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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Comments and questions about Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape.

To begin, I would like to second (or third, or fourth…) some concerns expressed by several other students about the author’s stated opinion that it is people who give meaning to landscapes. I like Forbes’s position that people and landscapes can’t be separated, but after reading through this book, it seems as though the pendulum has swung, perhaps, too far to the other extreme. It feels, often, that the physical environment, which the author notes has undergone long-term processes of change in conjunction with its inhabitants, becomes somewhat irrelevant to the production of meaning at Methana. Of most significance to me is that saying it is strictly the people from whom meaning emerges creates a huge divide between the people and the landscape that doesn’t mesh with Forbes’s goal of merging people and landscape. Is it possible to create an account of meaning in Methana that is more sensitive to the actual interactions between people and place, such that meaning emerges out of the interaction rather than out of the people alone?

Second, Forbes is critical of several scholars, such as Barbara Bender, whom he considers to have, “collectivized, anonymised, and homogenised” (Forbes 2007: 20) the people of Wiltshire. Certainly such things are to be avoided, but at times the people of Methana seem themselves to be treated as rather uniform in their ‘culture’. For instance, most of the discussion in the book revolves around villagers on Methana, though some mention is made of the towns and tourists and workers elsewhere. What would an ethnography of Methana look like that brought these multiple lifestyles together more thoroughly? Methana isn’t just a peninsula of villagers, and it would be interesting to merge the multiple groups and social networks that exist there.

Thirdly, the book, particularly chapters 8 and 9, sets out kinship through certain material forms, such as houses/households, vineyard plots, terracing, churches and graves. The kinship forms seems to become solidified through these material structures or boundaries. My reading of this is that the dominant forms of meaning production in the Methana landscape settles into discrete blocks. A house, or a set of houses, merge with the kinship form that appears there. Proximity to other houses and kin groups is mentioned, but only in so far as they are linked, marginalized, or isolated from each other. Members of one kin group might go to each other’s house to chat, get food, share bread and so forth, but the movement between these blocks never seems to hold on to something in and of itself. The ‘in between’ of these discrete units, which are traversed and which are part of the physical landscape, seem less significant than the actual house or church of land plot. Does this sever the people from the entire landscape by focusing on socially constructed components at the expense of the larger place?