Alex Knodell

Building off my interests in the Rocky Point Amusement Park, I plan to write about its role as a unique place in the broader landscape of Warwick, RI. I plan to look into how the park is currently used in comparison to how it was used before “abandonment” and specifically how its role in relation to the places around it has changed. The website “Art in Ruins” offers several fascinating accounts of former employees, visitors and others who visited the park while it while it was operational, as well as their feelings about it at the time of writing, in some cases decades later. Beyond these accounts, it may also be useful to attempt to get in contact with the people who live near-by the park and inquire about the role it currently plays in their lives: what kinds of activities go on there; what people, if any, frequent the place; how does the community as a whole feel about it; are there future plans to do anything with the place; etc. And in addition to what roles it currently plays, we should also consider the role of individual and community memory in the shaping of these contemporary views.

This sort of ethnographic practice can be combined with phenomenological approaches, as we have seen in the work of Hamish Forbes (2007), and I believe that this combination can be very useful. In doing so I plan to bring in theoretical discourses concerning phenomenology, urban landscapes, social memory, place and urban ethnography to produce a hopefully well rounded and developed project which takes archaeological approaches and theories typically applied to the study of the much more distant past and merges them with ethnographic practices in a study of a place encompassing both past and present.

Preliminary Bibliography

Bender, B (ed.). 1993. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg.

Edensor, Tim. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality. New York: Berg.

Forbes, Hamish. 2007. Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape: An Archaeological Ethnography. Cambridge University Press

Mayne, Alan and Tim Murray; 2001. The archaeology of urban landscapes: explorations in slumland. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

Van Dyke, R. and S. Alcock (eds.) 2003. Archaeologies of Memory. Malden: Blackwell