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Threatened Identity: What do We Lose When We Lose the Sense of Place? - Congress 2011 Big Thinking Lecture Delivered by David Adams Richards

Posted by Cynthia Wallace...
5 November 2011 - 12:45pm

As a writer of historical fiction, David Adams Richards is best known for his ability to explore elements of humanity within characters who "come from the fabric and the soil of the Miramichi." During Congress 2011, he spoke about this sense of place and what it means to those who identify with New Brunswick’s past.

Drawing upon the historical experience of mechanisation in the forest industry, Adams Richards explained how such concepts of modernisation are not new to Atlantic Canada. Here, he said, generations of people have weathered the sense of inevitable progress that is associated with global change. Often, such progress carries with it what Adams Richards describes as a "great anonymity" that threatens individual identity. It undermines a shared sense of belonging that comes from being part of a particular place and a particular way of life.

Within the abyss of anonymity, a sense of place is often regarded as a label of misfortune or unknowing ( "that people who live where we live would not know about what more successful people know about the world."); and so, to have a sense of place is thus to be restricted from being part of another more cosmopolitan place.

Yet, a sense of place can also be empowering. It carries with it a unilateral freedom that is grounded in a temporal sense of shared humanity. In the authors’ words:
"Even on a patch of frozen soil, a solitary man is his own true nation, and free as he chooses to be. No moment or comfort is ever secure, no matter where we live; or future certain for any of us, no matter where we live. How we respond to this is up to us alone. Each one of us can choose to be free."

So, what does this have to do with history education? (You may be asking yourself right now). I see this Big Thinking lecture as very relevant to our discussions on the teaching of history for two reasons. Firstly, Adams Richards touches upon the imaginative element of history. His highly descriptive style of writing makes it possible for the reader to empathise with people in the past. This emotional layer adds a vibrant richness to the past that cannot be found in empirical evidence alone. But is it history? Indeed, in my humble opinion, the best historians are those who are able to fill in the spaces between the lines of evidence and contextualise the past in vivid, rich, detail.

A second reason why I feel this lecture is very relevant to discussions on the teaching of history, is that Adams Richards describes a particular sociological phenomenon whereby history intersects with collective memory. Indeed, through his writing, the author presents a darker side of life in Atlantic Canada: "a world of hurt and alarm ... a world that has faced globalisation for years and years.” Such a world is not unique to Atlantic Canada; yet it has become deeply embedded in our collective memory. Even so, it need not cage us in, because memory can be fluid and ever-changing.

The role of history education should be to enable each of us to look critically upon the narratives that shape – or threaten – our individual identities. As David Adams Richards has pointed out, how we respond depends upon us alone.

Listen to David Adams Richards’ entire lecture  here:

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Who is Crafting our National Identity?

 

 

Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983)

Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.

In Les Lieux de Mémore (1989) , Pierre Nora establishes a distinction between real memory and historical memory: Memory is life, while history is the reconstruction of what is no longer; memory is a perpetual bond with the present, while history is a representation of the past; memory is selective in its information, while history calls for analysis and criticism; memory is sentimental, while history is prosaic; memory is bound to a specific group of people, while history belongs to no group in particular and is thus universal; memory takes root in concrete objects, while history is temporal; memory is absolute, while history is relative. As historians, we are taught to be suspicious of memory, for as Nora explains, the “true mission [of history] is to suppress and destroy [memory]” . With the acceleration of history, Nora argues, there has occurred in France a slippage of collective memory (authentic environments of memory). In turn, collective memory has been replaced by “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), which serve the people as their official keepers of memory. Thus, these sites of memory constitute France’s national memory, and can be monuments, emblems, commemorations, symbols, rituals, textbooks, documents, or mottos: the material culture of France. Ironically, having destroyed memory, history “calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”, and in its place, nations “deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally”. Such national sites of memory are problematic, in that we must question who is creating the memory site and for what purpose.

Every public institution in Canada has a Collections Management Policy and curators, as well as archivists, must be selective in what they actually collect – so in an indirect way, they are crafting our national memory, or, as Benedict Anderson would indicate, creating our imagined community. Nationality, significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind that are fabricated and imagined. Nationalism is not real: “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such imagined communities are perpetuated through the creation of a national consciousness - expressed through such national icons as emblems, maps, monuments, census, official languages, the arts, school instruction, and museums. As Anderson poignantly explains, “no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” . Rather than recognizing such monuments as sincere expressions of remembrance, Anderson sees them as tools to bind together our national imagination and somehow justify loss of life for a greater cause of national destiny.

Within such a gamut of national memories and imagined identities, our pursuit of “truth” in history seems ever more evasive. But, if our “national treasures” are the keystones to our national identity (no matter how fabricated this identity may be), they spark our imagination and thus selectively hold us together as a nation. This indeed is a great feat, and so the role of public historians in working with academic historians in crafting our national identity must be valued as a profession of utmost significance.

Submitted by Cynthia Wallace... on 5 November 2011 - 12:48pm.