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 Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow 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