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Benjamin Fraser
Over the course of the twentieth century, human geographers have worked to underscore the dialectical relationship between people and place, to bring it to our attention that the landscape is a human construction, a material expression of our unique immaterial socio–cultural worlds with further constitutive force. As Don Mitchell (2000) notes in his Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, “Landscape is best seen as both a work (it is the product of human labor and thus encapsulates the dreams, desires, and all the injustices of the people and social systems that make it) and as something that does work (it acts as a social agent in the further development of a place)” (93–94). In 1925, when one of the pioneers of cultural geography, Carl Sauer, published his seminal article “The Morphology of Landscape,” landscape was being approached by academics as active, if not already in relation to human cultural production, and not merely as the static backdrop for human history. On the heels of both discursive and visual practices of the nineteenth–century which, as expressed through realist/naturalist literature and also in landscape paintings, had rationalized the consumer of art’s symbolic power over the seemingly passive earth, one Latin American author in particular penned a number of captivating short stories whose central concern was precisely this intimate connection between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural.’ The stories of mining life written by the Chilean author Baldomero Lillo (1867–1923) and published in a collection titled Sub terra: cuentos mineros (1904) function simultaneously as both a document of the squalid conditions of his surrounding social context, and also as a critique of socio–economic practices he believed could and should be changed. Combining sparing prose and simple but compelling plots with a flair for poetic description and enduring images, Sub terra delves underground in order to advance a dialectical understanding of human work. Lillo’s triumph in these stories is to deliver an elaborate picture of how the immaterial socio–cultural notions which guide our production of the landscape create a built environment which then, in turn, impacts the way we think about ourselves. Like the Marxian dialectical premise holding that we transform ourselves though our work, the stories in Sub terra comprise a lengthy meditation on the importance of seeing our own reflection in landscape—ultimately providing the opportunity to revalue and internalize the reconciliation of our seemingly ‘natural’ material realities with our purportedly ‘cultural’ immaterial thoughts.
