THE LAND
WORDS & IMAGES Lester Mismash
Comfort exists in places we feel oriented, and we settle where we find meaning. We never stray so far from the familiar as to not feel connected; or if we do, there is an acknowledged or perhaps unrecognized, constant desire for a distinct character of place – a unique physical reality that at some time, embedded itself in our identity.
Almost ten thousand years ago man spread over a great part of the world. Anthropologists refer to this time as the beginning of a revolution, when we transitioned from a wandering, temporary existence of hunting and gathering to an agrarian, sedentary life of settlement. We shifted from small nomadic hunting bands to form denser, more permanent villages, and began to reveal our presence in the world. Nature once had the ability to constantly direct the hunter-gatherers’ patterns and behaviour; but now the settled man manipulated nature to dramatically reduce this effect. This revolution initiated man’s profoundly different relationship with the land.
Within our newly realized relative stillness, our landscapes began to feel familiar and became refuges against unknown wilds. The making of familiar ground created relief from unlimited space, a place of respite from the expanding horizon, and our own niche beneath endless stars. We formed deep connections with a certain quality of light, the moisture in the air, the smell of the earth. An intuitive knowledge of rocks, trees, water, and the lay of the land developed; we could define our place in the world holistically.
In addition to an intensified sense of place, creating dwellings and villages also established a level of separation between man and the wild. While a cave dwelling was still of nature and acted as an extension of the land, man’s early autonomous structures constructed a new, provocative distinction between inside and outside. Dwellings introduced order and form, expressed our understanding of the land, and fostered the beginning of complex social interactions. As we built this man made world within our natural world, we gained the perspective to contemplate nature as a separate thing from ourselves, and we began the expanding process of forgetting or perhaps denying our role as an integral part of nature.
The physical form of the land and the climate of a specific place communicate unseen forces. The mountains, the desert, and the sea hold the power of timelessness and of time; knowledge we desperately want to understand as it witnesses the instantaneity of individual life, as well as the long histories of our families. Within this passing and keeping of time the land moves, and then rests, in rhythms we cannot predict and in ways we cannot reproduce.
This omnipotent quality of the land led to an anthropomorphized interpretation of its unpredictability and power. Myth and religions developed embracing the land as sacred, so gods and spirits could unleash their wrath upon man, superseding and releasing us from the inexplicable nature of an overwhelming force. Man recognized a living essence in the land, the trees, the water, and the sky that demanded reverence.
In the Roman culture, these animistic manifestations of reason evolved into sophisticated guardians of place. Romans reacted to certain unique characteristics of place through manifesting spirits. These spirits reflected the qualities of landscapes; their presence gave hilltops meaning, guarded rivers, and made the trees their home. The spirits animated, explained, and lent their personalities to areas that became highly valued. Stone temples and prescribed paths through the landscape stand as a response to myths born of the specificity of place. We immortalize what we value most, through making, telling stories, and keeping histories. Many cultures have perpetuated an animistic belief system in which nature holds spiritual or ancestral meaning. Their deceased exist in nature, so leaving or disrespecting the land abandons a deeply felt, living relationship. Beliefs rooted in the land continue a cycle of life and death connected to a place. The land links and maintains a connection between generations of people and binds their culture. This cyclical understanding blurs the western-based linear sense of time.
I CONCEIVE
THAT THE LAND BELONGS TO A VAST FAMILY OF WHICH MANY ARE DEAD
FEW ARE LIVING
AND COUNTLESS NUMBERS ARE STILL UNBORN
~Author Unknown
“Maori land has several cultural connotations for us. It provides us with a sense of identity, belonging, and continuity. It is proof of our continued existence not only as people, but also as tangata whenua of this country. It is proof of our tribal and kin group ties…of our link with the ancestors of our past and with the generations yet to come.
It is an assurance that we shall forever exist as a people, for as long as the land shall last.”
It is an assurance that we shall forever exist as a people, for as long as the land shall last.”
~New Zealand Maori Council
For the Maori, immigrants meant encountering new forms built without a deep understanding of the land or its history, and witnessing these new cultures manipulate the land to suit their traditional concepts. In New Zealand, the natural response of immigrants to recreate a foreign landscape into a familiar image cleared forests, planted unfamiliar plants, and released domestic and predatory animals upon the land. Roads and trains connected many days of distances into hours, and introduced new ways of using the land. Most poignantly, the new inhabitants demonstrated land was an entity that could be owned by man, even a singular man, where previously no material value could be understood for a place of spiritual and ancestral importance.
Cultures often respond to outside influences through exchanges of ideas, symbols, architectural forms, and technology. The Maori responded with the meeting house, a structure evolved from the chief’s house in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
While its formal necessity was the result of new social adjustments from colonization, the meeting house retained a distinct relationship to the history of the land. Even today, it creates a metaphorical manifestation of the connection of a people to place, to ancestors, to the past. The Maori may interpret the ridge beams and rafters of a meeting house as the spine and the ribs of an ancestor, but its greater meaning is not contained in its form. Meaning comes from the artwork throughout these structures as symbols of family and ancestral heritage. Carvings and weaving do not decorate Maori buildings; they define them. It is this connection of a people through the land with time and history that truly separates indigenous cultures from Western culture’s obsession with the present, and feelings of disconnection. For the Maori, a sense of place and sense of community do not interconnect with the land of New Zealand, they are indistinguishable from it.
While its formal necessity was the result of new social adjustments from colonization, the meeting house retained a distinct relationship to the history of the land. Even today, it creates a metaphorical manifestation of the connection of a people to place, to ancestors, to the past. The Maori may interpret the ridge beams and rafters of a meeting house as the spine and the ribs of an ancestor, but its greater meaning is not contained in its form. Meaning comes from the artwork throughout these structures as symbols of family and ancestral heritage. Carvings and weaving do not decorate Maori buildings; they define them. It is this connection of a people through the land with time and history that truly separates indigenous cultures from Western culture’s obsession with the present, and feelings of disconnection. For the Maori, a sense of place and sense of community do not interconnect with the land of New Zealand, they are indistinguishable from it.
“I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.” ~Author Unknown
Island cultures differ in their examples of dwelling throughout the Pacific, yet there is a common thread that links them. The traditional structures in which they live or gather do not stand still. The act of building, of constantly renewing their connection with the land shifts them, acknowledging growth, decline, and change. Many of their buildings behave cyclically; thatched roofs blow away in hurricanes or entire buildings purposefully decay into the ground as a body would. New generations rebuild and adapt the remains of previous structures on land where ancestors once walked, shed blood in battle, planted crops, hunted and fished. The Maori often build as a community, strengthening relationships, and empowering place. The process of reconstruction passes down skills through generations, and reinforces a life cycle mentality to a detailed scale. Even pieces of wood are often repurposed; the notched marks of their past responsibilities telling their story.
This attitude is in stark contrast to a common Western tradition of valuing the building as a temporal memorial in which it stands apart, safe in perpetuity. The people of Western cultures shift in response to wars, religion, economics, or climate and have no ancestral history uniting them to a land from one generation to the next. The buildings of these cultures exist without a constantly reaffirmed connection to place or personal significance to future generations but act as containers of a specific moment in time and evidence of technological and artistic achievements.
WE ABUSE LAND BECAUSE WE REGARD IT AS A COMMODITY BELONGING TO US. WHEN WE SEE LAND AS A COMMODITY TO WHICH WE BELONG, WE MAY BEGIN TO USE IT WITH LOVE AND RESPECT.
~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
As we discard these ideas and move towards a globalized cultural identity we lose important place specific, restraining attitudes. In general, we have pushed away the intuitive, harmonious response to land and forgotten how to achieve expressions of locality. Metaphor is a communication tool inherited by many generations of many cultures who maintain strong ties to the land that can pull us back to remembering. These metaphors form the stories of ancestors, and gather ecological, and cultural significance into meaningful narratives anchored in a culture’s unique geographical location.
Metaphor has the ability to transfer our personal relationships with nature, like the long white overwhelming clouds of this land, onto new surfaces, and into new situations. In doing so metaphor provokes us to reconsider all a cloud is when expressed in smooth white concrete that navigates shadows in a new way and floats just above arm’s reach.
Metaphor has the ability to transfer our personal relationships with nature, like the long white overwhelming clouds of this land, onto new surfaces, and into new situations. In doing so metaphor provokes us to reconsider all a cloud is when expressed in smooth white concrete that navigates shadows in a new way and floats just above arm’s reach.
This cognitive shift displaces our rational understanding of one concept with something provocative. Both the subject used as reference and the receiver of the reference transform and connect; a new concept is born from seeing a cloud in the context of built form. However, metaphor means nothing if not understood, so its intentions must be grounded in culturally meaningful reference. The true power in metaphor lies in its ability to stimulate our imagination and leave determinations guided, but open-ended. It is precisely this polysemic nature, which leads not to ambiguity but to significance through a dependent relationship on source and cultural interpretation.
We have been building with the belief new architecture could emerge independent of past associations and independent of the environment. However if we re-evaluate our present concepts and attitudes in relation to the environment in which we live, if we listen to the stories, and engage the metaphors, the meaningful forms will come from seeing the new in terms of the old, carrying the history of the land and ideas of its ancestor’s forward.
Our actions whether synchronous or oppositional to the land are part of an undeniably complex natural system. Our self-imposed feelings of separation as we travel across the land without touching it, and pass through the night in city lights forgetting the stars is sub-systematic, and paradoxically connected to nature. Through an alienated lens, we view cultures that live in harmony with the land as virtuous, and remain nostalgic for that state of innocence before our ‘fall from paradise’. Our dialectic journey has gone from a direct dependence on the land to a growing, indirect dependence.
Is our focus on creating a global culture, and using technology to extend beyond our evolutionary comfort zone a necessary distraction from more than just the wounds of disenchantment from the land; but the deeper cut of disconnection with a localized life system? Can we simultaneously work harder to perfect synthetic realities, and maintain a global attitude while cultivating a personal and cultural identity with place?
The land that held mysteries and intimidated us with immeasurable forces now appears fragile, and we stand questioning our role in the system, afraid of its limitations. Ultimately, the level of our understanding of the land configures our expressions of specificity in time and place. Perhaps the beginning of understanding starts by remembering the land is not something to look at, to own, or travel through but something in which to be, for a very long time.
