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Reclaiming the land: belonging, landscape, and in situ displacement on the plain of Karditsa (Greece)
Abstract
Land reform on the Karditsa plain in the late 1960s/early 1970s greatly alleviated poverty for local farmers, but also disrupted their traditional way of life and relationship with the landscape. This in situ displacement arises not from reactionary nostalgia but from rupture to inhabitants’ corporeal and sensory experience of place.
This article focuses on attempts by inhabitants of the island of Samothraki, in North-Eastern Greece, to make sense of rapid soil erosion and degradation. Through the use of ethnographic vignettes, collected during my first fieldwork on the island in August of 2022, and broader ethnographic material, I show the imbrication of landscape perception with questions of collective ethics as well as the specific forms of social uncertainty which emerge from soil instability. The article highlights specific and local discursive attempts to make sense of broader processes, including weather events, as prompts used by Samothracians to think about their ways of inhabiting their own island.
The new, systematic, interdisciplinary research project “Land reclamation and the cultural record of Kambos” combines state of the art Remote Sensing, GIS, archaeomorphological and geoarchaeological analysis with extensive and intensive surface survey, palaeoenvironmental and bioarchaeological analysis, radiocarbon dating, archival research, material culture, historical and ethnoarchaeological
studies, in order to fully comprehend the compromised cultural record of the Kambos area.
Our cutting-edge methodology identified a plethora of, previously unknown, mounded archaeological sites and monuments, ancient fields and an extended connectivity network, which advance the comprehension of the diachronic space use at the lowlands of Karditsa and transform daily archaeological
practice by the Ephorate.
Displacement in the context of disasters and climate change has gained considerable attention in international policy processes pertaining to migration and displacement over the past years. However, analysis of currently dominant understandings of disaster displacement and its solutions at the global level, and how these translate into practice in the context of operational realities at the national level remains scarce. This article seeks to promote greater reflections on the discourse of displacement solutions in the context of disasters and climate change. It examines both the advancements and remaining gaps in approaches to disasters, displacement and solutions and how these collectively shape the conceptualisation of solutions to disaster displacement. The analysis sheds light on the dominant framings and their underlying assumptions and highlights the implications that these carry for understanding and responding to disaster displacement.
This article builds upon work which aims to ‘de-exceptionalise’ displacement [Cabot and Ramsey, 2021. Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12(3):286–299] by describing two hitherto unresearched examples of ‘unexceptional’ displacement. Both involve abandonment and going missing, and both throw light on the ways in which gender, space and emplacement work together to produce particular vulnerabilities via what I have called ‘spatial precarity’. In the first, lost or abandoned girls are held in a government-run Safe House on the outskirts of the city. In the second, women are displaced from their marriages when their husbands go missing. The context is a rapidly changing urban environment in which the rapacious development of property and infrastructure has led to a cityscape that is never stable. This environment, and the socio-political relations that are constitutive of it, have helped to create the conditions in which certain people get lost and others go missing, leading to highly gendered forms of displacement.
This article examines the narratives offered by those displaced through the gentrification of neighbourhoods in Melbourne and Sydney. Extensive qualitative interview data generated from encounters with self-identified displacees in these cities is used here to examine their responses to changes in and after they moved from their originating neighbourhoods and the impacts these changes had on them. This data reveals that despite displacement commonly being defined in terms of physical movement, in many cases, participants became dislocated and isolated by the physical and social changes that took place while still residing in neighbourhoods as they changed. The article traces these twin modes of displacement – both as a series of impacts generated by direct market dislocation but also as feelings of loss connected with a home that might be imminently lost and the cherished place around it. These narratives reveal how private renters respond to a symbolic violence that they locate in a changing built environment and a shifting social physiognomy that impinges and threatens the viability of their tenure of these places. The article locates these resentments and displacements within a sociopolitical context that celebrates ownership and investment in the very homes and places that are now lost to them.
This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.
This paper is concerned with the conceptualisations of space which underlie debate of gentrification-related displacement. Using Derrida's concept of the spatial metaphor, the paper illuminates the Cartesian understandings of space that act as architecture for displacement debate. The paper corrects this through arguing that the philosophy of Heidegger and Lefebvre better serves to understand displacement. Emphasising the topology of Heidegger's Dasein and, following Elden, relating this to Lefebvre's understanding of space, the paper ‘constructs’ displacement in a way that avoids the abstraction of displacement-as-out-migration and instead emphasises the lived experience of space.
Proust’s famous madeleine captures the power of food to evoke some of our deepest memories. Why does food hold such power? What does the growing commodification and globalization of food mean for our capacity to store the past in our meals – in the smell of olive oil or the taste of a fresh-cut fig? This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. Sutton challenges and expands anthropology’s current focus on issues of embodiment, memory and material culture, especially in relation to transnational migration and the flow of culture across borders and boundaries. The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where Islanders claim to remember meals long past – both humble and spectacular – provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Despite the growing interest in anthropological accounts of food and in the cultural construction of memory, the intersection of food with memory has not been accorded sustained examination. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in speciality cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the ‘anthropology of the senses’. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations.
This article introduces the dossier ‘Spatializing Transnational History: European spaces and territories’. It examines the intersections between transnational history and the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences, and points at future directions in historical research. It reviews two main different methodological approaches to the problem of space in transnational, comparative and global history and examines recent contributions on the history of territory. Finally, it introduces the contributions to this dossier, which approach the history of modern Europe from a number of transnational and spatial perspectives. The dossier argues that incorporating a combination of spatial approaches, ranging from the examination of transnational spaces, to the interplay between different scales of analysis, and to the historicization of territoriality, into the practice of transnational, comparative and global history may contribute to a deeper, wider and more complex understanding of ‘Europe’.
In the 1880s, a company was formed in France for the purpose of draining Lake Kopais - a large, natural lake in Central Greece. This was the largest water management project yet undertaken in the country, made possible by recent advances in engineering and technology, and it ushered in a century of similarly ambitious projects. Draining the lake fundamentally altered the environment of the region, but it did not create new agricultural land out of wasteland as the project's backers maintained; instead, it transformed one type of productive land into another type, and the resulting dislocations were felt in the region for years to come. As revealed in the records of the French company and the British company that succeeded it, as well as in contemporary news reports, legal documents, and government records, this transformation created conflicts between those who sought to protect their traditional land use rights and those who sought to use the land for capitalist agriculture. These conflicts lasted for decades, and they were fought in parliament, in the courtroom, and occasionally in the countryside with violence.
Drawing on textual sources from the Estonian diaspora, this chapter analyses changes of homeland as a form of cultural rupture. There have been two movements of diaspora from Estonia: first the so-called eastern diaspora, from the mid-nineteenth century to WWI, which involved voluntary migration to the east and south of the Russian empire; and second, the western diaspora, which took place during and after WWII and involved Estonians fleeing to Western countries. In both cases, physical relocation entailed a dramatic change of social, political and historical circumstances. Classical models of migrant adaptation refer to generational differences: while the first generation identifies itself primarily with the country and culture of origin, the second generation adapts and the third is assimilated. Although these models are generalisations, they capture a general shift in loyalty: from country of origin to country of residence. Using a landscape perspective to analyse published letters and song repertoires from Estonian diaspora communities across the world, the chapter examines the role of landscape imagery in such processes. How did emigrants “domesticate” their experience of these new, foreign landscapes? Did landscape representations and comparisons express different stages of migrant adaptation? Did they reflect differences between voluntary and forced migrations?
This chapter outlines the ambitions and key theoretical terms of the collection, and presents the various themes explored over the following chapters.
In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas. Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement - the revitalized movement for social progress.
In this interdisciplinary study, Hamish Forbes explores how Greek villagers have understood and reacted to their landscapes over the centuries, from the late medieval period to the present. Analyzing how they have seen themselves belonging to their local communities and within both local and wider landscapes, Forbes examines how these aspects of belonging have informed each other. Forbes also illuminates cross-disciplinary interests in memory and the importance of monuments. Based on data gathered over 25 years, Forbes' study combines the rich detail of ethnographic field work with historical and archaeological time.
The phrase “attachment to the ordinary landscape” seems simple and straightforward, if vague and inclusive. Nevertheless, each of the three critical terms deserves attention. Attachment I define as an affective relationship between people and the landscape that goes beyond cognition, preference, or judgment. Ordinary means routine, experienced in everyday life. This excludes “special” landscapes, those that contrast with routine experience, landscapes such as shrines and wilderness. Landscape I use in a broad, naive sense, as a setting for human experience and activity. In scale, it might be described as “larger than a household but smaller than one of earth’s biogeograph-ical regions.” It includes some of the spatial topics of other chapters in this book, such as possessions, childhood places, community, home, and home gardens.
Presents an innovative synthetic understanding of the dynamic relationship between conceptual, material and cognitive phenomena of rupture, brought together in the unifying trope of landscape.
Large-scale water control projects have been a major component of environmental engineering and landscape transformation during the twentieth century, creating some of its most characteristic modernist forms. The discourses generated by their design and implementation articulate diverse and often opposing cultural identities. Those surrounding the design and construction of reservoirs at Ladybower (1935-45), in what is now the Peak District National Park, and Rutland Water (1968-76), in England's smallest shire county, give insights into the role of landscape aesthetics and symbolism in the complex negotiations of local and national identity at different moments in the course of twentieth-century modernism in Britain.
The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification-induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle-class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low-income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low-income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under-researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long-term low-income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small-scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.
In Trikala, central Greece, specific historical events significantly inform understandings of the present economic crisis through what is termed “cultural proximity”. This is the notion that previous times of social and economic turmoil, apparently distant points in time, are embodied within the context of the present. Some past epochs of prosperity and crisis have proved more significant than others in shaping contemporary crisis experience. As accounts of the Great Famine of 1941–1943 are brought to the fore by the current economic crisis, concepts of lineal time and the nationalization of critical events must be interrogated. Through considering theories of time as proposed by Michel Serres, this paper addresses how specific historical events can become embodied during the current economic crisis.
The relatively new, yet extremely popular, TV cooking shows in contemporary Greece provide a public forum for the negotiation of national identity, the articulation of nostalgia for an idealised past, and the expression of anxieties over an uncertain future. This article examines the different ways urban and rural viewing audiences participate in those debates through their relationship to old and new cooking practices. Rather than assuming the role of the passive viewer, a surprisingly large section of the population actively debates current socio-political concerns through these cooking shows, providing a stimulating setting for the expression of questions of authenticity, tradition, and change.
All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of WArttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity. |In a careful reexamination of the historical evidence, Alan Nolan explodes many longstanding myths about Robert E. Lee and the Civil War.
To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past.
On August 29, 2005, it was just becoming apparent how devastating Hurricane Katrina had been for the city of New Orleans, as the storm surge resulting from the hurricane caused the breach of 53 levees in the New Orleans area, flooding 80 percent of the city. In an interview with FEMA deputy director Patrick Rhode on August 30, Jim Lehrer grimly speculated that the death toll had topped 50; only days later it would be clear that this number was a significant underestimation. I remember watching the news coverage with steadily increasing incredulity and horror, wondering: How can a place like this - with its everyday rhythms and cadences and ways of being—simply be extinguished so quickly? And how would a person begin to make sense of losing her place in such a terrible and dramatic way?
This essay is not an attempt to calculate the extent to which Katrina was a "natural" or a "man-made" disaster. Nor does it assess various claims about responsibility (or its absence) for preparation and recovery efforts in the area. Instead, parses the relationship between place, loss, and memory in New Orleans: how we understand what was lost or is being lost in the city, and if and how we should mourn those losses. To do this, I examine the accounts of journalists in their descriptions of post-Katrina New Orleans and their interviews with residents and former residents of the city. In their stories I see two, related themes: anxiety over loss of the city's particular character, and a profound sense of place attachment that undergirds New Orleanians' understandings of who they were and are.
These two themes generate several questions. First, does the particular tragedy of post-Katrina New Orleans reflect more a general apprehension about losing our place in a post-industrial world? And second, does place attachment or homesickness have a role to play in a world increasingly characterized by political and ethical commitments not bound to or dictated by place? (To phrase the second question a slightly different way: is place attachment a naïve and potentially anti-democratic sensibility, i.e., is it merely a poor man's patriotism?) (I posit that the simple answers to these questions are "yes," "yes," and "no," respectively. The longer and more complicated answers follow.) In the final section of the essay, I discuss briefly how these questions suggest a more general concern: how might we begin to theorize place and place-based politics in a way that is neither exclusionary nor reactionary?
While the traumatic circumstances surrounding post-Katrina New Orleans might be singular, they help us begin to articulate a notion of place that augments, rather than constricts, our attempts to cultivate pluralistic politics. The means by which citizens undertake efforts to remember and remake places are profoundly political and, as such, intrinsically interesting and important to political theorists interested in memory, agency, and democracy.
In the four years that have passed since Hurricane Katrina first made landfall, it is apparent that the stories we tell about post-Katrina New Orleans are, almost without exception, stories about loss. This is not and should not be surprising; after all, so much was lost in the storm that any other kind of story would seem macabre, especially in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.
Some of the most obvious losses are well known; their magnitude, though, makes them worth repeating once more. Lives were lost: more than 1,800 in all, and over 1,400 from Louisiana alone. People were lost: a year after the storm, some 135 people from New Orleans remained missing, and the number exceeded 2,000 for the entire Gulf Coast region. Property was lost, and then some; Katrina caused approximately $81 billion in damages, making it, according to...
In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
The devastating tornado of April 3, 1974, provided Xenia, Ohio, with an opportunity to rebuild while avoiding past mistakes in planning and zoning. A comprehensive redevelopment plan stressing downtown revitalization, housing reconstruction, and floodplain zoning, was approved. Simultaneous approval of “overlay zoning,” however, permitted the reemergence of pretornado forces to affect redevelopment of the impacted area. Three years after the tornado, elements of the “old Xenia” are appearing in renewed strip development and continued downtown decline, a reaffirmation of residential discard in “undesirable” areas, and continued uncoordinated environmental development. This article focuses on the persistence of these predisaster motivations and their probable effect on Xenia's future.
Reviews the literature on community sentiment and proposes an integrative conceptualization of community sentiment in terms of sense of place. Research on community sentiment can be divided into 3 broad approaches focusing on community satisfaction, community attachment, and identity and community life. The proposed conceptualization of community sentiment is explored, using interview material from 5 contemporary Americans residing in the same city but with different senses of place. These differences are expressed in terms of rootedness, alienation, relativity, and placelessness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Abstract Vietnam has emerged as the world's second largest producer of coffee. The benefits of this expanding coffee economy are substantial but not universal; their distribution follows ethnic lines despite government commitment to equalize welfare. Focusing on Dak Lak Province in Vietnam's Central Highlands, we investigate this commercial transformation and the “competition for coffee space” that it has occasioned. Combined ethno-history and household income analyses suggest markedly different benefits between native and non-native ethnic groups, despite generally larger landholdings among the former. We interpret these finding through the conceptual lens of in-situ development-induced displacement.
Zugl.: Madison, Wis., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, Diss., 1999.
This article examines the link between people and place through a study of the ‘spatial practices’ of a small group of southern
Ethiopian agro-pastoralists, the Mursi. Based upon fieldwork stretching over the past 35 years, I argue that there has been
a huge change in the way the Mursi collectively imagine the world and their place within it. They have been ‘localized’, by
being drawn into the ‘spatial practices’ of the Ethiopian state, and ‘marginalized’, by becoming dependent on values, norms
and technologies which lie beyond their own means of production and control. I conclude that to understand how a sense of
place becomes bound up with a person's social and individual identity, we must treat place, not as a stage for social activity
but as a ‘product’ of it. Such an understanding of the link between people and place helps us to appreciate that displacement
is not just about the loss of place, but also about the struggle to make a place in the world, where meaningful action and shared understanding is possible.
- Sutton D.
Η Πολιτική Γης της Περιόδου 1945-1967: Κοινωνικοπολιτικά Αίτια και «Αναπτυκιακές» και Περιβαλλοντικές Προεκβολές [The Earth Policy in the Period 1945-1967: Sociopolitical Causes and “Developmental” and Environmental Impacts
- D Rokkos
In press. Αναδασμός της Γης και Πολιτισμικό Τοπίο στο Κάμπο της Καρδίτσας [Land Redistribution and Cultural Landscape in Kambos
- N Krahtopoulou
- H Orengo
- K Palaiochoritis
- A Stamati
Book Reviews - Paul Bahn. Bluff Your way in Archaeology
- P Halstead
Από τις Παραδόσεις των Καραγκούνηδων στις Πρακτικές των Αρχαίων [Farming and Food. From the Traditions of the Karagkoúnides to the Practices of the Ancients
- P Halstead