university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

map them, because they can do that without actual physical movements. Modern cartography,
while relying heavily on political and geographical maps, excludes the movements of people
and thus creates an impression that the structure of the map depends solely on the structure of
material world (Ingold 2000: 234). Ingold uses an expression “cartographic illusion” (ibid.)
when arguing that modern maps create an illusory impression of stability of places and
borders. In this manner modern cartography is actually moving away from the peoples’ daily
practices, physical movements and dwelling habits (ibid.).
An opposite term to cartography or mapmaking (showing a certain structure and excluding
movements) is the term mapping. A traveller or a story-teller, who doesn’t create or use a
map, is “quite simply, mapping” (Ingold 2000: 231). The essence of mapping is a process
which never ends, which leads us over places, simultaneously differentiated and connected,
and thus creating spaces. In Greek language and in a local Greek dialect of Dhërmi/Drimades
the word istoria means at the same time “story” and “history”. Numerous istories (pl.) about
the sea and the mountains speak about the history and people’s remembrances. They uncover
things long gone or in de Certeau’s terms the “presences of diverse absences” (1984: 108).
Similarly to de Certeau, Tilley (1994) notes that “memories continually provide modifications
to a sense of place which can never be exactly the same place twice, although there may be
ideological attempts to provide ‘stability’ or perceptual and cognitive fixity to a place, to
reproduce sets of dominant meanings, understandings, representations and images” (1994: 27-
28). In Ingold’s terms memories are forged with words. They are not only represented and
passed on in oral accounts, but they are also practices of remembering, embedded in the
perception of the environment (Ingold 2000: 148). Ingold suggests that remembering is a
process through which memories are generated along with the individual trajectories which
each person lays down in the course of his or her life. These trajectories are never laid down
solely by the people themselves but are always embedded in a historical and political context.
3.2. Stories of the Sea and the Mountains
3.2.1. Stories of the Sea
I remember the words of Frosina, born in 1934 in Dhërmi/Drimades, in a conversation during
one of those early January evenings when we were experiencing an electricity shortage. We
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