Thinking in the territoriality, dwelling in the landscape: introduction to Geostoria
The story begins at ground level
Michel de Certeau, in his account of his ascent to the top of World Trade Center, provides an indication of method in the margin to the way you look at the world. There's the look, placing on top of things, expect the glance, is favored by the cartographer and the planner. But there is another kind of look, which descends from the top down to mingle with the life that circulates. And this is the "look low to the ground."
The polarity so the proposal is clear. The first is a look of such order. De Certeau, from the top of this skyscraper that stands out like a bow phantasmagoric urban island of Manhattan, put in the position of an external spectator. The eye looks into the skyline of the Big Apple and try to capture the design. Get off the ground means placing the eye "between things" in the world, mix it with other senses, seek a common feeling indeed. Once down, take De Certeau on walking: what you think about it is the first act of enfranchisement of man, evolved into bipedal, from the animal kingdom.
That of the French Jesuit scholar and is writing a summons and it works like a parable. We also give you a title: "The Wanderer and the skyscraper." The story suggests a moral. When we put a warning on the dissolution of the contemporary city-concept - conceived by geofilosofi, drawn by cartographers and planned by planners - do it for to pillory the primacy of the modern voyeur.
Read from this point of view, The Practice of Everyday Life is a book of apologetics: against the hegemony of the eye, puts forward the option of walking. Is not a matter of simple walking or running. The metaphor peripapetica counts as a new practice space syntax. These practices give shape to urban cities, and the myriad ways in which you will follow it or stay there who likes the return to De Certeau: an open space and changing citizenship, to put down roots means to first names and live networks social. Or create places, because - as noted in a remark burning - "the memorable is what can be dreamed of the place."
We take another step: "analyze the practices minute, singular and plural, that an urban system had to manage or suppress and instead survive its decay." This is a true indication of work. To defend the cultures of "place" to take back - mind you: out of any hegemonic temptation - not so much as the city, for everyone who made himself a "citizen", its practices of cities.
The story has changed places
Daniel Fabre, ethnologist of the time, recalled that it was not easy at all, until a few years ago, conduct an ethnographic between "residents" of your own home. The most common objection was interposed that, and you can understand, was: "We're not savages."
Moreover, with this attitude of skepticism has faced, on every continent, the whole discipline ethnoanthropological. There are reasons. Judge as "exotic" other means by itself, in truth, without dwelling on the differences come to recognize the value of otherness. In the words that Fabre chooses to introduce the volume Une histoire à soi (edited with Alban Bensa), you can then capture the value of a self-critical reflection that is still significant and is expandable to historical subjects.
What does not work, closer to a culture of "ethnic" or otherwise "local", is the posture "outside". When the French ethnology decided to turn his gaze within national boundaries, faced with a problem too often outstanding during previous campaigns addressed to the cultures of inquiry "tribal" extracontinentali. And that problem was the comparison with the word of others. A word that did not travel "free" in the oral transmission between individuals, but it appeared as sediment deep cultural and locally structured. In fact, let us once again, the word always sedimented culture, but ethnocentrism - come from any ethnic group, not only of European and colonial coinage - if you forget it willingly. This attitude will go into crisis - Fabre reminds us - once in contact with the deep rural France. Which, while finding himself treated under the auspices of "province", actually shows an internal articulation and structure in different cultures together.
Where and how culture is expressed that joint? First, a phenomenon well known to dialectologists, creating a language capable of conveying, through the invention of specific terms and phrases, the different habits of a people's world. There is now a linguist, I think, to deny to any dialect to be developed as a language of autonomy, where the adjective rhymes with local cultural, or with the existence, long-lasting, a local world. In the dialect - the consideration that affects our view geo-historical - is precisely crystallized a local historical syntax. What do you look for, in fact, in local languages? The signs of recognition of a "tradition" passed. Where and how does it show that interpenetration between ways of life and their expression? In the creation of a corpus of narrative, both in oral form (the stories of Genesis which we give the name of legends), both in writing (giving rise to local history).
On this last point, for comparison with the existing local historical sediment, concentrated reflection of the French referred to above. Origin - Fabre remembers him with a certain amount of irony - it was out of necessity. The misunderstanding of the "natives" were circumvented by presenting as historians. The pass was evidently not the status of the historian, as the approach as a scholar of the past, just to know, emphasizes the ethnologist, it can be associated, popularly, to a "free and meticulous study of a local company." On the other hand, the methodology ethnoanthropological had an advantage on historiography: it took up less of the archives and more people.
The story concludes, indeed, in the sign of a renewed alliance between intellectuals and people. If the story "also lives in the memory of each one," the ethnographer respectful and patient can see - evoking the past - to your liking this ... On the other hand the people (ie the local society) would gain an awareness not least for its ontological existence: that in every local society, while aiming at a historically strong community cohesion, can coexist different topics, different (on the other hand) oriented.
Anthropologist Faraldi Luc, speaking in the same volume, however, reminds us that there is a problem of reputation: while there represents itself, it is represented. It gives the example of stigmatization occurred in the neighborhood of Franc-Moisin banlieusard, more often identified as an emblematic place outside the "urban malaise." Yet, as we know from careful field work conducted by Faraldi, it is a real place, inhabited by stories that are inscribed, in the words of François Hartog, in "regimes of historicity" differentiated.
It gives, then, a history of population that is distinct from that of the institutions and is still different from that of specialists in various ways known to work in this area. They are representations that insist on the same site but did not return a single view, and therefore, so confliggendo and relating in a public form, helping to draw a plural identity.
From this examination, Faraldi draws a conclusion very significant for the effects that has on the cultural no less than on the political: the production of "local history" would have, against any easy claim to monochrome representation, a place of diversity. Of course, it is inscribed within a thinking that explicit path for cultural recognition, even beating, when necessary, against the practice of pest and stigma stereotyped language media. Because the corollary of this discussion involves, in its own right, the primary law of every social subject to take care of their historical memory, no less than to respect other people's memories.
In this, the story "changed places", winning the local level to the full dignity of the subject of historiography. According to the expression suggested by ethnologists of the present time, the time has come "to produce a story in itself." With the experience that I came from a twenty-year work with oral sources, I would add: "that represents itself in comparison with the history of others."
The story walks between cultures
Fernand Braudel, to coin his own concept of "civilization", he needed to tell the Mediterranean. He had to imagine that a geographical space. This is an historiographical changes radically the historical representation of the world: the "facts" are not sorted vertically in series chronological time, but comparatively arranged in a spatial relationship. The primacy of '"event" (histoire-bataille) gives way to the study of "structures" (economic, social, mental).
One can say that without the contribution of geographical science, there would have been taken from the historiographical revolution "Annales" between the two world wars. Interdisciplinary in that loan to be sought the origin of geostoria. Which, however, has focused on a certain gaze direction without ever gaining the status of a discipline in its own right. Nevertheless, the geostoria continued to walk through time and space, resulting in some enlightened scholars (Lucio Gambi want to mention here) are always new twists multidisciplinary.
Consider, again, to the creation of the Laboratory of history teaching in the national network of Institutes for the history of the Resistance. From that experience - and here it finally gives way to recognize the importance of the loan - we took the title for the project which since 2003 geostorici guide our steps. "Educate Place" we liked it because, in its ambiguous wording, not catechized in a gesture of command, but suggests an educational practice. But who teaches whom? Squeezed out of the disciplinary responses, the act of signification will be educational, geostoricamente, in the context of a living space to us historically present.
The reference to a space-time framework "present" is central to understanding the reflection on the led "appaesante" of the place. When Nadia Baiesi and Gian Domenico Cova write about it in the mid-90s, was in full swing the debate on political and cultural "places of memory" related to the geography of the Second World War and the Holocaust memorial. Imagine the historical juncture: it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regimes of 'real socialism "in the drama of a decaying Yugoslavia, and the prey of fierce ethnic furies. A thousand questions were shaking their European geopolitics, from the relationship between democracy and "just" war, as had been fixed for the aftermath of the Resistance movement against Nazism and fascism.
Therefore, where the figure of reference was the memorial monument, it begins to speak of "place" and "landscape". This is a crucial step and try to clarify it. The monument sign, as shown by the massive production linked to the wars, is usually impressed by the political-ideological institution in order to characterize a given territory. Students of ethnography civil, not surprisingly, dwell on the relationship - historically intelligible - between "social frameworks of memory" (to quote a classic in the field, Maurice Halbwachs) and monumental iconography. The replacement of the torque / monument area with a new, focused on the couple place / landscape, records do not need to update the simple language but a re-foundation of the semantic syntax memorial. Indeed, the difference goes right on the ridge between history and memory. From the first alleged, perceived as ruthlessly as an expression derived from the policy, a step back, while the second asks you to make voice or, rather, to borrow a key word of these years, "witness" of the past.
From the pedagogical point of view, the passage is also required: the ability to remember is removed from the field prefigured the "duty of memory" to be inscribed in a grammar of social cohesion based on "choice" of memory to belong. A 180 degree turn that is a direct correspondence, in Italy, in the flowering of intercultural studies. Common sign of this season is the declination "plural" connotative categories of identity before we coined the singular: in addition to culture, memory, community, belonging, but also couples peace / war, masculine / feminine.
The need to read a more differentiated subjective behaviors and attitudes that govern coincides with the perception of a large-scale change in the state of social relations. Think of how the global geopolitical changes during the 90s: Europe mature, despite a thousand contradictory impulses, their project of "union" Union of East and Italy, the traditional country of emigration, he recorded his first immigration process of the modern age. There is no wonder that these upheavals have generated widespread feelings, even mixed together, disorientation.
The emphasis on social transformation is found, explicitly, the definition of Intercultural who gave Ezio Compagnoni in 2003, when the first training course dedicated to geostoria by Prometheus. Basically, remember the teacher, they begin to talk about interculturalism when interpretive categories traditional denounce their blindness to new phenomena. The strength of this approach lies precisely in the ability - literally - to stand "between" cultures to allow a dialogue in the name of reciprocity. Not if you talk to interculturalism, "best" practices to be applied to the field of relations of identity and nonviolent resolution of conflicts. A third and equally important field of application - as shown in cross-cultural training supported by Prometheus last quinquiennio network with the geo-historical Laboratory Present Tense - invests the "working memory", that is plane spatial analysis.
The story in geostoria
Of geostoria he speaks, in the school for twenty years. Since that has become more acute perception of a double inadequacy of the historical discipline, before reading the surrounding reality and then to translate it into knowledge.
Think of the reactions triggered by the fall of the "Berlin Wall" in autumn 1989. On the one hand there was evident throughout the inability of historical knowledge in pre-see event, which - while presenting, with hindsight, so mature - suddenly took the most careful observers. The considerations rained later, around the "end of history", give us a sense of what is lost beyond the short-term marketing reasons of those who spoke them first (Francis Fukuyama, remember). There were, moreover, observations that arrived cold. The crisis of historicism, namely the possibility to understand the historical development within a linear narrative order, was well-established fact in the first 89. Only here, the event was so striking as to make it readily understandable to all. Faced with the enormity of '89, '91, however, which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, would be expected from history - and his early commentators, historians - a knowledge that no guidance is given.
This frustration comes, remember it is not obvious, the rhetoric of the Historia Magistra Vitae. Anyone, I think, has heard at least once to the adage: "study the past to understand the future." Except that there is nothing unlikely in this statement. It is a belief, which is inspired by a basic need of man, precisely to pre-see tomorrow.
To borrow an expression current investment on historical knowledge has served to improve our perception of security and, until 1989, we affected to believe. After the rhetoric, but remained, as evidenced by the downward trend of the cultural market and a certain disaffection of students in courses of study, history has invested less and less. The story retains its practitioners, of course, but it appears to the most - and for the first followers of politics - a rhetorical exercise of knowledge, perhaps sometimes fascinating, essentially little use to orient themselves in the present tense.
These are not dictated by economic considerations loving, clear considerations are present. Between 1990 and 1991, when I dealt with some other traveling companion to share the teaching of history in historical institutions Reggio, the questions were already beautiful capital squadernati. I had occasion to emphasize, on several occasions, is a history which is comparable to the feeling of the time. But at that bend prevailed other accents. And so began anguished questions in a row, to avert the "presentism" (the prevalence of the synchronic diachronic) and ritually exorcise the new generations (we wondered, "Whose children are these young people?).
Let's see what happened then. Operators of history, historians and teachers, have since remained alone anymore, I would say more socially just. Unless dive, and was a popular movement in its own way, in the memory. I must say, in this, restoring some order in its own way apparent. There are historians who make the history of the evergreen "remarkable things" - historia res gestae - as cleavers using periodization to determine, without ever questioning the historical sense of that operation, where a scheme begins and another ends. As you approach the field of memory, the presence of historical thins, until reduced to a minimum in the diverse and growing company that uses the memory as a primary source for interpreting the world. But one thing is "give voice" to the testimony, as it does very well "civic theater", is another question the witness as a historical source.
It happens then that, despite the presence of a substantial movement of oral history, is not really increased awareness among historians methodology centered on the history-memory (of what it means to make history "with" memory). To date, the story belongs to the world of books or the comments of a historical-political news, while the memory is documented and acted rather with the instrumentation of its multimedia theater, cinema, internet. So that in one case, lining up libraries, it continues to exert a kind of right and duty of influence in relation to the historical destiny of humanity, while in the second, giving space to the narrative, the concern is to work excessive operation for the recognition of subjectivity.
Considerations are not new, just think what he wrote Wievorka defining this (referring to the production memoirs about the Holocaust) as the era of "witness". But if we think that in Italy there had been, since the '50s, a movement critical of the "big" story - with the movement of studies on the labor movement gathered around Gianni Bosio, but also in the very first steps taken by the school historical studies of agrarian Bologna -, the results of this current political separation-disciplinary seem very little exciting. My opinion is that the History with a capital can not be answered with a performance also more than a Memory "authentic", but laconically, "exemplary". Perhaps it is time to try to think back to a story "with" memory, that is, to practice a historiography that can "treat" experiential science materials.
We reflect on this fact. The act of remembering is not the case in the ether of our instincts, to settle in finding memory needs to be recognized as a social act, and to "live" time and space that make it recognizable to the subject rammemorante. In this sense, is an allocative rammemorare: there is no memory without place. To the point that a whole movement of thought has overturned the sentence into its opposite: there is no place without memory, so in the absence of a recognizable identity profile and memorial we would face a "no place".
Historians have done their part, shamelessly practicing the notion of lieu de mémoire. I mean, how lucky it happens to all movements, even creating a confusion of plans. If the anthropologist Marc Augé investigates the "place" the references to their everyday social historian Pierre Nora in their "places of memory" intended to carve the identity traits of the nation. An operation that, in Italy, Mario Isnenghi has resumed paying greater attention to civil society but essentially acknowledging the criterion "topological" the same heuristic value.
The impression is therefore that of a modern historiography in search of a new or more appropriate narrative register. However, debts disciplinary struggle to be recognized and processed in terms of methodology. If we look at the contribution of geography, for example, we find that it takes place in two opposite directions for use. We start from favor, even in a larger audience, smiles to geopolitics. We are facing a shift in policy towards historiography of "territory", now assumed more and more widely as a key to read the processes of globalization.
This is a very useful category, but I would say, not at all neutral, without an adequate treatment methodology will follow sooner or later the fate of another category that seemed eternal, and now (unfairly) as a power limited to "class". So I'm allowed to put at the bottom of this introduction, the indication of "thinking in the territoriality": I can not use the category of the territory if coming at it from network analysis, thus learning to observe and feel "in" social networks. Which, fair reflection of the globalization as an anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, now hold to a size of venue that has changed the paradigm. In a world "radically delocalized", according to Appadurai, the location has less to do with space and more with the cultural bond: it is a "translocalità", which involves complex generative dimension of the Community report on two floors, the actual community (restricted to the neighborhood, neighborhood) and the "imaginary". But it is those ties, seemingly deterritorialized, to produce what Clifford Geertz calls "local knowledge", an indispensable assets to adjust between cultures and generations modes of cultural transmission and social reproduction.
Recognize and describe the different modes of existence of local knowledge would call definitely a geo-historical period, the only one able to defuse the totalitarian matrix (right philological observations of the geographer Franco Farinelli, on "terror" that engenders the territory) inherent in ' etymology territory. Geostoria do, rather than geopolitics, it means inscribe and circumscribe the subject within the practices and ways of living. This is handled as flat and not as a practical concept appropriative. In this ontological gap was placed, already twenty years ago, as an anthropologist Franco La Cecla border. But the knot, I think, is still an option to acquire a method to translate it in the fullness of an autonomous representation who can not be placed above but among the things of the world. Therefore, until the point of boredom, I reiterate that you live expert "in" area as you are in social networks: preposition, and articulates a clear intercultural posture, based on individual right to choose their own places of appaesamento transcultural.
Farinelli, in this regard, in contrast to land a second key concept of the geography of the landscape. This is a crucial loan, still not recognized by other disciplines. If the territory is thought starting from the borders, the landscape gives rise to the "view" which, as we are told by the geographer and philosopher, means two things together, what you see and what you think. The observer, in other words, it is also the first player on the geo-historical context in which it decides - through its exercise of observing - to become a constituent part. The quality of that look is really in sharing, as happens when it is proposed that a given site as a place of memory. In the good fortune to cross its threshold spatio-temporal, will you walk inside. The place of memory is that it produces, in this sense, an experience distinct; at the same time, I would not fall into uncritical and ahistorical reification that if he does quite often. Una cosa è predisporsi all'esperienza che ci restituisce come “autentico” il luogo di memoria: quello stato di straniamento mistico confessato da Mircea Eliade di fronte alla figura della “rovina” (che il tempo abita mentre abbandona). Altro è lasciarsi irraggiare dalla luce di un luogo elevato – paradossalmente, se la qualità primaria che pretendiamo di riconoscervi è la trascendenza – a soggetto ordinante.
In realtà, la maggiore fascinazione di un sito è quella di lasciarsi permeare dalle memorie diverse; le quali, mentre osservano e interrogano, stratificano e contribuiscono al suo riconoscimento in termini memoriali. Che sono cioè, in quanto tali, sempre a noi presenti anche quando si rappresentano in forme desuete. Il culturologo Jerome Bruner connette, in modo reciso, l'atto creativo di ogni cultura all'opportunità di tradursi in narrazione soggettiva: “senza la capacità di raccontare storie su noi stessi non esisterebbe una cosa come l'identità”.
Pensare in termini geostorici significa, a mio avviso, predisporsi a riconoscere ea interpretare la declinazione – unitaria per tempo e luogo – che si produce in ogni storia cui diamo l'opportunità esperienziale di farsi rinarrare.
Antonio Canovi
Storico del tempo presente
Nota bibliografica
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Baiesi, Nadia - Cova, Gian Domenico. Educa place in Matta, Tristan (ed.) A path of memory. Guide to the sites of Nazi and Fascist violence in Italy, Electa, Milan, 1996
Bateson, Gregory. Towards an ecology of mind, Adelphi, Milan, 1977
Bloch, Marc. Apology of the history or the historical profession, Einaudi, Torino, 1950
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Bosio, John. The intellectual overthrown, Milan, Nice Hello Ed, 1975
Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism: sec. XV-XVIII, Einaudi, Turin, 1982-83
Brunello, Piero. Letter to Herodotus "Altrochemestre. Documentation and history of our time ", n. 4, Spring 1996
Bruner, Jerome. Factory stories. Law, Literature, Life, Yale University Press, Rome and Bari, 2002
Canovi, Antonio. The territory and its signs. Memory of three recent experiments conducted between cultural reflection and concrete proposals for historical research, "Historical Research", A. XXVI, n. 70 October 1992
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Canovi, Antonio. The territory inhabited by the memory. A proposal for compulsory school education, "Historical Research", A. XXX, n. 79 July 1996
Canovi, Antonio - Houses Marianella. Living the city. Archives and research for the story of today, tabbed notebook, Istoreco, District III, the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, 1998-1999
Canovi, Antonio (ed.). North of the city. A history of water in Reggio Emilia that changes Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, 2007
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De Smedt, Marc. L'esprit des lieux, in L'esprit des lieux haut. 80 sites de France, "Question de ', Albin Michel, n. 65, 1986
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