“Rise of the Lobstering” is a piece in Conkling’s book, “Islands in Time” which brings, chronologically, information and sentiments dating back to when lobster wasn’t a commercial species to lobstering becoming a culture staple and a conservation issue. 1870’s was when lobstering rose to popularity as a resource for economic prosperity. With this financial spotlight came the first wave of lobstering laws in 1872. Conkling includes in his documentation more than just dates and facts but also the many social aspects of lobstering. He writes about “lobster gangs” and their territoriality. He discusses the flaws of fisheries management system and lobstering as commercial exploitation. However, he makes an emphasis to connect lobstering with Maine’s identity and how it connects to a patriotic view of “Americanism”. All through out the piece he brings many stories, not just his own but direct quotations from various others. He ends the piece with solutions to to flaws but also warnings of the consequences should they not be met.
Interpretation
A valuable lesson I got from Daniels and Cosgrove’s, “Iconography and Landscape” is that “various humanistic disciplines” are necessary to formulate an interpretation that probes beyond just the surface. The essay includes a very rich sentence that contains the definition of what discovering a “deep meaning” is, “by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion – unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work”. That last part was especially interesting to me, it seems to convey the idea that, whether intentional or not, anything creatively produced contains some sort of message or reflection of the time period it was produced in.
Another snippet from the essay that I found to be very relevant was “the concept of symbolic form.. a study of changing modes of perceiving and representing space, not as mere ‘conventions’ (to be taken up or not at will) or as true or false beliefs, but.. as ‘symbolic forms’ which structured the world according to specific cultural demands”. This sounded to me much like the description of what American Studies is.
What a Map Can Be
A piece of text that stood out to me in Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” is a dictum of Korzybski’s, “The map is not the territory”. This confused me at first. I had never really put that much though into what a map really is, other than a resource to get around. If I didn’t have a definition for what a map is, I definitely couldn’t tell you what a map isn’t or what it could be. I then realized that Korzybski’s statement is rather obvious. When I looked more into Korzybski, I saw another quote by him that really clarified the original dictum, “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” Maps are a person’s reaction to place. Harvey includes in his piece the idea that “maps, like art, far from being ‘a transparent opening to the world,’ are but ‘a particular human way of looking at the world.'”
Korzybski brings up an interesting point but Harvey is trying to go deeper, “deconstruction goes further to bring the issue of how the map represents place into much sharper focus.” He ends the piece with,”Post-modernism offers a challenge to read maps in ways that could reciprocally enrich the reading of other texts.” This is a very relevant sentence to me. My timeline group will be using many maps as forms of media, and this is one of our major goals. I’ve realized that a map is more than just useful, it can be incredibly meaningful.
Goat Island’s field of flows
Stella’s stories about the history of the island based on her life experiences and her possible delusions make this fictional space exactly what spacetime is described as. This conclusion can be validated through Stella’s visions of her husband. At “some point” he existed and then ceased to exist in the real word but continued to live through Stella’s hallucinations. Everyone on the island experienced Russell Bowie’s death, but Stella imagines him in the afterlife and the wife he left behind will dream of him.
Spacetime thrives here because on this island, the people are tied to each other in ways that surpass that of a neighbor label. Their experiences are interconnected but each person will remember, dream or even hallucinate some events or people more than others,
Authenticity in landscape and place
In Meinig’s introduction of Beholding Eye he states an idea similar to one, that through text and class discussion, we’ve established as true, “any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads”. The difference is that previously, we’ve only read and discussed this idea without the use of the word “landscape” but rather the words “place” and “space”. In one of our first class discussions, we sorted through the differences and meanings of the words “space” “place” and “landscape”. In those times, “space” and “place” took center stage. This piece seems to legitimize the idea and deep meaning of “landscape” and further proves its significance to our interpretation of place. A piece of text that stood out to me was, “It is landscape as environment, embracing all that we live amidst, and thus it cultivates a sensitivity to detail, to texture, color, all the nuances of visual relationships, and more, for the environment engages all of our senses, the sounds and smalls and ineffable feel of a place as well.”( Meinig, 45) This reminded me heavily of Relph’s distinction of the experience of “insideness” and “outsideness” in the human experience of place in Cresswell’s Genealogy of Place. The distinction has to do with “authenticity” meaning, “to be inside a place is to belong to it and identify with it, and the more profoundly inside you are the stronger is the identity with the place” (Relph, 1976, 49) This same idea of authenticity seems to be important to what Meinig describes “landscape as place” to be. To see and be in a landscape with genuine awareness is the stepping stone for creating landscape into place.
Connections and their relevance to place
In the Cresswell piece from Tuesday, page 11 contains wisdom from Cronon as he takes a analytical journey in order to know “what to make” of a place called Kennecott. His answer is to trace the connections between Kennecott and the rest of world. He explains connections as ” the ecology of people as the organisms sharing the universe with many other organisms, the political economy of people as social beings reshaping nature and one another to produce their collective life, and the cultural values of people as storytelling creatures struggling to find meaning of their place in the world.” (Cronan 1992, 32) I found this quote to be very applicable and relevant to the Acheson Intro. In the piece , Archeson talks about the social organization of the Maine lobster fisherman industry. He explains that social anthropologists have found that “each industry has a set of traditions, rules of behavior and myths about itself.. they share skills and a common knowledge of the means to exploit and market a certain product”. These social and cultural traits are not exclusively shared and understood by the Maine industry but also, “with other fishing communities in the United States and thoughout the world”. It is also explained that “Maine lobster fishermen live in long-established communities, interact with other people from “town” and are concerned primarily with events in their own community. ” These communities are “inextricably tied to the state, the region, and the nation. If Cronan’s words are a formula for understanding connections thus knowing what to make of a place, I would have an input for every piece of the formula based on what I’ve found in the Acheson Intro. With this knowledge is it possible to understand what defines the place of the Maine lobster fisherman?