Cultural landscapes - local knowledge versus outsiders' fresh eyes

Downtown Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin 1/2023

Thinking about cultural landscapes as I walked to my nearby grocery store, I imagined myself in a month or two immersed in my Japan project - biking and walking, on the lookout for features that attract my eye. The photos of traces from the past will serve as writing prompts so that I can explore the past (1875-1925) when infrastructure and modernization of mass-everything got going; and to appreciate what the society is now by contrast to then. Being able to "read" the landscape implies many things, things which set apart the people with local knowledge (deep or shallow) from those who have little or no way to fasten onto/tune into the surroundings.

This photo shows the old commercial district of the town, a place attracting buyers before the big box era of shopping centers at the outskirts of a town. For a first-time visitor one impression is the scale: this is comfortable to walk, possibly able to fit under the roof and footprint of a very large big-box store of today. A long-time local resident might know some of the shopkeepers and staff and may have purchased things over the years from some of the merchants. The cycle of annual events such as parades, debates and speeches, contests, seasonal decorations and entertainment will provide some memories of growing up in the area or the times as a parent with children of one's own. And even if not ready to spend money, being able to talk informally with a store owner about how to solve a problem is another way of making meaning here. Doubtless, a person of modest means will have a different set of relationships and memories in this scene than a person never wanting for money. And there could be patterns of difference in experiences by gender, age, ethnicity, religion, and so on, too.

What is called "local knowledge" has at least two dimensions. One is the ancient Greek distinction of Nomos/Physis (glossed as culture/nature, or perhaps subjective/objective). In the same way that Berlin and Kay did their famous color-chip sorting piles to discover where people of various language/cultures would make distinctions in the rainbow of the color palette (one calls it 'green' but another classifies it as 'blue'), so too of cultural vision of a place --one's own, or a place visited far from one's frame of reference, assumptions, meanings. That is to say, people local to a place are accustomed to labeling the cultural elements with familiar terms and distinctions. But outsiders may project their own understanding of what a thing is and how it could have value or else lack meaning. Or consider the metaphor of "Head Up Display" (HUD) used on fighter planes and now airlines, too: pilots looking through the front glass can also see useful and consequential information layered on top of what is outside in view. This is something like the way that terrain of infinite shades of gradation can be neatly labeled and divided into types or categories drawn from language or culture.

The other dimension of seeing the cultural landscape is based on meaning; not the labeling/projection phenomenon, above, but meaning in the sense of memories and personal involvement (not a spectator to a terrain, but an active agent with intention, purpose, meaning, expectation, precedents). A person who "knows" the place [important semantic play of Conocer (know personally) vs. Saber (know facts, analytics)  --Spanish example of separate "know" words that English lumps together] is able to see cultural capital (status level, past and present value, aesthetic degree of depth), and social capital (knowing names and relationships past and current of various residences, services, businesses; and knowing who to ask when solving any given problem), financial capital (past and potential/future sources of gain or risks of loss), and maybe linguistic capital (powers of verbal expression by voice or by writing). By contrast, a foreigner or even a citizen of the country who is unfamiliar with the locale, will lack almost all of the foregoing meanings that blanket the land, turning it from meaningless space to meaningful place.

Since I am an outsider to my Japan destinations planned for April and May 2023, but with some language and cultural experience and professional anthropology expertise of a general kind along with lived experiences gained by age, these many kinds of meaning will mostly be invisible to me. So, perhaps, I will have to imagine: granting the meanings to be all around and filling the terrain, even though I am practically blind and deaf to this local knowledge at the start.

In conclusion, locals with insider knowledge and layers of memory probably know their way around the physical plane and also the invisible terrain of events, personalities, and situations that are good or bad for one's own condition. Outsiders will faintly perceive only a fraction of all of those things. But a person who is looking out for the many meanings and sources of significance in a place is perhaps best positioned to see and to appreciate the worth of the many elements distributed around the terrain. For in-between the familiar and the taken-for-granted viewpoint of locals on the one hand, and the distant spectator stance of outsiders on the other, there is a flickering middle ground where some of the local meaning is hinted at and can be scrutinized to understand it more. In this middle perspective some of the meanings and lives, as well as possible futures and pasts of the place, come to mind. The beautiful complexity of cultural significance, social connections, linguistic play, and financial patterns all comes alive, together with the awareness that human meaning (nomos) neatly imposes itself on the much larger and more basic reality (physis), a system of meanings that is preoccupied with certain distinctions but oblivious of other ones.

Cultural landscapes accommodate all these viewpoints: locals, outsiders, and those with an inquiring mind who occupy the in-between space in order to see a bit of the outsider standpoint and the perspective of the local residents, too.