Too Thin a Tale
The vibrancy of life on Potomac Creek brings into relief an important observation about place. Judging by the popularity of archeology shows, travel literature, and your aunt’s stories of Berlin in the ‘60s, our eagerness to learn how people experience places seems almost inborn. Yet it also distracts us from the basic truth of any location.
In The Powhatan Landscape: An Archeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake,
anthropologist Martin Gallivan approvingly cites Henri Lefebvre’s vision of
space as a social product. In this approach, spaces are generated through
collective human activity and memory. Gallivan builds on this and the works of others
who suggest that particular locales acquire meaning through human “acts of
naming,” and by how humans then associate these locales with a sense of the
past. People relate one locale to other places, establishing, over time, a
distinctive landscape.
That’s a mouthful of theory. But Gallivan’s book on the Algonquians reflects a healthy trend among scholars of many disciplines. They are attempting to explain the places they study in three dimensions, acknowledging the full breadth, depth, and length of human experience. This is an important step forward from earlier, flatter narratives. And that’s partly what motivates Gallivan and his academic allies. Standard accounts in his area of expertise -- the origins of the Virginia landscape -- have typically started with 1607 and the founding of England’s James Fort, the precursor to Jamestown. The lives of Native Americans pass through only at the margins of vivid European experiences. These conventional studies lack peripheral vision and curiosity of what human experiences came before. By seeking both of these qualities, Gallivan and others productively de-center the study of the Virginia’s historical landscape.
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| Photo R. Singh |
Even so, from the perspective adopted here, there is an omission so plain that it is not easily seen. Where are the experiences -- the distinctive histories and "knowingness" -- of non-human lives? Each day we learn more about the keen sensory lives of species other than our own. That animals sense landscapes and worlds we simply aren’t privy to, as when an echo-locating dolphin sees the fetus within a pregnant woman. (1) That trees both cooperate and communicate – through the air and underground – in ways absent from forestry manuals but much alive in Tolkien’s imagination. (2) There are an estimated 3,200 plant species in Virginia, and the state’s Department of Wildlife Resources publishes a list of native and naturalized fauna that runs seventy-six pages – over 30,000 species. Is it at all reasonable, or even worthwhile, to conjure a Potomac Creek reducible only to us? And then to think we know the place?
The lives and times of a single, albeit vigorous species are too thin a tale to tell about any place.
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| The kind of thing I like to do. |
N.B. I'm currently giving a close read to James Rice's Nature & History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (2009). While still anthropocentric, his excellent book is much more interested in interaction between humans, flora and fauna, and landscapes. More on what I'm reading is available here.
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