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Two journeys: Forces that unite and disperse a community in the homeland

This article uses ‘the journey’ – the act of traversing a physical landscape – as a means of understanding the role landscape can play in preserving and reinforcing societies and their activities. It is based on material recorded over the course of three field seasons between 2006 and 2014 in the landscape of the Karavas basin in the northern part of Kythera, an island off the southern tip of the Greek Peloponnese. This material consists of spatial records of the location and the character of gardens, water channels, mills and other features in addition to accounts and reminiscences of inhabitants that relate to the former and current use of the landscape and their social, cultural and spiritual relationships to it. In this article, the journey is used to reconstruct a cultural landscape, a dynamic and self-sustaining amalgam of cultural, social and physical mechanisms and features. In this reconstruction, observed relationships between the inhabitants and their infrastructure form the basis for two interpretive approaches. The first considers the landscape and community as a unity, within which the character of the one is dependent on and reflects the character of the other. The second approaches the community as an interlocking and self-sustaining collection of cognitive and behavioural mechanisms. In this exploratory reconstruction, these two approaches are regarded as complementary, each compensating for conceptual and logical shortcomings of the other. The essential link between these two approaches is the landscape and its multiple meanings, in one sense a world defined, moulded and mediated by the task; in another, a structure of culturally mediated mechanisms. The author argues that both post-structural and structural interpretations generate valid and complementary understandings.