MANAGING PLACE AND IDENTITY: THE MARIN COAST MIWOK EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT. Group identity serves as a mechanism for claiming rights of control and access to land in the United States. Public land managers face myriad identity‐based claims to land in their care. Identity shapes claims that must appear valid within the strictures of a legal system created by a dominant culture to serve its interests. The very form of those systems—of which public lands are a large part—makes possible the expression of particular forms of identity. The story of the Coast Miwok community and the Point Reyes National Seashore suggests that geographical links among identity, landscape, and history are actively constructed through political work and rarely are as obvious as they first appear. Both the formal legal process of federal tribal recognition and restoration and the far less formal Coast Miwok claims to land at Point Reyes National Seashore teach important lessons about neotraditional identity‐based claims to public land.     

THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

ABSTRACT. Students of human landscapes often view those landscapes as documents and seek to “read” them for cultural and historical meaning. But how does one learn to read landscape? And how can students be taught to do it? After many years of teaching courses about commonplace American landscapes, I have discovered that students must learn two things before they can expect to read human landscapes. First, they must learn to pay attention to commonplace things which most Americans normally ignore. Second, they must master vocabularies that permit them to classify elements in the landscape and to connect small things with larger ideas. Two examples in the landscape of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—the town's war memorial and a scattering of California bungalows-demonstrate how these ideas work.     

THE PARLOR IN THE WILDERNESS: DOMESTICATING AN ICONIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPE*

ABSTRACT. Thirty years ago D. W. Meinig argued that certain landscapes “are part of the iconography of nationhood.” From the earliest European settlement, the North American “wilderness” forged the crucible that shaped U.S. culture. By the early nineteenth century romantic aesthetic theories and nationalistic patriotism influenced American perspectives on the emerging cultural landscape. Artists, writers, and travelers sought out places for their healthful and scenic qualities as well as for moral instruction from nature. The locus of this confluence of politics, philosophy, and art was the Hudson River Valley of New York State. Guesthouses and hotels, especially in and around the Catskill Mountains, accommodated these travelers. This article examines the cultural basis of the mountain resort in its appropriation and marketing of a regional landscape and its incorporation as a national icon, with a specific history of the development of Mohonk Mountain House by the Smiley family from 1869 to 2008.     

PORTRAITS OF PLACELESSNESS: BRITISH NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMAGES OF THE AFRICAN LANDSCAPE

Landscape art provides a window on the world of subjective interpretation and shared perceptions of place. Portraits of places are therefore simultaneously portraits of a society, its preferences and prejudices, and the meaning it imparts to the world. In the nineteenth century, settlers in Africa felt alienated, uncomfortable, abandoned and detached, and their landscape art—both paintings and poetry—was testimony to their emotional and psychological responses to the foreign environment. Both the imported artistic techniques for portraying nat?re and the symbols populating the landscape images revealed the temperament of the pioneers’ attitudes to place.     

SHIFTING SYNANTHROPY OF THE CROW IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA

The American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) falls into a category of wild organisms, called “synanthropes,” that have developed an affinity for, or dependency on, human interventions in the landscape. The distribution and numbers of crows in North America east of the Mississippi River have been largely tied to the anthropogenic fragmentation of the forest. As ground feeders, crows need open space for foraging, but they also need trees for nesting and roosting. Conflicts between corvids and people centered on the former's damage to agriculture. Both Native American peoples and Euro‐American settlers sought to thwart corvine preference for maize through a series of ingenious measures. After 1950 rural concern about corvine depredations greatly diminished. The appearance of large winter roosts in cities shifted the conflict with crows. Like humans, crows have undergone change, and their synanthropic character can be seen as fundamental to their biogeography.     

THE PANOPTICON'S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham's Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell's Big Brother; today, an electronic human‐tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human‐tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches—literal and metaphorical—are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate—local, national, and global—on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought.     

PUEBLO MISSION CHURCHES AS SYMBOLS OF PERMANENCE AND IDENTITY*

ABSTRACT. The three Pueblo mission churches of San Esteban del Rey, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and San José de Laguna are the most visually striking structures in the western New Mexico pueblos of Acoma, Zuni, and Laguna. Prime examples of “structures of permanence” on the landscape, the churches define local cultural identity. Church permanence and Pueblo identity are expressed in a five‐part typology of visible characteristics: natural materials and hand labor, massive exterior form, adjoining cemeteries, syncretism of interior decorations, and structural decay and rebirth. Permanence must, however, be understood as an evolving condition, undergoing new representations as multicultural relationships evolve.     

Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place,Memory, and Conflict

Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape — historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums — present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co‐constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.     

HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE‐SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.     

Residential perspectives: the value of Floodplain‐ buyout open space

This mixed‐methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisition—a buyout—impacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land‐use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and produced by individuals. This research explores how residents perceive and ascribe values to the buyout landscape in Lexington, Kentucky. Enabled by federal funds, but left largely to their own devices, residents in Lexington adopted uses, ascribed values, and produced their own land‐use norms in each buyout neighborhood.     

MORALITY,SPACE, AND THE POWER OF WIND‐ENERGY LANDSCAPES

ABSTRACT. Most of us have not known—or cared—where our electricity comes from. Our attitude is changing, however, as we turn toward wind energy, now the fastest‐growing renewable energy resource in the world. Because we cannot extract and transport the raw energy of the wind, reaping its many environmental benefits requires that we cope with the landscape presence of its development wherever it occurs. Sometimes this interferes with the value of open space, and sometimes it may be close to subdivisions. It is the immobility and very visibility of wind power that makes its presence unavoidable. In that regard it cannot be hidden underground, stored in tanks, or moved by trains. It is an energy resource that reminds us that our electricity comes from somewhere. The more we wish to tap the power of the wind, the less we will be able to avoid the responsibilities that our demand for energy brings. This necessary bargain, first evident near Palm Springs, California, is now being experienced wherever wind power is being developed.     

Symbolic ecclesiastical representations in the High Middle Ages landscape: A single-case study in northern Scandinavia

A regional examination of representations of geographical ecclesiastical features (boundaries, churches, and land use) in northern Scandinavia during the High Middle Ages was performed, using a peripheral parish as a single case. The analysis was based on historical maps, processed using microhistory and retrogressive approaches, and guided by theories of territoriality and landscape. The results showed that some churches were built on outfields, that landownership and prehistoric burials were clustered in two different areas, and that parish boundaries were often located in uninhabited forests between settlements and were sometimes moved. These results are discussed within the context of symbols, relations, and identity, which are complementary to explanations of centrality such as minimum travel distance. The author concludes that this indicates that, based on kinship networks, farmers from the settlement areas built the churches on jointly owned or managed land, which symbolises their collective effort – their sense of ours. Furthermore, settlement desertion during the agrarian crisis is probably the reason behind later changes in parish boundaries.     

URBAN SPACES OF AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE EXILES

Released in 1961, The Exiles is a low‐budget docudrama that chronicles the lives of three American Indians over a period of twelve hours in a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood in the late 1950s. Contemporary neorealist filmmaking appears to have influenced the film, whereas itsg narrative is ethnographic in form. An examination of the film and its dialogue reveals the ways in which American Indians who recently migrated from their reservation to the city have socially constructed the urban spaces within the framework of the physical setting provided to them. The nature of the engagements of the male and female protagonists with the sites and with other American Indians in this small urban sphere provides substantive clues to the nature and level of their respective transitions into the realm of the white‐dominated society of Los Angeles and beyond.     

WRITING THE MIDWEST: HISTORY,LITERATURE, AND REGIONAL IDENTITY

ABSTRACT. In this article I discuss the function of history in constructing regional identity and explore the ways in which the American Midwest differs from other widely recognized regions—New England, the South, and the West—in the kinds of historical figures and narratives that create a regional distinctiveness in the eyes of residents and writers. Whereas other regions tend to locate identity in a limited number of well-known figures and events from the past and to generalize them to the region as a whole, in the Midwest meaning is discerned on a more limited, place-by-place basis, in terms of more strictly local events and personages. This understanding of a particular kind of historically based identity is made especially clear in contemporary nonfiction from the Midwest, which collectively creates a dense mosaic of local meanings in a landscape conventionally seen by outsiders as largely empty of interest and significance.     

Spatial Ecology of Pre –Euro‐American Fires in a Southern Rocky Mountain Subalpine Forest Landscape

Natural disturbances such as fires have been widely studied, but less is known about their spatial ecology than about other aspects of them. We reconstructed and mapped pre–Euro‐American fire history in a subalpine forest landscape in southeastern Wyoming, and analyzed the fires using GIS. Mean fire interval varies little with topography (elevation, aspect, slope) and is spatially autocorrelated at distances of at least 2 km. Fires often spread downslope, and spread more than expected from the north and south and less than expected from the west, under the influence of particular synoptic climatic conditions. The landscape of 1868 a.d., at the time of Euro‐American settlement, was strongly influenced by fires. However, it contained large patches of connected forest and few high‐contrast edges, unlike the modern landscape, which is fragmented by industrial forestry and roads. The spatial ecology of the natural fire regime may be a useful guide for management.     

An Approach to “Sequent Occupance” For Schools: A British Case Study

Abstract

“Sequent occupance” is one of the fundamental geographical concepts explored in the American High School Geography Project. Its investigation involves the use of a variety of local source materials, often historical in their nature but significant in their geographical implications. One method of approach for school use is here illustrated by the case study of a British coastal resort and dormitory center—Southport, Lancashire. Among the materials used are the writings of literary visitors, one of whom in this case was Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American Consul in Liverpool in mid-19th century, who lived in Southport for a time. Apart from its methodological suggestions, it is hoped that the information presented in this article might provide useful overseas case study material for American teachers.     

CREATING NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN “LITTLE SWEDEN,U.S.A.”*

ABSTRACT. In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.     

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTION OF TOURIST SPACE IN VICTORIAN AMERICA*

ABSTRACT. Tensions and contradictions surround photographic representations of landscape—and the practices that created those representations—during the medium's so-called golden age in the late nineteenth century. These are examined by focusing on the landscape views of H. H. Bennett, a photographer of considerable renown whose stereographs and oversized panoramas of the Wisconsin Dells transformed a working river into a picturesque landscape. Such a construction of genteel tourist space in Victorian America suggests a post-frontier aesthetic in which nature is valued less as an opportunity for progress or an occasion for terror than as pleasing scenery.     

EXPRESSING “LOCAL CULTURE” IN HAWAI'I*

ABSTRACT. Detached from the mainland and with a distinct historical ethnic geography, the conquered kingdom of Hawai'i, now the fiftieth state, is the only U.S. state with an Asian and Pacific Islander majority as well as the highest percentage of racial and ethnic intermarriage. Hawai'i's population reflects the tensions between the culturally pluralistic “spirit of aloha” and the ethnic‐cum‐social stratification that has evolved from its historical economic geographies. In this article I focus on one of these strata—what is referred to as “local” culture—discussing its ethnogenesis and contemporary manifestations, and I apply Jonathan Okamura's 1981 model of situational ethnicity to examine how locals and new immigrants negotiate the ethnic dynamics and social expectations of their daily lives. I also discuss various ways in which “localness” is represented on O'ahu's economic landscape, with an analysis of the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet, as a holistic expression of local culture.     

Emergent Urban Forms,or Emergent Post-Modernisms? A Comparison of Large U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Post-modern urban theory has problematized the universality of existing models of urban form by focusing on fluidity and complexity in the urban landscape. Urban form is "chaotic," "galactic," and even "random" according to this view. Somewhat lost in this perspective are the emergent urban forms occurring in a wide variety of cities. This paper challenges the universalization of landscape complexity that lies at the core of post-modern urbanism by examining landscape changes in the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The key findings are that landscape complexity vis the mid-20th century city is overstated—not least because the latter was itself quite complicated—and that the unyielding focus on difference deflects attention away from important processes like inner-city revalorization, inner-suburban devalorization, and outer-suburban valorization that are reshaping very different cities in largely similar ways.