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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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As we discussed in class, and Claudia addresses in her response, so much of defining a location as a place vs. non-place seems to be highly personal, reactive, emotional, which Augé does cover in his definition ("relational, historical, and concerned with identity"). What is interesting to me, then, is how the personal attachments to a 'place' can define it as place or non-place person by person. Does a negative association create a place? What about neutral - does the lack of a strong reaction either way relegate it to 'non-place-ness'? (maybe 'placelessness' sounds better) Also, the time element is intriguing. Ground Zero is an example of a place of the "contemporary past" discussed by González-Ruibal in Time to Destroy. However, what if the Twin Towers had not been completed in the '70s, but were a new construction, open for under a year? The tragedy would have been just as great, and the place where they towers once stood would be no less powerful in their symbolism.

As González-Ruibal mentions briefly, the idea of a place or landscape embodying memory can be seen in the purposeful examples of destruction of sites like the Mostar bridge during the Bosnian-Herzegovian War. In line with our place/non-place debate, he states that "Places of abjection are sites where no memorial is built and no commemorative plaque is to be found. If supermodern anthropology deals with non-places, archaeology has to deal with landscapes of death and oblivion: a no-man's land too recent, conflicting, and repulsive to be shaped as collective memory" (256). It is an interesting comment that, while Augé can approach the supermodern place while it still exists anthropologically, archaeologists can only access similar places once they have been destroyed, since otherwise they would still be in use. However, the exploitation of a place post-destruction actually runs the danger of commercialization, just like the archaeological sites that were mentioned in class. Strange that the effects of conflict and tourism can eventually result in the same sort of changes to a place. The concepts of tourist landscapes and "manicured" memorial landscapes seem to imply that these places become less than authentic. The question of authenticity ultimately seems to be what we were discussing last Monday when listing the pros and cons of tourist pressure to an area. Ironically, as the continued use of a place continues in these cases, increasing its "historical" aspect, the personal attachments may weaken (while memorial sites are deeply personal for a few generations immediately after an event, 100 years later, when none are alive who had been there to experience it, they tend to be much less so).