Ecotone: Writing About Place: DiscussAncestralPlace

Discuss the current crop of posts on AncestralPlace here.

Funny...here we are again. All place writers writing about other-than ancestral places.

Is this kind of distance from one's own roots a prerequisite for writing about place? Do we need to be "out of the fishbowl" to write about the fish? Can Tuscans write about "being Tuscan" or do they just write about "being me?"

-- Chris

Not everyone in the world is a "pureblood". And not everyone in the world has lived exclusively in one place all their lives. Not everyone in the world knows everything about their ancestors. Not everyone in the world can even define what "ancestral place" means. And not everyone in the world sees "place" as purely a physical location. The word "home" is not even a concrete noun... you can't always use an article like "the" or "a" with it, because it is not something you can touch. Yet to everyone it is a place.

--Miguel

So many of the contributions seem to be from people who are themselves, or have descended from immigrants. I wonder how many generations have to pass before you can "adopt" the local ancestors.

--Geoff

I guess that's my point Geoff...travelling gives us eyes to write about place...it gives us the distance between the seer and seen that is necessary for analysis of place and landscape. I think ancestral places are probably those places where we are so embedded that we cannot think of ourselves as seperate from the land. We are literally rooted there. Only with the human experiement of migrating to we learn to see other places in the context of where we have come from. That difference allows us to gaze outwardly upon something rather than dwelling entirely within. -- Chris

Chris, maybe the writing that we have in this discussion group reflects the way modern society has altered from what we tend to see as givens in the way humans have inhabited places. Certainly Americans are some of the most mobile people in the world. When I lived in the States, for a total of 20 years, I moved a total of 30 times, whereas during my 22 years here in Japan I moved only 5 times, and 3 of those because of changes that took place in the States. In general Japanese tend to move, until now this is, very seldom throughout their lives. Now with money and greater ease of transportation they are beginning to move in ways they never did before and are losing nearly all of their traditional connection to their roots. I have met very few Americans who have not moved a number of times in their lives. This mobility must make it extremely difficult to adopt any kind of sense of "ancestral place". How does one embed onself within a place if one only passes through? And how does one come to identify with any place or people if one does not belong to any of them, as I don't? You asked earlier for Tuscans to write about being Tuscan, but as a German-Danish/ Filipino-Chinese/ African-American-Cherokee-Jew from South Carolina/ who grew up in Japan, the United States (New York, Oregon, and Boston), and Germany, exactly where do my loyalties and roots lie? I am not alone in this. The modern world is breeding a new kind of human being... call them uber-mongrels, if you will... who arose out of all those people migrating continually around the world. Ancestral places, as traditionally defiined, are dying out.

-- Miguel

Nice comments Miguel. I think this actually speaks to post-modern notions of identity. Which leads me to maybe seeing if we can't add a topic to the BiweeklyTopics? list on Place and Identity.

At any rate, I think you have produced your contribution on that. I love the idea of "moving in different ways." I think we are all learning how to do that.

-- Chris

Miguel, I think you put your finger on one of the reasons behind another aspect of American culture -- that one is defined by one's profession ... rather than by one's place.

-- P.

What an interesting discussion! P. makes an importnat point, I think. I know that my own concepts about ancestral place are shaped by the fact that I have really only lived in two places in my 50+ years: central New York, and Vermont/NH. That's it, and it's rather unusual nowadays. As Chris so rightly comments, you can't write about a place until you've left it, but I also think you can't necessarily have much to say about a place until you've lived there for a good while. Thus many of us are rather place-less, and have had to find other ways (such as our work) to define ourselves. For me, as I've gotten older and analyzed this more, "identity" involves both my physical relationship to a real place, with its landscape, rocks, trees, fauna and so forth, (a relationship which was ingrained in me from a pre-language point in my life) and a more metaphysical sense of inner identity that is independent of any particular place and yet has a certain sense of groundedness or "location" about it. I find that these two interpenetrate and inform each other quite a lot. --Beth

That's really the irony isn't it Beth. I mean, you can write about a place you've never left, but then you are just writing about life. You don't know that your place is any different from any other.

I think too that writing about place, especially a new place is a great way to get into it deeper, interpreting and pulling apart the threads that make it up. When you show that writing to others and they see themselves relfected, it's pretty groovy. -- Chris