Territoriality, Memory, and the Holy Land

In brief reading sessions scattered over the weekend, I dug into a couple of promising concepts that could help me connect my book's overarching analytical concerns (scale, cultural citizenship, Christianity) with a number of the ethnographic insights and intuitions that I have carried along with me for some time (without knowing quite what to do with them.) One is new terrain for me (territoriality) while the other I is one I've tinkered with in the past without really taking it anywhere (social memory).

Human Territoriality is a functionalist and confusingly schematic read (lots of diagrams, etc.) but will definitely be helpful in helping me justify and motivate the division of labor between Chapters 1 and 2, which deal respectively with aspects of place making that are tied up with colonial strategies and those related to cultural memory. It will also be very useful as a language for talking about shifts between key frameworks of place-making and governmentality at Mt. Banahaw over a the 150-year time span of the book.

• "Territoriality" really illuminates the Claveria surname decree in a new way for me
  
• the conceptual production of "empty space" and the notion of "place clearing" are useful tools for reading the ereccion de pueblos
• In general, the theory reveals many more interesting things to say about the colonial town-settlement pattern than I had previously succeeded in saying.
• The fact that territoriality as a strategy involves the production of nested hierarchies shows me that how it is possible to both discuss (i) scale qua territoriality in terms of hierarchical levels and (ii) scale as a socially constructed frame for subjectivity (which involves both the work of the imagination and agency.

A footnote in Human Territoriality to a book by Davies on the imagination of the Holy Land in early Christianity) set me on a trail that eventually led me to social memory. Before getting to that, however, I want to mention a couple of other sources on constructions of the Holy Land, which is a topic I'll definitely need to address in the introduction to the book: Halbwach's essay on the Legendary Topography of the Holy Land in the Gospels; Bowman's essay in Contesting the Sacred; Noonan's The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery. I would also like to read up on simulacra and displacements of the Holy Land, including Wharton's Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks, and Adrienne Hamilton's MA thesis on the House of Loreto. The latter's bilbiography alerted me to Assman's book Religion and Cultural Memory, which in turn led me to a cluster of recent essays on social memory by Olick, Sutton, and Wertsch, all of which appeared in a recent issue of Social Research.

Assman's work draws on Freud's suggestion in "Moses and Monothesism" that a facility for cultural memory exists that is neither a "collective unconscious" nor simply identical to the mechanisms of individual memory. The promise of the approach, as Olick describes it, is that allows one to trace continuities and recurrences (after long gaps) in cultural discourse that cannot be termed "instrumental." (Interestingly, Derrida engages with this Freud text in his book Archive Fever.) Sutton's essay from cognitive studies perspective tries to demystify some of the microprocesses that might be involved in getting from individual to social memory (involving emotion and transpersonal agency, for example) and is thus potentially complementary even if very different from the level at which Assman is operating.

• The "cultural memory" approach strikes me as a very promising frame for situating Filipino intellectuals' quest for identity sympathetically and respectifully. At the same time, it does not preclude at all my various criticisms of the way cultural citizenship gets constituted through their projects; indeed my contribution might lie precisely in bringing cultural citizenship to the fore as a key social dimension of cultural memory (and of cultural intimacy, which strikes me as an allied concept, although Herzfeld's account is probably more "instrumentalist" than the memory theorists might allow).
• This neo-Freudian framework could also offer a very compelling direction for elaborating on the notion of the "survival," as a kind of memory trace that appears to promise Filipino seekers the means for filling in the absences central to their identity. The resonances of the term "survival" (like "superstition") is something I have not yet successfully tackled in my book. On this, the Dictionary of Psychanalysis entry on "cultural transmission" is helpful.