GEOGRAPHY

PANEL DISCUSSION
SECTION II

79
THE MEANINGS OF LANDSCAPE AND THE LANDSCAPE OF MEANINGS
Mónica Cornejo

87
ON THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE USEFUL
LANDSCAPES TO BE PRESERVED, LANDSCAPES TO BE DESTROYED
Heriberto Cairo Carou

93
THE PERSPECTIVE OF PLACE: A THEORETICAL PROPOSAL
María Lois

99
APPENDIX II: BIBLIOGRAPHY

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THE MEANINGS
OF LANDSCAPE AND
THE LANDSCAPE
OF MEANINGS
– Mónica Cornejo –

I contemplate the rururban plot as if it were a coded message. Night has Mónica Cornejo, Doctor of Anthropology
(Universidad Complutense, Madrid). An
fallen. Houses and trees have been filing past monotonously for hours. Ever since
expert in Symbolic Anthropology and Reli-
we left, in fact. I am not sure of the purpose of our journey. I rarely am, but this gion, she was awarded the Premio Nacio-
feeling of indifference — this one in particular — has become somewhat familiar. nal de Investigación Cultural Marqués de
Lozoya for her research in 2007. Currently
Lévi-Strauss once said, “I hate travelling and explorers.” I begin to see a gradual lecturer in the Department of Social An-
change in the type of houses. But not in the trees. And then we reach Viveiro, thropology at the Universidad Compluten-
se de Madrid, her research centres mainly
from the east.
on cultural symbolism, religion and epis-
I keep thinking about the rururban plot as if it were the key that decompresses temology.
imported files. The evolution of the landscape has been more urban than rural,
and more urban the rururban. Some towns keep their older buildings in better
shape than others. As the journey progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that
these buildings are characteristic only in towns. We speculate about their selling
prices. And about the cost of modernizing them. We wonder if the tiled, swim-
ming pool-style ones cost as much as the stone ones (there are more rusty iron
balconies with flaky paint than wooden galleries or stone balustrades). There is
an order to these spaces: the evolution of a social and economic history, a politi-
cal archaeology of taste, after the manner of Bourdieu. This included the apocry-
phal composition of the rururban. After travelling over four hundred kilometres
and visiting town upon town, thousands of images of houses and trees retained
in the mind whirl into a morass of styles, prices — and meanings.
We had to enter Galicia from that side — from the east. I wanted to track the
evolution of that particular landscape. Its clustered forms and semantic augury
coincide, Frazer-style, with Carme’s photos. I have made this journey before.
The photos tell me so. History has been weaving this fabric for more centuries
than is obvious today. And this stretch of the journey in particular has its own
story. Its own way of articulating nature and culture. Symbolic pulchritude (or
the Occamist principle) has reduced such a plethora of dimensions to a simple
code — N-634 — so ingrained that it is evocative of nothing. But this is not about
Occam’s razor; it is about the handle. And the paradox of ancient nominalism:
the proliferation of symbolic razors, the forest of symbols, the (Cretan) labyrinth
of a postmodern oxymoron.
It is already dark when we pass through Ribeiro. It takes an age to get to
Viveiro. (I insist: the description must convey a sense of endlessness). In the
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darkness it is impossible to tell in what section of the code we are. The road signs
do not coincide with the names on the map. We pass the turning for Burela and
there is still a long way to go. A second observation relevant to this itinerary: the
municipalities’ fringes are more contextually — than textually — defined. The
geo-social units are disperse. The houses are scattered, the landscape dotted.
We might suppose that this constitutes a kind of cognitive (and not just admin-
istrative) schema of spatial textures; an inscription on everyday life, on the very
perambulation that articulates (or not?) the experience of landscape. The latter
will be the first thing to study next morning.
It is easy to find an instrument with which to begin: books and maps. We
spend all morning walking through the town. We enquire as to these things and
accept advice: this book and this other, the guidebook to dolmens and hill forts,
the archaeological route, the Easter programme (Easter programme?), a cou-
ple of street maps, and “do check out the website for Viveiro.” As hundreds of
anthropologists have already found when undertaking similar journeys, those
who recommend such material seldom actually use it. The key to experiencing
this urban structure is not to be found in photographs or books or in a list of
cartographic symbols. Nobody is very sure of the streets names. The streets are
named after people, and hardly anyone knows the story behind the names. When
you talk to people, they say the “upper street,” the “middle street,” the “sea
front” and the “fish market.” There is one street which used to be called “Calvo
Sotelo,” and perhaps because it is impossible to forget who he was there are still
people who refer to it by that name. “That was his house,” they say. As for the
rest, the map is like a cabalistic fossil; the setting of failing memory, where his-
tory loses its link with culture.
One of the street names has a valuable book written about it: Historia de
Vivero y su Concejo (The History of Vivero and its Council) by Juan Donapetry
Iribarnegaray. I find only one elderly and cultured man who knows about this
and he shows his displeasure at my ignorance. The book is useful for finding
one’s way around this setting, which is designed one way and used another, and
its exuberant ballad of toponyms helps one to sort out the new morasses. Man,
book and anthropologist, together we go over the landscape. First with a pointed
finger, as we stand at a window and take in the spectacular views of the Landro,
Celeiro, Covas beach, even Insua in the distance; then with the car and our shoes.
Without knowing where we are headed, we end up in an anomaly. One could call
this a hermeneutic breakdown, to borrow Agar’s term (1982). From the window
we can see strange-looking structures on a cliff top. As we draw nearer, I see
a sign that says “Ethnographic Park.” “Ethnographic?,” I ask. “They’re the old
mines,” I am told. We travel round the park and approach the metal structures.
We read the commemorative plaques. I listen to stories about the mines, the steel
that was transported via an old dock that is now a panoramic viewing point, and
the men and children that filed through the galleries. “Ethnographic?,” I ask. “It’s
a park now — Insua Park,” comes the reply.
A breakdown in the aesthetics and hermeneutics of the landscape reveals a
cultural breach around the meaning of ethnographic; like the one between the
everyday names of streets and their official nomenclature. “Why ethnographic,”
I have asked whenever I have had the opportunity. I have asked different people
about the park and have always got the same indifferent reply: “I don’t know,”
accompanied by various hypotheses as to who it is that decides the names, and
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suggestions about where I should ask. At this point I should confess something
that I did not always tell my interlocutors: that she who writes this is an ethnogra-
pher. That what you are reading is a form (amongst others) of ethnography. (That
ethnography and ethnology may be considered academic synonyms of anthro-
pology). And that I have not the faintest idea why the park around the old mines
of Viveiro is called an ethnographic park. And nor does anyone I know.
One may conjecture and enquire, with varying degrees of success, as to the
origin of this ethnographic anomaly. In short, it would appear that somebody,
suitably high-up in the business of signposting, hit on the word ethnographic,
believing it to befit such places where relics of an earlier activity survive, ei-
ther because they are old or because they have never been removed. It may
just as well have been called a “historiographical park;” or a “park of old and
disused mines.” Perhaps funding was allocated for something ethnographic and
it was decided that it should be spent on this. Or that the word ethnographic was
deemed to sound euphonic and postmodern, just as the idea of vestiges of a mine
perched on a cliff has an atavistic resonance to it. But neither vestiges nor ata-
vism are areas of study in modern ethnography, not in themselves. Indeed, these
observations would be entirely irrelevant if it were not because they highlight
the semantic hiatus that exists between the representation of things and what
things represent (between the logos and graphos we make of a landscape and
that which concrete spaces, in their singular configurations, seem to represent).
It is this hiatus (this distance between the everyday street names and their official
nomenclature, between parks and their nameplates) that the ethnographer stud-
ies. Now, as before (Boon 1990).
The anthropological validity (as opposed to vestigicality) of landscape resides
where such misalliances emerge. The day after discovering this new lead we con-
tinue visiting places recommended by friends and guidebooks to all newcomers
alike. We spend the entire morning in another park: San Roque Park. Well-kept
and pretty like the other (like all Viveiro’s parks), it lies on the other side of the
inlet although it dates from an earlier period. The history of Viveiro and the ap-
pearance of St. Roche seem to hide a structural dialogue with their neighbour.
If the leitmotiv of the former are the (negligible) traces of an industrial past, San
Roque speaks of nature’s both hostile and generous legacy. In the park, the orna-
mental wrought iron combines well with the rough stone of the benches and the
tree trunks sustaining the swings; the bare grass plays with (or against) a rising
ground of walnuts, pines and huge and perhaps ancient oak trees. The mines on
the far side; the saint’s chapel on this. There the profane, here pastoral Arcadia.
This dialogue of symbols transcends visitors’ usual interpretations of space
— as does the use of “Ethnographic” on the sign nailed at the entrance of the
derelict mine. Its advantage over the other however, lies in the deftness with
which it translates the cultural signs of two codes written into the landscape, two
codes never intended to engage in such a dialogue. Intelligible, at any rate. Its
defect, however, — traductore traditore — is that it conceals parts of the scene.
The rusticity of San Roque is a little forced because one has to look up the moun-
tain (and away from the inlet) and, in so doing, notice all the new windmills lining
the tops of adjacent hills. Imposing, sober, reliable and whispering wind combs.
Carla tells me she has been inside a windmill. She is ten years old and has come
with her teacher to study the windmills. They have no mystery for her, so when
I enquire as to their meaning in the landscape I am told that they mean noth-
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ing. Nothing? Nothing. Not in that composition, whose vocation is naturalist and
which enjoys the semantic plenitude of a landscape conceived in itself and for
itself, in its own wild rhetoric. Some time ago, I am told, the woods were full of
eucalyptus trees. In San Roque, efforts are being made to reforest the area with
autochthonous species. And this rhetorical framework, with all its artificiality, has
more cognitive efficiency than all the eolic impertinence silhouetted against the
horizon. The landscape of meanings also has its own textures.
The conventional aspects of Arcadian reconstruction (Medeiros 2008) are
easily recognisable by the phenomenology alone of the case (windmills, swings)
— even more so if we consider the narrative of the case (reforestation) — but
their historical character in no way diminishes the efficiency of their rhetorical
character (which, in this case, is naturalising). Something quite different occurs
down by the river Landro, where the sacred and the profane play out in a Dur-
kheimian upsurge of new horizons, co-ordinates and labels. They call the town
centre the “historical kernel.” Labels. It is the only landscape where the code
governing the social is evident to all. A few years ago, Viveiro’s town centre was
declared a “heritage protection site.” The guidebooks and street maps do not tire
of alerting us to this, and indeed it is a label that locals are only too happy to let
slip when showing their town to visitors. The guidebooks also inform us that it is
one of the few towns of Galicia to have such a high concentration of monuments.
I have no way of verifying this now, but everyone is convinced of it and that is
what matters. A stroll through the streets does not contradict this compromise
of motley monuments. Churches, convents, singular houses, entrance doors, re-
cent archaeological remains (can one say this?), curious alcoves, more churches,
more convents, more singular houses, some with coats of arms, some without,
some with a history, others with a famous proprietor, others just plain odd. All
manner of landmarks can serve as emblems, a label, a nominal excuse sustaining
the totemic effect.
The great emblem of Viveiro is “urban and historical” — as if the rest of the
municipality had no right to history; as if history were the preserve of the urban-
ites, and as if this were a situation that everyone, both inside and outside the ur-
ban remit, had blindly accepted with that persuasive and poietic certainty that is
alien to common sense (Schutz 1967). Yet just as one walks through the city and
senses its apocryphal gospels, one starts to perceive the faults of this other nomi-
nal exercise. In fact, it is possible to say that all classes of emblems can serve as
landmarks: the history that is inscribed in the codes on stones is the social his-
tory of the town, the history of those who, over time, have forged their own labels
(bearers of a power of enunciation that is consciously prior to the post- exercises
that seek to discover it). These emblems, which today have value on the cultural
market, are the traces left by a handful of families. Nowadays, a lay person can
trace no urban history that is not about convents, churches, and mansions. Simi-
lar histories exist all across the peninsula. There are no tourist routes that retrace
the steps of the unshod feet of fishermen’s wives. There is no sign left by the
miners that abandoned the ethnographic remains (significantly, the vestiges left
by the miners belong to ethnography, not history); no trace of those who suppos-
edly once inhabited this rural Arcadia. Nothing, at least, that is obvious to visitors
and residents. There are shops — marvellous shops — selling clothes and home
decoration. There are bars, bookshops, more chemists than are licensed in other
municipalities, dream jewellery shops and a sociological fabric which, judging by
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the narratives (unwritten on the these stone walls; ethnographic narratives that
have yet to gain their right to history), lend a seamless continuity to the old social
fabric that heraldic families, past and present, have inscribed on stone. Someone
will point out: the fishermen were from Celeiro, the miners from Covas, and the
rest from the remaining parishes. Beyond the walls. But this space is contextually
configured. What happens inside cannot be understood without knowing what
happens outside. The absence of a development plan has also played a part in
this profound misalliance. The rururban plot is interrupted (and distorted) at the
same nodes as where the social fabric is interrupted (and distorted).
One final reading, on a religious note: the religious fabric permeates the en-
tire space. If one proceeds with the eye of a specialist, it is easy to detect in it,
by way of a hypertext, another hermeneutic metaphor for another perspective.
(Indeed, if one proceeds with the eye of a specialist, it is possible to sense a
hypertext everywhere, to the point of paranoia). I choose this one. Religion has
codified through its own language Viveiro’s space and spatial relations. One re-
curring feature one finds in local history books is that those localities that could
qualify today as urban centres (even if this meant renouncing history) are still
called parishes. True, today the saints have slipped from the names and only
lay place names survive, but they constitute another interesting code. Parochial
distribution has its own textures too. It is not uniform and contains different vari-
eties of political and spiritual administration: lay (Boimente), matrix (Santiago de
Celeiro, San Pedro de Viveiro), in wild caves (Covas), prodigious (Santa María de
Galdo has a miraculous Christ), bureaucratic (Santiago de Viveiro was the parish
of a place until the temple was moved to another, very different place, and its
original congregation redistributed). Then there are others that are dependent
on their matrixes (San Xulián de Faro, San Xulián de Landrove), or more urban
and more rural (Santa María de Chavín, San Cibrao de Vieiro, Santa María de
Magazos, Santa María de Viveiro — also Santa María do Campo, to which San
Roque belongs) and a significant number of chapels and shrines, fountains and
caves, stone crosses and other features that make up the smaller details of this
numinous network that never ceases to shine in every temple and every house.
Like the fossilised cabal that filled the small streets and squares with names,
this one peoples the motley landscape with saints. The host of renowned charac-
ters that nobody knows (the memory fails) is today a code commonly used in the
classification of spaces, especially urban spaces. It is another of those codes to
which we have become accustomed, petrified as they are in their own logic de-
spite their obvious disuse. They are not fascinating like the numens. This, on the
contrary, is an anti-Occamist string, woven deliberately to stage the misterium
fascinans. That the effect lives on is quite another thing. Just as almost nobody
refers to a street by its name or to the name by its original owner, there are few
lay people capable of reading this map of parishes and places known by virtue of
their shrine. As with the previous case, only some — the most frequented — are
recognised; and few people are aware of the structural relationships that stitched
this religious fabric together (everyone has been to San Roque, but few to Santa
María do Campo; and even fewer will understand why I have put this reference
as an example here).
The pantheist myth of the enchanted landscape is reproduced today with the
same art as that used in associating ethnography with parks or Edenic nature
with the shrines and swings found beneath the imposing gaze of windmills. The
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stone crosses re-populating the hills are no longer beside roads: they stand on
the inside of entrance gates of detached houses. I am told that this is because
they have been stolen. And if I detect the slightest hint of continuity in that
past peopled with saints and the present it is not in the mysteries (even less in
present-day imaginings regarding what pantheism might have been); it is in the
organisation, the structural setup of the parishes written into the space with the
ink of the spirit. Many of the council’s parishes had brotherhoods, and in some
case, more than one devoted to the same saint, as was the case of Santísimo Sac-
ramento, San Pedro, de Nosa Señora, San Antonio, San Roque and As Ánimas.
This does not take the exegete on a flight of fancy towards numinous spontane-
ity and Dionysian effervescence. This represents a well-orchestrated symphony.
And the apotheosis of this symphony is not set in the wild forest and its musicians
are not daemons. The landscape where the definitive epiphany is played out is
the same historical centre as that which serves as the setting for the profane, the
most profane. The Corpus Christi was proof of this, as Donapetry has observed.
Today it is Holy Week. Banners and brothers parade together in an urban setting.
Brothers not only of parishes but also of neighbouring towns come to Viveiro to
participate in the scene and take their place behind the retinue of authorities. In
reality, they can only carry wax. They will never be nearer to the sacred than what
they are in their respective places of origin. This setting is one of distances, of
hierarchy, of the harmonious consensus that governs the asymmetries (of spaces,
of those that inhabit them).
To finish off the profanation of the pantheistic myth, it is worth saying some-
thing about a fleeting landscape — that of time. From a temporal perspective,
Corpus Christi and Holy Week represent the imprint of the social on the cosmic.
Both, insofar as they have been more or less important over the years, have been
pivotal in the festive calendars. That their dates are mobile underlines, for the
purposes of this reading, their flimsy link with the philonaturalist position. That
their dates are mobile only guarantees the nexus of religiosity with this fabric
of work which has freed itself from nature and chosen to agree on holidays by
agreement and not at stony altars. Thus, the messages written on the organisa-
tion of time also illuminate the taxonomies and temporal flows that accompany
experience longitudinally. The qualitative differences of time are superinscribed
in space and converge in the interpretative inertias of landscape considered ear-
lier: the rough landscape, the ethnographic park, and the historical centre are fu-
ture projects retrieved from the past, from a past imagined which is rewritten and
restored, which interrelates with new adjectives, which re-enumerates itself. And
I say future not only because of its occasionally plotted character, but because
it is obvious that the code in which these landscapes are rewritten is not neces-
sarily the code considered valid by those who inhabit it. Not even its semantics
correspond necessarily with the semantics which the landscape is capable of
articulating through grammar alone.
This not-always-measurable distance that separates the sign from what it
represents is where the place of meanings lies. And that is the place of the in-
terpreter: the totemic intersection where taxonomy and perception occur simul-
taneously, the central alley of the old Cretan labyrinth, the oxymoron’s point of
return. Rhetoric is culture. Landscape is rhetoric. We get into the car and take a
different route back; we head south. The evolution of the landscape is much more
obvious along this route. But by this point I am no longer thinking about the ru-
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rurban plot. We see rows of windmills for many kilometres. We stop to see more
churches, convents, stone crosses, cloisters, etc. My companions do not want to
stop to see the windmills. I reflect that they are still not a part of the landscape of
meanings (they have not crossed the point of return of my oxymoron-formula).

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