Land, Law And Environment: Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

228 Pages·2001·1.44 MB·English

by  Allen Abramson

LAND, LAW AND ENVIRONMENT
Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries
Edited by
A A D T
LLEN BRAMSON AND IMITRIOS HEODOSSOPOULOS
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
First published 2000
by PLUTO PRESS
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Allen Abramson and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos 2000
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1575 5 hbk
ISBN 0 7453 1570 4 pbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Land, law, and environment : mythical land, legal boundaries / edited by
Allen Abramson and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos.
p. cm.— (Anthropology, culture, and society)
ISBN 0–7453–1575–5 (hardback)
1. Human geography. 2. Landscape assessment. 3. Landscape changes.
4. Land settlement patterns. 5. Land tenure—Law and legislation. I.
Abramson, Allen. II.
Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. II. Title. IV. Series.
GF50.L33 2000
304.2'3—dc21
00–009107
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS
1. Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries: Wondering about Landscape
and Other Tracts 1
Allen Abramson
2. Whose Forest? Whose Myth? Conceptualisations of Community
Forests in Cameroon 31
Philip Burnham
3. The Land People Work and the Land the Ecologists Want:
Indigenous Land Valorisation in a Greek Island Community
Threatened by Conservation Law 59
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos
4. Tract: Locke, Heidegger and Scruffy Hippies in Trees 78
Paul Durman
5. Not So Black and White: The Effects of Aboriginal Law on
Australian Legislation 93
Veronica Strang
6. The Appropriation of Lands of Law by Lands of Myth in
the Caribbean Region 116
Jean Besson
7. Mythic Rites and Land Rights in Northern India 136
Kusum Gopal
8. Politics, Confusion and Practice: Landownership and
De-collectivisation in Ukraine 156
Louise Perrotta
9. The Re-appropriation of Sakai Land: The Case of a Shrine
in Riau (Indonesia) 176
Nathan Porath
10. Bounding the Unbounded: Ancestral Land and Jural
Relations in the Interior of Eastern Fiji 191
Allen Abramson
Notes on Contributors 211
Index 213
v
1 MYTHICAL LAND, LEGAL BOUNDARIES:
WONDERING ABOUT LANDSCAPE AND
OTHER TRACTS1
Allen Abramson
The treaty divided the valley between France and Spain through the centre of the
plain ... But the 1660 treaty failed to define the exact territorial location of the
Spanish-French boundary. Only the Treaties of Bayonne in 1866–1868 formally
delimited the political boundary, as France and Spain placed border stones along an
imaginary line demarcating their respective national territories ...
[However] The Treaties of Bayonne have left no trace in the memory of the Cerdans:
the boundary itself – the border stones – are attributed to the earlier accord. (Sahlins
1989: XV, 294)
Traditionally, anthropologists and other social scientists have set about the
analysis of land as though it were a mere setting for other things. Recently
though, interdisciplinary research in the humanities has shoved land centre-
stage by making the symbolisation of space central to the understanding of
land relations. In texts like Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Bender
1993b), Reading Landscape(Pugh 1990), A Phenomenology of Landscape(Tilley
1994), The Anthropology of Landscape(Hirsch and O’ Hanlon 1995), Landscape
and Memory(Sharma 1995) and, most recently, in Archaeologies of Landscape
(Ashmore and Knapp 1999), land now begins to appear in the humanities
as a resonant expanse of distinctive representations, meanings and
experiences and as an important area to revisit theoretically.
Looks, maps, narratives, experiences, contestations and memories: all
these features of human land relations come into sharper focus with the
theoretical promotion of land as landscape. As Strang says of the Australian
landscape (in this volume), landscape embeds ‘history, spiritual being,
aesthetic meaning, social relations and concepts of nature ...’. These studies
highlight the embedded histories of the land and its populations: the ruins,
traces and imprints, encrypted legacies – palimpsests (Hoskins 1985; Bender
1998: 6) – of successive and overlapping periods of meaningful habitation.
How do we deal with this symbolic aspect of land relations? De we subsume
it to the comparative study of landscape? Or, rather, post landscape itself as
1
2 Land, Law and Environment
a singular land relation amongst others? This question needs to be answered
unambiguously if a strong basis for comparison is to be found.
Anthropologies and archaeologies of landscape base comparison upon the
variation of a human function. The latter is normally cognitive or experien-
tial. For example, following Heidegger (1972) and Merleau-Ponty (1962),
Tilley (1994) establishes the phenomenon of landscape universally out of
the human experience of significant place and as a product of the phenom-
enological mediation of place and identity. For Hirsch (1995), by contrast,
the primary basis for the establishment of a universal landscape is cognitive.
For every social setting, the symbolic construction of enveloping space
juxtaposes a hinterland of ancestral origins and structural possibilities with
a foreground of actual forms. The cultural parameters of this juxtaposition
delivers the sense of a landscape.
Linking landscape to primary human processes helps theoretically defend
the symbolic study of land from utilitarian excess. However, there are reasons
for caution. In the first place, landscape has to be protected not just from
resource-oriented excess but also from crasser deconstructions which match
landscapes to actors willy-nilly, deriving as many meaningful landscapes as
actors can be found to imagine and inhabit them. Such spurious fragmen-
tation is the theoretical effect of wishfully planting the human actor beyond
the realm of structure. Lost on these deconstructors, is the constructed appro-
priateness of land as a material signifier of cultural difference in a limited
range of situations.
Second, when conceptualised as the realisation of a primary human
function, landscape may be too strongly opposed to features of land economy
and tenure. In this theoretical juxtaposition, landscape tends to emerge as
‘ideal land’ with property and economy interfering as ‘historical realities’.
The danger here, comparatively speaking, is of conceptualising land tenure
and land economy primarily as spoilers whose only significant effects are as
intrusions in the Garden of Eden. In this volume, contributors have been
invited to focus on property relations analytically whilst not losing sight of
the different regimes of meaning in which patterns of property in land
crystallise.
And, third, in rooting landscape in the cognitive and experiential
mediation of place and space, there is a danger of underestimating the
peculiarity of landand its several cosmic relations where land emerges as a
cult or symbolic obsession. After all, it is not any old space which sensibly
qualifies as Landscape. The constricted interior of a prisoner’s cell; the entire
universe of surrounding space suggested by any cosmology (i.e. Space); or
the cellular view through a microscope – all these spaces are only landscapes
to us in a figurative or metaphorical sense.
In this volume land itself has been selected for investigation not on the
strength of its cognitive or experiential importance alone, but precisely
because, in all of its human settings, land appears both as an object with use-
value and as a symbol with meaning. Dualised land; land, ‘economic and
Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries 3
symbolic, scarce and unlimited’ (Besson, in this volume) forms the focus of
this collection. In the process, ‘landscape’ is adopted in its historically
restrictive rather than in its universal human sense. As such, it reappears as
the product of a quite singular relationship between a certain structure of
property and a peculiar myth of personified land.
What, then, can the comparative project be which incorporates landscape
but subsumes it, which deals the landscape card as part of a larger hand?
Mythical Lands, Legal Boundaries tackles this question by exploring the
relation between myths of land relatedness and regimes of property in land.
THE BIRTH OF LANDSCAPE
Freedom
Historical landscape emerged in the modern West in the 16th century as a
terrestrial realm of desirably invasive sights, sounds and smells, and as a
movement whose members sought to give aesthetic and moral expression
to these sensory forms. From its inception, two opposite themes lent shape
and meaning to this realm: on the one hand, a feeling of unconfined and
sublime freedom but, on the other hand, a feeling of alienation and palpable
loss. The result was then, and remains today, the discovery of a land relation,
beautifully suffused with nostalgia.
As freedom, it is clear that landscape first worked for a subject, nurtured
in confinement. Bemoaning their isolation from it, one early radical
observed: ‘The English Spinner Slave has no enjoyment of the open
atmosphere and breezes of heaven’ (Black Dwarf, 30 Sept. 1818 quoted in
Hill 1980: 14). Similarly, the industrial subjects in L.S. Lowry’s paintings of
northern English cityscapes appear still imprisoned by their narrow streets
and forbidding factories even as they walk outside, stiff, bowed and blind to
the beckoning horizon of hills, which only the viewer sees.2 Landscape’s
freedom is for ‘virtually a new kind of human being’, wrote the utopian
socialist Robert Owen (quoted in Hill 1980: 14), a kind which negatively
learns to recognise itself by its constraints. ‘We are accustomed to being
boxed up, trussed up, nailed down by the limits of our limbs (where) ... The
reach seldom exceeds the grasp’ (Neve 1990: 99). Consequently, in the
landscape, ‘we find a humanising influence even in the wastes where our
grandfathers could see nothing but what repelled them as savage and
ferocious’ (Henry Salt, in Hill 1980: 15).
It comes as no surprise to find therefore that the arts of walking, touring,
climbing, skiing and simply being ‘in the countryside’ mushroomed therefore
as a passion for unconfined space itself. Viewpoints, mountain-tops and
towers were marked and enshrined, both for what they revealed of this
rambling unconfinement and for the zenith of expansive freedom their own
physical inaccessibility seemed to symbolise.3Where before, mountains had
4 Land, Law and Environment
loomed large as a diabolical hinterland of dangerously encircling forces, now
they marvellously transformed as a sublime backdrop to free lives, seeking
further freedom in the sheer, the icy and the craggy. The devils and monsters
evacuated this space leaving only their names and purported traces as
landmarks on the emergent landscape.
This same freedom also underscores a certain conception of the body.
When medieval communities peopled the mountains with predatory
monsters, they feared the margins as a tract that would colonise their bodies
or consume them (Sharma 1995). These terrors were but extreme manifes-
tations of the normal view: namely, that land, house and body formed a
tangible unity and that existence was tolerable as long as the bond between
tame land, house and person was strong (Gurevich 1985/1972). Landless
anti-socials (such as Jews, Gypsies and outlaws) were morally suspect
precisely because they were physically rootless. Normal and semi-divine
bodies were rooted in strips of land or estates which formed the basis for
ordered and regular lives. Houses, moreover, had to be consecrated not to
prevent them falling down but to stop them becoming the very ghostly bodies
of the souls who had previously occupied them.
The Renaissance, too, made a virtue out of this historic detachment and
a science out of disenchanted and de-personalised things. Inside Nature still,
but loftily raised to its pinnacle by the powers of Culture and Reason, human
subjects found new insights – found objectivity – in theoretically premised
transcendence. In Society, this transcendent objectivity would help deliver
knowledge philosophically as freedom. On the Landscape, this same freedom
would be expended, explored and aesthetically materialised.
Loss
Obversely, science and freedom were won at the expense of sensory
banishment. Set in the defining context of rural enclosure, uprootedness and
urbanisation, the freedom which was beautified on the historical landscape
was also shaped by the subjective split in the modern subject. Consequently,
the gaze directed over the landscape revelled in the freedom of the eye to
roam, but it also bathed in the nostalgia of human phenomena, lost. This is
why iconic landscapes in their respective national cultures have always
tended to inspire wistful feelings as well as feelings of exhilaration or national
pride. Salisbury cathedral, in one of Gainsborough’s famous paintings of the
English countryside, for example, is beautiful for being tinged by ‘the magic
of distance’, as the French poet Baudelaire put it (cited in Pugh 1990: 4), as
well as for the graceful shape of its spire. Other effective landscapes trap their
arcadian subjects in an obviously mythical time. Subjects appear alongside
tombs, ruins and marble gods, entangled in enveloping undergrowth which
seems to wilfully absorb these contemporary figures in the primordial past.
Then again, in Turner’s impressionist art, the startling light captivates the
Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries 5
onlooker not only for what it illuminates of its subjects but also for what its
glare and haziness shrouds and half-conceals. Such famous light is the light
of aeons as well as the light of seasons and the time of day. Elsewhere, the
landscape is depicted as the appropriate place for jilted lovers to discover
poetic solace (as, for instance, in Schubert’s Winterreise cycle of songs).
Similarly, having transferred much of his own power to his vengeful
monster, the scientist Frankenstein finds himself condemned to a search for
his lost alter ego on the harsh coldness of Alpine glaciers and the vastness of
the polar ice (Shelley 1818). The beautiful but inhospitable bleakness of these
fictional landscapes invites the literary invocation of extreme rupture, loss
and exile.4
Reacting to this generic human loss, landscape subtends a strategic series
of ephemeral returns to the land. These returns appear as so many temporary
repairs to fractured essence, all of them as much medical as recreational and
aesthetic. (In fact, the medical and the recreational fuse on the landscape
with the elite invention of the Grand Tour and, after that, with the
development of popular trips and holidays.) On these landscapes, the eye
‘takes in’ the panorama. The view ‘takes away’ the breath. The mouth
‘drinks’ or ‘gulps in’ the fresh air. The body ‘takes to’ the spa waters. Art critic
Neve remarks that: ‘It is as if the spirit renewed, feels itself part of everything
else’ (Neve 1990: 100). Moreover, even re-confined within the city, the
Subject embraces a flow of ‘whole foods’, ‘natural medicines’ and ‘earth
religions’ from the country: in fact, an entire homeopathia of curative relics,
all of them apparently able to cure by returning to body and soul what has
been putatively lost somewhere, somehow (Coward 1989).
Consequently, the discourse on landscape is always open to lapsarian
suggestion and semi-religious awe. Indeed, landscapes seem to offer
themselves up as appropriate spaces for the retrieval of religious, historic and
personal memories, not so much because their earthy tangibility helps
trigger memories which we have culturally archived there (Sharma 1995),
but because landscape embeds in symbols mainly that which has been lost
and, consequently, that which can only be retrieved precisely as recollection
and memory.
Property
Historical landscape coheres around the civilisational dialectic of modernity:
around freedom, pursued and won only at the expense of roots and
foundations. However, the modern passion for landscape is more than just
culture. Landscape also entails a definite history of property relations in
which both the physical reality and collective recollection of rural dispos-
session lends backbone to the aesthetic and philosophical sensibility of loss.
Indeed, as an artistic movement of painting and gardening, the passion
for landscape first developed in the two European countries which
6 Land, Law and Environment
experienced the fastest urban development and the greatest number of exiles
from the countryside: i.e. Holland and England (Colley 1996: 68). And, it
was in the 16th-century Netherlands that, semantically speaking, ‘landschap’
was invented (Hirsch 1995: 2). As the seaborne empires evolved, so the
Dutch and English towns quickly grew (Colley 1996). The need for rural
surpluses grew, land became more valuable, and so bourgeois property
relations in rural land hardened and became more exclusionary. In Britain,
where they were not broken up by revolutionary forces, the large estates
were rationalised and enclosed. The people’s rights to common land around
them was violently abrogated (a situation well described for England and
Scotland by Karl Marx in volume 3 of Capital). In the 18th century, the rev-
olutionisation of agricultural technology led to the further displacement of
the rural labour force in the direction of the towns and cities.
It was in the context of this changed structure of property relations and
this polarisation of population that the new image of land cohered, and that
it cohered primarily as a cultural act of urban imagining (Williams 1973).
Indeed, in direct proportion to its rate of capitalisation, land on its way to
becoming landscape, expanded as a site of cultural memory for those exiled
and self-exiled in the towns. Landscape, in effect, was:
Fostered by instincts of an urbanised population, torn increasingly from its ancient
roots in the soil by the industrial revolution ... (Theirs was) an urban existence that
pushes the primeval background out of sight, that makes it remote and unavailable,
that deprives people of intimate contact with it ... (Footpaths and Access to the
Countryside Report, UK, 1947, quoted in Hill 1980: 13)
Similarly, in the spacious ex-colonies5like Australia, where the drift into the
towns has proceeded more recently, landscape becomes progressively
definitive of Australianness (Strang, in this volume) the more the large urban
communities find themselves cut off from rural ownership, possession and
occupation. ‘Ironically’, writes Strang, ‘the romanticisation of the outback
... was generated by a greater distance between (white) people and the land.’
Moreover, to the extent that it manufactured images and experiences of
the factory worker’s alienation alongside the conveyor-belt of goods – recall
Charlie Chaplin being sucked up by the machine in the film Modern Times–
the memory of rural dispossession and the romanticisation of severed land is
also reproduced by urban capitalist process. Indeed, wherever urban
capitalism, depicted as an anti-human process seems itself to induce
fractured bodies and the theft of labour power, it appears not just as a system
of profits but also as the continuation and the deepening of the urban social
body’s estrangement from the land.
In sum, historical landscape emerged in the modern West as a palliative
mediation of the dialectic of freedom and loss. Its main characteristics are
not universal. Elsewhere, the articulation of different types of property
relation and different mythologies of land and person prompts different