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.
  

Introduction to Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, eds. Simon Coleman & John Eade (Routledge 2004).

The authors note the conventionality of place-centered approaches to pilgrimages and assert that "just as we broaden our ethnographic gaze to take in more than the central shrine, so we attempt to widen the theoretical location of studies of 'sacred travel'" (3) For Coleman and Eade, emphasizing place so strongly has led to the eclipse of movement, a theme they privilege in their efforts to revitalize pilgrimage as an analytical (and not just ethnographic) category. As they hasten to admit, "we are not denying the importance of place in ethnography" (emphasis added); not surprisingly then, their discussion leaves unexplored the potential of fresh theorizations of place to invigorate the study of pilgrimage. One of the consequences of the authors' failure to include a rethinking of place within their project of "reframing pilgrimage" is the resealing up of some of the very theoretical "dead ends" they seek to unblock. An example of this comes when Coleman and Eade discuss how studies of pilgrimage might contribute to understandings of globalization. Tellingly, their illustrations stress the emergence of various pilgrimages as sites for the reassertion of localism and particularism, as if accepting what the folk model of globalization implies-- namely that the embodied forms of travel involved in specific sites of pilgrimage could a priori have no bearing on the constitution of supralocal or "global" formations.

In all fairness, however, Coleman and Eade do engage with cultural geographers such as Urry and Crang, if not around "place" and "place-making" then in regard to their analytical approaches in distinguishing various forms of "mobility" and "co-presence," both analytically and within the "semantic fields" of pilgrimages themselves. This part of their discussion is worth revisiting when I revise Chapter 3.

Distancing themselves from Turner's characterization of pilgrimage as a "liminoid" phenomenon that generates "social encounters without hierarchical constraints", the authors cite Tremlett's (2003) observation that "both Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade can be seen as 'romanticist' in their attempt to secure for religion an 'ineffable inner space of realm' that can stand as a critique of modernity and its values". All in all, the authors sharply reject the tendency to view pilgrimages as activities "divorced from daily life" (ibid).

Tremlett's "romanticist" critique mirrors Partha Chatterjee's notion of the how Indian nationalists posited an inner, spiritual Indianness within the shell of external Westernization. Both examples may suggest ways of elaborating on Filipino intellectuals' search for the inner uncolonized self, either in Chapter 3 or in Chapter 5.

First, is the positing of an inneffable inner space or realm (here yet another reference point is William James) of a piece with the disembedding of religion from the rest of social life? I think so, although they're not exactly the same thing.

Filipino intellectuals who look to Mt. Banahaw to deal with historical baggage on a personal as well as societal level are perhaps looking for a kind of religious ethos that infuses every aspect of social life and is sumultaneously Filipino. In their everyday lives as modern Catholics, spirituality is important but compartmentalized (to the inner ineffable self and to personal religious observance and charity). It is as modern Catholics that they find the ideal of an embedded spirituality deeply appealing. And it is as creolized postcolonials that they are stirred by visions of autochonous Filipino religion. Their journeys to Banahaw give them a taste of what things might be like if spirituality were embedded in every moment of one's life and if the sutures stitching and separating the precolonial past and the postcolonial present were to vanish.

Many of the travelers I know to fall in this category are more than a little reflexive about this fantasy. The knew the ahistoricity of their longing and understood the incommensurability of the contemporary folk religious milieu with the autochthonous past. Indeed, they embrace that incommensurability, which makes it possible to be modern Catholic compatible and to make practical gestures towards spirits, as well as to cherish shadowy identifications with precolonial babaylan and the ma-aram, the latter mediated through key informants like Mama Rose and Nanay Isabel.