The Markener in the Material

The Markener in the material:

Material cultural landscape and identity construction in Marken, North-Holland.

Anna Miorelli | [email protected] Student Number: 11251115 Marken, North Holland MSC Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam Advisor: Vincent de Rooij | Readers: O.G.A. Verkaaik and Rob van Ginkel Submission: 1/23/18 | Defense: 1/30/18 word count: 22,403

Abstract:

The focus of this fieldwork revolved around Markener identity and the material cultural landscape of the town Marken, North-Holland. I observed the types of relationships Markeners have with their material cultural landscape. These relationships I argue are a part of processes involved in the everyday construction, through boundary maintenance (Barth,1969) of Markener identity. The method of this fieldwork was to observe the everyday activities, or ways of being (Ingold, 2000), Markeners engaged in with their built environment. Using Ingold’s theory of “Dwelling” as a lens of both observation and analysis I identify three relationships between the Marken people and their built cultural landscape. The relationships I have discerned are as follows; through an ambiguous definition of private-public spaces with regards to material landscape, through incorporating foreign iconographies as representations of a local identity in the material landscape, and through the autonomous nature of the Markener with regards to the regional material landscape. Each of these material related relationships is a part of the larger myriad of cultural processes Markeners engage in and which form components in the ongoing construction of the identity of the Markeners. (Ingold, 2000) Through self-reflexive analysis of these relationships, in each chapter, I argue that these relationships are types of processes, also known as “ways of being,” which Ingold describes as actively constructing the cultural identity of these people. I use the symbolic material iconography of the Moor of Marken, throughout this research in an ongoing vignette, to situate this research paper in the wider contextual dynamics of Marken. These being the influence of tourism, the regional history, and the autonomous nature of the Marken people with regards to governmental influence. I suggest that these embodied processes can be used to discern a web of larger societal constructions in Dutch society. Issues of race, economy and gender are discussed briefly.

Keywords: Material culture, Heritage, Cultural Landscape, Processes of identification, Marken, North- Holland, the Netherlands, Wapen, Moor, Architecture, Ingold, Dwelling, Race, Economy, Gender, Tourism

I would like to say thank you to my family Aleida Dominguez-Miorelli, Joseph Miorelli, and Cami Miorelli for supporting me in this endeavor….

Special thanks to my supervisor Vincent de Rooij for the guidance and freedom in the process of writing this paper….

I feel blessed, grateful and closer to my roots after completing this project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS |

Reference Maps………………………………6-7

Introduction…………………………………….9

Chapter 1………………………………………22

Chapter 2………………………………………34

Chapter 3………………………………………48

Notes on culture/identity relationship…..……..63

Conclusion…………………………………….68

Bibliography…………………………………..71

Annex…………………………………………74

Maps | It is around 40 minutes to travel from Amsterdam Central to Marken by bus. It costs around 8 euros both ways. Buses run from the 8am till around 11pm on weekdays. This differs drastically from about one hundred years ago where the only way to reach the island was during strong winds, which will take half an hour from a location on the IJ. (Roodenburg, 2002: 186) Sources: Top:, Bottom: http://www.gemeentemarken.nl/marken-geschiedenis.html

Sources : Top: Google Maps, Bottom : http://europaenfotos.com/amsterdam/pho_mark_25.html

Introduction |

Horses walking on water and tall ships sailing through grass; these are the hallucinogenic mirages imbedded into the cultural landscape of regional Waterland. The hyper- flat landscape of the polders accentuate a paradoxical reality between engineered and feral beauty. When in route from Amsterdam to Marken the speed of the bus adds a cinematic drama to the very commonplace reality of this suburban landscape. Between verdant flashes intermingled with multiple shades of blue and grey, an obvious aperture to the past can be spotted across the Markermeer. The low and wide sea-ships of the Zuiderzee are echoed in the 1800s replicas which still cruise the lake today. Waterland, in its simple strangeness, is a countryside fertile with romantic imagination. It is a place which temporally still exists and at the same time once was. Marken was once an island eclipsed by the salty water of the Zuiderzee (South sea) and now, after the engineered closure of the Zuiderzee (South sea) with the Afsluitdijk (enclosing dike) in 1950, Marken is a peninsula connected by a seawall road across the fresh water of the Markermeer. [Fig.1] While you cross the seawall, the windows of the bus act like a historic projection and for a moment, and you catch the wide brim of a black hat and faintly, the ghostly echo of fishermen dragging their nets. Marken is a place with its secrets and shadows, an intimate community, a mysterious “wax museum” to those who are not from there.

“How do people live on that Island?” I have heard many native Amsterdamers remark. “The homes are so uniformed and like a museum, on display, for everyone, how can anyone live there? What do they do?” I have heard various comments like this from my fellow university colleagues about Marken. “I would prefer studying Volendam, don’t they have a history of incest there?” Comments like these were frequent throughout my research. Surprisingly, the cultural diversity in Marken is as intense as Amsterdam. Yet, this diversity has a temporal demarcation; a boundary which encases the early morning until late afternoon, when the hordes of international tourists come off of buses and descended down the well-worn historic paths of Marken.

[Fig.1] Maps of regional geographic context 1850(Left) to 2009(right) Source: http://www.docukit.nl/spreekbeurt/het-zuiderzeemuseum

Marken recalls an imaginary illustrated best by these classic Netherlandish painters from the 17th century. These imaginary landscapes in a sense reveal the inner relationship of the Netherlandish artist, with the landscape. His imagination projects an imbedded-ness of man within the landscape. It is the land made and formed in the image of man. This concept of the Netherlandish landscape being constructed in the image of man, is not just poetic, it is somewhat literal, as Marken resides today, just on the horizon of the famous engineered polder landscape of Waterland. [Fig.3]

[Fig. 2] Right: Dutch school anonymous, unknown Netherlands south. 1570. Landscape anthropomorphic, portrait of woman. Left: Herman Saftleven the Younger, 1650. Source: https://pleasantpastime.com/anthropomorphic-landscape/ , http://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/the-anthropomorphic-landscapes-of-the-17th- century-or-why-being-human-is-to-see-ourselves-everywhere/

In reference to this region of the Netherlands, North Holland is commonly described as a landscape shaped by man out of utilitarian necessity against the rising sea water. This utilitarian angst forms a narrative of man’s struggle with nature and it is a factual reality as the Netherlands has fabricated and engineered most of its natural landscape. (See Annex 1 for more specifics on regional context)

In partnership to this factual cliché, I suggest that these paintings [Fig.2] hint at something a little deeper about the relationship between man and the landscape. What they suggest is perhaps a certain internal cultural way of being (Ingold,2000). An internal struggle, projected into the land, which becomes activated through the actions and activities man engages in with the natural environment. In regard to the various internal cultural processes of the people of Waterland, these “ways of being” (Ingold, 2000), have envisioned the natural landscape in the image of man’s necessities reflecting their struggling internal disposition.

Man’s internal ways of being are in a sense activated through relationships with the land and they are continually maintained through everyday relationships with the manifested cultural landscape. (Ingold, 2000) Here is where looking to the everyday relationships of a cultural group with their material cultural landscape can be revealing about certain internal ways of being and these internal ways of being can reveal facets and processes which help construct components of a cultural groups collective identity.

[Fig.3] Waterland Polder Landscape Source : http://cordablogg.blogspot.nl/2013_08_01_archive.html

This deep regional connection between the material landscape and man; the constant engineering, the grappling and transformation of the land and man’s activities with the land, is 11

what made me initially curious about this specific group of perceived authentic Dutch people; the Markeners. This made me curious of their specific relationships related to their specific material landscape. What about the Marken people is imbedded in their material cultural landscape? What relationships with the material cultural landscape could be discerned, which could hint at some forms of internal, “ways of being.” (Ingold, 2000)

[Fig.4] Left: Men fishing for eels around Marken, Dates: 1900 till 1920, http://www.vintag.es/2016/07/40-rare-vintage-photographs- that.html?m=1 [Fig.5] Right: Location of Buckfast bee research and breeding ground on Marken. For more information on this rare bee project see https://aristabeeresearch.org/ The honey can be purchased at the milk farm down the road from the bee farm on Oosterpad road. Source: Goggle Maps, Date: January 2018.

The physical landscape on the island of Marken was first populated by monks from Friesland, in the 13th century. The Marken Ferry-express website states that they initially made a living by farming. (Marken Express, 2018) However the area was susceptible to extreme flooding, making agarin pursuits on the island precarious, before the Afsluitdijk was constructed around 1950. Historic activities (ways of being), such as fishing for eels as a primary food source, or the processes of constructing homes on raised land, called “terps”, involved a finessed, intimate, relationship between Marken people and their landscape.

Today there is no longer an immediate threat of flooding thanks to the dikes constructed around the perimeter of the former island. Today on the peninsula of Marken because of the ecological shift in land morphology, not only does a micro trade of wool and milk exist but also a rare form of bee, the “Buckfast bee”, was introduced and is breed on the island. This ecological shift in the region has drastically interfered with the activities Markeners engage in with the land, this influences the ways in which material culture in the landscape is used. For example, the homes which were once on stilts have now been retrofitted with a ground level living space. Another example of a transition in the way the material culture is used by

Markeners, is now with the advent of Airbnb, many of the traditional Markener homes are rented out to foreigners, when formerly, there was only one hotel on the island and there was only one traditional home, owned by Widow Teerhuis in the late 1800s (Roodenburg, 2002:190) for foreigners to sleep in.

[Fig.5.5] This is the webpage for all the Markeners who live abroad now. It appears that the community keeps close watch over those who have moved away. The MES website, is a weekly updated website, which has the aesthetics of the 1990s, it is where the community finds out about local events, alongside the corresponding Facebook for this webpage. Source: Mesmarken.nl

Whereas before the 1920s the cultural activities and material landscape of the island were centered, solely, around the regional economic activity of fishing and the ecological threat of flooding; today, with the absence of a mono-economic means of living, the residents of Marken are scattered and around the world and many of them commute to, or now live in, the larger regional metropolises; such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hauge. With the ecological transition of the salty south sea into the fresh water Markermeer, we see a drastic, and rapid economic transition, as there is evidence that fishing as an economic practice, had existed on the island since the 1600s. “In the 17th and 18th centuries, the growth of the population went hand in hand with the emergence of a new source of income, namely fishing. New houses which were needed at that time were no longer built on terpen, but on wooden pillars.” (Marken Express, 2018) (Fig.9) This is about 300 years of a centralized, regional economy, which in the process of 30 years from about 1920 till 1950 completely disappeared. My main informant Eefje Visser, described to me that “not one person on the island, fishes today.”

So, it appears, rather than remaining together as a community which, identifies as fishermen throughout all these, ecological, economic and social changes; that with the individualistic advantages of modern technology in the 20th century1 and with the loss of this collective practice of fishing, the community of Marken seems to have developed a more individualistic, dispersed and outward looking means of gaining income. 2

I am most curious of this drastic change with regards to the material cultural landscapes of Marken. From a local, mono-economic to a global, diverse economic theater after such a long period of stability. One would think then, considering the enormous influx of tourism on the island, in the early 1900s, which increased while the fishing economy on the island decreased, that more people on the island would have transitioned from a centralized fishing economy to a centralized tourism economy. However, Eefje Visser also described, that “today only 4% of the island is engaged with the economic practice of tourism industry on the island. The majority of the tourism on the island is actually delegated by outside sources. In order to understand tourism on Marken, Key and K. Pillai give a good general outline, as to how tourism should be perceived within the anthropological lens of study:

“Tourism is a complex socio-cultural experience system that cannot be understood except in relationship to the overarching structures in the world system. Yet it is not enough to understand the macro structures without examining how tourism is played out at the local level in the tourist-host encounter. In other words, the economy, political structures, and ideological constructions interact within an arena where the tourist-host encounter becomes a microcosm of the dynamic and fluctuating changes in the production of social relationships. Tourism conceptualizations have included a sacred pilgrimage for authenticity (MacCannell 1976); a pilgrimage (Allcock, 1988; Graburn, 1983) a form of imperialism (Crick 1996; Harrsion 1991, Nash 1989) an agent of social change (Greenwood, 1972), and the commodification of culture (Greenwood,1997)”- (Key and K. Pillai, 2007:130)

These tourism conceptualizations, particularly “the commodification of culture” (Greenwood,1997), and “pilgrimage”( Allcock, 1988; Graburn, 1983) are perhaps the best conceptualizations to look at with regards to Marken and tourism. Pilgrimage (Allcock, 1988; Graburn, 1983) is a major concept, considering that tourists tend to use Marken as pastoral processional by-way towards Volendam. This pilgrimage is pursued in order to explore the

1Such as rapid and accessible travel along with quicker and more secure means of communication 2 of course there are most likely other factors involved in this dispersal, as it is a complex process, of which only a basic structure of understanding is necessary for my research 14

authentic Holland, away from the cosmopolitan intensity of Amsterdam. Marken is in essence a sight-seeing corridor, where in a commodified fashion, you can buy clogs at the entrance to the town, eat little pancakes “poffertjes” in the harbor and take a ferry ride from the Harbor over to Volendam. (see map figure 17 in chapter 1)

[Fig.6] Image taken by photo journalists, Date: 1900-1920 Source: http://www.vintag.es/2016/07/40-rare-vintage-photographs-that.html?m=1 [Fig.7 ] Image taken by Artist, from 1970-1990 source: https://www.henkvanderleeden.com/225238634/marken-jan-schouten date: 1970-1998

Since the early 1900s, Marken’s material, cultural-landscape, has been perceived within the touristic imagination as a quintessential “Dutch” fishing village, many native Amsterdamers I have spoken with see it as “a living wax museum” (Amsterdam native). (Fig.6, Fig.7, Fig.8)

[Fig.8] This photograph depicts the “authentic” touristic perception of Marken as a quintessential “Dutch” cultural-landscape, this photographer traveled the Netherlands in a before they pass series, conducted by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Date: January 2014, Source: https://www.jimmynelson.com/journey/the-netherlands

Looking at these three images from three different time periods across the 20th century, all taken by non-Marken photographers, it becomes a little clearer how this perception of the

Marken people as a crystalized ethnicity forms itself. The world-famous tourist, Rick Steve’s once visited Marken, traveling by a traditional wooden fishing boat from Marken. “It was a time of wooden boats and iron men” (Rick Steves Travel Blog, 2015) (Fig. 8) remarked a local Markener steering rick towards the island. This way of being consisted of 2 men in one wooden boat who would travel out across the Zuiderzee from Monday till Friday and come back for church on the weekend. (Rick Steves Travel Blog, 2015)

This imagination of Marken existing today still as it once was, was shaped by a diverse group of artisans, academics and traveling journalists long before Rick Steves set off for his touristic dominion of Europe :

“Marken was "different," they agreed. For most of them, the island evoked images of Holland's Golden Age, of its robust and glorious seventeenth century. Others perceived a "Teutonic" past, imagined themselves as having landed among a "primitive tribe," or even construed the islanders as direct descendants of Neanderthal man. Written and illustrated sources from the period offer a surprising palette of national glorification, primitivism, and race. Mass tourism soon entered the scene, fostered by convenient transportation. As of 1885, one could take the steam tram to the small town of Monnickendam, where the boat to Marken was moored. Around 1900 a direct ferry service (the "Marken Express") was even established between Amsterdam and the island. By 1905, a travel guide could already lament, "What is wrong with Marken is that for the most part it consists of sightseers" (Lucas 1905:19)” (Roodenburg, 2002: 173)

In a reflexive turn from this touristic imagination, which saw the Marken people as a group of primitives, strange, others; I found an anecdotal comment on the “Rick Steves” website which indicates a curious encounter of a tourist receiving ridicule at the hands of Markeners in 1902.

“Marken has been on the tourist trail a long time. My great-grandfather took the family on the grand tour of Europe in 1902. My grandfather’s journal tells of the sail boat ride to Marken. At that time the locals wore traditional dress. My great-aunt, fourteen years old at the time, was embarrassed that the local teens laughed at the way she was dressed.” – Posted by Chip on Rick Steves Travel Blog, October 2015, 10:18am

[Fig. 8] Left: A “Man of Iron” on a traditional wooden fishing boat. Date: 20th century Source: http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/nl/geheugen/view?coll=ngvn&identifier=NOMA01%3AAA771 [Fig.9] Middle: Traditional fishing costume of the Markener, depicted by Pieter van den around 1669-1689, from the Rijksmuseum collection.

It is interesting to see here how the foreigner becomes the object of exoticism with regards to clothing style, from the perspective of Markener children. Whereas in the past these costumes were an everyday outfit, today they are used only for traditional rituals Queens day (Fig.10), weddings, and commencements of historic events. I will note here that my gatekeeper Eefje, told me that there were, however, three women in the village whom wear their traditional costume every day.3

This historic crystallization of a “primitive” man to be encountered within a touristic framework, provided an interesting precedent for my research. Foreseeing the eventual loss of the traditional fishing economy of the Zuiderzee, folkloristics set forth to document the “ways of being,” before they changed. (Fig.11) In an effort to save Marken from the drastic economic and ecological changes which the closure of the Zuiderzee and the creation of the Markermeer

3 I did not get a chance to meet these women and the costumes of Marken were not a part of the material landscape focus of my research, though they are the most striking of the material culture the Markeners have.

would bring, the material cultural-landscape and people of Marken became a crystalized treasure of unique, endangered, “Dutch” folkloric ethnicity.

In a symbiotic fashion, today Markeners display in their museums the remnants of these the folkloric records. (Fig.11) The visual interpretations of the everyday life of the Marken people was shepherded by foreign artists who in a “intimist”4 (The editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 1998) style, depicted the interiors, interactions and costumes of the island of Marken. Today within the Marken Museum, they are hung on the wall to represent the historic narratives and heritage of Markeners. In a sense folklorists, artisans and even physical anthropologists, were involved in shaping the ways Markeners engage with their material heritage. (Roodenburg, 2002)

[Fig.11] Left: Collection of paintings by various artists hung in the Marken Museum, source: http://www.markermuseum.nl/?gallery=paul- kuiper Dates: late 1800s. [Fig.12 ] Right: I took this photograph in June 2017 of an artist in the harbor selling his depictions of Marken. Source: Anna Miorelli

What is fascinating is that this preserved material heritage today is a part of the assumed “identity’ of the contemporary people of Marken, through the touristic imagination, as though Marken is a static environment. It is perceived as though the environment has become crystallized “as it once was.” Even the terms “traditional” and “authentic,” are used to describe Marken as a remote, isolated, place of the past.

4 Intimism, variety of late 19th- and early 20th-century painting that made an intense exploration of the domestic interior as subject matter. 18

“ ‘Here we saw life in a new appearance as if at the ends of the earth. Here lives a small tribe or settlement, separated from the mother country by but a small sea and yet so different from the rest of the population, as though the distance between them was a hundred times greater" (Wood 1878: 134)’”- ( Roodenburg, 2002:188)

This superimposition of time in the imagination of the outsider, who visits Marken, invokes a place which never experiences change; from as far back as the late 19th century, persisting through the tourism industry today:

“Separated by a storm from the mainland in medieval times, Marken stands as a traditional Dutch fishing village frozen in time. Though today reconnected with a dike, the small island (now peninsular) town retains much of its tradition and culture. Wander along the waterfront and down quiet streets surrounded by wooden houses, and you'll feel as though you've stepped back several centuries. Keep an eye out for the "Horse of Marken," a lighthouse on the peninsula with a 16 m (54 ft.) tower dedicated to guiding sailors and fishermen to safety. Stop by the local museum to learn more about age-old Dutch traditions, the history of the town, and the traditional clothing worn in the past by the population. Don't miss the wooden shoe workshop in the village, which produces a classic symbol of Holland. Make Marken a centerpiece of your Marken vacation itinerary, and find what else is worth visiting using our Marken trip planner .” ( Debloukas, 2017)

Considering the fascinating relationship between man and the landscape in the Netherlands, I was curious of Marken because of this “crystallized” nature foregrounded by previous journalists, folklorists and physical anthropologists. I was curious of how the Marken people associate themselves with their built environment. As an aspiring anthropologist, with a background in Landscape-Architecture and Design, my focus of fieldwork revolved around the ways Markener identity is embodied in the material, cultural-landscape. How is Markener identity constructed through, every day, “ways of being” (Ingold,2000) in the cultural landscape of heritage, in Marken, North-Holland?

My logistical limitations, as a field worker, greatly influenced what type of information I was able to retrieve from the field. They were as follows; a change in initial research question and strategy, not speaking Dutch and using a translator, living in Amsterdam and a temporal constraint, of only three months to conduct research. These constraints, along with my existing skill set in Architecture and Design, helped to define the parameters of what was possible to research with regards to the concept of identity construction. Thus, the material, within the cultural landscape of Marken, became the sincerest area of ethnographic focus considering the

practical constraints I had as a researcher. Hence this research is highly observation informed and uses excerpts from my richest ethnographic interviews, with substantiating excerpts from other interlocutors within the town.

The opportunities of the research are to be found within the very constraints. The methodology I used focused on a month and a half of purely observational notations and photographic analysis. Essentially this is akin to an Architectural approach of site analysis, where you immerse yourself in the built environment and observe the ways the local people interact with the surrounding landscape. This is done in order to have a solid first person encounter with how I perceive the site as being used, compared to how my informants perceive their sites as being used. It was important to witness behaviors first, without the native influence of my informants clouding the data. The next month and a half of this field work, was used to strategically interview on the spot, various locals, on their relationships with various aspects of the material cultural landscape, which were curious to me as an aspiring anthropologist. The focus of this research is on the Marken people and the physical material landscape of heritage, in the cultural landscape of Marken. Hence, I selected Ingold’s theoretical framework of “dwelling”, which focuses on the study of the built environmental landscape, as a method from which to observe the cultural processes, or “ways of being” which constitute components of identity construction.

Through analytical dissection of how these relationships are involved in everyday “ways of being,” I describe how the Markener identity is embodied in their built cultural landscape. This ethnographic research seeks to provide insight into the dynamic processes which connect identity construction, material iconography and the material cultural-landscape of Marken.

As Ingold explains: “environments are never complete but are continually under construction.” (Ingold, 2000: 172) and in those environments, which humans inhabit, “it is in the very process of dwelling that we build” (Ingold,2000: 188). Building for Ingold is not the “simple transcription” of imagined designs upon the environment; rather the imagined design is a part of the process of “dwelling,” which already exists in the connection between humans and their environment. The building is not the “crystallization of human activity” in the environment, it is not a constructed object or specimen outside of the human body, rather it is a part of the ways of being that are there before the structure is built and after it is built. Buildings are dynamic “processes” based on the activities around them. The built house and the

activities of it have, as Ingold argues, historically been perceived as dichotomous, rather than embedded within each other. It is this embedded-ness of people’s activities with their environments, building as a part of the environment, which constitutes Ingold’s definition of “dwelling.”

In my research I use Ingold’s definition of “dwelling” as a theoretical lens to look at identity construction in Marken, within the cultural landscape, as it relates to certain processes/ “ways of being” which through this “theory of dwelling” reflect Markener community identity.

Below I have identified three cultural processes or “ways of being” by which the community identity of the “Markener” is actively constructed through the material in the cultural landscape of Marken; through the ambiguous private-public relationship of the Markener with his environment, through the usage of the foreign as a local motif, and through the autonomous nature of the Markener as hinted at through the material landscape. I present many details and excerpts of various activities and ways of being which I have observed throughout my field work, however, these are the three strongest relationships I was able to discern, which reflect something about the identity of the Markeners.

Within each of these chapters, I reflect on various examples of these relationships through urban mapping, photography and ethnographic interview. These relationships which are a part of the cultural identity of the Markeners can be used to discern a web of larger societal constructions in Dutch society. Issues of race, economy and gender are discussed briefly, with regards to the embodied processes surrounding the relationships I have observed above.

CHAPTER 1| The ambiguous private-public

Voyeurism, spatial power, and ownership in the cultural landscape of heritage

What was I looking for in Marken? Who was I looking for? The more the days passed by and the more the weeks turned into months, I started to feel lost in my fieldwork. Why am I studying these people? Observation can take an isolative toll and it takes discipline to remain away from contact. “Yes, they have some beautiful aesthetic fabrics and an interesting fishing history, but what is my meaning for being here today? What is curious or captivating about the way these people dwell in their urban environment?” I had to reflect back on my initial research question, which began with a riddle that has always puzzled me; I had to rethink what brought me to Anthropology from Architecture to begin with:

How and why do one group of people, use the image of another group of people to represent themselves?

Initially my field work research was to be situated in the Canary Islands, studying the contemporary material usage of an indigenous group on the Islands, called the Guanches. I was curious as to how and why this indigenous group became assimilated into the contemporary population and how the contemporary, Canarian, population used the material iconography of the Guanches to represent a local Canarian identity.

So, what remained of my original research proposal now, had to be converted to situate a community somewhere near Amsterdam. Considering my economic constraints at the time which hindered me from continuing the Canarian research, I chose another island community, the Markeners, for their, peculiar, relationships with the material landscape and reframed my initial research question to focus, less on the topic of indigeneity, more on the relationships of humans and their material cultural landscapes.

Yet during my lost wandering in this small town, I had absolutely no idea I would come, serendipitously, face to emblematic face with the very topic I was so curious about in my initial research: a group of people, the Markeners, using the image of another group of people, A Moor, to represent themselves on their official heraldic seal (Wapen) of Marken.

I was about a month into critically observing the built environment, and at that point I was even a bit desperate. The people were friendly yet distant and there seemed to be less material culture of interest than I had initially assumed about Marken. It was here where the story begins.

I was visiting the official Marken museum, attempting to communicate with a few jolly elderly women, who seemed like they were sisters, yet were only old friends. I was trying to explain something in English, to a young French woman, since the two women working in the museum only spoke Dutch.

“The characteristic orange dress on a cloth doll represented the traditional Queens Day costume for the Markeners…” Mid-sentence, my eyes caught something glittering underneath the glass display case of souvenirs. It was similar to a bumper-sticker I had seen on my mother’s car of a German town we had lived in when I was young. Triangular, stark blue and yellow and red…. It was a heraldic seal of Marken. (Fig.13)

[Fig.13] Moor of Marken sticker on the right and official black and white seal of the Moor of Marken which is used for the official event planners of the town of Marken, you are not allowed to copy any of the images on the MES website, so the quality of the logo is a little poor. Source: Anna Miorelli ( right), http://schoutenenterprises.com/MES_SMJ_archief/MES_Nieuws_Archief.htm ( left) Date: both 2017

“Oh,” I thought, “oh wow”, it’s the outline of a black figure, yet he’s depicted as golden. He has an earring and a bandana, and he has roughly drawn features, a depiction of foreign man by another group of people. “Is this another Zwart Pete?” I thought to myself. “Who is this man?” Then I look up, and I see another shield, (fig.14) made out of cardboard, hanging on the wall, in worn-out gold and blue paint and its’ another version of this same man’s portrait. I ask the women behind the counter who he is, we both stumble in awkward broken Dutch, English. It was a tense conversation, I could not speak Dutch and they could not speak English. Here a very abrupt realization arose, just 40 minutes by car from Amsterdam and you are no longer greeted with friendly indifference towards English, here English is a foreign language, in Amsterdam it is a second language.

More importantly it was a tense conversation because I had just reversed the role of my behavior with them; before I was a friendly interpreter of their cultural affinity for the Queen of the Netherlands. Now I was a questioning antagonist, asking about a depiction of a man who, later on I would find out, has received some controversy and criticism from the bands of tourists which enter the town.

[Fig.14] Left: Closest image I could find which mimics how the shield I saw, in the museum, looks. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marken_wapen_HRVA.svg [Fig.15] Traditional Marken interior of Marken Home, this is the water closet with clogs displayed for foreigners to view, although this image is from a house, which depicts the traditional Marken home and interior, in the open-air museum in Arnhem Source: http://detantevantjorven.blogspot.nl/2012/07/het-marker-vissershuisje.html

I noticed an affective, emotional relationship regarding the types of material heritage we could speak about. There was audible tension about certain material objects. This behavioral interaction left me curious as to the private-public nature of the Markeners. Paradoxically they have their intimate traditional house on display for everyone from around the world to see and at the same time certain objects within that intimate space have a “look-but-don’t-ask” quality to them.

The urban environment mimics this private public tension. As you can see in figure 18 below there is a network of ambiguously public, narrow streets, woven into the hyper public touristic routes. Within these “private-public” routes a toggle of voyeuristic behavior exists today amongst the Markeners, windows with eye catching displays perform a museum like display for the visitor, yet look a little deeper into the open window and you may be met with a hostile face looking back at you. If the built environment is rife in Marken with so many private-public ambiguities, what through Ingold theory of dwelling can I infer about their “Ways of being” as they exist today? The private-public tension in the urban environment has blurry limits. A stoic openness, to each home with a diversity of reactions from the owner of the window inside, yet, mostly, a definite attention-grabbing display. There is almost a flirtatious nature to the Markeners with their touristic visitors; the windows suggest to “look at our traditional home; absorb all the information you can about the beautiful interiors of our homes, look into our contemporary homes, look at what I have put on display, but do not get too close to my home, and do not look deeper than the window.

I was taken aback by Marken the more I spent time there. The inclusive nature of tourism, which drops the spectator into the seemingly most intimate forms of local heritage, in Marken, has a strict boundary. What you see is what you get and to dig deeper into this seemingly transparent, seemingly intimate experience, I would say from my field work, is a taboo. You see homes, you see “Markeners” living in their homes. You see a harbor. You see their history. It is a very voyeuristic experience for the outsider. It is a mysterious place, but also a very slow moving, very quiet place, which is even a boring place, there is something about this mystery which is inaccessible, and you are left with a feeling of boredom.

The mystery on Marken exists but it also does not exist for the locals in the way I perceived it. Any talk like this with some of the locals would make me seem as someone who was looking too deeply into simple things. In a sense the mystery on Marken was a repressive mystery,

where all you see is the myriad of window displays. The conversations I had on the spot with locals in the café, mimicked this “display” interaction; there was an overt openness to conversation yet, metaphorically speaking, a curtain to close this open window very near to this openness. When any deeper questions about the origins of Marken costumes, or Marken houses arose, merely factual information was replied in a matter of fact way. In this sense I see that the private-public manners of conversation I had with people as a reflection and a connection to the ways in which they live.

During the first month of my field work, some days an eerie feeling of isolation would dawn upon me, “Why am I researching this town?” The further I immersed myself in the urban environment, the more isolated and austere the surroundings of this “quaint and charming town” began to feel. Later on, I found an article from 1887 in which the author encounters the same austere feelings of isolation I felt:

“ ‘A feeling of loneliness and utter desolation came over me: the feeling that takes mastery when one is compelled to come into contact with a people, with whose inclinations and emotions one has nothing in common.’ Indeed, ‘the island seemed to be separated from the world in every sense of the word.’ ” – (Roodenburg, 2002: 186-187)

From my field notes: “The more the urban environment became alive with connotation the more I saw the same three colors of paint; blue, dark green, black….is anyone alive here? Only, an open window with a white sheet would rustle back in response. There are days that I get the feeling I am being avoided, yet also watched, this I am sure is not just about my presence, but the presence of all foreigners; you can see the dark silhouettes of people in their homes, and you can feel their eyes watch you silently.” ( Anna Miorelli, May 2017)

One day at the edge of the Minnebuurt neighborhood and after looking out across the vista of newly born lambs in spring, I turn around to go back to the bus stop, when I catch one! A Markener! looking right back at me, this time, I make a locked gaze through the window of their home. I caught him, he was watching me watching the town. A middle aged older man in his wooden seat, observing me and two other foreigners, observing the town. The tension of voyeurism in Marken is a volley between local and non-local. The private and public spheres of Marken have a distinct looking glass, a bi-directional portal of intimate exchanges.

[Fig.15] Left: Henk van der Leedensource, Grietje van Altena and Luutje Schipper behind window: https://www.henkvanderleeden.com/225213045/marken Date: 1970- 1998, right: Meeting Markener gaze, Here the women pose in traditional costume behind the windows, however in real life, the women and men in their homes were everyday contemporary clothing. Source: Anna Miorelli, June 2017 Right: This is another image of a girl working in the window of a kitchen, whom I guess became confrontational when I was taking photos in the harbor. Source: Anna Miorelli

Yet for the Markener this is somewhat of an elected voyeurism and an imposed defense mechanism to stare back. As the highlight of touristic experience in Marken is to display the interior of their historical homes, it may follow that tourists become used to the blurred line of interior privacy as a public right. Figure 15 depicts my experience with filming in the tourist central harbor where one woman looked back into my camera, almost aggressively while I was filming the facades of homes.

Regarding tourism, I was shocked at how little economic interaction locals have with regards to transporting the tourists. Of course, the; two museums, six touristic souvenir shops, singular hotel, eight Air-BnBs, famous Marken-Volendam ferry service, four snack stands and six restaurants on the island benefit from this influx of tourists. Since only 4% of the community works with tourism, the local population of about 1800 people has very little control over how many people visit the island every day, this is almost entirely outsourced to private touring company’s and the independent usage of the public transportation system.

I wonder if the lack of power in regulating the amount of touristic traffic, has given a sort of watch dog confrontational-shyness to the Marken community. I have observed the tourists being particularly unruly, in the most intimate parts of the community ( the orange lines

in figure 18 below). I have observed them tearing the leaves off of trees, being very loud, taking “selfies” on people’s doorsteps. It appears that the Marken people are visually territorial with their cultural landscape. Yet, I never witnessed outrageous Marken vs. tourist type of altercation, despite the elaborate physical behaviors which tourists performed throughout the material landscape.

However, there were again, these visual altercations, similar to the window experience. For example, if a tourist was taking a “selfie” right outside a local’s house, if the person in the house was home, they would make their presence known in some way. (fig.16 )

[Fig.16] Tourists outside of Markener in his home. He made his presence clear by opening the window and staring out at the people in an awkward fashion.

This activity of voyeuristic enforcement, on the part of the Marken people, may be one acquired way of being, a new community practice, which through Ingold’s concept of dwelling, could be considered an inherent cultural component of identity. However, it is a phenomenon of curiosity for me as an aspiring anthropologist. Considering, the language barrier between tourists and locals, the bodily behavior of a native Markener enforcing an expected behavioral comportment for the tourist, through the bodies’ location in the environment is a curious activity. It is a quiet activity and it let me know something about the quiet possessiveness the Markener feels with his/her home. Where the Markener dances back and forth enforcing that the ambiguously private-public streets, may indeed be public, yet the watchful gaze and bodily presence of the Markener suggests that the streets may indeed be private in a non-legal way.

Through seeing and being seen privacy is demanded. Rather than privacy being denoted by a language, by a physical fence or a shot gun, it is defined in the urban environment and constructed in the built environment in an ephemeral, non-tangible way.

This is precisely what Ingold speaks of, where a human’s environment is constantly being constructed even when the physical building has already been built. The home and its interior can be constructed at a distance and projected as a boundary which is further than the actual physical limitations of the home. The quiet suggestion of an owner through making his body known, which defines the ambiguous private-public urban architecture of Marken, is a part of the construction of the identity of the Marken in that it is embodied in the physical environment through the activities of the Markener in the environment in his/her everyday “way of being”, with that environment.

[Fig. 17] Map of touristic route from Amsterdam, through Waterland, through Marken and onto Volendam. ( yellow on mainland, red on Marken, Blue where the ferry takes you from Marken to Volendam) Source: Anna Miorelli

It is regionally perceived that Marken is a touristic rest-stop between Amsterdam and the more famous fishing village, Volendam. (fig. 17) Every day this cadence of touristic

migration peaks and subsides with thick streams of Urdu, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, English, audible, through the tight alleys of wooden horizontal monochrome. It is interesting to note that there is only one entrance into Marken from the parking lot. There could have been many ways to design the entrance to Marken. It is like entering a walled city, only there are no walls. However, there are clearly designated paths which lead you directly from the parking lot entrance to the harbor. There were many options when designing Marken, the original entrance to the city in reality was always the harbor, but today, the entrance is reversed to the harbor of the parking lot. Between the harbor and the parking lot, the main buurtschappen are intersected by the main pathways, as the urban formation of Marken originated from corresponding hamlets (‘buurtschappen’ in Dutch).

Figure 18 below clearly illustrates the clustering of homes (outlined by the orange pathways) and the way in which the paths expand and contract and cluster into very intimate bisections of urban planning. The touristic highlights are mostly home related, with the exception of the clog factory; these are the Marken museum, a traditional “Markener home with a plethora of material culture. The “Stilje Bos” is another Marken home open to public voyeurism and even within the cafes there are mini replicas, made in cloth and cardboard dioramas of the Marken interior design.

[Fig. 18] Map of touristic circulation around the orange private public ambiguous routes, the yellow which signifies the touristic routes and the magenta which signifies the commercial buildings in the harbor neighborhood. Here in faint yellow to the right we see the massive parking lot which then leads to the clog factor, the rectangle yellow square, to the upper left of the parking lot. Source: Anna Miorelli

Many private homes have their doors open, yet they are shielded by dangling beads, or waist level painted plywood and met by lace hangings to shield the interior of the homes. The tourists rhythmically arrive through these passageways, from 7am till around 14:00 every week between March and October. The narrow streets are technically public, but have a very constricted, intimate, private courtyard ambience. Here is where an encounter with a peering local is possible, if you wander alone. ( Fig.19)

[Fig.19] An example of an ambiguous private public pathway through the historic district of the town. These can be seen in orange in map figure 18. It was a great unexpected tension, to meet the human gaze, within what had been consistently narrated to me as a “wax museum”, “tourism town”. It is a reminder that Marken is very alive in its Material landscape. What appears to be the quiet un-moving material is imbedded with the visage of the Markener.

My research revealed private and public displays of emotion in different ethnographic interview situations. Depending on the context of the language being spoken, the mannerisms and degrees of expression would change. After my second month I enlisted the help of a Dutch friend of mine, Emma, to help me speak with people and make contact because gathering informants had become increasingly more difficult. This greatly improved my data collection process. In fact, this was a complete revolution in the amount of information and behavioral treatment I received. Familiar language being exchanged between strangers ultimately enhanced the public display of emotion. When Dutch was spoken, it was like watching a light bulb turn on and the animation in their faces would become cheerful or at least vivid in some way, with some kind of expression. If the Dutch language was not there, then in English there was a kind of autopilot response I would receive. I am aware that this could also be a personality trait; some people are more charismatic then others. However, I observed this public display with language amongst many of the neighbors walking out of their homes. Greeting each other, I saw people stop their bicycles in the street, to chat for a minute or two, and the dialogue, though in Dutch was always a few degrees more audible, than a conversation in English, the faces of these people, (usually women) who stopped their bikes were generally open, with raised eyebrows, their cheek bones raised in a friendly greeting.

While I was in Marken, in a way, I was experiencing severe culture shock. In Marken there is an invisible wall between you and the other and where I am from there, this invisible wall is an openly displayed emotion, whether it is an in-genuine emotion or not. Even if it is an emotion like disgust, or anger or confrontation, something is expressed in the direction of most people, especially if you are in their neighborhood. For example, it’s not uncommon for someone who doesn’t know you at the grocery store in Miami, Florida, to confront you and say, “what are you looking at?” even if you are just turning around for no reason at all. People where I come from assume that others are aware of others and respond openly with emotions; affronting or affirming, comforting or confronting. However, in Marken, it was like other people didn’t exist for the Markener, you could tell who a local was by the way they actively ignored or were indifferent to the surrounding cultural landscape and to the surrounding groups, of what I will call, “outsiders”. These outsiders were easily spotted for a myriad of reasons, but underlying them all, was their active receptiveness to the cultural landscape. Outsiders looking around, or listening to a tour leader, guiding them, or just a general unexplainable alertness in the cadence of their walk.

The “warmth” I could sense between native Dutch speakers, after having my friend help to translate, was a strange phenomenon to witness and a breath of relate-ability. I could now see, that like most stereotypically small communities in the world, “my ethnographic group of focus is just somewhat clannish,” like my Cuban family members back home. Skeptical and critical of outsiders, possibility due to a specific framework of relate-ability and a specific set of behavioral and verbal cues for intimate exchanges of neighborliness ( see chapter 3, culture- identity analysis). Behaving in a clannish way, as opposed to a sort of stoic coldness, from a self-reflexive point of view, I personally understand the clannish mentally better. In the clannish mentality where I come from even if you dislike someone you are receptive to them, even if it is in-genuine. The “cold” interactions I was witnessing and engaging in before with Markeners were very off putting and deterring, but in a sense, they were genuine. Or so I assumed, because I started to wonder if in the same way, my community of people back home, has an in-genuine openness, towards strangers, no matter how the individual feels about the stranger. Maybe it was possible that the Markeners had an in-genuine coldness. Maybe they didn’t actually feel so cold or indifferent to outsiders. Maybe it was just an act, the same way that being open was an act for my community.

CHAPTER 2| the local foreigner

Incorporating foreign iconographies in a Marken “way”

Back in the Museum shop when I had made my discovery of the wapen of Marken, I was just in the middle of explaining the orange dress costume to a French tourist when a distinct image of a foreign man had caught my eye. I asked if I could buy one of the wapen stickers. They reluctantly let me take one of the images after I explained my research. I left the Museum and walked to the harbor thinking about my serendipitous luck in congruent research topics. “Oh my God, there he is again”, how had I not seen the wapen of Marken before! It was flying in blue and yellow as a flag in the Harbor, the flags being tangled over some of the harbor buildings and unfurled over others.

“Strange,” I thought, “very strange”. Here is the heraldic seal of the town, yet he is somewhat hidden within the town. There is no statue of him. There are no stories written about him and when you Google “Marken” without typing in “wapen of Marken,” specifically, the image does not appear. The wapen and flag also, do not show up, immediately when you Google search Marken. I notice that I kept referring to this icon as a real man and not an image or an object on a shield. For me the image of this man is alive in some way.

Hence, after the discovery of what appeared to be a foreign man representing a local people, I was awake with curiosity. One reason is because this man was a material emblem which satisfied my initial desire to research question Why/How one group of people uses the image of another to represent themselves. The other reason is for its’ stark contrast in regard to the other regional Wapens of Waterland. Marken is a historic fishing village and has regional performative cultural continuity with the surrounding villages of Waterland and the Zuiderzee in regard to ceremonial marriages, Protestantism, traditional costumes and a rich fishing lore. (Fig.20) Yet their emblem is a foreign man, used to represent a very local Marken, a local place and local people. A people who have been characterized by anthropologists in the past as being an ethnically rich variant of a “authentic” Dutch culture. How and why is the symbol of a Moor being used to represent a people who have no direct or indirect cultural connection to this person? What does the historic and present material presence of this wapen in Marken say about processes of identification of the Markener?

For me this use of a foreigner tied into a common relationship I saw in the urban environment, the use of the foreign to represent the local traditional Marken heritage. This was evident in this material emblem of the wapen as a flag and ceremonial seal for festivities. It was evident in the use of multiple foreign objects brought home as souvenirs by Marken men and their fishing expeditions’ in the North Sea. As I was told by Eefje my gatekeeper these foreign objects were then arranged within a specific “Marken-way” an aesthetic design of display in the traditional home of the Markener. Finally, it was evident in the use of the foreign tourists as a mirror for which to perform their local heritage in the urban environment of Marken.

With regards to the Moor I perceive him as an “other,” and a “foreigner” in regard to the Marken people. They themselves have described him to me as a legend, a symbol which is owned and as a real person. Yet for categorical purposes I must say that they referenced him to me as “the moor,” or “a moor”.

Again, the historic “ways of being” and ”dwelling,” (Ingold,2000) which constitute the physical architectures and habitat of Marken and the surrounding region; for example, fishing as economic revenue, Protestantism as religious doctrine and then agrarian subsidiary practices. All of these regional qualities manifested a “traditional” aesthetic of heritage, a symbolic vernacular (see definition in next few paragraphs) is embodied in the symbolic logic of all the regional wapens of the distinct communities of Waterland. This holds true for most of the wapens of the historic Zuiderzee region. These wapens all reflect regional, material, attributes of the landscapes of these places; monks for Monnickendam, swans for Broek and Waterland, horses and cows for Volendam. Urk literally has a fish. Yet Marken, chose a Moor…. Allison Blakeley gives a very solid definition of the Moor and its origins in the Netherlands, see figure 21 below.

[Fig.20 ]: Wapens of regional Zuiderzee Towns. Sources, from Left to right: http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Marken, http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Monnickendam, http://www.hugovandermolen.nl/brieven/gemeentewapens.php, http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Broek_in_Waterland, http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Urk.

[Fig.21] Allison Blakeley from Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society

Usually the aesthetic images of a wapen are used to evoke some kind of union of people and to represent the place and people to outsiders. Yet they are using what I deduce, from my fieldwork, to be an “outsider” to represent themselves.

Here it is important to understand what vernacular means regarding the built environment and the symbolic iconography of Marken. Vernacular is a term which describes the material landscape and the processes of building and creating material objects which use essentialized motifs of a place. This will be expanded upon in Chapter three as it relates to the physical urban environment. However here it is interesting to take this vernacular concept as it relates to the wapen and the wapens symbolic, stylistic forms. Marcel Vellinga (Vellinga, 2011) in “the end of Vernacular,” speaks of the cultural processes which essentialized the identities of people through architectural landscapes. In Marken we see the essentialized vernacular of the aesthetics of an authentic, Dutch fishing culture, preserved to its original state with the “original” aesthetic characteristics which deem it a place of genuine heritage. An example of a traditional Marken material vernacular would be the essentialized folkloric costumes; which were once thought of as “primitive” for their characteristic bright colors and bold patterns (Roodenburg, 2002).

Here it is interesting to note that the symbolic logic of an essentialized fishing village would assumedly be composed of fishing nets and boats and seafaring paraphernalia. Yet when you visit Marken, unlike Monnickendam or Volendam, there barely a net to be seen. I assumed in a essentializing manner that because the town of Marken is so ichnographically representative of what a traditional fishing village looks like, my assumption of the Markener identity was to see them, representing themselves with iconographies that are related to fishing. This clearly shows how the essentialized touristic view of Marken, and the essentialized , “authentic” crystallization of Marken in the imagination of outsiders, has in a way reinforced the homogenous nature of the imagined and assumed vernacular of Marken. There is a dominant emphasis, with regards to material culture, on the costume of Marken and on the interior home of Marken; material cultures I would have never associated with the material culture of a fishing village.

So here the wapen, the Moor, becomes a key periscope into perhaps an under-looked aspect of Marken cultural identity. I was so blinded by my own vernacularized conception of

Marken as a fishing village that I was for a month and a half passing by this Moor every day; in the harbor, in the café and in the tourist zone, without even noticing it.

In the material urban environment, the historic districts of town are where most of the tourists spend their time in Marken and curiously the Marken wapen only exists on the main avenues where the tourists flock to.[See Map fig.23] I do not have substantial information to prove that the influx of tourists has forced Markeners to claim their symbolic seal again and place it in the paths of foreigners, however it is curious. The mythologies and personal interviews I gathered depict contrasting arguments to a purely touristic usage of the symbol. The interviews are ripe with words that are related to processes of identification, like “it is our symbol”, and “he was a warrior” and “he lived in the tower on the road” but also more distancing qualifications such as “oh, he is a really ugly guy, isn’t he?” These statements give qualitative life to this symbol and argue against the Moor being only a static urban monument or ordinary mascot.

One hypothesis could be that the Markeners are trying to claim their autonomy in face of the regional government, as the Marken Moor was taken out of service in 1991 and brought back in 2014. When it was brought back in 2014 (see http://www.gemeentemarken.nl/ for source of this information) it was also the first time it was commoditized, and you can nowadays purchase Marken Moor cups, pencils, flags and notepads in the tourist office information point or online through personal email. See the “info point” section on the Gemeentemarken.nl website for more information on how to purchase these items.

“ 2016 the flag is 200 years old In order to investigate this paradox, I interviewed many locals on their own stories and origin myths regarding the origin of this Moor. As an aspiring anthropologist I am particularly interested in the local mythologies surrounding this material symbol in the landscape of Marken. How do these local mythologies relate to this material cultural symbol? This is after all the emblem and representative symbol of the town.

The most fascinating origins for the usage of this wapen and his features and characteristics, deal with a story about him being an “African man”, something like a “pirate” or an “adventurer.” Emma my translator had translated for me from a young woman who was working the café. She was not from Marken, but asked the chef who is from Marken in the back of the restaurant and he said, “that he came with the Vikings, and he was a leader of a tribe.”

The restaurant has the images of the Moors face imbedded into the window panes of the restaurant.

Another origin myth of this wapen and how it relates to the identity of the town is from these two elderly women in the Kerkbuurt neighborhood of Marken. They were both in Church on a Tuesday reading what looked like psalm books. Around their mid-60s. From my field notes: “Two older women in church, both reading in different sections of the church, in their late 60s maybe late 70s, kind smiling: light brown hair and grey shirt/purple shirt with colorful pants, the story is of a moor that had travelled from Amsterdam, further into the land. He was living in Marken for a while in the “tower?” which supposedly was further into the harbor? (Still do not know which tower they are speaking of) Though they didn’t know much of him, Emma says they used words like, pirate or explorer, or adventurer and he somehow got stuck in Marken. They said they happened to know about this story, but many people wouldn’t know about it, but they don’t know if even “the woman in the VVV tourist office would know about it”. (She didn’t, but as you will see in the next origin story, she was very proud of him and possessive) They suggested the library and the books in the library there. They said he was “from Morocco, a Moor, a black guy, traveling from Amsterdam to Marken. The small canal was safer to travel to Marken from. Safer than going through the Zuiderzee”, and he lived in a tower, “ well the people in the tower don’t know, now they are all people who moved to town later on so ... They made it very clear that most people were not interested in the history of the town, “it’s a topic people are NOT really interested in at all these days...” (Curious cause the symbol was brought back into town in 2014 and now is flying as a flag in a lot of places, but it is also very subtle, you do not notice it unless you are looking for it.) This time I went with Emma through the harbor and I saw the wapen so many more times, than when I visited the island alone, it is there but it is subtle compared to the other Marken flags shown ”(June 2017, Anna Miorelli)

The narratives of the locals sometimes mirrored the written, online sources of information on the origin of the Moor in Marken. The visage of the Moor has been compared to the heraldic seal of Sardinia by many of my interviewees and many of them stated that he may have been a Christ figure or a crusader. The man depicted on the shield wears a bandana and hoop earrings similar to this shield of Sardinia. (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapen_van_Marken) The written and online sources of information are official and institutional and form one way in which information about this symbol of the Moor is to be used as a representation of Marken. The official information online states that he is used to represent the Christian church and the crusader Saint Mauritius. Crusader, Viking, leader of a tribe, Saint Mauritius.

(http://schoutenenterprises.com/MarkerNieuws/2016/9701.htm) It is interesting to analyze the official information for the variety of tales described in the local mythologies. From field notes:

“He came with the Vikings, and he was a leader of a tribe.”- Chef at Marken Restaurant (Anna Miorelli, July 2017)

Within the opinion of this local Markener, the Moor is tribal and a member of another European group. In the official record the Moor is a part of a European Christian institution. The image of this Moor perhaps reflects in my opinion a type of autonomy and difference, a “tribal-ness”, similar to that of a roaming group of Vikings, rather than an institutional fighter, a crusader. ( http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Marken) It is also interesting to note that the three posed photographs in the introduction, fig.8, come from a contemporary series from 2014, where the photographer was focusing on “tribes” around the Netherlands.

[Fig. 22] Procession and usage of the foreign wapen in the celebration of unveiling historic plaque commemorating the great flood of the 20th century. The use of a foreign man in material form used in the replication of a historical event. Photo date: 2016. Source:

The quality of life, the Marken people, have historically led, on their island, has been one of foreigners within their own region. Men constantly at sea providing income for their families and women banning together. They remained outside of the regional government from around 1600 till 1991. When they were re-incorporated into the Waterland region again, I suggest that there is a strain on the locals now being incorporated into a regional identity, and perhaps the re-emergence of the Moor, now available in more commodified forms, is a subtle voice to the independence and autonomy the former island once had. The Moor is perhaps also a form of cultural hero.

Overall the wapen of Marken has a stronger online presence than a public environment presence. It shows up in very intimate community moments, like the unveiling of the commemorative plaque of the great 1900s flood, or at the mid-summers festival. (fig.22) However in the public environment it has a distinct presence now in the largely touristic areas. I have made a map with corresponding photos of the locations where he appears in the public environment of Marken and a photo montage of his presence in the online environment.

[fig.23] The yellow route in the map signals the main touristic artery through the town. The faint blue lines signify the areas where the corresponding Marken Moor can be found in the material culture. The red signified the historic districts of importance within Marken where the architectural environment is restricted to certain governmental regulations. It is curious to see that the Moor shows up only around the touristic routes and not within the private community. Source: Anna Miorelli 2017

In order to ask questions about the aesthetic connection of the Marken wapen with identity I must first define what I mean by aesthetics. For this research I am concerned with aesthetics as defined by Wilfried van Damme, in his “Towards an Anthropological approach for aesthetics”:

“It is clear that to be applicable cross-culturally (not excluding Western society), aesthetics, as an empirical study, can no longer be regarded as

pertaining to the study of the visual perception of the beauty of a material object. First, remaining faithful to its etymology, aesthetics should consider not only the eye and the ear, but also the olfactory, tactile and gustatory experiences, and even the experience of movement, as well as possible combinations of the different senses in perceiving. Secondly, aesthetics has to deal not only with beauty or what comes close as an equivalent, but also with the perceptive experience of the ugly, the comic or other categories that in a given culture may be discerned as descriptions of what are deemed qualitatively different feelings resulting from perception. Thirdly, aesthetics should pay attention to the evaluations resulting not only from beholding static objects, but also from perceiving objects and events occurring in space and/or time.” ( Van Damme, 1996:177)

This definition is important with regards to understanding the links between the material icon of the wapen within the cultural landscape of Marken, and the Markener people, in that it opens the term aesthetics up into something with less positive or negative connotations, and situates the aesthetics of a symbol, or a material object as being connected to something more than just the way a material object looks to someone. It implies the deeper meaning of aesthetics which is crucial for understanding identity, which is about the affective and emotive roles of aesthetics. How the emotional is tied to the material and how this relates to the built environment.

It is curious to note that with regards to Moor of Marken There was a strong tension on the topic of “ownership” over the way in which the aesthetic depiction of this foreign Moor was used to represent Marken. From Field notes:

“I interviewed a woman whom I will name Marieke. She worked in a very visible place in the Island and was born in an iconic feature of the town. She considered herself an “authentic” and “original” Markener, proud of her birthing narrative. I had done a bit of research into the topic of the Moor and Marken. Where did he come from? What is the origin of his usage as a local symbol? There are speculations on the official website, that he is a depiction of Jesus Christ or an emblem of Saint Mauritius. Marieke says she doesn’t think he looks like Jesus Christ, even though she said that this is a possibility of whom “they think5 he could be. Marieke is very extroverted, and matter of fact, she wears a glass starfish necklace, and has a conservative beach attire, white pants, blue shirt, short haircut. She passionately divulges that the mentality of the Markeners was to “move on,” move forward,” don’t look back, “so we don’t have any history or a way to write down the history of this symbol”, she said. I find this really curious. She said, “yes others have complained,” “They said how could you” and she retorts “So what?!, “it is ours!” “we are proud of it”, her bodily aura had a kind of stampeding momentum, foot to the floor, stubborn

5 The official sources not sure whom she meant by “they”, 42

and triumphant mannerisms. She said various defensive remarks about the wapen like this over and over again, quite defensive, of it.” ( Anna Miorelli, June 2017)

From Marieke’s point of view, she feels like it is the town’s “own symbol”. She said they “don’t even sell this flag in the shops, people ask to buy the flag, but you are not allowed to.” I pressed her more on the history of this symbol. She said, “Many people throughout the ages have been visiting Marken, it’s an influence you can see, the symbol comes from Monnickendam or from Frisian monks who put it in the town.”

This wapen is a local image of the foreign, it is another instance for Marieke of this “look but do not touch,” a private symbol, which is on public display. This paradox is still quite a curious portion of the research. The Moor is an icon of a foreigner, representing a non-foreign people in the cultural landscape and ironically it is on display for foreigners (mainly tourists), yet they cannot possess this wapen of a foreigner, which represents a localness which is out of their reach. I start to wonder perhaps metaphorically how the people of Marken identify with this African “other”, even though no one distinctly claimed that they saw themselves in the Moor. So what qualities and characteristics of the Moor and this Iconography spoke to the identity to the Markeners?

In order to further develop this point about how an identity is constructed to begin with. I was reminded of James Baldwin from“ I am not your negro”:

“Well I know this, and anyone who has tried to live, knows this. Now what you say about somebody else, you know… anyone else…. reveals you. What I think, of you as being …….is dictated by my own …necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires…. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me.

Now here, we in this country... we got something called a nigger, which doesn’t in such terms…, I beg you to remark, isn’t used in any other country in the world. We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent it. White people invented it.

I have always known, I had to know, by the time I was 17 years old. What you were describing was not me, and what you were afraid of, was not me. It had to be something else…. you invented it, so it had to be something you were afraid of, and you invested me with it.

Now if that’s so, no matter what you’ve done to me, I can say to you this….and I mean it, I know you can’t do anymore, and I’ve got nothing to lose, and I know,

and I have always known, and really always, that’s a part, of the agony. I’ve always known that I am not the nigger, but if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you? Then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here.

I know one thing from another and I was born, and I am going to suffer, and I am going to die and the only way you get through life is to know the worst things about it. I know that a person is more important than anything else, anything else. I learned this because I’ve had to learn it, but you still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. Well it is un-necessary, to me, so it must be necessary to you. So, then I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger baby, it isn’t me. “- James Baldwin, take this hammer, KQED film unite San Francisco. (NET, National Education Television 1963)

He speaks about how the white people in the United States created the Nigger out their own minds, and then placed it onto the image of black Americans. James Baldwin always identified as American, not as “African American”. He rejected this personification of something from within the white people, of the United States, something which said more about them, than it said about him, and which he felt was placed upon him and unnecessary to him. Taking from James Baldwin’s logic, I wonder here; what is it about the iconography and aesthetic of the Moor, which the Markeners needed to identify with themselves, something they needed to create, about themselves in the image of the other, in order to represent something about themselves? Then why was it placed in the material environment as an emblem of their own identity?

I am aware that this coat of arms could be an arbitrary reproduction of a historical precedent which has become disconnected from the local population and their sense of meaning with regards to identity. Indeed, two on the spot interviews suggested such a response. However, in the case of this wapen, as you will see later on, the historical usage and transition of skin color of the “Moor”, from darker to lighter and from more crudely drawn to refined, suggests that this wapen has had a contemporary presence renewing itself and changing its identity within different time periods, from the 1900s till today. Also considering the removal and re-introduction of the symbol from 1991 till 2014 (see gemeentemarken.nl) makes me believe that there is something about this wapen which speaks to a collective sense of identity. An identity of the Marken people who upkeeps this Moor symbol to reflect a representation of itself.

The historic evolution of the iconography of the Moor of Marken, and the supposed reasoning for its aesthetic look- its’ meaning and its’ signification-with regards to identity, are very mysterious. They leave me with doubts as to the identity of the Markeners. The wapen is about 200 years old says the GemeenteMarken.nl website. He was transformed into a white man around 1900- 1920 and then in 1940 went back to an African physiology man.

[Fig.24] Physiological changes in the features of the Marken Moor . Left to right: 1910, unknown date, pre-1985, 2014. Source: http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Marken

When I asked people about the Symbol many of them did not know of this historical change and only had a mythical account of what the symbol meant. For example, I asked the owner of the Marken Antiques shop if he has ever come across “the Moor” when dealing with Markener antiques. He said oh “yea he’s a really ugly guy isn’t he,” and then he was curious about me and about what I was researching in relationship to “the Moor,” when I told him about my curiosity about people using other people as symbols to identify themselves with, he laughed a bit, he didn’t really seem to care too much about the symbol either way, “do you ever see him (the Moor) on a plate, a flag, etc., “no no, no,no” Many on the spot interviews left me with more questions than answers as to the reasoning behind this iconographic shift in representation of the Moor of Marken.

Considering my own Cuban-American heritage, there are many issues, particularly on the American side of my family and within the United States as a whole which mirror similar race /cultural appropriation tensions happening in the Netherlands. However, my main focus is still about how this group of Markeners is using the aesthetic, cultural, and physical features of this “other,” as a way to represent/express and/or display their identity. So here is where I have been directing my questions in on the spot interviews with people and through my translator friend, Emma.

I am confused as to whether this is a “racist” place or if it is an “ignorant” place, or if these kinds of connotations of the people I am studying is merited at all. I think again I am just consistently interested into the logic behind using an “other” as the symbol for yourself and your people. Why does this phenomenon happen? Do people think of these other people as adornments and “things” or “objects” the way you would use a mascot in a football team? Is it that he is a “Moor” and he depicts an “adventurer or warrior spirit” considering the possible historic connection to “St. Maurice” and the Crusades?

People who are not from Marken, especially “Amsterdamers,” have all responded with shock and surprise that this is the symbol for Marken. They think it is very strange and curious. A group of elderly Dutch women in my Spanish class laughed a little bit, they did not have very nice things to say about Marken and thought it was a basic “Dutch” tourist town, and the “exotic” symbol of the Moor was met with a surprise almost gasp in the room when I spoke about it out loud, during our conversation in Spanish.

When I asked the woman working in the tourist office about maybe any meaning or connection of the Marken people to the symbol she stated that: “our people are survivors focused on the future not the past, and so no one has tried to preserve the meaning or origin of the symbol. She also says Marken has been a place where there have always been foreigners traveling in and out of the Village, “Spanish people, (some other names I did not write down)etc.”. She was born in the Marken lighthouse and her family has lived there for generations. So, this woman is as “Marken” as it gets. She was very defensive of the “Moor” and kept asking things like, “why is it a problem.”

Emma later says, she thinks, “they (Markeners) are not so interested in other cultures.” “They are kind of living in the past in Marken, people from all over come from Spain (again Spain gets mentioned) from where ever but they are not really interested in them, they are interested in their money. There is a disconnection from him (The Moor) and the Markeners... they do not know who he is , they do not know his history, they don’t know anything really, and he is a bit of a mystery?” (Emma’s’ Interpretation)

No doubt what can be extrapolated from the shift in its aesthetic representation is that the relationship of the Marken people with their wapen has undergone some deeper social processes with regards to identity. Yet sometimes if I was met with ambivalence towards the

wapen, I felt strange. Was it just a material iconographic image and the identity of the town had nothing to do with the wapen other than for official use? Yet my mind kept pushing, even if it is not a collective imagination, the wapen is representing, it is at least revealing something about the Marken people, which they may even be unaware of. A disconnection from the symbol of the town was prevalent; I heard dialogues about how so many new people were moving into Marken that they did not know what the wapen meant to them or what the wapens’ origins are. They are foreign people who did not grow up with the symbol, they are not familiar with its history. .

Chapter 3| Autonomy and Replication

Issues of Autonomy in Marken

The Moor seems to portray uniqueness, autonomy. There is something foreign and remote about the Markener in his/her dance of private-public, their geography is an Island in the most literal sense. One tension regarding autonomy occurs, between the regional government, the gemeente, Waterland, and the local people of Marken, in relationship to the upkeep and maintenance of this wapen (coat of arms). I have encountered many re-occurring dialogues about the lack of understanding of the gemeente Waterland and how they represent Marken. That the Waterland gemeente doesn’t understand the specific requests of the town.

Furthermore, this chord of autonomy can be found in the unofficial government website, which poses as the official government website. It is telling that the Gemeentemarken.nl website, which is the only “government” website on display in the touristic office to represent Marken, is actually an unofficial website run by one man and his historic knowledge of the island. So, there are competing powers over the cultural narratives of Marken; the official Waterland government website and then the unofficial but locally respected authority on Marken. It is the unofficial, local, one which is presented to tourists. There is a dance for sovereignty with Marken. There is a tension between autonomy and who has ownership over the official records and power to create symbols which signify identity in the town.

[Fig. 25] Left: Gemeentemarken.nl card found in tourist office. Source: left photo: Anna Miorelli, [Fig.26] Right: Objects you can purchase online with the Marken Wapen, http://www.gemeentemarken.nl/index.html

The two elderly women, I was speaking with back in chapter 1, page 21, spoke in fragments, throughout our conversation, about the gemeente Waterland and they gave more

information on the rationale behind why in 1991 the wapen was removed from the island, and why in 2014 the wapen was installed as the local symbol again. From field notes:

“Two old ladies in the museum, one said she used a book from the library for a presentation on women in Marken and that we should look for this book. “No, he’s not in the museum” (the moor), they complain a lot about the “others,” the outsiders from Waterland , making all kinds of changes to the town , no legends no myths on the moor, just that, “the old wapen is now displayed in the museum after they took it down in the Marken Gemeente when the three cities were unified, (Volendam, yet might be another city), Marken and Monnickendam. I think they said) in 1991. They complained on municipality for a long time about various items on the island.” (Anna Miorelli, June 2017)

Second portion from field notes on their perception of the Moor:

“He was a warrior or a fighter. Ship hero traveling, he didn’t sound to them like a Christian conqueror… something more like an adventurer.” I found the information about outsiders and the tensions about the local government to be more interesting within this question about the Moor.” ( Anna Miorelli, July 2017)

My translator Emma commented after we spoke with the older women, that for her Marken seems like an “underdog loner”, we were speaking out on the fringes of the Kerkbuurt neighborhood, here with the chickens and verdant green grass and Volendam masts in the far distance. There was a little white duck playing in algae, and silky red, black and orange roosters moving around the old farmers sheds. Emma says Marken “is the 3rd of all the famous fishing towns”. I wonder to myself if Marken is the “other one” the separate, more foreign of the three.

Emma said what she kept hearing about the Markener mentality reminded her of Zeeland (where she is from) and the struggle of people with the water, like these poetic ways of saying , “we will rise up above the flood”, and the mentality of living with the water –as in these sayings- with the environment, “like we will move forward, will move up out of the water”, “we won’t look back, we will change” , “this struggle keeps us grounded it keeps us humble”. “I wrestle, I come up.” She said.

I mention the usage of coral in Zeeland as a symbol for some region of Zeeland. She mentioned that she never thought of it, or its origins or why they used it. That it was just tradition and that’s just the way things were. Yet now that I had brought it up it did seem strange to her,

or at least curious. To continue on this struggling way of being I reference Eefje, in our interview, from my field notes:

“Eefje is [a] tall, elegant woman, composed and stoically receptive. We spoke for 30-45 minutes in the home and I arranged for a more in depth interview this week. I am visiting Marken again tomorrow and will have to follow up with her, if she’s working the “Stilje Bos”. More and more I am starting to perceive Marken’s urban environment as one giant hive where women lived almost as one family with children, while men were away. Even the way the costumes are organized reminds me of uniforms, uniforms of gender and uniforms of passages in time. There are so many different costumes for each passage of a person’s life, and the costumes are highly gendered with the exception of children who until they are 7 years old dress in the same outfit.6 The most crucial information I gained from Eefje, is that there are to this day “four women who dress every day in the traditional Marken costumes. As I stand in the old room, a mosaic of material textures, similar to the bodily costume, only adorn the walls of the home. They encase me in a feeling of humble opulence. Striped curtains clashing with a bright yellow kitchen counter. Little porcelain dogs and ornaments of ships and pitchers with delft blue inscriptions line the room and meet bright red and rainbow folkloric textiles in the room. These objects themselves are secondary to the regiment by which they are displayed. The home is a treasure box where the jewels are inlayed into the chest rather than stowed away. The room is not cluttered. It is highly organized and spotless, yet it is composed in a manner of horror-vacuii 7 . The space, between, is at the same scale as the objects themselves. The floor-to-ceiling, decorative plates, are lined up in perfect regiment. I pay the two Euros to enter the home. It is just one room and a kitchen and a hidden upstairs. I walk around. I peak into the forbidden staircase to the upper floor and can see a handsome pine wardrobe underneath the tall echoing pitch ceiling. I then stare in shock at the size of the bed, it is the size of a small dining table and with the comfort of one no less. It is recessed into the wall so that curtains can be pulled, and the bed disappears, flush and level with the surrounding walls. Eefje goes on to describe to me what she describes day in and day out to all the tourists who look upon this utilitarian bedchamber; “yes and the children slept here under the bed.” She points to a crude coffin like chamber under the bed. Also covered with polychromatic pin- striped curtains. She then points to what appears to be a wooden shelf, similar to one you would normally stow onions or other produce in your pantry. “This is where a new born infant would sleep, right about the mother’s head.” I am starting to get a taste of the ways in which Markeners have historically lived. How their practical, necessity, to survive against the flooding waters, against the austere winter, and against the geographical isolation may have contributed to a designed austerity in the way they use the space of their homes. I am told that this is not uncommon in pre-war Holland.” ( Anna Miorelli, July 2017)

6 They no longer dress this way as children, only for the special ceremonies of the town 7 A Art history term which literally translates to a “fear of space”. It is used to describe Ancient Egyptian mural art work and the manner by which every area of a composition is covered in some kind of drawing. 50

Here in Marken the stoic, lack of plushness seems to originate from a protestant aestheticism, a way of being influenced by the religious customs. Yet the ascetic quality here unlike other protestant communities in the Netherlands is highly ornamented visually and colorful. What the home lacks in textural plushness and comfort is made up for in the use of color. It is a visual coziness, not a tactile one. This can be seen when peering into the open windows of the Kerkbuurt homes as well. A simple wooden bench, yet it is adorned with a complex patchwork cloth. Here again like the private-public personalities of the Markeners which I have connected to an urban way of being with their architecture in Chapter 1 I suggest again that this interior arrangement of the Marken home has a lot to do with the inherent cultural activities which Markeners had traditionally engaged in which ultimately is a struggle for survival. A bare necessity way of being. From my field notes:

“Eefje told me that there is a specific Marken dialect which she speaks. Then she stated to me that the many traditional home interior designs are a specific “Marken” aesthetic and not a Dutch aesthetic. These authentic aesthetics are bright, colorful, contrasting colors, a multitude of juxtaposed, “mismatched” fabrics, and then not the material itself but characteristically how it is arranged on the walls, is a specific Marken trait.” ( Anna Miorelli, July 2017)

Through Ingolds’ theory of dwelling, the building is the dynamic process of the activity, not a static monument of the activity. The activities here encompass all the ways of living and being which are specific to the environments where a structure is built. An explicit example Ingold references is on the origins of the permanent homes of pastoral nomads.(Ingold, 2000:2180) with regards to Marken being perceived as a crystalized stagnant town, photography has more to do with the assumption than the reality of Markens built environment. As Ingold states:

“To argue that the forms of buildings arise as a kind of crystallization of human activity within the environment clearly puts paid to my initial dichotomy between design and execution.” ( Ingold, 2000: 186)

If we are to still view Marken in this archaic lens, the very kind which photographers visiting the town still place people within, then we are no longer seeing design and execution as two parts of the same whole, rather than separate processes.

The activities involved in nomadic life set a rubric for the spatial relationships and utilitarian arrangements of provisional tents and temporary structures. What is fascinating is

that ways of being in nomadic life and the activities involved informed a layout which becomes evidence of a way of dwelling. As these nomads start to settle down, the designs of the more permanent homes, reflect the same layouts as the tents, only now with a more durable exterior. The dynamic activities and ways of being, the processes of dwelling, are the very designs of the nomads more permanent homes. Not as a dichotomy of design and then activity but of activity as the design. Dwelling is the activity of being a part of and relating to, the environment. The building is embedded in this as a dynamic manifestation of the needs of the people and this affords their ways of being, building involves dwelling, because building is a product of the activities which constitute dwelling. (Ingold, 2000)

For this research I was curious as to what activities in Marken, what ways of being/ processes of dwelling, are shaping the aesthetic configuration of the material cultural landscape of the town as it is today. A fascinating “way of being” , influenced by the regional government, is that of creative license with regards to the traditional Markener home. People cannot re-build or adjust their homes, since they have to adhere to strict restrictions in stylistic choice and material when outfitting their historic homes.

With regards to Markener-built environment relationships there is a striking phenomenon of replication of the home in miniature model size to be displayed in front of the homes. I have also noticed the obsessive behaviors of cleaning and painting the homes in the town, lots of scaffolding up on the homes to maintain their paint in the summer time. (fig. 26.5) Perhaps because creative expression is halted at the limits of the real, human home, in the historic districts, I think as Ingold suggests, perhaps Markeners have sought to express themselves in the forms of replicas and in cultivating an almost sport-like activity around re- painting their homes every year. One is a necessity, the painting and maintenance, but the other is a creative endeavor.

[Fig. 26.5] Images of local Markeners cleaning homes. I counted four women this day cleaning the exterior of their homes. On other days I would see one or two. This was particularly prevalent in the month of June 2017.

There is a relationship of Local Markener, local government and environment, which constitute and influence these activities/ways of being. I have observed some homes which have not been maintained and they are almost rotted through and through. Wood seems to be very difficult to maintain against the constant rain, snow, wind and cold of the year. Then these activities and processes which I see seem to make up the nuanced characteristics of a particular identification. The miniature replica of homes can be seen as a minute component of material cultural heritage which is now a part of the contemporary identity of the Markener.

In contemporary Anthropology “dwelling” as a concept has many different meanings, such as the political notions of “dwelling” for scholars such as Jared Zigon. However, for this research I am concerned with dwelling in the human ecology framework, which Ingold describes at length in his “The Perception of the Environment, Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill” and which I have described above. If we take Ingold’s theory of dwelling, as a framework for understanding the processes by which aesthetic choices are made in an environment, then we must acknowledge that “ways of being” have limits and constraints. There will always be limits and constraints on how one dwells, such as the climate, the government regulations, the temporal ageing of a place, etc. which shape how environments are continually under construction. So how are these boundaries interacting with the ways of being and activities of Marken for all of those who dwell in that place?

Using Ingold’s Theory on dwelling I had to account for who dwells in Marken. In Marken the people and place have been shaped by locals and outsiders. These outsiders have

viewed and encountered the place rather than being born into it. This for my account means that when I use the concept of dwelling and ask who dwells in an environment I have to consider the historic record of outsider influence on the aesthetics of the place and the current influence of the tourists who dwell for hours at a time in that space as well. This means that the temporal context of the identity of the town is diverse; those who have lived there ancestrally, those who live there because they bought a home, and then those who either stay for a few days or a few hours. Jeremy Boissevan explains how a similar process has been happening in Malta, with regional locals and foreigners buying homes, searching for an authentic way of living, a return and a restoration of the past. The context in Marken is different in that it is mostly people from surrounding Waterland who are not Markeners, but they are still considered foreigners. Boissevan gives a parallel anecdote about this being a European phenomenon in the 1980s:

“It was towards the end of the 1980s that forms of nostalgia for the past, including aspects of landscape, emerged, as they did elsewhere in Europe (Lowenthal 1996:4). Rustic motifs became chic. Slices of old building stone (sejjieh dekorattiv) began to be worked into the facades and interiors of new houses, simulating "the countryside in domesticated space".4 Terraces, windows opening to the outside - rather than only to interior courtyards - and country views became fashionable. Obsolete farming implements and other rustic objects from the past, especially cart wheels and plows, began to appear on the walls of restaurants and on the verandas of houses owned by persons whose own parents had denigrated 'country folk'. Above all, farmhouses and village 'character houses' became popular among the Maltese themselves. Such houses were increasingly becoming available as their former owners moved to new houses on the village periphery of their own villages. These traditional houses were particularly prized by young, urban bourgeois couples seeking vernacular space and imagined rural peace and anonymity. They lovingly 'restored' them by chipping off the stuccoes surfaces of exterior and interior walls and arches in order to expose the underlying building stone. This systematically undid the efforts of many generations of previous owners who had plastered and stuccoed in order to domesticate, and thus to 'civilize', the natural stone. The result was usually striking, giving exterior walls a medieval allure and, transforming interiors into dark spaces sometimes resembling dungeons and stables. An eighty year old former schoolteacher, commenting to me on the restoration work taking place on a nearby old house in Naxxar, remarked, "Restored? I don't remember houses ever looking like that!" (Boissevan, 2006: 91-93)

Online there is a specific realtor website named Mooi Wonen Op Marken, “beautiful houses of Marken” in English. (http://www.mooiwonenopmarken.nl/) where as of December 2017 there are seven homes for sale ranging from 198,500.00 euros at two bedrooms to 425,000.00 euros for a six bedroom home all on Marken.

[Fig.27] Tourist bathrooms underneath house (right), Tour guide dressed in authentic costume (middle), Ferry travel hourly along with road into island brings massive number of tourists who have to walk directly through the residential community. Source: Anna Miorelli

I argue that, hourly, tourists and regional foreigners are just as much a part of the framework of the town’s identity, as the locals are, despite the locals’ contrary opinion. The built infrastructure of the village has manifested itself in material forms to accommodate the influx of tourists. Also because of the extensive triangular relationships I have observed in the Marken environment, between, local, outsider and built environment. Examples of this are the large public bathrooms underneath the homes in the harbor, the various food stands in the center of the harbor, the gigantic ferry in the center of the harbor and the various methods by which the museum and its “heritage” groups have aesthetically altered the landscape with signage and “way-finding” in even the most remote and residential parts of the island.

[Fig. 28] New construction in historic areas (left), replicas of each of the historic houses in front of the houses (middle, right) Source: Anna Miorelli

The locals have historically shaped their aesthetics by which outsiders have come to associate them through. This aesthetic has historically been situated around the craft, utility and ingenuity of design in regard to the constraints of the ecological environment. For example, constructing terpen to place their houses on because of flooding and putting their houses on poles to avoid wet living conditions, these architectural aspects become iconic associations with the authenticity of the place. They were created out of an economic urgency in conjunction with an ecological one.

A term which describes the material landscape and the processes which essentialized a place into symbolic, stylistic forms is the “vernacular.” Marcel Vellinga in “the end of Vernacular,” speaks of the cultural processes which essentialized the identities of people through architectural landscapes. (Vellinga, 2011) In Marken we see the essentialized “vernacular” of the aesthetics of an “authentic”, “Dutch” fishing culture, preserved to its original state with the “original” aesthetic characteristics which authenticate it as a place of genuine “heritage.”

Vernacular from architectural theory as it applies to anthropology is the aesthetic selection of the specific types of material landscapes which tend to “represent other cultures as a collective, homogenous and un-fragmented.” (Vellinga, 2011:185) When a Landscape is deemed to be a part of a culture’s material vernacular, it “others them and leaves no room for cultural variety and cultural change, and essentially relegates the culture to a fixed pre-modern time and place that can only be left at the expense of a loss of authenticity.” (Vellinga 2011: 185)

If the architecture vernacular of Marken is regulated by the government in order to preserve its “essential” aesthetic, and the people of the town are vernacularizing themselves in a style for touristic voyeurism, then looking deeply into this replication process it is curious to see how the Marken people have in effect been vernacularizing themselves through this replication phenomenon concerning their houses

To be clear about what vernacular architecture is, I give a definition from Vellinga, in “The end of Vernacular”:

“American scholars defined the vernacular in terms of what the contemporary architecture of the industrial age was perceived to be not: ancient, natural, honest, and specific to cultural groups and places. The vernacular, as a new homogeneous category, was not a part of the newly emerging academic architectural tradition, but was instead assigned to the people' or the 'folk', equally undifferentiated categories that were characterized by their perceived timelessness, their homogeneity, their static nature and their (in terms of the social evolutionist paradigm accepted at the time) culturally 'early' state.” (Vellinga, 2011: 177)

This timelessness which Vellinga speaks of is particularly pertinent when we look at Marken: although the architectural environment is preserved, it is –at the same time- constrained from developing in a livable way,

Eefje brought up some interesting local facts during our conversation which relate to this tourism issue. First, she told me that “not even one person” -her right hand made this defiant one finger, gesture, when she said this- in Marken “fishes” or makes a living from fishing in the village anymore. I asked about tourism and surprisingly she stated that only “four percent of the people living in Marken work in tourism at all”. From field notes:

“She said she went to university in Amsterdam but now lived in Marken and that her Mother and grandmother had lived in the home as it was displayed for visitors to see now. I asked about what people in the town did for money since historically the town was all fishermen but now “what did many people in Marken do for a living”? She said many people left and worked everywhere in the Netherlands, “Utrecht, Rotterdam, Den Haag….”, she said this in a way that made the big cities seem much farther away from Marken. I asked Eefje about the ornaments in the room the boxes stacked together, since I disclosed to her that I am very interested in the aesthetics of Marken. Where are the plates on the walls, and the little porcelain dogs everywhere from? What she told me was very surprising, I had assumed that they were from very distant lands. As I was unaware that the fishing industry in Holland traversed very large regional distances. My personal reference for the Netherlands is of “The Golden Age” of trade, I was unaware till I came to study in the Netherlands that the regional complexities of shipping here in Holland, specifically, are very concerned with the North Sea. “The dogs came from England, and the boxes from Denmark, the plates were delft design. There was a much more regional centric accumulation of material objects that I had expected, considering the regional emphasis on herring out here in the Netherlands. As North Sea bound fishing would mean bringing ashore catches in British and Danish harbors.

She described to me that she had visited Bergen Norway and remarked that they had the “exact” same design, on this specific ribbon worn by the women of Marken, “in their own”, everyday traditional costume, “which the women of

Bergen had as well”. I asked her if she knew why that was? She seemed puzzled and did not know, looked at me kind of strange.

Then, I asked if the fishermen in Marken had traded with the people of Bergen and she said, “yes she supposed so”. But, I am not so sure whether to take what she said here literally, because from her body language it seemed like she was just guessing, kind of the reciprocal exchange of kindness between strangers, where you kind of agree about things you both don’t know anything about, in order to keep the conversation going.

She described that because the men were historically always fishing or on long fishing expeditions that this explained why “the women” were so strong and independent (in Marken?). The way she said this made me think about the Netherlands in regional context, she said this about women in a way that referenced something bigger than Marken, putting the emphasis on “the” women, something in her inflection and tone of conversation, said women as a monolith and not just Marken women; this is my impression of her words and body language though. She went on “because they had to fend for themselves and raise the whole family, left alone out here.” I will note that I never asked anything about the family or kinship relationships or gender relationships of Marken, but this came up on its own, when speaking about how the objects and materials in the room were mostly souvenirs and presents from faraway places, from the husbands and their fishing expeditions.

The materials the men collected were brought back and arranged in the homes as souvenirs, which are in their manner of display the symbolic emblems of an “authentic” Marken tradition.” ( Anna Miorelli, July 2017)

Here we see the material heritage of Marken is maintained in a manner of display which reflects the inherent ways of being (Ingold, 2000) which relate to the economic process of the past. The old ways of being (Ingold, 2000) were directly related to an aesthetic manner of dwelling (Ingold, 2000). Behaving and acting in the world, in Marken historically consisted of economic fishing linked to long periods away from home, carried out by men:

“Nearly all the male population are engaged as fisher men, or as fish-salters. In summer, they set sail on Monday, and return on Friday night; in winter, they leave on Sunday night, and return on Saturday night.” ( Dr. Charnock,1871:310)

“Historically caretaking and local maintenance of the cultural landscape and homes carried out by women: they do not show themselves much, and rather avoid strangers.” ( Dr. Charnock, 1871: 309)

“These activities, or ways of being, instruct how habitats are constructed and presuppose the built cultural landscape even before it is made.” (Ingold, 2000)

The ecological landscape, the economic landscape and the foreign temporal landscape of visitors to Marken people, have helped to shape the aesthetic vernacular of Marken as it is today through each of these concepts boundaries interwoven with social constraints. Even the physical architecture of the human body in Marken has historically been aestheticized by the utilitarian constraints of the environment and economy; clogs for wet landscapes, hats which adhere to the wind and cold, wool from sheep in the pastures and even the persistence of costume usage in ethnically “traditional” events.

[Fig.29 ] Actors performing the great flood performance, to commemorate this horrible yet historic day. Source: http://www.rodi.nl/widgets/1720-waterland/nieuws/1296965-de-street-was-de-zee-in-markenmarken-herdenkt-de-watersnoodramp-met- toneel

The influence of foreigners within the cultural landscape have perhaps even shaped the way Markeners pose themselves when dressed in traditional outfits, when on display for foreigners, as exemplified in figure 29 of actors performing the great Marken Flood. When these posed photographs are placed next to the intimate photographs of Paul Kuiper, a local Markener born who passed away in 2002, the emotive contrast and the dynamism of Markener everyday life is starkly opposed to the posed static object-like photographs taken by outsiders. When I found Paul Kuiper’s photos at the end of my Research they opened this portal of emotion and collective belonging which I was not directly immersed in when I visited Marken. If we see a festival I attended at the end of June 2017 and we see the photos of festivities in Marken from the past, there is a palpably different atmosphere. Today’s events are held in

private tents, whereas before they were open air events, in which the town would hand craft garlands and objects for their parades. They still promenade today for Queens day and for various Juliana Marken orchestrations. However, this even I attended, the Juliana Marken band was seated and there were no costumes. It left me with a sense of longing and nostalgia for the joy of the older photos. I could not help but see the stark difference from the MES-Stichting event I visited where the Juliana band who is playing in these photos looked so much more alive and dynamic.

[Fig.30] Left: MES harbor event entrance constricted entrance on harbor, held within a tent. Right: handmade garlands at entrance to summer event, woven into the landscape. The way Markeners celebrate in their landscape seems to have changed with the changing economic landscape of Marken. Source: Left: Anna Miorelli, Right: Paul Kuiper, http://www.markermuseum.nl/

The MES harbor event I attended was locked away in a tent on the harbor, and there was a charged entrance fee and the locals dressed in t-shirts and there was a commercial quality to the event, with food stands. I wonder how the dispersed nature of Markens economy today has some kind of influence on this. These photos reveal something which I think can be found in the temporal economic relationship in Marken. In Marken the economic practice was centralized, with the exception of a few bakers, and the priest, there were clear material gender roles, Men fished for an economic living, women took care of the home and the family, the costumes delineated these roles, with the exception of children who were in a sense undifferentiated with costume, till the age 7. The economic diffusion and decentralization along with the influx of modern technology (ease of communication, quicker travel to further distances, and the ecological advantages; dikes which stabilized the threat of flooding) drastically changed the regions ecology. This ecology was linked to economy, and now without the stabilized means of economy from the surrounding ecology; which contributed to the material selections on how to portray a way of being ( Ingold, 2000) as a community of fishermen, the material selection which heralded one way of being, now dispersed and diffused

into a more global aesthetic of material culture, in line with a more global economic way of being. All of the changes to economy, ecology, and the changes within the larger regional context of post war Europe, all contributed to a decentralization the aesthetic styling of the Markener material culture. In effect the Waterland municipality had put regulations on the homes so that the heritage could be maintained, and the material culture preserved, least Marken become like any other surrounding suburb of Amsterdam. The curious component for me is on how long the traditions of costume survived… image of fisherman from 1500 Rijksmuseum till 1950, and yet post 1950 the material culture changed and mirrored the rest of the world. The timing of the loss of the central, dominant economic enterprise, which was connected directly with the surrounding landscape, signaled the loss of the everyday ways of being with regards to the performance of the material culture of the traditional dress (today called costume). There is a sense of unity, belonging, happiness, and community, here in these photos, where everyone is wearing their costume and there are big open tables. These photos, show no trace of commerce, like the festival I attended where you were asked to pay entrance and then buy food, and these phots show a boundary-less Marken, one which had long open tables, a density of people and the wide open landscape of water, frozen or traversed by boats and filled to the brim with Markeners in traditional everyday dress. I am left with a sense of longing and nostalgia looking at these photos, perhaps there is an innate desire in other people to essentialize other people as a way to express a feeling or emotion, through their image.

Though I was never there for these events, but the Marken I saw today, even at the festival I attended, although there was drunken merriment, I didn’t see the type of behavioral collective sense of identity, which is visible in these pictures. I wonder if the people in these photos were stripped of their costumes, would this behavioral unity still shine through. These photos are a private world either I as an anthropologist failed to contact or perhaps with the loss of centralized economy, with the loss everyday customary dress, with the influx of foreigners who live on the island now, and with the economic dispersion of locals around the world, no longer exists. I wonder today how the Markeners belong, what exists today in Marken is materially very different from the past, yet still maintains its material continually as an architectural façade encasing a memory, yet the ways of being with this landscape, particularly with regards to festivals and celebrations have changed quite a lot.

Perhaps a part of me is seduced by the romance of the past in Paul Kuiper’s photos, I just can’t help but perceive a more open sense of community in his photographs. People are

facing each other, there are many smiling faces, they are surrounded by the cultural landscape they created. These other photos show a disconnect from the landscape by being held in a tent. I have seen photographs online of the Juliana Marken band performing within the landscape, outside, however the most striking difference from the photos of these past events with the photos of the MES event was the lack of children I saw at this event, compared to the photographs of the 1960s. Of course, there were children, however they were off separate from the event, rather than in the forefront of it as we see in the older pictures. (fig.31) My analysis here is of course using two separate events for comparison, however what is most crucial about this, is the lens of the photographer taking these photos. Paul Kuiper was an intimate part of the Marken community, and he is featured on the Marken website as a type of archival hero. I was a visitor in Marken. This lead me to dig deeper into my own conception of what identity and culture are and to assess deeper the role an anthropologist can play in revealing intimacies of a cultural group.

[Fig.31] left top and bottom: Photos of Markeners in winter celebrating an event, photos taken by a local Paul Kuiper in the 1960s. Right: photos posted on Facebook from the MES harbor event in 2017 I attended, also taken by a local. There is palpable difference to the emotive displays in these photos from the past till the present. The major difference is the commercialized interior with advertisements and the entrance fee of 17 euros which was charged at the front. However, when I was inside there were mostly Dutch speaking people. very few if any tourists. . Source: http://www.markermuseum.nl/?gallery=paul-kuiper (Left side) https://nl-nl.facebook.com/Marker-Evenementen- Stichting-1458884641008472/( right side)

Self-reflexive notes on changing perception of culture and identity |

My original plan was to observe intimate behavioral and affective responses to material objects of heritage on Marken, yet there were challenges involved in gaining access and openness with regard to intimate conversations on identity; considering the inherent constraints of my field work, the language and translation barrier, the closed off mentality towards foreigners, and lack of interest towards my research topic from many of my informants.

However, what I did discover as I have shown in this thesis, are some insights into a network of complex processes which have contributed to the perceived image of the “Markener”. This image is being shaped by certain “Markeners” themselves and through the interaction of outsiders with the community of Marken today. (fig.6, fig.7, fig.8)

I started this fieldwork with a vague, cloud-like amalgamation of what identity and culture actually were. Their definitions were always ambiguous to me. They both held a synthetic, hybridized, meaning. What I realize now is that they are two very distinct concepts, linked but not superimposed. Now I see them as interlinked with specific nuances.

Community identity, in this case, the community identity of Marken, is centered on the collective imaginations and curated images, composed by both the community themselves and by those not within the community. Identity here is intertwined with image and imagination of both the Markeners and the influx of outsiders who have generated material culture and tangible data on the specific ways of Marken life. (Anderson, 1998)

Whereas culture, is what the Markeners know intuitively, even unconsciously, about their community of people they belong to. This intuitive knowing is apparent in the indescribable behavioral minutiae of friendliness and ways of engagement, which I observed “Markeners” having with each other; yet I as the observer could not describe. The knowing was a shared culture, not a shared identity. Yes culture is linked to identity, but identity is not linked to culture. Post field work I think now what many people refer to as identity is actually a topic of culture.

The culture I observed in Marken was an invisible force I could sense in the interactions of Markeners yet I could not signify as a specific trait. It was always in the details and the

specifics that I couldn’t write down in my observations. I could write about relationships of identity, how the Markener woman spoke about the ownership of her Moor, how he was hers, a part of her. Yet I could not tell you specifically how the image in her psyche stired up images and connections to a imaginary space of belonging and community. That imaginary space which her and perhaps another Markener occupied was were culture lied. That imaigination was outside of my grasp. Her sense of identity was perceivable by me as an anthropologist, yet her sense of culture was critically out of reach.

This culture was in a smile and in an inflection of the way someone said “hallo” or in the micro movements of body language, one man on his way home waving to another man in his home. This movements linking to a history of movements and micromovements which signified a greater imagination which solidified a place of belonging. It was a micro- composition of details I was observing yet could not specify, yet I could sense was acknowledged by both “Markeners”; a hello which signified an affirmation of “yes you belong here” from one man to the other, and then from the other man in reply.

In this sense, culture is a secret internalized code of embodied information’s. It engages, embodied information, on how to “be in the world.” These types of information’s are intuitive responses between two people from the same culture, whether it is an intuition informed by nurture or nature or both, I am not sure. However, I am sure that what I witnessed in regard to culture was always the thing which was invisibly engaging the Markeners with each other. A sense of knowing and recognition of all these internalized secrets. One hello or one goodbye between two Markeners was amplified, in each Markeners consciousness, by the vast layering of invisible secrets, narratives, behaviors and characteristics which make up their culture.

Identity is not this phenomenon I have described above. To break this down a bit more, community identity, as it relates to what we as anthropologists study as “culture,”8 is perhaps only the surface level imagination of these deeper intuitive processes and behaviors of known ontological information. This “known,” intuitive, ontological information, which I am defining as “culture” is emotively rooted to some ineffable feeling of belonging. (Anderson, 1991)

8 as I am presenting it here 64

Community “identity” does not embody the intuitive secret code. Identity is what others can detect about a culture of people. Culture is only what someone from a culture can detect about their culture. Hence in my research I have been able to identify relationships related to identity, however on topics of culture, which post fieldwork I understand now as more psychologically rooted.

Perhaps I am thinking in a Bourdieu-ian sense as I seem to now understand that culture is an embodied phenomenon which takes a conditioning of time and environment to gain an unconscious development of the embodied phenomenon, these secrets I have described with relation to culture. (Bourdieu, 1989)

For example, living in the Netherlands over a year now, I slowly started wearing less jewelry and less makeup and slowly started mirroring the more utilitarian, efficient, rituals of being; I have seen many “Dutch” people perform. I did not choose to do this to myself, it’s just that no one has been around in which I am “culturally” connected to. Culturally connected to for me is a person born in Miami to Cuban Diaspora mother and an American father, raised in a Cuban family and influenced by Miami-isms.

I also realize now that self-identifying with a culture is not the same as belonging to that culture. Anyone in the world can start reading about how “Markeners” perform their wedding ritual and then engage in that ritual in any part of the world and then they can self-identify with that ritual. Yet I think it doesn’t make them a part of the “Markener” culture. I think belonging to a culture now means that you have somehow been ingrained through immersive temporal conditioning. Just because you feel an intense passion for a culture or have even family members who belong to a certain culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean you also belong to that culture. Belonging is a complex topic; however, I wonder now if you only belong, if you have spent enough time, the time it takes to gain the unconscious code of unconscious micro bodily mannerisms which include you into one culture.

After this research I do not think you choose to belong to a culture. It seems to choose you. It seems to me that culture is more environmentally and experientially informed that I initially thought it was and that culture is much deeper and more ingrained than the concept of “identity” or even the processes of identity.

After this research I noticed that it takes a lot of conscious work and internal “awareness” in order even explore what some of my own minute behaviors and mannerisms that make me culturally “Miamian.”

In order to understand culture, perhaps one needs to reframe their ethnographic questions into more of a question set for a psycho-analyst . Here with my fieldwork I gained in- depth knowledge into the “image” of the “Markener” embedded in the relationships they have with their environment. I did not gain particulars of their culture, I gained particulars about their relationships, which I have proposed speak about their perceived identity. The ambiguous private public nature of their public image. The usage of foreign iconographies in their homes and their Wapen to signify to themselves and to outsiders their historic fishing past and their autonomy. The autonomous identity which they present to the world as signified through the usage of the Moor and through their protests about the regional government. These relationships hint at qualities of their identity. I do not believe they hint at any deep underlying cultural behaviors. These cultural behaviors would have to be investigated through deep immersion into the community; something like marrying a Markener. I can say that I could only describe the surface level relationships and feeling that I was watching something I could never understand, which was the actual culture of “Markeners.”

I think this reveals the core of what anthropologists try to do. We try to encounter and catch a chill of the mystery of a culture we do not belong to. We accumulate some tiny unconscious shedding of a former way of being and then self reflexively dissect what within us has changed since encountering and being immersed in this other culture. This may be the only reliable way to understand and gain insight into various cultures. In the self-reflexive part and not just in the raw “answers” from the interlocutors.

Ethics: | It was important to research Marken not just from the perspective of the local community but also from the perspective of the foreigners who fluctuate in and out of the island every day. With regard to the Moor, sensitive issues of race arose, when communicating with some of my interlocutors’. My own perception of the Moor was initially one of character racism. This is of course influenced by my American background: seeing crudely drawn figures of African Americans in America usually denotes a lack of knowledge surrounding America’s painful history regarding race. I have touched slightly on race, yet my thesis is more focused on the material environment with regards to identity. I am mostly concerned with how the material components of the cultural landscape influence identity through the everyday relationships the Marken people have with their built environment and cultural heritage. Since none of my interlocutors revealed any overt terminology regarding race, I do not want to make assumptions about their points of view on race, for this could be unethical and falsely defaming.

However, I am aware that it is possible to see this character of the Moor in an offensive and hurtful way. This ethical issue parallels symbolic representation with culturally sensitive material in the United States. For example, our football teams, have used the imagery of local Native Americans as mascots, and this has caused both pain and pride in certain Native American communities. ( Taylor, 2011) Really the issue of using the image of one group of people, to represent another group, who are not the group whose image, they use, can cause a lot of controversy. Particularly, concerning the way the image is depicted.

Conclusion|

In English the etymological definition of landscape is of Dutch origin. From the 16th century middle Dutch “lantscap” meaning “land-ship”. Land is a place and a scap is a relation of people to something. The relationships of people with the land of North Holland, the polders, have for centuries been created, destroyed, enhanced, or abandoned in movement, communication and in manipulation with their stewards. I have presented many details and fragments of how Markeners are in relation with their landscape. These can be understood within the woven tapestry of economic, social and ecological adaptations and necessities with the landscape. This relationship of the people of the Northern Holland region as stated in the beginning of this paper, is most poetically represented below, in the anthropomorphic pictorial trend of 1700s Dutch painters.

[Fig. 32] Dutch School Anonymous, 1600s. source: https://pleasantpastime.com/anthropomorphic-landscape/

The aesthetics of the landscape are depicted with human features and perhaps these Netherlandish painters saw themselves, maybe their “people,” imbedded in the landscape. This embeddedness of practice with the landscape is akin to the principles of “dwelling” as theorized

by Ingold. Marken an island in the Markermeer is a perfect example of a wild landscape turned cultural landscape through the continual generative and degenerative processes and manipulations of the people of North Holland with the land. The imbedded relationships of private-public ambiguity, the incorporation of the foreign into the local, and the autonomous signification of the Marken people, with regards to their historic geography and historic regional independence, can be seen as overarching relationships which encompass the myriad of details, nuances and particular observations I have made of Markeners interacting with their landscape. Although after this research I no longer believe what I have observed is integral or definitive of the exact cultural make-up of Markener identity, I do believe that what I have revealed are facets of relationships within the complex processes of identity construction and identity boundary maintenance ( Barth, 1969) which Markeners perform with their landscape.

All of these boundary manipulations with regards to the material cultural landscape, which are braided together with the historic, present and future contexts of economy, regional society, and local ecology, come with certain aesthetic choices; certain conscious or unconscious styles and selections and design processes which result in the overall “look” and physical signature of a place. The inhabitants of the western coast of the Markermeer have throughout time gained their “authentic” material heritage and aesthetics through resources from the surrounding environment, manipulating and adapting to the environmental, economic and cultural influences from the outside world. These relationships with the economic, environment and social have shaped all the various “ways of being which I have mentioned in this thesis. Marken has also been the historic optic for an “essentialized”, “Dutch” culture, since the 1880s. This process of preserving an essential aesthetic of “Dutch culture” found on the island of Marken arose around the same time as the academic birth of Anthropology and Folkloric studies. With the looming environmental changes of the region, Anthropologists and especially Folklorists, sought to preserve the aesthetic characteristics of Marken, through photography, material conservation and ethnographic storytelling.

My role as an Anthropologist today, similar in methodology to these Dutch painters above, was to reveal the embedded cultural processes, like the embedded faces of the paintings from the introduction, within the cultural landscape of Marken. These paintings reflect an embedded anthropomorphizing of the landscape of the Netherlands, a projected “way of being” in which historically the wild landscape is cultivated and manufactured in relationship with mans’ perceived image. In a similar way my work has reflected on the deeper societal

constructions embedded in the material iconography landscape of Marken. Within my Thesis I have tried to show how processes,” ways of being” are linked to the material-cultural landscape as an expression of Markener identity.

[Fig.33] Paul Kuiper, 1960s Marken Summer festival

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ANNEX: Facts about Marken.

Marken is a former island in the Zuiderzee, it has a current local population of about 1000 residents. It was a historic fishing community before the closing off of the Zuiderzee in the 1920s. It is in the Municipality of Waterland, which has a municipal council with 17 seats.

Some specific details geographic details; “Marken was separated from the mainland in the 13th century during the formation of the Zuiderzee. The 2-mile- (3-km-) long island has an area of 1 square mile (2.5 square km) and lies about 1.5 miles (2.5 km) offshore. (https://www.britannica.com/place/Marken)

Tourism is the most important source of income for the island. In the past, the island lived off of fishing, mostly for eels. Most of the residents today are orthodox Calvinists. The island is known for the locals dressing up during tourist high season and the elaborate aesthetic costumes of the people on the island. The heritage of the island has been for the past hundred years explored through physical anthropology, painting, and writing.

It is located about 20 minutes north of Amsterdam. Today it is connected by highway to Monnickendam and by ferry to Volendam. It is the crux of a tourist route filled with daily tours and buses of people. There are mirages of polders, boats and water, weaving in and over of each other as buses, bikes and trains, weave between these through the agricultural country side. It is in the Markermeer, surrounded by water.

The climate is temperate, all four seasons are expressed here. The international global tourist market has made its mark on the town and the recent developments in housing can be heard ringing throughout the country side of the island. Patches of the island are held in pristine, clean, manicured and even sterile condition, preserving the fisherman’s house aesthetic and ornamentation.

Source: https://fluswikien.hfwu.de/index.php?title=File:Land-reclamation-on-the-north-sea-coast-map.jpg

The Markermeer is a fresh water lake resulting from the closure of the Zuiderzee and the subsequent closure of the IJsselmeer from the Zuiderzee. Even today the nation of the Netherlands is manipulating its landscape again creating new Wetlands, the Marker Wadden, along the Houtribdijk, which closes the Ijsselmeer from the Markermeer. The Markermeer is used now as a fresh water aquifer for the surrounding towns and previously was the source of income and sustainable consumption from fishing.