t r a c e | w o r k

I’m Not Licking Anything! ~or~ Columbia through Four of the Five Senses

2012-02-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

I started this blog post by asking myself: if I were to write about Columbia University as a landscape, how would I do it? What would I say about it? As someone who traverses the uneven brick walkways every day, how would I describe it? And by extension, how could I describe it to someone who does not spend most of his or her time here? How could I explain to them the Columbia that I experience on a daily basis?

In previous posts, we have looked at Columbia through the lens of objective outsiders, or we have looked at one piece of it as one might examine a bug under a glass. But one thing that I think we have forgotten about Columbia as a place is exactly that. It is a place. Moreover, it is our place. It is, in many ways, the one thing that all of us have in common. To echo an idea that has been bandied about in discussion, Columbia University is the 4x1 city-block arena upon which all the little dramas of our lives play out.

As a place and a landscape, however, Columbia is very often neglected, unappreciated, and straight up ignored by many of its most frequent visitors: its inhabitants. Can any of us honestly say that we have taken time since ourinitial visits to really look at the campus we beat our feet upon? Do any of us ever stop and appreciate it in a Hoskins-ian sense? I propose that in order to rediscover Columbia, the place, it might be necessary to get our proverbial boots muddy.

I propose that we stop hurrying about the very important business of living our lives to take a walk about Columbia in order to simply appreciate it; to observe it and perhaps even to understand it more as a landscape and less as a backdrop. Think of me as Hoskins, and yourselves as the exclusive in-group of genteel city-dwellers weekending in a locale that is at once familiar and exotic:

It is 10 AM, and the sounds of Amsterdam are deafening to the ears. The shake and rumble of a myriad trucks and cars seems to vibrate through the very pavement. Some hiss and belch smoke as the go by. Angry beasts. Travelling up Amsterdam towards campus amidst the cacophony, one is immediately struck by the size and austerity of the brick buildings. Wearing their green caps, one might feel as though they are standing on the outside edge of a group of similarly dressed giants who are resolutely ignoring them. Taking a deep breath, however, one can smell the pleasing scent of soap, sometimes tinged with lavender, sometimes with “Mountain Spring.” It is these:

Moving on, it is possible to sense that one is walking uphill. Not because of any distinct rise in the terrain, but more of a tightening in the calf muscles. Even though it is not yet noon, the olfactory senses are assaulted by the pungent smells of spiced meat.

Food trucks are lined up daily around the periphery of campus; prohibited from selling within the gates, they vie for prominent locations on the sidewalk, sniffing around the university’s skirts.

Turning left onto College Walk, one is immediately struck by the lack of sound. It is as if simply by entering the gates, the chaos of the outside world is muted. It is quiet here. Footsteps are audible and voices seem hushed even though no one is whispering. Somewhere close to my right side, a pigeon rustles is feathers. Smells are also different here. Outside, the avenue is full of scents of laundry, cooking, gasoline, and sewage. Here, however, one can detect the crispness of the early February air.

Approach the center of campus and the scenery changes yet again. Here, one has the distinct senseof having somehow squeezed into the middle of the group of similarly dressed line-backers and gotten a glimpse of the warmth that can be found on the inside. Indeed, in the middle of campus, one can feel the sun, and the wind is somehow less bitter. Looking downwards towards Butler Library, it is easy to miss the odd circular platform lodged amidst the granite steps. According to Columbia lore, an immense bronze globe once stood upon that dais but was taken down during one of the World Wars, presumably for safety reasons. After that, it mysteriously disappeared for a few decades before resurfacing in a cornfield somewhere in Missouri. What happened to it after that is anyone’s guess.

Looking up towards Low Library, one is confronted immediately by wide steps. Your narrator happens to know for a fact that underneath those steps lies a labyrinth of tunnels, most leading between various buildings on campus, some even leading into Barnard. Some tunnels are still used today by catering staff and grounds crews. The symbolism of this reality is, I hope, not lost on anyone.

The next stop on our tour takes us up several levels of stairs and into the humanities quad. Every time I take this route I feel as though I’m exiting stage right. But going straight up the stairs by Alma Mater makes me feel too exposed. One wonders if the original designers of Columbia meant to do that.

Here, one notes that conversations are much less muted. The front doors of buildings are apparently places where people congregate, and perhaps being in the lees of the buildings allows them to speak more freely than in the wide open expanses of College Walk and The Stairs. It is darker here, too. There is less sunlight and more wind. Odd that this is where many people choose to stop and chat. Despite this however, one can hear the chirp of songbirds, and the hedges that divide the grass from the brick are pleasing to contemplate. Upon a deep breath, one can smell a whiff of the woodchips used to line the shrubbery, now many times frozen and thawed. I remember one year when manure was used to fertilize the hedges. It has hasn’t happened again since.

Moving deeper into the belly of the beast, one approaches a freeway of sorts, complete with rest stops and on/off ramps. In between classes, this thoroughfare is congested, and bodies are easily jostled along the way between here and there. It is rush hour without the cars.

The social sciences quad always makes me feel as though I’m in a well, and despite the attempt at a cheerful sitting area in the center of the brick-lined basin, one is never quite comfortable enough to linger here long. Perhaps it is the lack of sunlight, or the distinctly decrepit façade of Fayerweather hall; perhaps it is that the sitting area seems forced, but here, more so than anywhere else on campus, Columbia seems to loom.

The apex of our tour takes us into the engineering quad, a part of the Columbia landscape that always seems to me a sort of afterthought, despite the presence of the newest and most advanced buildings on campus. Perhaps it is because no matter where you are, you are always staring at the ugly backside of Uris, or perhaps it is that the constant hum of the generators required to heat and cool the laboratories makes one feel as though one has wandered into the boiler room. Listening to the bustle around me, I can’t help but feel as though I’m not the only one who thinks these. Gone are the distinct footfalls heard on College Walk; instead, feet shuffle, the sound of sneaker soles rubbing over stone a diametric opposite of the click, click, click, of high heels. Perhaps this reveals the differences between the types of people who frequent the engineering quad versus the humanities and social sciences quads. I won’t presume to pass judgment here.

One can never miss the entrance to the gym. It smells gym-y. A mixture of sweat and chlorine that, aptly, I’ve always thought, emanates from the yawning maw that is the entrance to the Doge Fitness Center.

Despite knowing that the gym was constructed underground in the interest of maximizing space, the image of Columbia placing the mental on top and shoving the physical down below is never far from my mind whenever I come here.

The final stop on our tour takes us out the other side of College Walk, spilling us unto Broadway, which despite being only several hundred meters from Amsterdam, could not be more different. Here the first smell that greets you is of roasted peanuts, coated in sugar and welcoming even on the worst of days. Here, the smoke-belching, hissing delivery trucks are gone, replaced by the sharp chattering of taxis and car-horns. Instead of solemn office-buildings and hospitals, the facades of buildings are packed with storefronts. Instead of hospital staff, Columbia B&G, and the occasional harried graduate student, it seems all of Columbia’s student body are gathered. Broadway is the boisterous, extroverted, and boastful cousin of Amsterdam’s head-down, working-man.

Thus, a picture of Columbia emerges from our little walkabout. One that portrays our place as one that is at once immediately and powerfully visually cohesive, and yet containing so many nuances and points of disunity that it is almost impossible to paint in broad strokes. What I hope I have done here, with this lengthy and rambling post, is reintroduced you to the landscape upon which you live your lives, and encouraged to go, yourselves, and look at your Columbia with an appreciation for all the good, and the bad, that it dishes out. Columbia is not just a stage upon which we happened to land for the present moment in our lives, nor is it a static entity that will never change. The appreciation one can glean from viewing the Columbia landscape is one that, based on our understanding of landscapes so far, is undergoing changes as we speak, because of us. Who knows what it will look like after we are gone.

Morningside Pond Waterfall and Lily Pond

2012-02-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

Morningside Park is a forest on a craggy cliff facelocated in Harlem, a black and Hispanic Manhattan neighborhood famed since theJazz Age for its colorful artistic flavor. There is a waterfall in Morningside Park which flows down a 50-footprecipice into a wide lily pond, perhaps reflecting the precarious nature ofthe neighborhood itself. This is notnecessarily a negative description, although the area has had its share of successand setbacks. The lily pond teems withwildlife that has a mutually affectionate relationship with people, and thefierce nature of this relationship suggests the landscape is one of active anddetermined upward ascent.

Every summer, children free their pet turtles tolive in the lake, where dozens of the little creatures paddle alongside walkerson a nearby foot path and crane their necks to plead for food. The turtles then retreat to a reed-coveredisland by the waterfall, where they pile up on rocks under weeping-willow treesto bask in the sun. They share theirweeping-willow island with graceful, snow-white egrets and tiny mud-brownsparrows, a flock of mallard ducks which aggressively patrols the lake, and afat herd of Canada geese which protective local residents visit every tenminutes throughout the day with loaves of bread, crackers, and cake. After all, no one else will remember to feedthe geese if they don’t. No one elseloves the pond like they do.

“I told you to wait and eat slowly,” a lone bookish man in gold-rimmed glasses scolds at an eager goose padding behind him, wagging his finger at it. “Now you have to wait.” The walkway by the lily pond is thick with discarded bread crumbs, and a surrounding field is filled with placid strolling birds, baseball games, barbecue picnics, elderly bench sitters, bounding dogs and playing children.

In fact, the lily pond resembles a Central Parkminiature, in which many of the best aspects of New York City’s grandestexpanse are recreated on a neighborhood scale for personal enjoyment. Like New Yorkers who spend up to $25 millionfor a brownstone on Central Park West, the Harlem residents who live near Morningside Park can walk one block from their doorstep to a place ofmaintained retreat and contemplation. Landscaping signifies luxury, the power to create an idealizedenvironment, and on its best days, the lily pond imparts a sense of New Yorkabundance, a private pavilion for those who have earned their place in the citythrough extraordinary determination. Italso has an unmistakably challenging undertone—the lily pond landscape suggeststhat a ghettoized lifestyle is not some eternal byproduct of urban existence, aubiquitous condemnation of city dwelling that must always accompany industrializedlife or technological dependence, but one of many potential outcomes arisingfrom choice and circumstance.

The reason for celebration at the sight of asuccessful waterfall pond arises from the former reputation of MorningsidePark, which has still not completely disappeared. This peaceful lakeside valley lies at theheart of a park once considered one of the most lethal in Manhattan, if notAmerica, in the 1970s and 1980s. It waswell-known throughout the country among college students and tourists alike asa symbol of New York City’s irreversible urban decay. Terrified students of Columbia University, anIvy League bastion of perceived white educational privilege built just oneblock away in a gated community, were warned that just a few steps into thepark would surely be their last, and that imminent attack by Harlemneighborhood gang members and drug addicts lurked within. Some New York residents blamed local drug andalcohol use for the park’s deterioration. Others believed a 1968 battle with Columbia, in which student protestsderailed their university’s attempt to build a neighborhood gymnasium whoseseparate entrances for students and black residents had racist overtones, lefta permanent pall of racial tension over the area. Few on either side of this racially chargedneighborhood conflict could easily forgive this clash. The university waited for a new generation ofstudents to erase the protests’ painful memory, and bitter resentments still simmerin a neighborhood which was permanently radicalized by the event.

Columbia students tear down gymnasium site.

The lily pond was built on the site of this oldgymnasium project in 1989, one of many restoration attempts started in 1981 bya group of Columbia students. SomeHarlem residents did express anger that such a newly planned landscape, howeverbeautiful, would be built in the park with funds that could be spent restoringwhat already was there. The lily pondproject seemed yet another symbol, like the Columbia gymnasium, of the City’sassumption that black and Hispanic Harlem could not be entrusted to maintain alandscape of valued beauty, and that only white upper-class Manhattanites couldgradually replace the hopeless site with something more genteel, and thereforeworthy of maintenance funding. Today,Morningside Park is surrounded by multimillion-dollar brownstones andcondominiums, its nearby train stations and foot paths are safe enough fordaytime use, and the park has a steady stream of visitors. Because of these significant numbers, an armyof volunteers is needed to keep the lily pond free of debris, but the ongoingfight against this deterioration is a predictable one of sustainingfunctionality in a crowded New York setting, rather than one of abandoneddespair at broken race relations.

As such, the lily pond landscape holds a certainnostalgia for the past—of the Jazz Age becalmed, of radical politics reduced toa square of green earth and bland rituals of seasonal recreation. But it also demonstrates the fulfillment ofownership, as the residents of Harlem descend on the park and wrest it from theclutches of its formerly dangerous reputation. On a given summer Sunday afternoon, there are picnics by the lily pondcrammed so close together they overlap, children with new puppies chasing geeseand turtles, serious bespectacled teenagers discussing their latest homework ona site known as the Peaceful Dale by Dutch settlers in the area over threehundred years ago.

Perhaps it already evokes nostalgia to some present-day visitors, as they imagine looking back in time, decades from now, on the gracious New York hideaway where they lived their most lighthearted moments, which their neighbors worked so hard to recreate in the image of a lost New York ideal.

Cannibalism! It's who's for dinner...

2012-02-07T09:11:00.000-08:00

Two cannibals are sitting around the campfire eating. “You know,“ says one, “I really don’t like my mother in law at all.” His friend looks over and says “Well, then, just push her to the side and eat your vegetables.”

Cannibalism has lost its edge. Once too heinous a taboo to name, the consumption of our species by some of its members, has lost its ability to make you want to gag and retch at the very thought. Clarisse Starling is not alone in falling for the wealthy, refined and dazzlingly brilliant Hannibal Lecter. It’s been more than 40 years since the administration at the University of Colorado Boulder allowed the students to provocatively name the cafeteria the Alferd E. Packer Bar and Grill and decorate it with the snappy exhortation to “Have a friend for lunch!” In 2003, rebel militias in Congo were charged by a UN observer with hunting down, killing and eating at least a dozen pygmies. Jeffrey Dahmer’s freezer and recipes captured our imaginations. Even vampires, arguably a cannibal splinter group, are undergoing a rehabilitation if not a renaissance. Excess makes us inured to horror.

The word cannibal first appears in print in English in 1553. It is derived from “caribal” the Spanish word for Carib, brought to us by Columbus in 1492. At the time, Columbus assumed the natives he encountered were subjects of the Great Khan of China, and they thus became known as khannibals. A post-coinage Latin etymology was also ascribed to the word, giving us cane (dog)–bal, and its resonance with a dangerous monster dog-man or man-dog. A heavily loaded word.

In 1580, Montaigne wrote the deeply influential On Cannibalism, in which he differentiates types of cannibalism; those which occur out of desperate circumstances and those which are ritual revenge. Today’s anthropologists divide it into survival cannibalism, which has to do with eating other humans when there is nothing else to eat, and gastronomic cannibalism, which is the choice to eat human flesh when the floral and faunal conditions provide plenty of nutritional selection. Montaigne’s essay forces us to examine who the cannibals really are:

I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.

Montaigne also explains otherness/alterity/barbarity and why we assign those qualities to those outside our ken:

I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.

He establishes the still-pervasive perception of the native inhabitants of the New World as happy noble savages existing in a state of nature as close to the Judaeo-Christian prelapsarian vision of Eden as it is possible for us, the fallen, to imagine:

These nations, then, seem to me barbarous in this sense, that they have been fashioned very little by the human mind, and are still very close to their original naturalness. The laws of nature still rule them, very little corrupted by ours; and they are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes vexed that they were unknown earlier, in the days when there were men able to judge them better than we. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple as we see by experience; nor could they believe that our society could be maintained with so little artifice and human organization.

And by writing of these things –the hopes and dreams of a continent that had clearly made a total hash of things at home over many centuries, Montaigne foisted the burden of history’s collective yearning for a better place onto the back of New World, along with the coeval notion of its noble, pure and uncorrupted inhabitants. This is where Rousseau got it, and the repercussions of his reading Montaigne’s essay are felt to the present.

Cannibalism, or more precisely, the accusation of cannibalism, is the McGuffin that serves as metaphor not only for the imagined brutish savagery of the Other, but also, and simultaneously, for the devouring spread of European colonization. The stigma of the accusation of cannibalism is worse than the cannibalism itself. It is a bifacial political curse applicable to both oppressor/oppressed, savage/civilized, European/Other at the same time. It surfaces in times of extreme social, economic and/or environmental hardship and is by nature political. There seems little doubt that cannibalism has existed throughout human history, for one reason or other. To deny it is simply an exercise in trying to elevate humans above other animals, to justify our perceived imperialistic right to dominate the world and all in it.

This specific use of cannibalism as political accusation is made nowhere more effectively than by Jonathan Swift in his A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. Published anonymously in 1729, this satirical essay/political pamphlet offered a solution to the Irish Problem by suggesting that the Roman Catholic Irish poor might consider improving their lot by selling off some of their too numerous young children to be eaten by their Protestant British oppressors. "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout," Swift wrote. He described an entire economic system built on cannibalism, but succeeded so well in keeping his tongue deep in his cheek, that comments about it in the press focused not on the horror of the suggestion, but on the inaccuracies of his business model and whether it could actually function.

Development of Self: Prescribed Status and Societal Role

2012-02-03T16:49:00.000-08:00

Ralph Linton's essay, The Study of Man explores a sort of foundational understanding to our place within society. An abstract definition the Linton offers of Status is the position in aparticular pattern. We engage in multiple patterns thus having multiplestatuses. Rules, roles, regulations and obligations of statuses come togetherto contribute to the self within the divisions of gender; male, female and orage; child, adult and the elder. Each object (rules, roles, regulations andobligations) exists, representing potentialities within lifespan development.

This essay distinguishes how gender can have animpact on an extreme level within a variety of societies or tribes; “Apparentlythe entry of women into the occupation had robbed it of a certain amount ofprestige.” As well as outlining the differences between social maturity andphysical maturity, Linton gives us prescribed roles. Within specific societies, the transition from child toadult must be satisfied communally and often will involve members outside ofthe family as well as multiple members of a society seeking this right of passage.

National Geographic cultural videos representing the two statusdivisions:
Apache Girl’s Right of Passage

Initiation with Ants

Biological transformation and early puberty canfactor in to societal norms (separation and exclusion); however, often will nottrigger “social maturity”. In regards to a transition from adult to “old”, orwhat I assign as ‘the elder’, it is unclear and set by no boundary as to when the transition occurs. The act of bestowing rights from an elder upon the younger familialgeneration is key to acknowledging a move to the next stage in lifedevelopment. In some societies, there is a stage beyond death; passing intodeath for a man is to surrender existing status for a “new” one.

The partial taboo subject, for thetime, of mortuary practices is important to question if we are talking aboutlifespan development. Certainly, the focus is on the self and not the presumedafter life of the self but it is valid to question the perspective of Linton asan observer. He did not seem to explore deeply into how others care for theself as it prepares to pass and how the self may be represented thereafter. Theindividual’s role remains significant; however, the capacity is unclear andwould have been great insight.

Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. Appleton Century Crofts, Inc.

Crossings and Boundaries: Moving through Manhattanville

2012-01-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Landscape transformation is ongoing, but can be exacerbated and accelerated by dramatic interventions both natural and human-induced (and of course both or a combination thereof). Such is the current case in Manhattanville, where Columbia University’s expansion project north of 125^th Street into West Harlem is intervening daily to produce new spaces that consciously seek to integrate the worlds of the university and its surrounding communities. In 2005, Marilyn Taylor, one of the primary design collaborators on the project, wrote the optimistically titled, “Crossing Beyond the Boundaries: Columbia University in West Harlem.” In it she stated the intentions of the project:

“This twenty-first-century urbanity [of the Manhattanville extension project] is in direct contrast to the twentieth-century version that created the character and “gravitas” of the Morningside campus. The introspection and formality of this classic space created a magnificent presence. But it was one conceived as fundamentally separate from the surrounding city. In Manhattanville, we envision the energy of the city and academy flowing together. We hope this will create a place that is simultaneously “campus” and “not campus”” (Taylor 52).

But the transformation of a landscape (and even more, of the relationships of the people living in it) is obviously not just about the difference between what was before, and what is after. It is not only about the end result of spatial management and integration. It includes elements that are also temporal, active and social. It is about the transformation process itself – in this case, the period of time during which the area is under construction – and the social and political relationships that are produced, suppressed, and negotiated through the experience of living in that change.

Perhaps this is why a quick perusal of news coverage of the project over the past few years does not return many discussions of the final vision, critiques of the proposed design itself, or reflections on its historical comparability to the existing campus. Instead, and indeed somewhat predictably, I found criticisms of the intrusion of construction on daily lives, of enforced displacements, and of the shortcomings of administrative responses to these concerns that typically took “big picture” views. Furthermore, the complaints I read are not, as one might expect, primarily about the visual unpleasantness of waking up to a skyline of cranes, or walking past giant sinkholes. Instead, the complaints draw attention to other ways of knowing and living in an urban construction zone that emphasize its multi-sensory and multi-elemental nature – aspects of life that are not apparent in pristine urban design drawings and mock-ups, or from aerial views of that remove one bodily from the scene.In attempting to break down aesthetic boundaries as seen from outside and above, the project may well be re-inscribing numerous emotional and psychological ones.

I give two examples of affected non-visual aspects of the landscape here.

First, in the rush to examine the construction areas themselves, one might easily miss the very space that allows their examination: the streets.

You can find a list of planned closures and restrictions to streets (and consequently, movement through them) here. The list is not short, or uncomplicated. It requires one to consider the complex and often subconscious ways in which movement through a changing landscape reinforces one’s relationship to it, and how enforced changes to that relationship recreate power struggles and inequalities that are re-experienced every day.

Henri Lefebvre wrote that “Power seeks to control space in its entirety, so it maintains it in a ‘disjointed unity,’ as at once fragmentary and homogenous: it divides and rules” (Lefebvre 388).

What more effective way to divide and homogenize than to close and alter roadways? Streets are the spaces that allow movement from one place to another, that bring people together through and across a landscape, even as they emphasize the distinction between being in one place or another. When they are closed, all of the daily activities of life – businesses, commutes, leisurely strolls, shopping excursions – must be subordinated to the ends of the project. To close a road while subsuming the area around it into the university’s domain seems the ultimate example of Lefebvre’s observation.

The second example comes from an intended response to the first. As stated on the page linked above, New York City does not allow work on intersections during daylight hours, presumably to minimalize the spatial impact discussed (as well as, in all likelihood, for its own convenience, as the traffic from backed-up intersections would be much more difficult to manage and re-route). This means that as of February 13, work at the intersection of W 125^th St and 12^th Ave will take place between the hours of 10:00 pm and 5:00 am.

I quote, “This will include some noisy work.” This is clearly a problematic logistics issue, and I can imagine that once the decision to do work is taken, the scheduling of relative inconveniences is difficult. However, it does provoke consideration of the choice, a joint maneuver of city and developers, in the overall context of the project. Night construction provides yet another way in which the activity of transformation invades and re-structures local lives; noise pollution is always part of city living, and noise always refuses to stay outside, pushes itself past other physical boundaries and makes itself known wherever it finds itself. However, now this noise will not be confined even to daylight hours, when one expects to encounter the greater part of the rest of city noise. Yet another boundary is disregarded, and therefore thrown into high relief.

I conclude with another quote from Taylor, who writes that with the accomplishment of the expansion project, “The boundaries between the academy and the workplace will become less defined. So too will the distance between the city and the academy diminish. This will create a new urbanity, energized by learning, characterized by interaction” (Taylor 53). I cannot help wondering who is identifying the boundaries to be (un)defined, and the distances to be diminished, and to whose advantage the closing of this landscape might be.

Photo credits: Nathan Kensinger – more photos of the demolition can be seen here: http://kensinger.blogspot.com/2011/08/demolition-of-manhattanville.html

Drawing credits: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Cited works:

Lefebvre, Henri, 1974. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Transl). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Edition, 2011.

Taylor, Marilyn, 2005. “Crossing Beyond the Boundaries: Columbia University in West Harlem.” Places 17:1

Views from Columbia's Campus

2012-01-31T15:54:00.000-08:00

Slowly Broadway -- the old main thoroughfare of the New Netherland colony to the City -- rises up along the hilly backbone of Manhattan toward Columbia University's campus (and then onward). Nowadays, walking along Broadway, the elevation is barely noticeable in the man-made canyons of New York City; so many of the original natural landscape features have been erased in this City..

The current Columbia campus is a bit like a castle, a prison, or an oasis, depending on your mood. A series of high buildings surround and enclose a space that is open, sometimes green, sometimes claustrophobic. A fortress from the outside.

Depending on one's approach to the Campus, this castle-like quality of the campus may not be the first thing one notices. The Campus' entrance is in fact quite open: high open gates and trees welcome the visitor. In New York City, high imposing walls of buildings are nothing new and so are easily filtered out. Coming to this open space, one becomes aware that one has indeed reached the Columbia Campus. The University announces it presence. The visitor sees before her a straight path -- the College Walk -- leading straight into the clouds.

Following the path one comes to a great open plaza, where the highest point is taken up by a building marked "The Library of Columbia University". Although ironically this building now houses the university's administration, which looks down from its high point on the current main library -- Butler Library -- on the other side of the main square. A cynic may say that Power goes over Knowledge here.

It should be noted that the point taken up by Low Library may not be the highest point in Manhattan as a whole (it is in fact in Bennett Park), but it is clearly one of the highest points on the island and certainly in the neighbourhood. The elevation of the point is only accentuated by the steep decline into the valley that has its lowest point around 125th Street. However, none of this is clear when gazing upon Low Library from College Walk, or even walking around Campus. As I said, the Campus shields off most of the city with its wall of high buildings. From the campus grounds there are only a few cracks in the wall; one instance being between the Schermerhorn and Fayerweather buildings.

Apart from this little alcove and the view from College Walk, there is another point where Columbia's elevated position in the city is made clear and this is at the The Charles Revson Plaza, that strange space that hoveres over Amsterdam Avenue in front of the Law School.

If it wasn't already, a strange eye-like statue makes clear what this place is about: looking out over the city -- on either side. Even though, the view toward the north (into the 125th Street valley) may be more spectacular, in fact the eye looks toward the south, toward the city, gazing down.

In conclusion, the campus of Columbia University appears to provide only two views: 1) as an enclosed space, buildings keeping the outside world out. Or 2) it provides vistas from above, such as Revson Plaza and College Walk. The campus appears to say: we are not really in New York City, we are in the sky! When we are on campus, we are sky-(wo)men, indeed: god-like - like De Certeau looking down on Downtown Manhattan, Wordsworth gazing on his favourite valleys, or Dante reaching heaven.

Invisible City

2012-01-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

Over the course of three days, scientists pumped 10 tons of concrete into an ant hill. After letting it set, the colony was excavated, revealing a structure of staggering complexity covering 50 square meters and running 8 meters deep. In creating this archaeological site and revealing this unimagined landscape, one may assume that a large instance of ant genocide was committed in the name of scientific knowledge, but the extraordinary results trump countless formic murders.
The ants who built this particular colony moved out 40 tons of earth in the process of construction, with each worker carrying three times his own weight in soil on each trip. According to the video, it is the ant equivalent of building the Great Wall.

What was revealed is astounding. A vast complex city-state with tubular roads and air vents and bulbous extensions, it looks space age in the contained environment manner of Charles De Gaul International airport with its connected travel tubes and pods. It calls to mind Frank Herbert’s Dune with its underground drug mining society and giant worms. These are the Invisible Cities that Italo Calvino didn’t write about.

That there are such states below our feet, and that they are far more complex than the architectural and structural archaeological remains of many human sites, inspires awe. The Maya inscribed their sculptures on their bottoms, acknowledging the gods beneath the surface, the divinity of earth. As archaeologists, we are drawn to the hidden; we must remember to be open to that which we least expect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFg21x2sj-M

Geology Among Us

2012-01-23T18:40:00.000-08:00

I walk by a boulder countless times a week on my way to and from my building on 114th and Riverside. Couched between the back of a Cuban restaurant and an apartment building, this huge chunk of rock rests innocuously behind a gated fence blocking the restaurant's storage entrance from the street. Many people walking by don't even register its presence; the iron fence obscures the rock's dark face. Two stories tall and 100 feet wide, the rock takes up what must be valuable Morningside Heights real estate.

Looking at photographs of the neighborhood from a century ago, there was much more open space to be developed. Hundreds of similar rocks must have been blasted to make way for the construction of the crowded blocks of today's New York, but for some reason this one was overlooked. According to a New York Times article, the rock was simply never removed in the course of the neighborhood's development. "'When the row houses were built around it in 1896, leaving the rock was no big deal because there were hundreds of acres to develop,'' said William Scott, vice president for institutional real estate at Columbia. 'But now, it's just this huge ugly rock in the middle of our neighborhood.'"

It serves as a reminder of what Manhattan looked like before we drastically altered its appearance. I mean no judgment in that statement, but I appreciate the two senses of the city evoked by the sight of the rock.

On one hand, Manhattan is defined by its city blocks, myriad stores and residences, and strictly delineated property lines. The rock on 114th is tamed by its iron fence, and made mundane by the stacks of beer kegs and trash cans lining its eastern side. On the other hand, this rock clearly renders unusable one of the most cherished commodities in the city - space. It reminds us that the nature that we cordon off in city parks was once all that Manhattan consisted of. Millions of years of geological time seep into our everyday experiences of New York. The city before human occupation is not gone, just buried under concrete in most places. But sites where its earlier form remains, like with this rock on 114th st., are not static reminders of the past. A tree grows out of one crack in the rock's street-facing surface, oblivious to the lack of greenery around it.

On a larger scale, it appears that every part of the city was intentionally placed, but when experienced on a day-to-day level each neighborhood and street reveals idiosyncrasies that fell through the cracks of urban planning. Walking by that boulder every day gives me a little twinge of delight, like I'm experiencing the land's response to human occupation.

Images from: The Fed, The Harlem Eye, Columbia College

Further information: NYTimes, The Fed

t r a c e | w o r k: Claiming [Space] for Altruistic Motives

2012-01-21T12:55:00.000-08:00

t r a c e | w o r k: Claiming [Space] for Altruistic Motives

Claiming [Space] for Altruistic Motives

2012-01-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

In 2006, while photographing New York City I came across agraffiti script on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge. Though I thought itwas interesting, I did not capture that image; however, as I continued walking,I saw the identical “i love you” phrase on a beam obviously difficult toreach but much more striking. This was intent…this was claiming space thatoffered the reader a moment to possibly reflect or at the least question. Often,graffiti was used to claim space for territorial gangs. Other groups would thenretaliate and cross out, tag over or otherwise reclaim space for their own.Since the late 80’s, there has been a shift from simply tagging and claimingspace for the ‘hood’ to recognizing tags as an early form of street art. Itwas; however, visibility versus the static graffiti art that became important…cityand commercial trains were the media that lent exposure to these unknownartists.

To now consider this somewhat newer (static) graffiti artwith a message; “i love you”. Certainly New York City is known as atransient city which would lend to exposure. The artist now becomes thetraveler, echoing their known art. In this case…I, as the photographer of thisgraffiti am perpetuating the exposure and dialogue. The message is simple andis easily applied to anyone’s personality or disposition. When we juxtapose RobertIndiana’s Love sculpture we add another element to question. Commissioned work,though trending a similar message, does not hold the same impact nor impressthe same audience.

So the question is posed look at thescript upon the bridge, "I love you", if you were to encounter thisin public, what would you think, feel or do? Would you have a response?

Response: I see man's creation, andknow instantly that it is man who has tackled the challenges of the world. Coffee House: DreamscapeVisions Photography & Poetry

Is it the ambiguity that transmits the message? Is it thebridge that underlines a message of conquering men or the bridging of humanity?Is this the taming of a wild city or fulfilling moments for individualencounters? Do we need a back story to accept the message or can we claim thespace as simply purposeful for our own wants of the moment?

Included below is an excerpt of an interview with a streetartist which from the script, would appear to be the same artist, whose work I photographedon the bridge.

Much of the paint has faded or has been removed, butNathan Reimer's altruistic message to New Yorkers dissolved some heavy urbancynicism. Photographs carrying the same high energy live on.

Why, "I love you"?

What three words have had a more profound effect on any of us? Nothing makesyou feel better than hearing those three words. I really put my heart intowriting every single one of those words. I meant it all. I love people, I lovethis city, I loved the experience and I wanted to get that message across aboveeverything else.

It was also a really good shot at people who hadn't been able to previouslygrasp the larger concepts of street art as a social commentary and sort ofpublic notice board. It's like killing folks with kindness. I used to really getoff on getting up in front of people and I'd walk out into Astor Place and getup a big silver I Love You on the cube in front of twenty or thirty people. Ithink that had a lot of effect on different types of people. I think so manypeople who wanted to be mad couldn't help but feel good.

More of the interview and gallery content can be found at Artist's page-iloveyougraffiti.com

Daniel Molina

http://dreamscapevisions.com/

Occupy Wall Street Archaeology

2012-01-19T18:06:00.000-08:00

A number of Columbia University archaeologists and anthropologists have created a small-scale archaeological project at Occupy Wall Street.

We have created a weblog, where we will post about our findings. Furthermore, we are inviting abstracts for our session at the upcoming TAG-USA (Theoretical Archaeology Group) conference, in Buffalo, NY, May 17-20, 2012.

(serving spoon in a storm drain at Zuccotti Park on morning after the eviction, Nov 15, 2011)

Moon Archaeology

2012-01-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

Image from New York Times

Great to see that people are starting to think about archaeology on the moon. Greg Fewer wrote a paper about this a few years ago, in a book called Digging Holes in Popular Culture, edited by Miles Russell. His paper is 'Towards a Lunar and Martian Sites and Monuments Record'

punkarch

2011-11-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

Paul Graves Brown and John Schofield are doing interesting work on the archaeology of punk, via an apartment used by the Sex Pistols.

I wonder if anyone archived anything from New York's CGBGs before it went the way of most popular culture.... A quick google search throws up a few things

Sounding Off: the symbolic values of speaking and listening in the city

2011-11-21T09:42:00.001-08:00

I usually hear New York before I see it. On the plane coming into the city, coming up the steps from the subway, and particularly emerging from Columbia’s immediate area and crossing into the surrounding city, I often find myself suddenly aware of one, a few, many, a waterfall of New York sounds and voices that signal to me things about where I am before I make a visual distinction of place. Which is why I found the following video entertaining and thought-provoking (if the video embed doesn't work, click here):

This video is an elaborate impression of the signs people send about themselves and their places through their voices. It demonstrates the several levels of linguistic analysis that are involved in instantly interpreting different accents in New York City, supposedly as a "native" New Yorker would hear them. There are phonological differences, in terms of the pronunciation of unique sounds within words, such as the “masticated vowels” in the Brooklyn accent, and in terms of the placement of stress on specific parts of the word, as in the punctuated first consonants heard in the Bronx accent. There is also the speed of speech, particularly evident in the Manhattan “fast-talker”, and cadence, as in the Brooklyn “sing-song” and the drawn-out, “nasally” Queens speaker. However, for each of the cases, the most significant point is that lifestyles, borough-specific cultural traits, and social attitudes are depicted as the causative factors behind different speaking styles. Although clearly intended to play lightly on classic borough stereotypes, a quick glance through the comments shows how strongly and widely these indices resonate, positively and negatively, with viewers.

Language, speech, and its associated forms and manners have long been a recognized site for signaling all kinds of anterior social information. To put a theoretical context to this, I turn to the rather well-known thoughts on language, symbolism and power of Bourdieu, for whom every act of speaking is also an act of positioning oneself, consciously or subconsciously within one’s social field (which in fact dictates the way in which you can carry out that act of positioning). How one speaks, as much as what one says, is an act of identity assertion, a process of articulating belonging or difference, and simultaneously claiming the authority to do so. He writes:

“Thus we know that properties such as voice setting (nasal, pharyngeal) and pronunciation (“accent”) offer better indices than syntax for identifying a speaker’s social class: we learn that the efficacy of a discourse, its power to convince, depends on the authority of the person who utters it, or, what amounts to the same thing, on his “accent” functioning as an index of authority. Thus the whole social structure is present in the interaction (and therefore the discourse): the material conditions of existence determine discourse through the linguistic production relations which they make possible and which they structure” (Bourdieu 1977: 653).

Accents (sounds, styles, forms, mannerisms of speech) are instantly meaningful to us because we recognize them by degrees of difference and sameness to not only our own accents, but to those of others operating across our social field(s). As such, they are symbolic of broader generalizations that we make about relative positions in those fields. Without delving further into the implications of his structural determinism here, I instead pose the issue of power and class relationships embedded in our interpretations of accents.

Bourdieu would see the stereotypes offered in explanation of the different borough accents as a reflection of the power struggles going on between social classes, and I do not dispute that the associations we make with the accents in the video reflect power dynamics past and present, but I think that this video also describes a site for positive identity claims. Through tongue-in-cheek stereotyping, the narrator bonds New Yorkers together through their idiosyncrasies of language; a local inverse of the perhaps now-clichéd observation by George Bernard Shaw that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”

This discussion is of course easy to elaborate out of New York City itself and consider in the context of broader regional or interregional accent relationships. I find it particularly interesting, as a Midwesterner, that the Midwestern accent is often described as the lack of an accent, as I have always considered (as implied above) that accents within a shared language are all relative to each other and any prescribed norm is an illusion created by a dominant group and, these days, enforced by the power of the media. However, speech behavior and attitude towards accent is different; I find that I subconsciously assert my “accent,” such that it is, and other distinctive speech patterns, far more strongly when I find myself outside of the Midwest, and even more so when outside the country, in a place where my accent or language is not the dominant social norm. This behavior in its various forms as conscious and subconscious, individual and group, and within and between languages, has been well-noted by linguistic anthropologists, who see it as a reaction to the fear of one’s identity disappearing into homogeneity or conformity. For many indigenous groups throughout the world, for instance, it has become a form of activism against a history of oppression and exclusion that progressively eroded their languages; for this purpose, the Endangered Languages Alliance exists in New York City: http://endangeredlanguagealliance.org/main. To bring this back to the case of city accents, a quick Google search for “New York City accent” will bring up pages of articles whose headlines proclaim concern for the demise of the “traditional” or “working-class” accent of New York City in an era of globalized language and media, changing city demographics, and increasing gentrification. These urgently-worded concerns, as well as long debates about their relevance and accuracy according to individual experience of accents, have been going on for years: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/is-the-new-york-accent-disappearing/ for instance, and http://gothamist.com/2008/02/25/new_york_city_a_1.php). In these instances, accent and language have become potent symbols of identity and resistance that are continuously reconstituted in their daily use, and in the processes of re-learning, recording, teaching, and even in some cases, rejecting them.

Although it is somewhat beyond the scope of this contribution to consider fully here, I would also like to include a link to this 2006 article, presents changing city accents in a particular group defined by class, gender, and age (middle and upper middle-class, female, young) with a series of meditations on causes and meanings of this change. I offer one excerpt: “Mr. Vaux, who conducted a survey of American dialects while teaching at Harvard, said that while the voice heard increasingly in New York was distinctive, it was not particular to the region. Trying to pinpoint what made it unique, Mr. Vaux crossed off nasality, which he says is what humans always mistakenly identify as different in foreign speech. He overlooked “like,” for which he said the speakers of Sanskrit also had a penchant” (http://www.observer.com/2006/03/city-girl-squawk-its-like-so-bad-it-really-sucks/). Dell Hymes, in his work on ethnographies of speaking, also looks to antiquity when describing the method of assigning social and cultural characteristics to particular speech patterns. He cites Plato’s description of Athenians, Spartans, and Cretan speech patterns: “The Athenian citizen is reputed among all the Hellenes to be a great talker, whereas Sparta is renowned for brevity, and the Cretans have more wit than words” (Plato Laws Book I, Preamble: 28; cited also in Hymes 1974: 35).

Clearly, speech patterns have a long history of carrying all kinds of symbolic baggage around with them, and our interpretation of this baggage may tell us more about where we identify ourselves relative to the speaker than about the speaker themself. In either case, the processes of change played out in the sounds of speaking continue to fascinate and compel us to interpret and evaluate them.

Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. “The economics of linguistic exchanges.” Social Science Information 16: 645-668.
Hymes, Dell, 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Plato, “Laws” in The Dialogues of Plato. B. Jowett (Transl.). Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1873.

Communicating via Roly Poly: The Remote Possibility of Touch

2011-10-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

MoMA's latest offering, "Talk to Me", explores the recent movements in the design of human interaction with man-made objects. In recent years, design disciplines have taken a new angle on the old themes of form, function, and meaning. Recently there has been a movement to integrate these with even more intimate and ambitious forms of communication including ideas of dialogue, connection, and even emotion. One object on display at the MoMA exhibit that struck me as particularly evocative was the Roly Poly, from the Design Incubation Center in Singapore.

From the Design Incubation Center website:

Roly Poly is designed to enable two individuals to “sense” the presence of each other even though they may be physically apart. The mirrored movements in a pair of Roly Polys is such that a soft tap to rock one will simultaneously rock its partner to the same degree, creating a corresponding reaction in the other instantly. While the Internet provides a vast array of text messaging and video calling interaction options, Roly Poly offers a unique, spontaneous and subtle mode of instant communication, exclusive between two individuals.

There is no doubt that the explosion of Internet and wireless technologies has enabled the emergence of a variety of new forms of interpersonal communication. Like so many new technologies, what has once been considered a novelty is now an essential utility, like water or electricity. Today, texting, facebook, email, and photosharing are deeply integrated in our lives. Each new medium is accompanied by its own unique logic of expression. And yet, the expressive power of these media is in some ways constrained, and in other ways enabled by the affordances of each particular system. The entire ecosystem of Twitter, for example, is defined in 140 character snippets. Such a microform, we have found, far from being a painful restriction, has facilitated vast networks of communication.

However, these forms of communication just mentioned are based on 19th and 20th century metaphors of communication: the typewriter, the cable telegram, the photograph. These paradigms of communication are ones that we are extremely comfortable with, and function well in our lives. But the potential to access other, less traditional, forms of personal interconnection through digital technology has hardly been explored. The Roly Poly represents just such a shift away from traditional forms of symbolic communication towards haptic forms of expression. There is something beautifully intuitive, nuanced and yet simple and ambiguous about the Roly Poly. Like the Ouija board used in seances to communicate with the dead, the Roly Poly allows for the externalization of one of the most neglected of human senses: the proprioceptive sense, that is, the sense of orientation, of movement.

This proprioceptive sense, perhaps more than any other, has proven the least abstractable. This at least in part accounts for its neglect by contemporary communications technology. It is also perhaps the most intimate, the most context specific, and yet, paradoxically the most universal. The message of touch is a challenge to define abstractly, but is easily recognized. The possibilities for communication touched upon by the Roly Poly opens up a world of questions about the future of human communication as well. As our daily personal experiences become increasingly subsumed by the remoteness of digital communications, how will we adapt the basic human wiring for haptic communication (that is, for touch) to an inherently sterile and abstracted medium? Is such a simple gesture easily interpreted between people? between cultures? And how does the distance that separates us when we use the Internet to communicate affect the shared knowledge of meaning on which such an intimate medium as touch relies?

Crosstown Traffic meets The Land of Confusion - The Colour-Coding of the New York Subway System

2011-10-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Ever missed a date in Constantinople, because she was waiting in Istanbul? Yeah, me neither. But I’ve been living in New New Amsterdam for just a couple of months and I already had a misunderstanding due to failed reading of the Subway system nomenclature. Some friends of mine were visiting the city and wanted to see the university campus. I gave them proper directions from the place they were staying in Flushing to Columbia with the subway with only one transfer at Times Square. The plan was foolproof as the 116-Columbia station has only one exit and I was waiting just outside of it. It was easy, it was perfect. And then I got the call from 116^th and Lenox Ave…where the 2-train stops, some seven avenues away. Everybody who has used the New York Subway at least a few times by now knows that they got confused by the colour-coding and took the other Red line, which does not go to Columbia. You have no idea how many times I said “the 1-train” in my directions and how many times I refused to answer the question “so which colour is that?”…

The obvious reason for the confusion is that the couple that visited me was from Chicago where the ‘L’ only has colour-coding as opposed to the NYC Subway which has a triple coding system of colour, line and service. While colour is obvious, the other two terms might be confusing even to locals. “Service” refers to the letter or number, which is the most commonly used every day name for a train and then “line” refers to the physical tracks that the trains run on, which both have historic background. Up to 1940 there were three companies (two private and one municipal) that operated the Subway – Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and Independent City-Owned Subway System (IND). They are all now parts of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), but they are still recognized by its structure. The IRT alone constitutes the MTA’s A-Division and its services are assigned numbers. The B-Division consists of the former BMT and IND and its services are assigned letters. So any given train receives a three-fold code, for example the one that goes to Columbia University would be IRT Broadway-7^th Ave Line Tomato Red 1-train.

Here are some examples of remnants of the three former companies :

BMT Subway

IND Subway 14th St

IRT 191st St

CTA 'L' Map

The history of the subway system in New York as well as its structure made it all so complicated. To use the Chicago example, every line has its own tracks and theonly stations with multiple lines are in the down town area around the Loop, where all lines stop. However, the history of the rapid transit system in Chicago is not much different with the major change coming in 1940 as well. So why can Chicago switch to simple colour-coding and New York cannot? Another question spring out of that, though – how simple would such a system really be in NYC? One could argue that such a system is already in place since people most readily recognise the colour-coding. Currently, though colour is assigned in correspondence to the line the service runs on in Midtown Manhattan. For one, this shows zonal rankings within the city with Midtown apparently being the most important one. Another possible meaning that could be derived is that Midtown is supposed to be the main tourist centre as local would most probably know the system better and would not simply rely on colour-coding. I bet Battery Park City, SoHo and the Financial District would have something to say about such distribution of tourists…

MTA Subway Map

Many interesting inference could be made about the meaning behind the choice of colour-coding, but it is not only culturally and socially, but also practically problematic. What would happen to tourists who decide to wander outside of the realm of Midtown? What people who live in the city but are new to the area? For example, I know people wondering why the E-service is coded Vivid Blue and paired with A and C-services. It only shares eight stations with the C and five with the express A. On the other hand the E-service shares six stations with the Bright Orange M-service. Orange colour seems even more appropriate when considering that the E-service runs together with the F-service from Jamaica to Long Island City and they share five stations when running express during the day and thirteen stations when running local at night. So how confusing could it be for someone from Chicago or Washington, DC or Prague, for example, where only colour-coding is applied, to recognise the A and E-services as the same line? How confusing is that for someone who lives in Jackson Heights and to whom the F and E-services are virtually the same, but are different in colour?


Future 2nd Ave Line

So it is confusing, but so what? Maybe it is more important for the city to preserve its historic association with the BMT, IRT, and IND, whose ownership of the Midtown tracks before 1940 determines the colour-coding of the whole transit system in four of the five boroughs. Maybe the MTA does not believe that colour is all that important and that letters and numbers are more appropriate labels. Maybe the colours are just an extra that the MTA throws out of generosity. Buy one get two free kind of situation. Maybe the diversity of New York is once again represented in the subway nomenclature as it uses this three-fold designation system. Well, maybe. But what about the planned 2^nd Ave line? It will not run on any of the three historic companies lines in Midtown so how can it be assigned a colour? Or a number or letter for that matter? The 2^nd Ave line is tentatively dubbed T in teal and is supposed to open in 2016. It would run from Hanover St along 2^nd Ave up to 116^th St and would then end at 125^th and Lexington Ave where transfer would be available to the 4-5-6 IRT Lexington Ave Apple Green lines. A redirection of the BMT Broadway Sunflower Yellow Q-service from 59^th St to 63^rd St and then onto 2^nd Ave would provide a double service on the new line. I guess the BMT connection with the Q-service is where the T-service gets its letter association. But where does the colour come from? Is it a combination of the 4-5-6 apple green and the Q sunflower yellow or is it just completely random? I assume everyone is free to making his own reading of it.

What the MTA Subway system shows is how colour-coding could be read in a variety of ways. The reading presented here is perhaps the one that the MTA was looking for, but there are so many others. The 1-2-3 and 4-5-6services run almost parallel in Manhattan on the two opposite sides of Central Park and are assigned the two opposite colours of a traffic light – red and green. However, the 2 and 5-service run along the same tracks for a substantial length in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, too, which makes the opposing lines reading obsolete. The L-service could be read as tied to the Shuttle services.I have heard tourists regularly referring to the “S-train”, which a local would probably never say. The MTA makes the distinction between Light Slate Grey L-service and Dark Slate Grey Shuttles, but I am sure many people think they somehow need to be connected due to the proximity of their colours. Yet the L-service does not share a single station with any of the Shuttles. Colour is also recognized differently by different people so some might view the Lime Green G to be closely connected to the Apple Green 4-5-6, while other would-think they are just as different as any other two line and colours. Some would see the M-service (newly Bright Orange) running along with its former colour-mates Terra Cotta Brown J and Z-services for some six stations as logical because of the proximity of the colours, while other might think otherwise. I am not even going to dare discussing colour-blindness and how it could affect reading the subway nomenclature. At any rate, the subway system isquite a fascinating case of how colour-coding could be read in a variety of ways producing both justification for the MTA arrangement and confusion and drawing on history, visual perception, track length, number of stations shared and many other categories.

The Anthropological Lion King 3D

2011-10-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

As an action of nostalgia, I went to see The Lion King 3D this weekend. This is my first movie in New York City. I’m excited. I could still remember me watching it in the community cinema in Shanghai when I was a teenager. Today’s experience acts as a passage rite, linking two “me” in two stages, with different geographical location and language context.

The greatness about this movie is that it is so typical, so Hamlet-like, yet, very touching and inspiring. The story is simple, as you all know. As an anthropologist now, however, I did some weird investigation by re-reading it as a type of so-called “text”.

1. Patriarchy or Matriarchy.

Scientifically speaking, the lion society is believed to be matrilineal. The female lions constitutes the body of a herb. Sisters, mothers and grandmothers hunt in a team, reproduce lionets and deliver techniques from generation to generation. On the other hand, the male lion is replaced from time to time. The most powerful male, decided in combating no matter inside or outside the herb, gets the territory and the right to mate. So, females stand more substantially. Lions in the movie, however, perform patriarchy, with one male protecting territory and several females hunting. The picture is clear that the only one powerful male (Mufasa) dominates females, among which a comparatively fixed mate is named the queen (Sarabee). I, as many other kids, would not think it a problem. In fact, it is even more acceptable than the true theory. The conclusions are poles apart based on the same evidence of labor division and sex. I would ask why.

An archaeological reflection is required. Material culture is not object as we think it is. Evidence is clear and static, but we are more likely to reconstruct and represent the relationship between objects in a way that fits better to our pre-known knowledge, sometimes even culture and politics. In this case, kids in the West would believe more in patriarchy as they agree that strength and courage as a superpower, also, as a sign of male mammal, is required to hold a family. They would seek a correspondence within human society. By this I mean, their own nuclear family. The father usually makes bigger decisions and fights violation, and the mother is subordinated (though not always) physically, economically and psychologically. As for the young “me”, it is probably because China holds a long tradition in polygamy. And the lions in the movie fit perfect into this particular scheme of thought.

This case discloses the danger of simplicity in sign matching in archaeology. When we see male, we think of strength and aggression; female, always protection and settlement. Even if the link between the signifier and the signified is correct, the link between entities inside which the meaning is carried could be seriously wrong. Behavior pattern is always needed in both zoology and ethnography. The study should be less linguistic, instead, more dynamic.

2. Drastic variation in the eco-system.

There is a scene. Years after Scar took the place of Simba illegally, the flourished Pride Land became barren. Lack of food is constantly reported. The landscape turned gloomy with skeletons of cattle and antelope all over the place. I used to see it a metaphor of the brutal and ineligible politics. But now I see an actual possibility when viewing the Pride Land as an eco-system, a typical thinking pattern in processual archaeology.

In this system, there are predators, such as lions, and preys, such as ox, zebra and antelope. The third balancing element is scavenger, which hunts and is hunted at the same time. The evil accomplice in the movie, hyena, is not located high in the food chain. They are scavengers, eating what lions leaves. The food is limited, thus the species must be small. After they are introduced to the higher place in the food chain with lion under the permission of Scar, they have more access to fresh preys. They are originally born with lower survival standard, comparing to lions. The population explodes certainly. Hyenas, in K. Flannery’s word, promote (figure b) in the hierarchy and cause a hyper-coherence (figure d) in the system. The carnivores soon outnumbers the herbivores. The circle of life is then broken, followed by famine and drought.

Think about the early hominids. They weren’t designed to prey, rather, omnivorous, and gathered more. They could also survive as scavengers, according to L. Binford’s theory. Well, the stone and bone implements served as “the permission of Scar”, gradually providing them with higher capacity and effectiveness in hunting. But, humans, along with other primates, were far lower in reproduction efficiency than other mammals. Therefore, the resource is widely explored, yet the population remains under control, which leads to linearization (figure c). As long as the ecological capacity is sufficient, the chaos would not occur. And this might explains the lateness of agriculture emerging in Africa, when the food for gathering is already enough for survival.

BTW, some other irrelevant thoughts here. Scar seems to care the least about mating after he takes the lead, while Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, married Gertrude right after usurping. Ironically, human performed “lionly” and vice versa. Well, it is a G-rated after all. Also, what bothers me since forever, if Mufasa is the only male in the group, Nala must be Simba’s sister of half blood. So, Simba and Nala... Isn’t it incest?!...

Uh…as you can see, it is bitter-sweet being an anthropologist. Sometimes you read more, sometimes you just read too much.

The Fashion of Color on Fifth Avenue

2011-09-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

It’s a rare day when I trek over to the East Side to see my friend at NYU Uptown. I always glance at the Empire State Building during the long trudge from the 6 Station to her 1^st Avenue apartment. Last week the group of us that had gathered at her place debated the significance of the evening’s lighting colors. Red, yellow and black signaled the start of Oktoberfest to some and nothing to others, but a quick Google search confirmed that we were all wrong. The lights commemorated the 54^th annual Steuben Day Parade which, while perhaps related to Oktoberfest, was still lost on us when we interpreted the color scheme from a mere glimpse.

The Empire State Building, as its website claims, is one of the most seen buildings in the world. To become a “lighting partner”—or, to have the ability to choose a night’s lighting color scheme—demands a detailed application and an approval from the private group that owns the building. Charitable and nonprofit groups are most often accepted. (Famously the Empire State Building displays red and green lights for Christmas and blue and white for Hanukkah, but religious requests are unilaterally denied.) Even the competition as to whose technology has the privilege to light the building is fierce.

Mark Kingwell, author of Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams, described the Empire State Building as “the distinctive image of mythic New York,” an image that is “totally irresistible.” (Although it’s a bit old, this commemorative section in the New York Times elaborates on the Empire State Building’s inner workings, its social meaning and its importance to New York’s skyline.) It is difficult to resist the urge to advertise one’s cause on the top of a billboard that reaches millions of people nightly. While these lights are surely seen, the transmission of their intended message is often ambiguous, sometimes obtuse and even incomprehensible.

Some of the lighting arrangements are universally identifiable: red, white and blue for Independence Day, green for St. Patrick’s, orange and black for Halloween. Yet, often divergences from the classic white (which itself signals a lack of a lighting partner for the day) are more obscure and therefore puzzling. Could you guess what this lighting scheme represented?

It’s Hanukkah and Christmas put together, on December 24, 2008. What about this one?

This was in honor of the various countries competing in the 2006 Olympics, where each side represented a different nation. In celebration of a particular school’s commencement every year, we get this:

While Columbia students easily recognize this sign, the typical city resident may have no idea what it indicates. Luckily for the stumped and irked, the Empire State Building publishes the lighting schedule and its significance online. You can even create your own color combination with a unique meaning and send it to a friend using the e-card maker.

Colors serve as indicators for many unspoken concepts in New York City. The colors of the subway lines signify which express and local lines travel on the same paths, or even the character of the station (the powder blue tiles at 116^th Street come to mind). Colored traffic lights direct trains, vehicles and pedestrians (although they are not strictly obeyed). Wear red at a New York Yankees game and prepare to face ridicule, even if you do not intend to associate with the Red Sox. The coppery green patina of the Statue of Liberty not only secures its status as another recognizable symbol of the New York skyline but also its old age.

The Empire State Building and its lights are paradoxical: they are ubiquitous and recognizable, yet their nightly color-coded message can be confusing and even unintelligible. One person may see one meaning while others see another. Unlike the letters of language or the colors of a traffic light, there is no predetermined paradigm for what the Empire State Building’s color arrangement represents. Whether or not we understand its significance is independent of our identification of the colors in and of themselves. The sign may be visible to all, but the code is not always easy to crack.

The Written City

2011-09-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun"2

I run my fingers over the broad ripples of a tooth and read “deer” as clearly as if the ridges were Braille. Rain is written in the darkness of the oncoming clouds, the sun’s late position adding an urgent exclamation point of punctuation, subtle shifts in temperature with the coming of evening a footnote referencing hail. In the mountains of New Mexico, days can pass without so much as a stop sign, and so one reads other signs instead—the language of the landscape, the passing of time, the allofacts1 of artifacts. One of the myriad adjustments I had to make upon returning from archaeological fieldwork to New York City this fall was in the way I see signs, mainly in exchanging sensory input for the here-ubiquitous use of the written word.

Written language is one of the most overtly used semiotic systems in our culture. The city is saturated with it, from the neatly labeled vertices of each street to the storefronts of bodegas barely visible through a wall of prices, advertisements, fliers, and graffiti. However, while its volume never varies from Harlem to the Village, the language in which signs are written reflects individual neighborhoods within Manhattan, creating a sense of community, and conversely otherness, depending on whether one can understand the locally-used language.

Such a distinction between being a member or outsider in relation to a certain cultural pocket of the city is not felt so strongly when indicated by other signs, such as changes in audition (music), smell (foods), sight (architecture and fashion), or even spoken language. This is because written language carries the most authority of all these indicators, and is the least adaptable—one can appreciate foreign music or food without recognizing the instruments or spices, but it is impossible to appreciate the essence of a foreign language (that is, its nature as a form of communication and not just pretty sounds and symbols) without deeper understanding.

Whenever we cannot interpret the primary signs we encounter, we inevitably rely on secondary signs. In archaeology, an example would be to depend on size, shape, and proximity to other artifacts to hypothesize the origin and function of a piece of pottery whose distinguishing markings had worn away. On the streets of New York, one can rely on the sight of an apple and a numerical price in lieu of being able to read “Apples—on sale.” This is analogous to how, when people who use different spoken languages try to communicate, they each have to forfeit their primary verbal method in exchange for a secondary means—such as a shared third language, or the use of gestures.

In a city as literate and regulated as New York, the written word is the most accessible and reliable medium of information. Written signs overpower most natural signs, images, and speech because they convey authority—any loon in the subway can predict the end of days; a NO PARKING sign represents the legislation and local government responsible for its existence—written words show greater intent, and therefore greater validity (on a sliding scale, from this to home-made signs in a bakery).

In signs we can also see snapshots of our language’s progression. “Donuts” and “THRUWAY” are considered acceptable, though they still make this logophile wince, and the current trend in signs is away from language entirely. Because of written language’s exclusive nature, many public messages have transitioned to using symbols. Examples of this include how the pedestrian WALK signs at intersections now often communicate pictorially (which is fine with me, since the written signs couldn’t fit an apostrophe in their DONT WALK, again, wince), and the recent anti-smoking campaign whose posters feature images of cancerous lungs in greater prominence than their textual warnings.

Rose Matzkin

Sings in Chinatown cater to the linguistic diversity of the area

(photo credit: thenyknow.com)

An art installment illustrates different WALK symbols from around the world
(photo credit: walking-men.com)

An anti-smoking advertisement typical of those currently seen around the city
(photo credit: reason.com)

References
1. Deetz, James. Invitation to Archaeology. New York: The Natural History Press, 1967.

2. Preucel, Robert W. Archaeological Semiotics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Links

http://walking-men.com/

historical detective work

2011-07-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

Great blog about Benjamin Feldman's efforts to track down the history behind an old leather coin purse that he found at a Chealsea flea market. The NY Times also gives an account. Not quite the biography of an artifact, but the purse has opened up a fascinating story of immigration, lower east side tenements, prohibition, well-known descendants, and the changing city. The purse on its own likely wouldn't have prompted this search, but neither would Sol Goldberg's name without the purse. The combination of name and object is a potent semiotic mixture that, unlike most flea market finds, provides enough context to start a search, and evoke a sensual history.

When Laws and State Historic Preservation Divisions Fail to Serve and Protect

2011-04-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

As you read, I invite you to listen to Izrael Kamakawiwo'ole's moving song, "Hawai'i 78"

Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) Scholars Against Desecration: The Case of Naue

As the final speaker in the Ontologies of Exhumation lecture series, Native Hawaiian activist and scholar Dr. J. Kehua lani Kauani, associate professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, came to Columbia on April 21, 2011 for a session on Native Hawaiian indigenous politics surrounding the adverse effects of Hawaiian burial ground desecration in the form of architectural construction.

We examined the case of Naue, a beachfront along the northern shore of Kaua'i where real estate developer Joseph Brescia disturbed the grave of at least 30 known iwi kupuna (Hawaiian ancestral remains) - churned the ground with backhoes, crushing and mixing ancestral bones with sand and concrete - to build the foundation of a multimillion dollar home. The controversy lies within the suspicious nature in which Joseph Brescia obtained a permit to move forward with construction from the State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) without the required consultation with the Kaua'i-Ni'ihau Island Burial Council.

Despite years of protests which began in 2007, Native Hawaiian protesters and activists were denied of their requests for a halt or temporary injunction to stop construction until a Burial Treatment Plan was approved (which wasn't until the 16th draft in March of 2010). Part of the issue was a lack of genealogical experts within the SHPD to trace familial lineages which were required by NAGRPA law in order to halt construction.

Our discussion with Dr. Kauanui brought to light several different kinds of issues which tie together many of the themes we covered throughout the semester - legal narratives, exhumation and ethics, agency of the dead, emotion, humanitarian narratives, counting the dead and representing the dead.

The case of Naue is a prime example of laws and "humanitarian" preservation organizations that fail to serve, protect and preserve the rights of indigenous groups on account of political corruption and legal ambiguity. NAGPRA, as originally drafted, pertained to "legally recognized" (a controversial issue in and of itself) Native Americans in mainland U.S.A., and tangentially, but inadequately, attempts to serve the needs of Native Hawaiians. As Dr. Kauanui discussed, there is an important difference between common descent and island identity. If mortuary practices are culturally bound, why do these laws operate as a function of biology/DNA/genetics? And what is to be done with corrupt archaeologists like Mike Dega, who Brescia hired and wrote the initial Burial Treatment Plan; or with SHPD officials like, Nancy McMahon, who approved Dega's BTP without consulting the Burial Council? Who's interests do they really serve? Who will the Kanaka Maoli and Iwi Kupuna turn to if the very organizations and stewards of cultural heritage do the exact opposite of what they were established to do?

The desecration of the Naue graves also invites us to think about the agency of the dead and how it is constantly undermined by secular hegemony that dictates who counts as human and whether or not the dead have rights. For Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and general Kanaka (no direct lineage), human bones are very much alive and are believed to protect living descendants who in turn have a kuleana (responsibility) to respect and care for their ancestors and ancestral places of rest. Dr. Kauanui expressed the complexity of issues surrounding grave desecration which include arrests, negligence, a lack of interest from younger generations, and even an incident of suicide triggered by legal bouts. Carrying out their kuleana (responsibility to care for the dead) is also particularly difficult when jobs are on the line and when law enforcement use intimidation tactics against emotionally distraught locals.

Dr. Kauanui also recognizes the fact that these issues resonate not only with Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) but to the wider community, to the individual that simultaneously deals with being Hawaiian, a Christian, an archaeologist, and perhaps a construction worker or a law enforcer. As these issues are not black and white, we should all be prompted to think and act accordingly.

To hear more about indigenous politics, tune into Dr. Kauanui's public affairs radio program, "Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond" which airs on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Tuesday of each month from 4-5pm EST on WESU, Middletown, CT. Past episodes are also archived at www.indigenouspolitics.com. Of particular interest might be "Desecration at Kawai'hao Church" from March 11, 2011.

Theoretical Archaeology Group at Berkeley May 6-8th

2011-04-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up on the next TAG meeting - it'll be at UC Berkeley over the weekend of the 6-8th May. The theme is 'Archaeology of and in the Contemporary World', a favorite topic of our bloggers here at Trace|work, who'll be out in force: - Check out the 'strata/palimpsest' poster session and 'Apocalyptic Imaginations: Disaster, Ruination, and Resilience'

There are many, many wonderful looking sessions over the course of the weekend - the difficulty will be choosing which ones to go to - Hope to see you there!

Que queremos? Justicia y Verdad! (What do we want? Justice and Truth!)

2011-04-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

"It's said that the bones of the dead tell no lies. In many cases, they speak on their own behalf, telling stories of pain, violence and abuse...they speak of the crimes against humanity, of the genocide committed by the Army against the indigenous population." - Rigoberta Menchu Tum on clandestine burials from Guatemala genocide, 1992.

Photo by Jonathan Moller, 2000, Nebaj, Quiche, Guatemala, "Praying at the gravesite of a man killed and buried by guerillas in 1983."*

On April 7, 2011, following the "New Pathways to Justice Conference: An International Conference to Stop Violence Against Women in Central America" at Lehman College, was the opening of a traveling photo exhibit at the Leonard Lief Library titled, "Refugees Even After Death: A Ques t for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation." The photographs were taken by Jonathan Moller, between May 2000 and July 2001, as a staff photographer for the Forensic Anthropology team of the Office of Peace and Reconciliation of the Quiche Catholic Diocese in Guatemala. The images are connected to the ongoing forensic exhumations of clandestine burials, representing a small fraction of the 40,000 disappeared, that resulted from over 36 years of civil war between local rebels and the Guatemalan government.

Unlike other cases of archaeological exhumations of human remains, the indigenous people of Quiche, Guatemala - survivors of the Guatemalan Army acts of genocide - were in support of forensic archaeological work and sought to recover the remains of their loved ones for three primary reasons: for proper reburial, for collective proof of the horrendous acts adamantly denied by the Guatemalan government/army officials, and to charge those responsible for the injustice. But as mere words cannot adequately justify the impact of the horror surrounding genocide, Moller's traveling photographs resituate the intensity of emotion, the suffering of the victims, and the survivors' senses of loss, unity, desperation for justice, and even their sense of hope behind the fatigue of 15 years of hiding.

Moller's twenty or so photographs on display strongly demonstrate the power of images and their ability to evoke both conflicting and concordant emotions from viewers, which in a way reflects the very nature of the photographs' subject matter. How is it that I was drawn to the rich colors, beautiful landscape, and the captured feelings emanating from the people in the photographs and yet fearful of looking too closely at each portrayal of sadness, loss and despair?

The universal contortion of the face and downward turn of the mouth expressing grief on the survivor's faces found me fighting back tears and failing twice. I couldn't help but replace the faces and bones of the Quiche victims with those of whom I have lost or fear losing in today's heightened belligerent state. What do you do when the army shoots down your family and denies that it even happened? How do you cope with hiding until the Peace Accord was signed some 15 years later while knowing your likely deceased loved one may be lying in a ditch like road kill or eaten by wild animals?

How do you react when you realize that the skeleton unearthed before you is wearing your father's favorite trousers?

As the exhibit panels indicate, the families and forensic archaeologists involved continue to risk their lives as they, Guatemalan human rights organizations, other international human rights organizations, foreign governments and the Catholic Church wish to push forward with these exhumations, even in the face of resistance from some military sectors and the 90% of crimes that go unpunished.

So, what can we think about here? As a student of archaeology, exhumations like the ones in Quiche, Guatemala feel right when they are favorable in the eyes of the victims and survivors of wartime tragedies and when local indigenous groups are closely involved. Their involvement represences a level of reverence of which we may be too ignorant to realize and therefore unable to carry out. These bones live, tell stories, seek justice, bear our grief and are, for some, harbingers of hope.

* All photographs are taken from the "Refugees Even After Death: A Quest for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation" Exhibit at the Leonard Lief Library of Lehman College, 250 Bedford Park West, Bronx, New York.

Inhabiting The Unfinished Past: Isaias Rojas- Perez Speaks At Columbia

2011-04-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Isaias Rojas-Perez, recent graduate of John Hopkins University and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark came to Columbia University on April 14 as our third speaker in the Ontologies of Exhumation lecture series. His lecture, titled “Inhabiting Unfinished Pasts: Law, Transitional Justice, and Mourning in Post War Peru,” considered how survivors and relatives of victims of state terror engage in state-sponsored legal projects aiming to put an end to legacies of violence, impunity, and forgetfulness in cases of gross human rights violations that took place during the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s.

In August of 2003, after two years of work, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) submitted its final report to then President Alejandro Toledo. The Peruvian TRC concluded that over 69,000 people died in twenty years of internal war between the Peruvian security forces and the guerrilla groups Shining Path and MRTA. Rojas-Perez described the experience of violence and terror in the Peruvian Andes as “an attack against cultural practices and what it means to be human beings.”

In his talk, Rojas-Perez focused specifically on how mothers of the desaparecidos [missing persons] engage the forensic excavation of clandestine mass graves in Los Cabitos, a military base in Ayacucho, Peru that served as a headquarters of the state sponsored counterinsurgency campaign. According to testimonial evidence, Los Cabitos was a major center of torture and extrajudicial execution of suspects of terrorism. The forensic excavation provided hard evidence to confirm those allegations and questioned longstanding official denial of the detention, disappearance and extrajudicial execution of accused terrorists at the site. After almost five years of work, the team of forensic archaeologists of the Peruvian Legal Medicine Institute exhumed around 100 complete bodies—including a number of children. The remains contained evidence of torture, blindfolding, and the binding of hands. There is also evidence supporting that the victims were forced to dig their own graves. In order to mask these abuses and thwart potential future forensic work, the perpetrators sprinkled the bodies with lime salt to expedite the decomposition of the flesh. There was also evidence of the existence of furnaces in which the military allegedly burned the bodies of their victims, using Nazi-like technologies of disposal of bodies. However, the forensic work was less successful in identifying and individualizing the victims. Thus, the bodies could not be returned to their relatives for proper burial.

The relatives of desaparecidos attending the exhumations were witnesses to these “landscapes of devastation” In his talk, Rojas-Perez discussed how the relatives of the desaparecidos appropriated the outcomes of the excavations to reclaim the past and assert truth against official denial. For seeking their missing sons, these mothers were defamed- labeled as drunks, madwomen, even terrorists themselves. The truth uncovered during the forensic excavations confirmed their allegations and allowed them to indict official denial.

However, because the bodies of the desaparecidos could not be individually identified, their families were never given the opportunity to mourn the remains, making complete closure impossible. Rojas-Perez spoke of how with no identifiable bodies to mourn, uncertainty continues. These wandering souls form communities of the dead- maintaining agency even without a physical body- haunting the living through dreams, offering some reassurance, some peace, some articulation that they once lived. The wandering of the ghosts mirrors the wandering of their living relatives- displaced, searching for a body.

The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Committee has made great strides in aiding the prosecution of the perpetrators of state violence and the breaking of public silence about the fate of the disappeared, but the past is still “unfinished”- and the wandering living and dead will continue to inhabit Peru. Current President Garcia, who himself is still under investigation for human rights abuses committed during his first tenure (1985-1990), is still in power and has attempted to grant immunity to perpetrators of gross human rights violations. However, stories such as those of the desaparecidos make such attempts not only illegal, but immoral. Thus, it can be said that that the violence of the past is a matter of an ongoing struggle, rather than reconciliation.

Fernando Moscoso on Forensic Archaeology in Guatemala: Looking Back, Writing Recent History, & Advocating for the Use of Forensic Evidence in Court

2011-03-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

On March 10, 2011, archaeologist Fernando Moscoso attended Columbia University’s Archaeologies of Contemporary Conflict seminar, where he spoke to students and visitors about his experiences applying forensic techniques to the study of mass human rights violations in Guatemala. Moscoso’s presentation was preceded by a laudatory introduction outlining his professional trajectory and his many contributions to the fields of forensics, archaeology, and human rights. Trained as a specialist in Mayan archaeology, Moscoso received his Master’s at Stanford University. In 1992, he helped found the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala (FAFG, Fundación de Antropología de Guatemala) and served as its Director between 1992 and 1998. In addition to the praise that Moscoso and the FAFG have received within an ever-expanding global network of human rights advocates, Moscoso himself has been decorated with a range of public recognition, such as Time Magazine having named him one of the most pioneering researchers, thinkers, and human rights advocates of the 1990s. Throughout the description of his achievements, one thing remained constant: Moscoso’s dedication to innovative ways of thinking about forensics, history, memory, and human rights.

Photo from http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FAFG.html

Moscoso framed his presentation as an attempt to describe “the state of forensic archaeology in Guatemala.” In a field where practitioners often collaborate across geographic regions, continents, and nations, this desire to describe the specific characteristics of Guatemalan forensic archeological practices is a telling one. More telling still was Moscoso’s insertion of his own development as an archeologist as a part of this larger historical narrative. Like many other Guatemalan anthropologists, Moscoso’s first experiences in the field were heavily entangled with the study and excavation of Mayan artifacts. Guatemala, like many of its Central American neighbors, has a rich history – a history that is marked by the Spanish Conquista, the ensuing colonial period and independence movements, and a multitude of changes between rural and urban life and forms of agricultural subsistence that took place throughout these periods. As a result, archaeology was almost completely centered around the study of distant histories regarding indigenous culture.

Before 1992, archaeologists working in Guatemala were almost uniformly interested in the Mayan archaeological record and issues of patrimony and history linked to it. In 1992, things changed. Suddenly, archaeology was recognized as a way of documenting, understanding, and uncovering powerfully revealing evidence of the armed conflict that had been consuming Guatemala for more than thirty-six years; an armed conflict that despite its extreme violence had gone unnoticed by many Guatemalans. With much of the violence relegated to the rural regions of Guatemala, not seeing violence often led to misunderstanding it or simply not recognizing its powerful, even pervasive existence. For Moscoso, this change in intellectual focus was not merely constitutive of a general shift taking place among Guatemalan archaeologists and anthropologists. It was also indicative of a personal revelation and the beginning of Moscoso’s more nuanced understanding of Guatemala and its violent past.

Photo from http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FAFG.html

In an honest and revealing tone, Moscoso described an excavation that he conducted in 1992. The focus of the investigation was to study Mayan artifacts. What Moscoso found, however, were “modern remains.” Moscoso described the powerful impact that this experience had on him. In search of clues regarding a distant past, Moscoso found himself facing a more immediate history whose brutality could not be ignored. For many Guatemalans and the wider global community, the extreme violence experienced in rural regions of the country were often not recognized, ignored, or simply not seen. Moscoso was no different. However, unlike those who feared finding an explanation for the existence of so many modern remains laying just beneath the earth’s surface, Moscoso and other archaeologists decided to figure things out. In figuring things out, thousands of mass graves would eventually be unearthed, the details of bloody deaths would be teased out from the confinement of silence, and relatives of the disappeared began to become more active in their calls for justice.

The birth of forensic archaeology in Guatemala began in 1992 when Clyde Snow and other Latin American forensic anthropology teams like the EAAF, came to Guatemala to oversee the first exhumation and to train local archaeologists in forensic methods. Since 1992, the exhumation of mass graves and the application of forensic techniques and technologies to the study of grave human rights abuses have not ceased. According to Mocoso, there are between one and two thousand mass graves that have now been exhumed in his country. In fact, Guatemala is the country with the most exhumation mass graves in the world. More shocking is the fact that this number of exhumations is more than the total number of exhumations conducted around the world. In the shadow of these staggering statistics, only one exhumation case has reached the Guatemalan courts. As Moscoso poignantly demonstrated, the sheer quantity of evidence of mass human rights violations is paired with an unpaved, practically absent road to justice. This, Moscoso suggested, is a reflection of the state’s willingness to look at, understand, and make sense of “La Violencia.”

In order to understand this blocked road to justice, we must understand the Guatemalan experience with political violence. This, as Moscoso, illustrated in his presentation is contingent on understanding the country’s history. Before the colonial period, there were over twenty-two indigenous communities living in what is now Guatemala. These communities had their own territories and languages. The members of these communities also owned or controlled the land that allowed them to subsist. With the arrival of the Spanish, ideas about ownership was mixed with a more complex system of land control. The resulting system of land tenure, known as comunales, stayed constant even after independence. However, in the mid-1900s, liberal governments put an end to this system in order to reap the benefits of controlling land and the resulting export of agricultural goods. Simultaneously, European migrants were brought to Guatemala in order to start and oversee coffee plantations, production, and export.

The resulting need for land and labor prompted the first attempts to create laws that would regulate land and work. Under these laws, indigenous communities were required to work plantation land for at least one third of the year. Those who did not want to participate in this system were forced to work indefinitely in order to build highways and improve aspects of the country’s general infrastructure. As a result of this legislation, indigenous communities grew poorer. They had no control over their own lands, and they were obligated to work in an unofficial form of slavery. In the mid-twentieth century, indigenous communities reacted to this and led a peaceful revolution, known as the “Revolución de Octubre” which resulted in an agrarian reform that abolished forced labor. All non-cultivated lands went to the indigenous communities that had been cultivating them. At the same time the US staunchly supported the ag-industry and defended Cold War inspired politics. The result was the US’s backing of a counter-revolution. In 1954, the Guatemalan president was overthrown, and indigenous communities were forced to return their land to the new government. Finally, in the 1970s guerrilla movements fighting against this system began to gain momentum. The result of these developments and political intersections was almost four decades of armed conflict. As national and local governments, guerrilla fighters, and indigenous peasants were caught in this conflict, a long period of harrowing political violence ensued. As a consequence, an estimated 200,000 people were killed, 50,000 people were disappeared, and over 1 million were displaced.

Photo from http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FormerMilitaryDetachments.html

In light of this history, Moscoso’ experience unearthing “modern” remains was a moment of realization: The unknown past was not necessarily the one of hundreds or thousands of years ago. The past that needed to be revealed and studied was the more recent one, in which a wide variety of latent, political, social, and economic factors resulted in the massacre, abuse, and disappearance of thousands of Guatemalans. Moscoso’s insistence that the “state of Guatemalan forensic archaeology” must be understood within in broader understanding of the country’s history – of his own history – is a call for understanding the ways in which extreme forms of violence are permitted. More importantly, it is a call for understanding why a nation finds it so difficult to look back, to uncover suppressed stories, and to recognize a period of violence in which everyone was implicated, whether they were aware of it or not. For Moscoso, forensic archaeology in Guatemala is about looking back and moving forward. In order to move forward, however, archaeologists must actively participate in the excavation of the past. However, more importantly, they must continue to face the looming threat of political violence and look for new paths of bringing perpetrators to justice. With thousands of graves now opened, the struggle is to find ways in which the evidence that forensic archaeologists collect can be made public, disseminated, and brought into courts of law. The struggle is to give communities and individuals whose lives were almost erased completely a voice in which the recent past can be rewritten from their perspective.

Smell Map of NYC

2011-03-10T11:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/29/opinion/20090829-smell-map-feature.html

This seems slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it's a concept that has been bandied about quite a bit in discussion about phenomenology and such. Following Ingold's reasoning, I think you could argue that a map like this isn't as visually biased as it first seems. We use each of our senses to orient the others. Smell is a particularly experiential sense, linked closely to memory. While we lack the ability to conveniently reproduce smells, we are often able to recall through close description the experience of them.

I believe that the Chicago Tribune also ran a similar feature a couple years before this as well. Note that the most prominent smell in Manhattan according to this map seems to be urine.

forensic archaeology in Guatemala

2011-03-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

Ontologies of Exhumation: a speaker series considering the ethics and philosophy of archaeological exhumation.

Fernando Moscoso Moller, founder of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team
Thursday 10th March, 4.10pm.
963 Schermehorn Ext.

The second speaker in this series is Fernando Moscoso Moller, who will be talking about his experiences carrying out forensic exhumations in Guatemala. We will be discussing the role of NGO’s, and thinking about the tensions between forensic practice and the need to attend to local sensibilities around death and exhumation. If you would like to join us the readings for the class can be found on Courseworks at the link below.

The ‘Ontologies of Exhumation’ speaker series is sponsored by the Council for Graduate Schools Project for Scholarly Integrity, the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Archaeology, Columbia University, and is running in conjunction with the ‘Archaeologies of Contemporary Conflict’ graduate seminar at Columbia.

Please contact Zoe Crossland for more information and for the readings (zc2149@columbia.edu)

Egypt’s Antiquities Czar Quits: What’s next for Zahi Hawass?

2011-03-05T07:27:00.000-08:00

The archaeology and Egyptology worlds are abuzz with questions, gossip, and rumor surrounding the resignation of Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Antiques Minister, Thursday in Cairo. Dr. Hawass is a man about whom it is easy to have mixed feelings. Everyone loves Indiana Jones, and Zahi is clearly his heir. He's the most well-known and easily identifiable Egyptian since Omar Sharif played Yuri Zhivago. This passionate Egyptian with the omnipresent hat has done more for Egyptology than anyone since Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone in the early 1800s. At the same time, he has been in office for 30+ years, has not trained a replacement, is very tight with Suzanne Mubarak, and prefers to be addressed as Pharaoh. And, oh yes, he misspoke repeatedly about the safety of Egypt’s antiquities, reassuring the world they were protected, when they weren’t.

What lies in the future for Zahi Hawass? As an Egyptian American, a student of archaeology, and a fan of the absurd and humorous possibilities of predicting the future fortune of others, I have assembled a list of potential options for Dr. Hawass.

Becomes CAO (Chief Archaeological Officer) of the Discovery Channel and the best paid archaeologist in history.
Heads new archaeological institute in Germany, backed by those nice folks who gave him a personal CT scanner for his mummies. His compensation is more than the average Egyptian wage of $2 a day.
Becomes a tycoon by merging Stetson and Borsalino into his hat company. Corners the international explorer’s hat market with his $45 signature replica collectible model, currently available only at the King Tut Store.
Becomes fabulously wealthy selling impossible to tell from the real thing reproductions of Egyptian art exclusively through Walmart.
Goes into the antiquities business, opening successful shops in Geneva, Rabat and Shanghai.
Takes a break from all the terrible events of 2011 with Hosni and Suzanne in Jordan.
Sits at home in Heliopolis obsessively checking Facebook, waiting for the people of Egypt, or, perhaps, the Sphinx, to beg him to return to the job only he can do. It will be chaos without him.
Consults Kim Kardashian about how he, too, can earn $10,000 per tweet, which he will use to safeguard Egypt’s antiquities.
Is seen dining in LA with Lindsey Lohan in that cute white mummy dress she wore to court. Charlie Sheen stops by the table for a chat and introduces Zahi to his goddesses.
Runs off with California babe archaeologist Dr. Kara Cooney after friending her on Facebook.

- Sylvia VT Calabrese

Slobodan Mitrovic speaks on: “Fresh scars on the body of archaeology”

2011-02-17T17:11:00.000-08:00

From: http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/anthro/faculty/mitrovic/

In his paper, titled “Fresh scars on the body of archaeology: excavating mass- graves at Batajnica, Serbia,” Slobodan Mitrovic writes that “bodies… carry great potential to perpetrate their historicity and extend it well beyond any understanding.” This act of extending their history gives bodies a kind of agency over the living. Bodies are powerful because they are simultaneously “us” and “not us,” resembling our exteriors while belonging to a world quite apart from our own. Bodies are indexical, serving as a material reminder of a loved one. They are often iconic, representing the casualties of war, preserving a record of political change, reminding us of the power of ideas. In this context, the bodies Mitrovic encountered were read as evidence of the cruel and untimely deaths of the people that once resided in them.

In late 2001, Slobodan Mitrovic, a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center participated in an excavation of a series of mass graves on the outskirts of Batajnica, Serbia in cooperation with the International Committee on Missing People, the Belgrade District Court, and the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Belgrade. He came to speak with us about his experiences as a part of the ‘Ontologies of Exhumation’ speaker series at Columbia University, sponsored by the Council for Graduate Schools Project for Scholarly Integrity, the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Archaeology, and in conjunction with the ‘Archaeologies of Contemporary Conflict’ graduate seminar.

From: http://worldtravel.bloguez.com/worldtravel/1012340/Cuprija

The purpose of his excavation in Batajnica was to exhume the bodies of hundreds of Albanians massacred by Serbian militants during the Kosovo conflict and gather evidence of war crimes to present to the Hague Tribunal. His talk on his experiences in Batajnica and the discussion that followed raised important issues in modern forensic archaeology, most notably: the power and agency that a dead body possesses over the living, the power the living have over the meaning of the dead, and the role of affect and emotion in the excavation process.

The bodies Mitrovic excavated exerted their agency upon him through creating emotions and memories. A question posed to Mitrovic was whether he had a different reaction to disarticulated parts rather than a whole body. At first, he described the experience as jarring, but later it became just another part of his life at the excavation site. He did say however, that there would occasionally be a body with a defining feature that would throw him back into the tragic and human elements of the excavation. He gave the example of a red women’s shirt that retained its color after all of those years buried underground. He also showed us a picture of a wristwatch on a hand burned beyond all recognition. This image was particularly haunting, bringing to mind the stark image of a ticking clock buried so many feet under the earth amid disarticulated flesh, slowly silencing with no one to wind it. The bodies would later haunt Mitrovic. He would see objects in the “real world” that would bring him back to the grave.

At the end of the day, however, his role was that of an archeologist. He found the evidence that he was looking for, but not unmixed with a wave of “unusual insanity.” He would vainly try to justify, to understand what was done with these people, intermixing these justifications with thoughts of how the murderers messed up, how they could have been killed better. At the core of Mitrovic’s testimony was the idea that though archaeological theory and scientific objectivity are undoubtedly important, and are unarguably things we spend so much energy and time learning and developing; they are, ultimately, inadequate. They fall apart when faced with the undeniable evidence of human suffering. Mitrovic believes that bodies cannot ever fully belong to archaeology, because of their “connection to the visceral.”

From: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/48xx/481x/4816_Explorer_Vampire_
Forensics-03_04700300.JPGhttp://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/48xx/481x/
4816_Explorer_Vampire_

Forensics-03_04700300.JPG

Though the power of the corpse over the living is distinct, it does not have hegemony in the archaeological context. Instead, Forensics is a dialectical relationship between the two parties, the scientist and the corpse. By interacting with the remains, Mitrovic acted upon them just as they were acting upon him. Mitrovic’s authority as a professional archaeologist and as one of the few people who were granted permission to see these remains put him in a uniquely powerful position to exert his agency upon the dead.

As an interpreter of the events of Batajnica, he said that he felt a responsibility to bear witness to the world about what he saw. He said that though his contributions to the outcomes of the Hague Tribunal were limited, the paper he wrote was his act of bearing witness, and in turn his act of commemoration for those lost in the Kosovo conflict. He described the excavation as a process with multiple closures, and his attempts to identify the bodies as a way to bring them to life, to celebrate the difficult lives they were given.

The talk ended with an open question, directed to those in the room who had also excavated human remains. From these questions, one archaeologist described feeling that the bodies would haunt him, just as they did Mitrovic- and that they also helped him connect with his own corporeality. Another said that it surprised her, how industrial and factory- like the environment seemed. She catalogued remains that were in bags for 4 or 5 years before being returned to their burial places. These however, were dried bones- much easier to mistake for objects rather than human begins. In all accounts there was an underlying consensus that there is an ongoing conversation between the archaeologist and the material body, and in our profession it is essential to acknowledge this discourse and integrate this understanding into our practice of bearing witness to the past.

archaeology of grunge

2011-02-15T09:50:00.000-08:00

CBGB club facade, Bowery St, New York City. Photograph by Adam Di Carlo, taken 10/1/2005. Wikipedia Commons.

Interesting note in British Archaeology about an archaeology of grunge. Building on Paul Graves Brown's 2009 critique of the usual monumentalizing, place-based orientation towards musical heritage, Steve Ashby argues for a focus on the ephemeral, disposable detritus of popular music: "material created simply as a means to communicate information about what really mattered - the music".

What sort of archaeology of sound and music might we imagine for New York City? Might we tell these archaeological histories not through text and words, but through sound and image? Arguably, the songs and shows we hear today are already doing that. Whether Lady Gaga reworking Madonna for the 20teens, or Scissor Sister singing 21st century disco - current artists continue to draw upon and rework the material traces of New York's music, providing a radical challenge to our archaelogical modes of story telling.

Graves-Brown, P (2009). "Nowhere man: urban life and the virtualization of popular music." Popular Music History 4(2): 220–241.

Ontologies of Exhumation

2011-02-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

Announcing the first of our speaker series 'Ontologies of Exhumation' which will be considering the ethics and philosophy of archaeological exhumation.

Slobodan Mitrovic from the Graduate Center, CUNY will be talking on Thursday 10th February about his experiences carrying out forensic excavations in the former Yugoslavia. We will be reading his article ‘Fresh scars on the body of archaeology’ and considering questions of affect and exhumation.

The ‘Ontologies of Exhumation’ speaker series is sponsored by the Council for Graduate Schools Project for Scholarly Integrity, the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Archaeology, Columbia University, and is running in conjunction with the ‘Archaeologies of Contemporary Conflict’ graduate seminar at Columbia.

PLEASE NOTE: This event is part of a graduate seminar. Please contact Zoe Crossland for more information (zc2149@columbia.edu), and for access to the class readings.

Watch this space for a review of the event

park slope plane crash

2010-12-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

Well, the holidays are almost upon us and everyone is busy writing papers and/or grading. The blog will be quiet over the next few weeks until the spring semester kicks in. In the meantime, here is a fascinating piece of disaster archaeology from the NY Times City Room blog:

Cityroom blog: park slope plane crash - the lingering scars

Palimpsest - just some thoughts

2010-12-06T19:02:00.000-08:00

I had to look the word up- a fragment of a manuscript or scroll scraped off to be reused. Scraping is a specific act that to me implied some tenacity on the part of the inscribed. The idea of reuse also seemed to help convey some part of the past manuscript forward. In architecture the word refers specifically to a shadow of one structure on another such as that seen here. These shadows adhere to our New York as traces of past cityscapes. The city is full of such shadows.

Other traces of past New Yorks are still prevalent and some have been captured on a low tech website. (http://www.forgotten-ny.com/) Sandwiched between pages of photographs documenting the taphonomy of advertisements painted on brick buildings around the city is a barely legible sign for Globe Electrotype. Electrotyping was a process by which multiple copies of printing plates were made. Globe was located on 38th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. A quick search of the web for the company yielded mostly fragments of inaccessible texts:

the Globe Electrotype Company, 209 West Thirty-eighth street, New York, is in a better position than RICHARD CROWE ... Richard Crowe and Lew Wallace, who LEW WALLACE direct the firm's activities, are making arrangements with their ... in this book

Page 33

Printing, 1929
Publisher: Walden, Sons & Mott New York
·

New York is often discussed as a fluid place but plastic and sticky seem a bit better suited. Traces of this "scroll" resist being scraped from the canyons of this city and each week I only need go a few blocks out of my way to see traces of my own family's history. Globe was great grandfather's business. (It seems there may be some intersections with todays topics.)

Retethering My Identity to Jackson Heights

2010-12-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

I spent the first few years of my life in Jackson Heights, Queens, where the bulk of my Dominican family lived at the time. My folks left New York in the early 1980s for the almost unimaginably distant state of Texas in pursuit of work, maintaining contact with our New York family, but never returning east again in any permanent way.

The stories my folks told of Jackson Heights revolved around Dominican people in decidedly Dominican places. My visits during the 1980s seemed to confirm that, making it my own Dominican Republic, or something like that. At least I was sure it wasn't Mexican, the dominant Latino identity in Texas and the ethnicity with which I spent the greatest time negotiating during my childhood and adolescence.

People spoke Spanish (and Spanglish) the way my father did in Jackson Heights. They ate red beans or moros with their arroz blanco and tostones. The accordion was an unknown instrument there. Neither the term orale nor the term güey made up any part of the Jackson Heights vocabulary as I knew it. Jackson Heights was my personal claim to "Dominicanness" or, perhaps more accurately, to "non-Mexicanness" and "non-Texanness."

That link remained uncorrupt in my overly-proud mind until my late teens, when by chance I ran into another native of Jackson Heights. By the standard of my social context then, he was white -- white as it was possible to be, as he was a suburban doctor. But our conversation led to the discovery that we shared a common origin place, Jackson Heights. How different his origin place was than mine! His Jackson Heights was an Italian-American neighborhood, one that his family left not long after the flood of Dominicans that brought my family there had swept over that part of Queens. I nodded my head proudly at the mention of the replacement of people I considered white by the great brown flood, one that I'd not heard of before that moment. But the mention of a later brown flood, an influx of migrants from the Indian subcontinent, threw me for a loop. The story of Dominican triumph, developed in my mind only seconds earlier, fell, and quickly. I listened with greater humility then, as my claim to outside ethnicity crumbled and the notion of palimpsest arose in my mind for the first time. I was more than shocked when the doctor told me that most New York neighborhoods experienced such turnover. The white doctor became Italian-American that instant. He cured me of my cough and of a certain social blindness at the same time.

Since I returned to New York several months ago, I've lived in Corona, Queens (where my Dominican family now resides in the wake of the "other" brown wave), but I have made it something of a private mission to explore the place to which my Dominicanness was once tethered. More specifically, I've spent a fair amount of my spare time in Jackson Heights searching for Dominican "survivals" in terms of businesses, homes, and other material aspects. My Dominican family's world existed largely within the spatial confines of Roosevelt Avenue, near the Jackson Heights station, so my semi-ethnographic jaunts have been limited generally to the same area.

Since my first visit, however, my interests have moved quickly from seeking Dominican survivals (of which there are relatively few in that area) to studying the latest brown flood: the arrival (ironically for me) of Mexican migrants in great numbers. I've been told by many that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, most Mexicans in New York having been born in Mexico. Though I didn't quite expect it, the Mexicano presence, including the occasional "que onda guey," makes me feel more at home than any other aspect of New York City. And, getting to what this post is actually supposed to be about, the material symbols of Mexicanness have become a sort of conglomerate anchor for me, coming together in my mind bringing me a sense of familiarity in this otherwise confusing and often unfriendly city.

I understand the symbols I see in contemporary Jackson Heights. I know why the serpent chokes under the talon of the Aztec eagle. I know the Old English font wrapped around the Aztec Nacion storefront. I know many of the songs I hear on the new Roosevelt. I recognize its smells. I know its colors. I know its Virgen. Maybe I even know some of its thoughts. Whatever the case, I've come to see that while I'm Dominican in Dallas, I'm Mexican in New York. Viva la raza, pues. I've attached some examples of the symbols that helped me come to that realization, retethering my identity to Jackson Heights.

Contemporary Roosevelt Avenue, draped in a new red, white, and green standard. The photo suffers from lighting problems, but if you look closely you'll see that the Mexican flag floats in some form over many, many doors.

Restaurant in Jackson Heights just off Roosevelt. What a fantastic business name! It truly does represent the latest Chicano frontier!

A Mexican flag placed proudly in the window of a home on my old block.

Appropriating the Past on the Architectural Façades of Manhattan

2010-12-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

With all the commotion happening on the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan, it can be a challenge to remember to look past the storefronts and advertisements that compete for attention at street level and admire the detail of the architectural façades that loom above our heads. The extent to which architects have gone to design and execute the façades of their buildings is a testament to how important a building’s façade is to its identity and character, and together these various identities contribute to the greater identity of Manhattan. Often, even newly renovated apartment buildings will go to great lengths to preserve the history of their façades, giving New York a face of tremendous diversity that pulls inspiration from all regions and time periods. While the majority of these elaborate façades reference design trends from Europe, once and a while we may be surprised by the artistic and cultural themes that some architects have chosen to represent the identity of their structures. I have been surprised by architectural façades on two occasions within the Upper West Side alone.

The first building I would like to discuss is the Cliff Dwelling, designed in 1916 by architect H. L. Meader. This building, located at 243 Riverside Drive, between 96th and 97th Streets, was originally built as an apartment hotel, but was converted into a residential co-op in 1979.[1] This building is remarkable for its unusual terra cotta friezes, which draw upon distinctly American themes of diverse origins. What makes this façade so perplexing is its bizarre integration of visual references from the American Southwest with those from ancient Mesoamerica. The most elaborate frieze stretches across the strip of wall between the second and third floor windows, with accents above the main entrance in the center, and the corners on either end. The corners carry a clear Native American reference with the depiction of a cow skull flanked by flint-tipped arrows, which also seem to relate to the central bull or cow head motif above the main entrance.

The wall frieze, however, surely draws upon Mesoamerican designs, although exactly which ones is more difficult to pinpoint. The practice of carving elaborately designed stone friezes onto building façades is common throughout Mesoamerican architecture and can be seen at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, and also at various Yucatan Maya sites like Chichen Itza. Moreover, the geometric brickwork surrounding the Cliff Dwelling friezes certainly seems to point to the Zapotec site of Mitla. Yet upon closer inspection, the figures on the Cliff Dwelling friezes are not more than a vague echo of Mesoamerican designs, as if H. L. Meader had never seen Mesoamerican friezes himself, but had only heard or read descriptions of them. The snakes and mountain lions of the Cliff Dwelling friezes are rendered far too naturalistically, and the geometrically stylized “masks” are sort of a confusing hybrid of Teotihuacan faces, Zapotec funerary urns, and Mayan Puuc style Chaak masks. Just what was Meader trying to express with these friezes? An intriguing comparison can be made between the Cliff Dwelling and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (1919-21), as both draw on elements of Mesoamerican art and architecture. In an effort to develop a purely American architectural style, Wright often looked towards Native American and Mesoamerican architecture for inspiration, and he was a primary instigator of the Mayan Revival architectural movement that followed in the 1920s and 1930s. Was Meader already striving for a similar architectural revolution in 1916 on the east coast that would favor American motifs over European ones?

Ten years later, in 1926, architect Thomas W. Lamb would build an even bolder cultural hybrid of non-European antiquity that likewise serves as a reminder that anything goes regarding New York architectural façades. The Pythian Temple, located at 135 W 70th Street, was built as a sort of clubhouse for the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal order founded during the Civil War. Apparently having an affinity for the ancient world, the Pythian Temple in New York was designed with explicit references to Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian architecture, curiously united by an art deco aesthetic. The main entrance, crowned by a pair of sphinxes in profile, displays a cacophony of iconographic motifs that include Egyptian hieroglyphics, columns topped with the heads of Assyrian divinities, miniature Assyrian lamassus carved in relief, and an impressive array of geometric floral designs in brilliantly painted terra cotta tiling.

And this is nothing compared with the top of the building, which recedes into a series of balconies that are flanked by two pairs of full color, colossal sculptures of seated Pharaohs. Although the building was originally designed with a windowless façade, today the façade is mostly windows as the building was radically renovated in 1982 when the interior was converted into condominiums. Among its various uses, the Pythian Temple once served as a recording studio for Decca Records where such rock icons of the 1950s as Bill Haley & His Comets, Buddy Holly, and Billie Holiday are said to have used the studio.[2]

The Pythian, unusual as it is on its own, is even more bizarre in the context of it neighbor, a Catholic school with its own relief sculptures of Catholic clergymen and abbreviated gothic architectural elements such as pointed arches. The eccentric façades of these two buildings appear to be engaged in a humorous stand-off, of which the Pythian is bound to emerge as the winner of the dual. Keeping my eyes fixed halfway to the skyline, I can’t help but notice the sudden presence of a multitude of characters and odd personalities that adorn the residential buildings of this Upper West Side neighborhood. In a sense it seems only fitting that the buildings of New York City should be as distinct and variable as the people that live within their walls.

[1] Gray, Christopher. “Streetscapes/Cliff Dwelling at 96th Street and Riverside Drive: A Terra Cotta Masterpiece in Unusual Dimensions.” The New York Times, January 6, 2002.

[2] Gray, Christopher. “An Improbable Cradle of Rock Music.” The New York Times, June 21, 2009.

Links:

http://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/manhattan/the-cliff-dwelling-243-riverside-drive/1846

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/realestate/streetscapes-cliff-dwelling-96th-street-riverside-drive-terra-cotta-masterpiece.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/realestate/21scapes.html?_r=1

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UWS/UWS009.htm

A Really Greater New York

2010-12-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

On a website of ‘Strange Maps’, I came across an early nineteenth century image of a distorted and bloated Manhattan. The title of the particular post, “A Really Greater New York,” explores a 1911 proposal for the expansion of New York City by Dr. T Kennard Thompson, a consulting engineer and urban planner. The proposal called for the reclamation of 50 miles of land from the New York City Bay and East River. If carried out, the water dividing Manhattan and Brooklyn would be non-existent and the 5-mile distance between Staten Island and Manhattan would be significantly lessened.

Through some more searching, I was able to find Dr. Lennard’s radical proposal in an issue of Popular Science Monthly from 1916. In the volume he propounds, “New York’s City Hall would become the center of a really greater New York. Having a radius of twenty five miles, and… ample room for a population of twenty-five million, the entire project would be carried out in a few years.”

Now of course this idea was never realized, but for a few fleeting moments I was overcome with images of ‘imagine if’. Imagine if the Empire State Building was never constructed because it was never necessary or imagine if the Brooklyn Bridge was razed to the ground. I was left considering what was laden in this realm of possibility of “A Really Greater New York”? And to what extent would our collective memory of New York have been altered?

I also recently stumbled upon a series of photos from 1960s New York City. The Mad Men-esque photographs signify an actualized, but now defunct image of Manhattan. Vibrant Images of classic yellow cabs, women in voluminous skirts and cat eye-glasses, buildings cloaked in adverts of a bygone era, all trigger feelings of nostalgia. Once again I was flooded with imagined memories. In my mind’s eyes, I was watching a woman ever so coolly take a drag from a cigarette and another blissfully soak up the sun on a busy street corner.

These evocative images, one a map of a proposed future, the other of snapshot of the past, seem an index to situate us in the present and a stimuli for the proliferation of memories. Memories of this sort Mary Warnock argues, reifies the past as continuous with the present and effectively allows us to live through it (949). And it is by reliving a memory that we experience the pleasure and sense of creativity that lies within the historical imagination (949). Viewing these pictures (you can see the larger images on the websites) are a wonderful exercise in historical imagination. How does one imagine past and possible future in the present? What can we learn about individual and collective memory/imagination by such an exercise?

Links:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/24668?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+bigthink/blogs/strange-maps+%28Strange+Maps%29

http://citynoise.org/article/10513/in/new_york@ny

Mary Warnock, "Memory: The Triumph Over Time"

Popular Science Monthly Volume 88, "A Really Greater New York"

Symmetries of Εικόν (Eikόn)

2010-11-30T06:57:00.000-08:00

The Rubin Museum of Art has been intriguing enough to host a remarkable exhibition entitled Embodying the Holy: Icons in Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. It tries to shed some light on parallels between the Eastern Orthodox Christian and Tibetan Buddhist sacred traditions in function, subject matter, composition, and story telling strategies. Pairing some 63 icons from important private collections and the Museum of Russian Icons (Clinton, Massachusetts) with 26 from the Rubin Museum of Art and other collections, the authors wanted to intrigue our skepticism and see whether orthodox icon paintings, iconostases, and crucifixes or Buddhist thangkas (Tibetan silk paintings with embroidery depicting a Buddhist deity), and reliquaries are essentially serving the same functionality. The possibility of salvation, battles of good vs. evil, notion of heaven and hell are the concepts introduced by these works of art from 2 very remote and separate regions of the world.

Although unconvinced in the beginning, I began to see some symmetries between the two realms of depicting the Holy. Exhibition shows us the different notions of compassion manifested in the iconography of Mary and Jesus and that of Tara, the goddess of Tibet and the feminine embodiment of compassion. Parallels are also seen in the depiction of ‘’family trees’’, such as Christianity’s Tree of Jesse and Buddhism’s diagrammatic charting of the deities and teachers connected to particular historic figures.

An 18^th century Byzantine icon from Greek Asia Minor depicting Christ adorned in flowing red robe, rising from the tomb amid fields like blue and green waves is exhibited nearby 19^th century Tibetan thangka in which the life stories of the Buda are depicted in colored profusion. A considerable number of works on view, show us the canonic representations of saints and teachers from the Russian or Greek Orthodox Church. This impressive collection is juxtaposed to an impressive collection of images of Tibetan lamas, ascetics and yogis represented in a group of 18^th century paintings or sacred statues.

The exhibit tries to explore for the first time, how two very different religious traditions have used very analogous visual language and iconography to express fundamental religious narratives. The symmetry of both Buddhism and eastern Orthodox Christianity translate their written and oral traditions into symbolic imagery for the same sole purpose to convey the religious message. Viewed through Peirce’s sign typology, such imagery (Tibetan or Christian Orthodox) is, in fact, based on a convention that personifies iconic similarity no matter how distant and isolated these two realms of religious thought might be.

~Branka