Violence and the Re-Discovery of Place
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Copyright © Museum Tusculanums Press Violence and the Re-discovery of Place Maja Povrzanovi ç Frykman Povrzanoviç Frykman, Maja 2002: Violence and the Re-discovery of Place. – Ethnologia Europaea 32: 2: 69–88. Violence imposed on a place bears not only the implicit challenge to the identities associated with it, but it also provokes responses related to a sense of place. In the context of war, place suddenly matters in a more direct and more intense way. The uniqueness of the place based primarily on the social value it has for people becomes visible and reflected upon as concrete and at one with action and thought. In this article, personal narratives on war experiences in the 1990s by the civilians in Dubrovnik, are related to Edward S. Casey’s propositions about every place being encultured and every culture being implaced. The tension is explored, between being “Europeans” and being “war victims” – two types of place-bound identity. Maja Povrzanoviç Frykman, Ph.D, Ass. Prof. at IMER, Malmö University, SE-205 06 Malmö, Sweden; Outer associate of Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research,POB 287, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia. E-mail: [email protected] Whilst collecting war-related narratives for the (“In war, everyone is ours”; cf. Povrzanoviç 1997: purpose of a doctoral thesis on dealing with fear 156–157). People that I interviewed explicitly in the context of everyday life in war-torn Croatia revealed an awareness of their lives being 1 in 1991–92 , I talked to several people in anchored in the places of daily interactions: this Dubrovnik, a town on Croatia’s Adriatic coast awareness acquired in war was worth remem- with some 60,000 inhabitants. My first question bering and possible to talk about. The war- was about their most important war memories. experiences mentioned above, that were reflec- The long narratives induced by this question ted upon in the interview situations some years were predominantly stories about air-raid later, have been significantly embedded in the alarms and shelters, about food, water and narration about belonging to the place. In this hygiene, about neighbours, friends and helpful article, they are analysed in relation to the strategies, about the importance of family ties philosopher Edward S. Casey’s claim that “how- and the care of children and elderly people, ever oblivious to place we may be in our thought about obstinacy and courage. They outline a and theory, and however much we may prefer to war-time politics of identity, based primarily on think of what happens in a place rather than of strategies of survival in the context of siege, the place itself, we are tied to place undetachably military attacks, injury, death, and destruction. and without reprieve” (Casey 1993: xiii). These narratives show that everyday routines were an efficient means of coping with war- Violence and Belonging provoked deprivation, fear and anxiety (see Povrzanoviç 1997). There is certainly neither a singular theoretical Yet the unexpected part of the collected connection between place and identity, nor an material – and it was its relative frequency that univocal interpretation of any place character- surprised me most – were the statements about ised by a social and historical complexity and people’s love for their town, about the feeling of multiple links with the “outer” world. However, belonging to the region and about feeling like a it seems that violence imposed on a place bears family with all the people inhabiting the region not only the implicit challenge to the identities Ethnologia Europaea vol. 32: 2; e-journal. 2004. ISBN 87 635 0158 9 69 Copyright © Museum Tusculanums Press associated with it, but also that it provokes “Implacement is an ongoing cultural process responses “intimately related to a well-developed with an experimental edge. It acculturates sense of place” (cf. Tangherlini 1999). A whatever ingredients it borrows from the comparative reading of studies of such responses natural world, whether these ingredients are facilitates an understanding of their – as it bodies or landscapes or ordinary ‘things’. Such seems – universal character. acculturation is in itself a social, even a Discussing the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the communal act. For the most part, we get into folkorist Timothy R. Tangherlini (1999) shows places together. We partake in places in common how the riots impacted a space that had been – and reshape them in common. The culture transformed into highly specified and culturally that characterises and shapes a given place is a charged places by the people living and working shared culture, not merely superimposed upon in them. The story of the city had been forcibly the place but part of its very facticity. (…) The rewritten by destruction: the landscape that time of cultural implacement (and the time had been defined by the spatial practices of experienced in that implacement) is that which people who worked and lived in it had been informs a place in concert with other human deeply scarred and, in some instances, reduced beings, through one’s bodily agency, within the to rubble. embrace of a landscape” (Casey 1993: 31–33). As shown by the anthropologist Michael Jackson (1995) writing about Australian Taken as encultured, places are matters of Aborigines’ concepts and practices of appropria- experience (along with the bodies and landscapes ting the landscape, it is the activity of those who that bound, and sometimes bind, them). We “own” the place that gives it value. They “own” “make trial” of places in culturally specific ways. the place, but at the same time “belong” to it: the This principle, according to Casey, applies not value of an inhabited place is embodied by the only to the familiar places to which we are people living in it. accustomed but also to faraway places that are The Aborigines’ mourning over their destroy- visited. ed dreaming-places in the Australian landscape, It also applies to the places deprived of their the people whose dwelling and working places peaceful familiarity. “If a position is a fixed posit have been destroyed in the Los Angeles riots of an established culture, then a place, despite and the civilians trying to keep minimal every- its frequently settled appearance, is an essay in day normality under violent attacks in the experimental living within a changing culture” 1990s war in Croatia, have indeed been living in (Casey 1993: 31). The experimental-experiential very different political, social, cultural and “trials” of the places changed by violence is the spatial circumstances. Yet, the reactions to the theme of this article. violence imposed on the places they define as A comparison of narrative presentations of their own seem to be similar. Together with the such “trials” and the experiences and images most obvious shock and anger, such violence framed by the concepts of belonging to Europe intensifies the relationship between people and and mobilising cultural heritage might be seen place and provokes a complex and very pronoun- as being too far-fetched. Namely, the newly ced feeling of self being fused with the sense of raised awareness of belonging to the place in my place. Place suddenly matters in a more direct examples indeed happened in an abnormal and more intense way; the uniqueness of the context. It happened in a situation of manifold place is based primarily on the social value it reversed orders, in the context of restriction or has for people becomes visible and reflected annihilation of most peacetime and peaceful upon. everyday coordinates of identity which imply Edward S. Casey (1993: 31) claims the truth preferences and choices. of two related, yet distinct propositions: about Yet, while illustrating the re-considered, re- every place being encultured and every culture discovered and newly discovered relations to being implaced. the place in which their everyday life has been situated, this article also relates the experiences Ethnologia Europaea vol. 32: 2; e-journal. 2004. 70 ISBN 87 635 0158 9 Copyright © Museum Tusculanums Press The Cathedral immedi- ately after being hit, De- cember 6, 1991. Photo: Milo Kovac. of modern urban Europeans, for whom belonging to reflect upon the tension between two types of to Europe has been an undisputed fact. It has Dubrovnik inhabitants’ place-bound identity, been taken for granted not only by geographical between being “Europeans” and being “war location but first and foremost by inheriting, victims”. living with and taking care of some of the most distinguished objects of European architectonic The War cultural heritage. The poet, Luko Paljetak, (web site http:// When the war started in Croatia in Summer www.dubrovnik.hr) expresses it like this: 1991 – in the regions with a considerable Serbian population – the people of Dubrovnik did not “Like a sea-shell, full of the sounds of life, feel threatened since their region was indisput- Dubrovnik lies on the shores of the Adriatic, in ably Croatian with regard to the ethnic affilia- Croatia. (…) Without it, you will not be able to tion of the vast majority of its inhabitants. No complete your mosaic of the world’s beauty. (…) claims on “Serbian territory” similar to the ones Dubrovnik’s culture, literature, painting, in Eastern Slavonia were imaginable (see architecture, music, philosophy, science and Goldstein 1999: 198–238). Besides, the border diplomacy are an integral part of the cultural between the Dubrovnik region and the areas heritage of Europe and the world. Dubrovnik is that are today parts of Montenegro and Bosnia- a cultural monument under UNESCO’s special Hercegovina dates from the Middle Ages. protection. (…) Dubrovnik will be just the way However, Dubrovnik was attacked a couple of you are yourself when you come to it. And you months later. will leave it the way Dubrovnik is.