Comments on the Carrlands Project
I largely agree with Sekedat’s thoughtful review of Pearson’s Carrlands digital media project, although I maintain some reservations. Pearson’s apparent goal is to make the undeniable depth of meaning and experience in the north Lincolnshire landscape accessible to the public. Initially this would seem laudable; public outreach, and indeed the preservation of whole landscapes for the appreciation of the non-specialist, seems to dominate current debates in CRM and heritage scholarship. More specifically, the general school of British landscape archaeology within which this project’s structuring principles can be contextualized has often maintained an approach which is vigorously accessible to the non-specialist, through placing emphasis on the experiential (e.g. Edmonds 1999; although Pearson would presumably reject such categorization as an unnecessary generalization, and in some respects he may be right).
However, the notion of ‘making accessible’ itself demands further evaluation. Pearson invites us to engage with the landscape in a more meaningful way by listening to a series of audio files. This could arguably be seen to carry the perhaps unsettling implication that the listener may have been unable to fully appreciate her surroundings without a specialist (Pearson) assisting in her interpretation of it. The voices and sounds, potentially arranged, we must remember, according to an agenda, become vehicles for interpretation. A reticulate and multi-variant approach to landscape could be seen to be rejected in favor of a single trajectory of experience. There is no a priori reason for preferring one approach or the other, and again, I am sure that the Carrlands team would reject this assertion of their work as delineating an unavoidable path of interpretation. Yet the insistence on the importance of multivocality and of interweaving of narratives jars when considered alongside the somewhat parochial tendency to suppress the listener’s voice, narrative, individual story, call it what you will.
My second concern is with what I perceive as a dualism that emerges in these audio files. Frequently, stress is laid on the rural, the rustic, and the local. For example, tension between the local (the Carrs) and the supra-local (government; outsiders) is a very obvious theme in these pieces. This, perhaps, should not surprise us when we consider that this piece was conceived as ‘site-specific performance’ (another term that is often used carelessly and without proper consideration of its implications). The local, however, must be recognized as a construct, and not an ontological category which emerges ex nihilo. What is not local? Who is not local to some locality? Where does the local end? I would assert here that it is the case that the loci of attention in a given landscape are mutable and temporal; conversely, Pearson conceives of the Carrlands as a distinct discrete entity, Othering itself against a wider world. This, again, relates to (parochialist?) themes which run through this work. It also speaks of a reification of an idealized past in which things were not as they were today, and implicitly qualitatively better. Consequently, we may in part categorize the project as Romantic, with all the attendant criticism.
Finally, a personal note. I was born in Lincolnshire, about fifty miles from the Ancholme Valley, and am consequently, like Pearson, a ‘Yellow Belly’ in popular slang. Moreover, I lived in the flatlands (‘Fens’) of northern Cambridgeshire, a landscape not so very different from the Carrlands, for twenty years. I found that elements of the landscape, which had registered powerfully in my experience of it, were absent from Pearson’s synthesis. In particular, the absence of the paraphernalia of modernity, which so powerfully control the rhythms of the agro-deserts of Eastern England, are muted. The motorways, the sprawling overflow estates for Home Counties commuters, the vast coal-fired power stations, and the grim market towns whose prosperity has moved on, are concealed in Pearson’s piece. Again, I would argue that this should be understood within the context of his Romanticization of the English countryside, which frequently emerges in the work.
References
Edmonds, M. 1999: Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic. London: Routledge.