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Sense of Place
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BuckyE
468 posts

Re: Sense of Place
May 07, 2012, 22:59
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that when we feel the power of Nature out on the moors or the mountains, we are picking up vibes that were of great concern to our ancestors. But we're thinking about those vibes differently from the way they did, and they were more correct than are we, except their response was ineffective.

Malinowski, Levi-Strauss and who knows who else --it's been way too long since I was in school-- were, if I remember correctly, at some pains to point out that the "primitive," or "pre-literate" or "traditional" societies studied during the 19th and 20th centuries had few problems with believing and practicing what we might call magic, science and religion all at the same time and for much the same ends.

As part of that mindset, I imagine that no, our ancestors did not "experience their own perception of 'raw nature', connecting to the planet in the manner I, again, believe I do?" They certainly apprehended what I'd call Overarching Natural Forces: the wind, rain, the heavens, the life that keeps the weeds pushing up through the cracks. And sprouting all over my yard!

They also understood what I'd call their Local Ecologies in great detail. Note that both ONFs and LEs could, as we use the word, be called "Nature," or "wildness." In the sense that they exist without humans to create them, and with the caveats that ONFs are always beyond immediate human control, and LEs may or may not have been modified to greater or lesser degree by prior human intervention.

I imagine they had two Plans in mind. Plan A was "Hack, Burn, Eradicate, Extirpate and Generally Do Away With" anything in their LEs they couldn't immediately use to feed, clothe or house themselves. This was their magical/scientific approach to the Natural world. They were adept at it and serious about it.

Plan B, which ran concurrently with, and was a backup to Plan A, was "Propitiate and As Much As Possible Control" the ONFs. Whether that control was supposed to have come from from cairns on high places or promontories, henges by rivers, stone rows leading to ancestral cists, barrows or circles aligned to celestial events, etc etc doesn't matter. All of these Plan Bs and many more were tried over the ages. They were all prompted by experiences of "wildness," as noted above. No problem.

The problem comes in when we believe our ancestors' response to wildness might have some relevance to our experiences of the same wildness of the same ONFs. So sure, they could well have had dozens or hundreds of reasons for placing their monuments according to Plan B. The questions is, do we care what the reasons were? Given the nature of Plan B, I mean.
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Re: Sense of Place (BuckyE)		 Replies:
Re: Sense of Place (Littlestone)
Re: Sense of Place (GLADMAN)
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