Landscapes of Power: national memorials and the domestication of affect

City & Society, Vol. 18, Issue 1, pp. 50-61, ISSN 0893-0465, online ISSN 1548-744X. © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce article content via www.copyright.com. When first invited to discuss Richard Longstreth’s paper, I had some doubts about the relevance of my own expertise for the subject at hand. Knowing little about issues of public space and the built environment, much less the architectural history of Washington, I wondered if my interests in memory and emotion would sufficiently tie in. But reaching across disciplines and regions can be a useful way to bring a somewhat different lens to otherwise familiar topics. In this essay, I focus on one aspect of the densely coded landscape discussed in the Longstreth paper—war memorials. Washington’s “mournful memorials” (as referenced by Mary Hancock) offer a particularly apt entrée into the emotional politics of the city’s architectural spaces. For most citizen-visitors, the capital district is a special kind of place—a place with an aura. If not exactly “sacred,” it is a space defined by its obvious monumentality and historical depth. The issues raised in the Longstreth paper seem to me just the kind of issues that a public anthropology ought to engage to bring the apparatus of cultural analysis to bear on issues of contemporary significance. Furthermore, for a profession that regularly holds its annual conference in Washington D.C. there is every reason to reflect on the means through which the capital district constructs and projects state power. The first and obvious question we might ask of the array of historic sites in the Washington landscape is what is remembered and what is not. Of course, the ground of public memory is always in motion, shifting with the tectonics of national identity. At any one GEOFFREY WHITE