Category: Practices

Quarantine lazarettos and leprosariums in the islands

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

Island space and health issues are linked. In a diminutive place, it is all the more possible to confine the populations concerned as it is easier to identify infectious, if not contagious, outbreaks. “Cutting off the relationship between bodies in order to cut off the disease within imposed limits: these two conditions, of cutting off and enclosure, have been fulfilled[1] ” by a geography of fragmentation of the islands to which a double strategy has been roughly matched. Either exclusion banishes the leprosy patient from a space to be purified, or inclusion proceeds by isolating the plague patient within a space to be controlled2 . Leprosy: move away to remove; plague: remove to intern. Such is the insularisation practised from the continent. Contain in a naturally circumscribed environment.

Half of the lazarettos designed to protect against the plague in Europe were islands3 . In 1377, the first historical quarantine took place on the islet Mrkan (Adriatic), before moving to another islet in front of Dubrovnik in 1430 and then to an island called Lokrum. In 1423, Venice already had a settlement on the islet of Santa Maria di Nazareth, to which was added a lazzareto nuovo (1468), then another on the island of Poviglia. Lazarettos under Venetian authority existed in Cephalonia and Corfu (on an islet near the city). In Livorno, a sanitary control was set up on the islet of Fanal in 1582. In the port of Ancona, a pentagon built on the water gave the lazaretto the appearance of an artificial island. Naples has its own on the islet Coppino next to Nisida (an island where only “observation” facilities are located). Still in a position of double insularity, the islet Manoel to the north of Valletta in Malta, or the islet of quarantine in Menorca, before the digging of a canal which had the effect of changing the peninsula of San Felipet (Mahón) into an island where a second lazaretto stands (similarly in Trieste: a canal isolates a lazaretto from the city). Not even the lazaretto of Kostajnica is located on an island (admittedly a river island) on the border between Bosnia and Croatia. Marseille has two quarantines: one on Île Jarre for ships in “gross patente” (infected), the other, ordinary, in Pomègues (Frioul archipelago), where the Grand Saint-Antoine from plague-stricken Syria was about to decimate the city in 1720. The great sanitary turning point in Europe, after the plague pandemics, was the eruption of yellow fever and cholera, for which new island facilities were built: Caroline Hospital on the islands of Frioul (Ratonneau Island), Sanguinaires (Ajaccio), Hyères (Porquerolles and Bagaud), San Antonio (Sicilian port of Trapani), Asinara (Sardinia), Ayios Nikolaos (Cyclades)4 … A sanitary cordon is deployed on the Atlantic coast: at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue (Tatihou islet), Le Havre (islet du Hoc), Brest (Trébéron

island), Lorient (Saint-Michel island), Rochefort and La Rochelle (Aix island).

In the colonies, where the new tropical epidemiology partly originated, leprosy and plague crossed paths with yellow fever. In Saint-Domingue, in 1712, the authorities hesitated to banish twenty or so families to the island of Tortue on account of leprosy, before changing their minds. In Guadeloupe, lepers were sequestered on Désirade between 1728 and 1958. The first documents relating to Guianese lepers date back to 1818. Forty slaves were interned on the Îlet la Mère, then transferred to one of the islands of Salut (Royale), and from there, moved to a tributary of the Mana, the Acarouany. The question of what to do with colonial lepers was coupled with another one, in the wake of the abolition of slavery: just as a distinction was made between free and slave patients (in other words, whites, who were for the most part exempted from sanitary confinement, and blacks, who were in principle interned), regulations now distinguished between two categories of lepers, those from the free population and those from the penal “element” introduced by the convicts of French Guiana and New Caledonia. The latter were in fact under the sole control of the prison administration. In French Guiana, they were sent to the island of Saint-Louis du Maroni. The lepers in New Caledonia were sent to Nou Island, not far from the penitentiary, then to Art Island (Belep archipelago) and to Goat Island, before being sent to the Ducos peninsula near Nouméa. Melanesian lepers from the Loyalty archipelago are interned on Dudun Island (Maré Island). The difference, ethnic (natives/slaves) and legal (convicts in the process of being sentenced or released), also operates socially for the destitute, who are intended to be placed in a “maritime leper colony” (and not “terrestrial”), in Cochinchina, and who are eventually sent to an island in the Mekong, as, in the Ivory Coast, they are sent to Désirée Island, in a lagoon four hours from Abidjan.

Plague (epidemic) is not the same as leprosy (endemic). While the former is slow-moving, incurable and reputedly moderately contagious, the latter is both devastating and less easily prevented than leprosy and its stigma before the first symptoms appear. When the plague arrived in Nouméa, the urban space was the object of a distributive insularisation: within what the health authorities called a “great fence”, the peninsula was divided into isolates for the Europeans; for the “hired” labour force of Asian origin, on the other hand, a quarantine island was set aside in the bay of Nouméa (Sainte-Marie). The same spatialization/specialization can be found at the entrance to the city, in the lazaretto of the Freycinet islet, which was itself divided into two reconditioned parts: for the observation of the disease on the one hand and for its treatment on the other. The same applies to the Îlet à Cabrit in the Saintes archipelago in Guadeloupe, which is occupied by a central prison, and which also serves as a depot for Guadeloupean convicts sentenced to forced labour, whom two convoys a year lead to the penal colony in French Guiana5.

Isolated without being sent away, the quarantine lazarettos have a policy that is the opposite of the leprosy over-insularity scheme. It was not a question of establishing them as far away as possible but, as with the Maskali island on the French Somali Coast, as close as possible to the ports and commercial circuits. This is why, in 1893, the lazaretto of Les Saintes was closed in favour of another one even closer, on the islet Cosson in Pointe-à-Pitre. It would no longer be an entrenched camp likely to reinforce epidemics by concentrating diseases, but a place of transit, a way to speed up the circulation of people and goods. Disinfection of ships will be substituted for the internment of quarantine patients, preferring the inclusion of goods in a free trade flow to the inclusion of diseases in an organisation of isolation in all cases (leprosy or plague) that is incompletely implemented and more or less controlled.

Éric Fougère

[1] Éric Fougère, Les Îles malades, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2018, p. 8.

2 See M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975.

3 See Daniel Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets, Aix-en-Provence, Édisud, 1986.

4 See John Chircop and Francisco Javier Martinez (ed.), Mediterranean Quarantines, 1750-1914, Manchester University Press, 2018.

5See Éric Fougère, La Prison coloniale en Guadeloupe, Matoury (Guyane), Ibis Rouge, 2010.

The colonial prison, between the Cabrit island of Les Saintes in Guadeloupe and the penitentiary colony in French Guiana

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

The “colonial prison”[1] is not only the place of detention found in the colonies but also an organisation subject to the specificity reserved for their administration. In the same way that there is a colonial penal code (abrogated on 8 January 1877), there is a system of internal penalties in the colonies, which will be distinguished from that concerning convicts sentenced to forced labour in metropolitan France who are sent to serve their sentence in the colonies. “Colonial prison” is therefore an ambivalent term. Depending on whether it refers to the origin (in relation to criminal acts and court judgements affecting the strictly colonial population) or the destination (the colony of French Guiana, where all those sentenced under the Transportation Act of 30 May 1854 were sent – “colonials” and “nationals” together), it has two different meanings. It is a colonial prison in the sense that it is an institution operating from metropolitan France to the colonies via the Ministry of the Navy and the colonies – but whose model is conditioned by the Ministries of Justice and the Interior. It is also a colonial prison in the sense that its ‘Creole’ identity is marked – but with contradictory tensions between local and national interests. This ambiguity is compounded by a doubling of the status of “simple” colonies to “penal” colonies.

In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, a typical case is that of Guadeloupe, in the midst of a social transformation with the arrival of a workforce of “engagés” of Indian origin accused of arson and vagrancy, alongside freed blacks who were in the news for robbery and violence or rebellion. It is in the continuity of these repeated criminal cases (which do not necessarily have the reality that the press and public opinion want to give them) that the prison service of the colony is restructured by decree of 26 December 1868[2] . The correctional nature of the sentences handed down, as well as the difficulties in introducing prison work, seem to follow the same evolution as in France. There is not a single statistic that does not show a clear analogy with the judicial and penitentiary situation in metropolitan France. It is in the type of population targeted, the reaction it provokes, and the penal and prison system envisaged that the difference should be sought.

Judging only by the difference between “Creole” and “European” rations, the balance is unequal[3] – or would be if there were “European” rationers. For there were no whites in Guadeloupean prisons, as

shown by a statistical report from the prison in Les Saintes in 1884, where all the prisoners were Creoles (58) or of Indian origin (62)[4] . This penitentiary, constituted as a “house of force and correction” from its creation in 1852 until its closure in 1905, was built on the islet of Cabrit to concentrate three categories of convicts: those sentenced to more than one year’s imprisonment, those sentenced to forced labour and those sentenced to imprisonment. The rejection of its penal population partly explains the choice of removal to an islet, but also that of allowing the colony (when it gave up on perpetuating its ephemeral “jail” set up on a pontoon) to “transport” its “African and Asian” prisoners to the jail in French Guiana, instead of letting them serve their sentences at the place where they were sentenced by the courts, as is the case in France: aggravation of the sentence having the effect of introducing into French Guiana, alongside the category of ‘convicts’, the exclusively racial and colonial category of ‘prisoner’.

The iniquity of Guianese imprisonment[5] can be gauged by examining the fate of Guadeloupean (but also Martiniquean and Reunionese) convicts who are sent away on average once a year from the penitentiary-depot of the Îlet à Cabrit. Despite the legally recognised need, at first, to establish a legal distinction between the transported first-class convicts and the second-class colonial prisoners, the penitentiary administration came, in fact, to confuse them, in terms of clearing work (reputed to be “the most painful of colonisation”) as well as in terms of food rations and punishments. Although the straw hat worn by the convicts was replaced by a grey felt hat on the heads of the prisoners, and the initials RC (Réclusionnaires Coloniaux – Colonial Prisoners) were sewn onto the left sleeve of the latter’s jacket, the two categories were nonetheless grouped together, according to criteria that were clearly ethnic and not penal, in the most deadly camps, in particular Sainte-Marie, “for the digging of certain ditches that it would have been dangerous to have whites carry out”[6] .

Éric Fougère

[1] See Éric Fougère, La Prison coloniale en Guadeloupe (îlet à Cabrit, 1852-1905), Matoury (Guyane), Ibis Rouge Éditions, 2010.

[2] It succeeds that of 1852, on the organisation of colonial prisons, and of 1858, on the internal regime of prisons.

[3] Under the terms of the 1868 decree, rations were broken down as follows : bread 660 g, or cassava flour 60 cl, cod 125 g, vegetables 100 g (Creole prisoners); bread 625 g, fresh meat seasoned with 12 grams of fat 250 g or salted meat 200 g, vegetables seasoned with 12 grams of butter 120 g (for prisoners of European origin or with “European habits”).

[4] An average for the years 1886 to 1891 indicates a so-called “ethnographic” distribution of 62.2% Creole convicts (blacks or mulattoes), 30.5% of Asian origin (Indians), 0.6% of African origin (indentured servicemen), 0.4% of European or metropolitan origin, and 3.3% of various origins (in particular from the English colonies). See Armand Corre, Le Crime en pays créoles, esquisse d’ethnographie criminelle, Paris, Stock, 1889 and, by the same author, L’Ethnographie criminelle d’après les observations et les statistiques recueillies dans les colonies françaises, Paris, C. Reinwald & Cie, 1984.

[5] This is to be distinguished from the seclusion applied to convicts as a disciplinary measure on Île Saint-Joseph, one of the Salvation Islands (Guiana).

[6] Letter from Bonard, Governor of Guiana, to the Minister of the Colonies (18 November 1854). Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies series H 45.

The “bad subjects” of Désirade (1763-1767)

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

Désirade is an island of about twenty square kilometres located not far from Grande-Terre in Guadeloupe, to which it is administratively attached. What is known about it from official sources begins with the relegation of lepers who were abducted there from 1728[1] . A Creole micro-society[2] (“cotton farmers”, “petits-blancs” (white trash), mulattoes, slaves) had been living there for three decades when another event crossed its history on the fringes of the major trade flows (it then had about fifty families[3]): under the terms of an ordinance of July 1763, Louis XV and his minister Choiseul intended to deal with “young people of bad conduct”. One aim was to clear the houses of strength where these “dangerous subjects” of the family were normally kept.

There is a whole tradition. Under the Regency, “engagés” (forcibly enlisted) were sent to colonise the West Indies and Louisiana (Île Dauphine), allowing some of them to escape from the galleys. This experiment was initiated, further back in time, by letters patent authorising the use of criminals released from prison to go and populate Canada (1540-41) and then the Golden Islands (Bagaud, Port-Cros, Levant) decreed to be lands of asylum (1550). We also recall the plans to found a French colony in Brazil, on what is now Villegagnon Island, in Guanabara Bay (1555-60) by recruiting some of the candidates from the criminal element (and in particular vagrants and false convicts), and then on Sable Island (off the coast of Nova Scotia) with some sixty convicts, of whom only a dozen survived (1598-1603)…

If the 1763 text states that “the king allows” young people […] whose irregular conduct would have obliged their parents to request their export to the colonies to be sent to the island of Désirade, it is because, unlike the practice up to that point, these young people were not tried but targeted by “lettres de cachet » (sealed letters) on the simple accusation of a private individual who wanted to obtain an order of arrest, which remained at the discretion of the authorities after an investigation. They are not prisoners of justice but prisoners of the police. In La Désirade, therefore, the aim was not to colonise but to correct. Hence the disciplinary orientation: the “bad subjects” would be distinguished by class as they were “recognised as being more or less reformed” on the basis of “life certificates”. The last difference, this time explaining the military organisation, was that they were “contained” by a company of infantry responsible for surveillance under the orders of a commander who, if necessary, would have them “put in solitary confinement in irons on hands and feet”.

The design of the establishment, a prison within a prison, gives it the appearance of a camp, not only by its construction (a masonry prison, six huts where the “bad subjects” are locked up each night in a district of the island called Les Galets, planted perimeter walls and sentry posts) but also by its functioning: three sergeant-inspectors took roll calls every night, as did three majors, “at unspecified times” – which did not prevent the escape of four presumed drowned prisoners or that of five others, two of whom were “brought back”. But Villejoin, appointed governor and commander of the camp on the spot, was the first to denounce the conditions of what he called “filthy idleness”: “The ration is not enough for the majority. […] many are barefoot and shirtless three quarters of the time; very few receive news from their families and even fewer receive help. Obliged to “make their submission” (pay the captivity pension), some families forget to pay it. But the theoretical equality of treatment was far from being followed. The best-rated, often gentlemen, benefited from favours: they ate at the table of the governor or the officers of the garrison, and had money lent to them…

On board corvettes or liners, the “bad subjects” were embarked by the dozen from Rochefort, bound for Martinique and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe. At each stage (we must also count those who brought them from all corners of the kingdom and from the prisons of Saint-Lazare or Bicêtre in Paris), the passengers were kept prisoners (an average of six months in the Rochefort prison, and up to three years for some). They were provincials (only two were Parisians, two others were from the colonies), denounced mainly for “violence” and debts (especially gambling). The average age is around 25 (the youngest is 16, the oldest around 40). Some of them were from the lower or middle nobility of the robe or of the sword, others belonged to families of craftsmen and small traders, and others belonged to the bourgeoisie. When the establishment closed in 1767, there were about forty of them, awaiting departure from Rochefort, who had not been deported (dead, escaped, repentant, “revoked” at the request of their families, or because the shipments had stopped) out of a total of 139 files that were closed without follow-up or refused[4] .

As early as 1765, when it had not been in existence for a month, there was no longer any belief in the establishment. The correspondence between the colonial authorities and the metropolis, between the provincial intendants and the Ministry of the Interior and the port of Rochefort and the Colonial Office, emphasised at least three points: excessive expenditure (in consideration of such a limited number of “boarders”); the absurdity of a system of “correction” which made Villejoin, who became his detractor, say that the good bad subjects “are confused with some who are apostilled [noted] as people without hope, who have too many vices of heart […]. It is not with such people that one will draw feelings and, overwhelmed by misery, one will find very few resources at home to return to”; the unworthiness of

of their offspring resurfaces, and their guilt rubs off”[5] “because of the lack of interest shown by them in the fate of their progeny. Of the 53 who returned to Rochefort in the middle of winter (and one of whom died during the crossing), 12 were again prisoners until their parents took them away. Four of them were only released in the spring, without any response from their families to the letter asking them to claim them.

Éric Fougère

[1] See Éric Fougère, Les Îles malades, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2018.

[2] The only difference is that the monoculture is cotton, which is much less profitable than sugar cane.

[3] Difficult to estimate accurately before the first censuses.

[4] See Bernadette and Philippe Rossignol, ‘Les “mauvais sujets” de la Désirade’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe n° 153 (May-August 2009), p. 92-97.

[5] Éric Fougère, Des indésirables à la Désirade, Matoury, Ibis Rouge, 2008, p. 104.

The origins of modern relegation and deportation: island exile in Roman antiquity

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

The historical contribution of islands to prisons goes back to antiquity. The Romans distinguished between relegatio ad insulam and deportatio in insulam[1] . Beyond the strictly legal content (deportatio, which caused the convicted person to lose his civil rights and the property of his estate, was in theory a perpetual punishment and was pronounced by the emperor, unlike relegatio, which was pronounced by a governor and did not have the same rigour), we can see the articulation of two notions that the legislations will take up when it comes to criminal law and islands: mobility in remoteness (relegatio ad), immobility in confinement (deportatio in). In this respect, a gradation of punishments is observed: temporary or perpetual relegation (outside a city or province), relegation to an island, deportation to an island, death penalty[2] . There are also three kinds of exile: banning from specific places (in particular Rome), exclusion from any place other than a specially designated place, confinement to an island (not specifying which one before sentencing).

It was possible to relegate, if not deport, anywhere as long as it was far away, as shown by the example of Ovid in the Pont-Euxin (Black Sea). The island punishment was no less practiced, also marked by distance, with the deportation to the Kerkennah archipelago (Tunisia) of Sempronius Gracchus, lover of Julia, daughter of Augustus, who was also relegated by her father to Pandataria (Ventotene), in the Pontine archipelago (where her mother joined her), before dying in Reggio di Calabria five years later in 14 AD. Tiberius exiled Julia’s daughter there, as well as other women of the imperial family: Octavia, wife of Nero, Flavia Domitilla, wife of a rival of Domitian, Orestilla, wife of Caligula, Julia Livilla, Agrippina the Younger (daughters of Germanicus), exiled to the island of Ponza, Julia Vipsania, in the archipelago of Tremiti. All of them (except Flavia Domitilla) for matters of morals (adultery, abortion, debauchery, impiousness) but probably also for the same reasons, political, explaining the sending to Capri of Lucilla, sister of Commodus, and Crispinia, his wife, accused of conspiracy against the emperor, or of Seneca in Corsica on the grounds of his adultery with Julia Livillia, but also victim of intrigues in the entourage of Claudius[3] . In 417, the first Western Roman emperor, Priscus Attalus, was exiled to Lipari (in the Aeolian Islands, where Caracalla’s wife, Plautilla, had been exiled and then murdered), accused of usurpation. The last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was sent by Odoacre to Nisida, in front of Naples.

From Tacitus (Annals) and Suetonius (Lives of the Twelve Caesars), among others, we know what use Tiberius made of the Sporades (island of Kinaros) and especially the Cyclades as places of exile: Seriphos (where Cassius Severus, a political opponent, and Vistilia, a matron accused of prostitution, were shipped), Kythnos (where Junius Silanus, a proconsul accused of embezzlement, was relegated), Lesbos (for Junius Gallio, because he had proposed a change of etiquette that did not respect precedence), Amorgos (where the proconsul Vibius Serenus was deported), Andros (Flaccus, prefect of Egypt), but also Gyaros and Donoussa, which seem to have been reserved for the most severe banishments[4] and of which historiography has not retained much because of three factors, the first of which is the strategy of oblivion that presides over banishment (when the deportees are not suppressed in one way or another – murder, misery… – at the end of their island exile). Another explanation comes from the fact that this strategy, with some exceptions (notably that of some four thousand freedmen deported to Sardinia in 19 AD because of their “Egyptian and Judaic superstitions”, and who were charged with repressing banditry there), mainly concerned isolated individuals about whom historians only spoke (third explanation) when these individuals had some title to notoriety.

If the fate of each of the Roman convicts taken separately is not, at least for them, anecdotal, we are nevertheless faced with the observation of a disparity of insular experiences that cannot be globalised. What do the lives of John the Evangelist on Patmos and Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Augustus, on the island of Pianosa have in common, for example? What is there in common between islands, mostly very small, where everything was deemed to be lacking (Kinaros, Seriphos, Gyaros…) and others where rich Romans had built holiday homes (in Capri, Pandatera, Nisida…)? One last observation remains, however: the Romans seem to have invented (even if drafts of it could be found in the Hellenic period[5]) the idea of prison-islands whose use, still empirical, is at the same time already systematic.

Éric Fougère

[1] See Vincent Jolivet, “L’exil sur les îles dans l’Antiquité romaine”, in Brigitte Marin dir., Les Petites Îles de Méditerranée occidentale, Marseille, Éditions Gaussen, 2021, p. 172-175.

[2] See Yann Rivière, “L’interdictio aqua et igni et la deportatio sous le Haut-Empire romain”, in Philippe Blaudeau, Exil et relégation, les tribulations du sage et du saint durant l’Antiquité romaine et chrétienne (I -VI^ere siècles après J.- C.), Paris, De Boccard, 2008.C.), Paris, De Boccard, 2008, and, by the same author, “La relégation et le retour des relégués dans l’Empire romain (I -III^ere siècles), in Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser, Christophe Pébarthe dir., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, Bordeaux-Pessac, Ausonius Éditions, 2009, p. 535-570.

[3] See Roselyne Immongault Nomewa, ‘Les exilées romaines et l’espace répulsif dans l’empire romain : l’apport des sources littéraires latines’, CHA, 2014, online at https://www.academia.edu

[4] See Étienne Wolf, “Ambivalence of the islands in Roman culture: the example of the life of Tiberius”, Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 2008, 1, p. 139-145.

[5] See Patrice Brun, Les Archipels Égéens dans l’Antiquité grecque (V -II^ee siècle avant notre ère), Annales littéraires de l’université de Besançon, Institut des sciences et techniques de l’Antiquité, Centre de recherches d’histoire ancienne, vol. 157 (1996), p. 23.

The insular political deportation in France

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

When Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, we thought that the title was brilliant, before asking ourselves why. The Gulag had its beginnings on the Solovki Archipelago, just as the Tsarist penal colony had made Sakhalin Island a place of choice, but Russian deportation was naturally continental, the antithesis of the British deportation to Australia, Not only was it associated with insularity, but it also took root on Norfolk Island and in Tasmania, in a logic of over-insularisation, the equivalent of which would be the over-remoteness of the “labour reform” camps in Siberia. It is precisely from Siberia, an arch-continental block, and more precisely from Kolyma, that the explanation for the apparent paradox of a representation of Soviet camps in an archipelago comes to us. In his Kolyma Stories, Varlam Shalamov (‘enemy of the people’ who spent seventeen years in the camps) almost never uses the word ‘continent’ to refer to ‘free’ lands:

In Kolyma, the central provinces are still called the “continent” (…). The connection by sea, the Vladivostok-Magadan sea line, the landing on bare rocks, all this was very similar to the pictures of the past, of Sakhalin. This is why Vladivostok is considered a city of the mainland, although Kolyma is never called an island[1] .

The camps would therefore only be an archipelago a priori insofar as their lived, if not fantasised, geography (which we will distinguish from ‘real’ geography) is that of a negative continent in mirror image, or rather by default, designed to designate deprivation (particularly of freedom) by analogy. This way of using space for the purposes of penal or prison representation is what is at stake in the French ultra-marine deportations.

This is mentioned in the 1810 Penal Code, where deportation must take place “outside the continental territory” (Article 17). In the absence of a specific place, deportation remains theoretical, as can already be seen in the precedent of a project to deport recidivist beggars to Madagascar, which was drawn up by the first Penal Code in 1793. As if the word “continental” (which can be explained in part by the fact that Napoleonic France was a European empire at the time[2] ) had created the image of islands to which the deportees were to be sent, subsequent deportation projects were logically directed towards Bourbon Island (Reunion Island, Cirque de Salazie), and then towards Mayotte (the islands of Pamandzi and Dzaoudzi). Without result: deportation continued to be applied on national territory in citadels (Mont-Saint-Michel, Doullens, and later still on Belle-Île).

Historically, France has a long tradition of deportation to “the islands”: in Désirade, where “bad subjects” denounced by “lettres de cachets » (sealed letters) were the subject of an ordinance of 1763 which kept them prisoners in a palisaded camp until 1767[3] ; in the Seychelles (and later in the Comoros), by virtue of a senatus-consult of 1801 settling the fate of those accused of the Rue Saint-Nicaise attack[4] , in Corsica and on the island of Caprera (priests hostile to Napoleon), on the island of Elba (insurgents from Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe[5] , in a cross-over between the metropolis and the colonies that is a secret of the history of slavery)…

But there was also a whole range of doctrinal opposition to deportation, in addition to the lack of islands of choice of location. Barbé-Marbois (himself a former Fructidor deportee) and Tocqueville (author of Écrits sur le système pénitentiaire) were opposed to deportation, the former because it was contradictory to the idea that a sentence should be brought closer to the place of the crime[6] , and the latter because he was in favour of a prison reform where the model was solitary confinement and not deportation. The turning point came from a double political event: the June 1848 insurrections and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.

The urgent reaction was not only the number of those to be tried, unprecedented since the Revolution, but also the abolition of the death penalty (article 5 of the 1848 Constitution) for political crimes. After the law of 24 January 1850, which “transported” them to the penitentiary-camp of Lambessa (Algeria), then to French Guiana (Îlet la Mère and Île du Diable), the law of 8 June of the same year chose the Îles Marquises and introduced two degrees of deportation: “simple” (already contained in the Penal Code), and “aggravated” (known as “fortified enclosure”).

The novelty (prefigured by the deportation projects to Bourbon Island and then Mayotte) is the introduction of a detention into the deportation, according to the concept of “fortified enclosure” derived from that of “citadel”. Thus, not content with correlating the place of punishment and the punishment of the place in such a way as to confer all the remoteness possible on exile, the device associates confinement. This made Victor Hugo say, during the legislative debates (April 1850): “We combine climate, exile and prison: climate gives its malignity, exile its burden, prison its despair; instead of one executioner we have three. The death penalty is replaced… (…) say with us: the death penalty is restored.”

Faced with an even greater number of convicts, following the events of the Commune in 1870, it was sufficient, under the terms of the law of 23 March 1872, to substitute the Isle of Pines for Nuku Hiva (simple deportation) and the Ducos peninsula for the Vaitahu valley (fortified deportation) in order to transfer the convicts to the island, to substitute the Isle of Pines for Nuku Hiva (simple deportation) and the Ducos peninsula for the Vaitahu valley (deportation in a fortified enclosure) to transfer the principle of penal insularity (an abstract space characterised by borders) coupled with prison insularity as a concrete place of confinement to New Caledonia[7] .

Éric Fougère

[1] V. Shalamov, Stories from Kolyma, Lagrasse, Éditions Verdier, 2003, p. 900.

[2] But the banishment provided for by the Penal Code (Article 8) is served “outside the territory of the empire” (Article 32).

[3] See Éric Fougère, Des Indésirables à la Désirade, Matoury (Guyane), Ibis Rouge Éditions, 2008, and Bernadette and Philippe Rossignol, ‘Les mauvais sujets de la Désirade’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe n° 153 (May-August 2009).

[4] See Jean Destrem, Les Déportations du Consulat et de l’Empire, Paris, Jeanmaire, 1885.

[5] See Yves Benot, La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon, Paris, La Découverte, 1991.

[6] “(…) to remove to immense distances, is to make one lose sight of the memory of the crime, at the same time as one loses sight of the criminal. François de Barbé-Marbois, Observations sur les votes de quarante et un conseils généraux de départements, concernant la déportation des forçats libérés, Paris, Imprimerie royale, 1828, p. 61.

[7] See Éric Fougère, Île-prison, bagne et déportation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002.

Asinara Island: a concentration of health and prison insularity in Sardinia

Posted on 25 de July, 2023 | By caparicio

Before becoming a national park in 2002, the island of about 50 km² , which lies at the north-western end of the Gulf of Asinara (Sardinia), experienced all the forms of confinement that its relative isolation allowed, some 500 metres from the islet of Piana, separated from the peninsula of Stintino by approximately another half kilometre. This began in 1885, with the creation of an agricultural penal colony in Cala d’Oliva, on the heights of the island’s village, and a quarantine lazaretto a little further south, in Cala Reale. The difficulties raised by the bill presented to the Chamber of Deputies by the President of the Council and Minister of the Interior, Agostino Depretis: the fate of the island’s fishermen and shepherds and the lack of water, were solved by building a cistern and expropriating the inhabitants. The workforce was made up of the penal population brought in convoys of 10 to 40 convicts who were harnessed to the construction of the lazaretto until 1897 (it closed in 1939) and a new prison which was soon built in Fornelli in the south of the island, where the territory was divided under the dual jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Navy and the Interior.

Between December 1915 and March 1916, with the disembarkation of 24,000 prisoners of war from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the “health station”, organised for a maximum of 1,500 patients, was unable to cope with the cholera that broke out on board the maritime convoys at the same time as in the Albanian transit camp of Valona. The epidemic kills 7 to 8,000 prisoners spread over several points of the island according to the camps that are hastily set up (forcing the penal colony to concentrate in the north of the island): in Fornelli, Stretti, Campu Perdu, Tumbarino. The location of this last camp was used to supply the colony with wood, while in Santa Maria, Campu Perdu and Stretti, farming and breeding (and fishing) were practiced: 230 hectares (of olive trees, vines, cereals and other food crops) were cultivated at the beginning of the XX^e century not only by the colony – a life-size prison inspired by the one set up in the Tuscan archipelago on the island of Pianosa, which was constituted as a penal colony in 1858, and then on the island of Gorgon in 1871 – but also thanks to the arrival of 10,000 other prisoners of war after the cholera epidemic.

In 1937, the eldest daughter of the Negus Haile Selassie, captured by the Italian colonial authorities, was interned on the Asinara, as were several hundred Ethiopian personalities during the second war of occupation of that country. The Mussolini confino politico thus revived the relegatio ad insulam of Roman antiquity by interning opponents, as a police and security measure, on islands with a history of exile, in particular Ponza and Ventotene in the Pontine Islands archipelago off the coast of Lazio, or even Ustica, Favignana, Lampedusa, Lipari, Pantelleria and Tremiti. In the 1970s, the turning point in Asinara was the transfer of some of the most important leaders of the Red Brigades to the Fornelli prison, in the building, reconditioned for the occasion, where the penal agricultural colony had initially been the place of detention for about fifty convicts, whose number increased tenfold: Now (in the mid-1970s), there are more than a hundred in the Fornelli prison, twice that number in the casa di lavoro (“open” regime during the day), the remaining small hundred or so in ten sections (diramazioni), including Casa Bianche, the northernmost one (where sconsegnati benefiting from semi-liberty are housed), which is added to the existing “annexes” (for sexual crimes, among others, in Tumbarino, and for international drug trafficking in Santa Maria).

Following a series of causes – the controversial authority of the new prison director (tried and then convicted for corruption), the right to visit and the very severe conditions of detention, foiled escape plans, rebellions that were more or less put down, pressure from the local population and public opinion, the taking hostage by the Red Brigades, still at large, of a judge in Rome to obtain the closure of the Fornelli district – the activists were transferred again at the end of 1980; This did not prevent the Asinara from continuing to be the “high security” prison of organised crime (Sicilian Mafia and Camorra) until its closure in 1997. At the beginning of the 1980s, Cala d’Oliva, which remained a “central” prison, became the “fortified” prison of Toto Riina.

For more than a hundred years (almost forty of which were spent demanding the conversion of the island into a natural park), what makes Asinara special, chosen almost by accident alongside the seven other agricultural colonies in Sardinia, is not only the combination of its sanitary and penitentiary functions but also, paradoxically (given its remoteness), its involuntary immersion in a history (world war and colonisation, fascism, terrorism and banditry…) which exposed him to all the regimes, alternately civil and military, in terms of discipline (workshops and agricultural colony) and surveillance and detention (semi-liberty, reclusion, relegation, quarantine, internment in “concentration” camps for prisoners of war). And this very exposure to history also explains its recent metamorphosis… A complete reversal of paradigm indeed: visiting the Asinara on a “little train” that swirls to the rhythm of the calas, the tourist is asked to keep a good distance from the donkeys, which are left entirely free to cross the roadway which cuts the whole island from south to north. Endemic to the island, the breed of albino donkeys is considered “vulnerable” because of what makes it a “protected species” while at the same time contributing to this vulnerability: inbreeding. So much so that, not content with transforming the donkey from a domestic animal into a new island emblem stamped “nature” (at the cost of a false etymological connection[1] ), we have switched into an axiology of “Animal Reserve” and tourist attraction where the health station has given way to the veterinary station and the prison space to the environmental Eden.

[1] None of the Latin names of the island (Herculis Insula, Sinuaria or even Aenaria) allow the recognition of asinus (i.e. donkey).

Éric Fougère

COSSU A., MONBALLIU X., TORRE A. (1994), L’isola dell’Asinara, Carlo Delfino editore, Sassari.

DODERO G. (1999), Storia della medicina e della sanità pubblica in Sardegna, Aipsa edizioni, Cagliari.

GUTIERREZ M., MATTONE A., VAISECCHI F. (1998), L’isola dell’Asinara: l’ambiente, la storia, il parco, Poliedro, Nuoro.

GORGOLINI L. (2011), I dannati dell’Asinara, l’odissea dei prigioneri austro-ungarici nella Prima guerra mondiale, Utet editore, Milano.

Water Planning

Posted on 1 de April, 2023 | By caparicio

“The world is full of islands” (Baldacchino, 2006, p.4). It is not surprising that, over the last decades, there has been an increased interest in island studies, attracting researchers from different disciplinary areas who, together, have been able to promote this “new” line of research, thus developing the so-called “island science”.

Island science, although young, has shown great relevance in international studies, as demonstrated by the editorial title of the journal Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie: “The coming of Age of island studies” (Baldacchino, 2004), thus proclaiming the “maturity” of island studies (King, 2010).

For Young, the island is a place of secrecy and mystery, but its isolation also conditions its historical evolution (Young, 1999, p. 2). In this sense, the insular specificity may be in correlation with the hydraulic issue? This entry intends, therefore, to make known the main trends of Hydraulics at the research level. In this sense, and with regard to island territories, the article by Paulo Espinosa and Fernanda Cravidão, in “Revista Sociedade & Natureza”, entitled “A Ciência das Ilhas e os Estudos Insulares: Breves reflexões sobre o contributo da Geografia / The Science of Islands and the Insular Studies: brief point of view about the importance of geography”, contains a set of themes to be studied and reflected upon.

All emersed lands, of greater or lesser size, are surrounded by oceans, so islands inevitably occupy an extremely important place in world life (Biagini; Hoyle, 1999, p. 1). There are facts that translate, in a synthetic way, the real value of islands worldwide, although they are often ignored by most researchers. According to Baldacchino (2007), nearly 10% of the world population, almost 600 million people, currently live on islands, occupying about 7% of the Earth’s surface. Approximately a quarter of the world’s independent states are islands or archipelagos. Furthermore, islands assume themselves as differentiated identities and spaces in an increasingly homogeneous world, as a result of the globalisation process.

Despite their value, small island spaces are often associated with a set of structural constraints since “as a consequence of their scale, small islands are limited in size, land area, resources, economic and population potential, and political power” (Royle, 2001, p. 42). Thus, it is not surprising that of the total number of sovereign countries that are not entirely insular, only two have their capital on an island, these being Denmark and Equatorial Guinea, reflecting a political and functional preference for continental areas to the detriment of territories exclusively surrounded by water.

Thus, there are many difficulties and potentialities that we can find in the islands. For this reason, these spaces are extremely rich in terms of scientific study. Lockard & Drakakis-Smith (1997) state that the themes of islands that have most attracted the attention of researchers include, apart from tourist activity, emigration and return migration, transport and accessibility, limited resources such as water, and economic development policies.

Therefore, water has always been an essential factor in establishing life, in general, and mankind in particular. The importance of this liquid has led to an evolution in the techniques of transport for human consumption over the millennia (Baptista, 2011).

Despite this evolution, verified throughout the years of existence of the human race, it was in more recent history, mainly in the 20th century, that major advances in water supply systems were verified, due to the need to respond to the population increase verified around the globe and the emergence of new materials, such as, for example, polymers. Also at the design level, a major evolution was noted due to the discovery of new hydraulic laws, which allow optimizing the supply conditions (Baptista, 2011).

In most current cases, buildings are supplied through a public network that carries drinking water. However, there are situations in which the water is supplied from wells. In these cases, it is necessary to proceed in order to guarantee the potability of the water (Baptista, 2011).

In the execution of this type of project, essential factors are taken into account, such as economy, the conditions of application and use, the routing requirements and also the chemical constitution of each material, always bearing in mind the legislation governing this type of system. It is based on the optimization of these factors that water supply networks are built (APA, 2018).

Water planning aims to ground and guide the protection and management of waters and the compatibility of their uses with their availability in order to (APA, 2018):

Guarantee their sustainable use, ensuring that the needs of current generations are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs;
Provide criteria for allocation to the various types of intended uses, taking into account the economic value of each one, as well as to ensure the harmonisation of water management with regional development and sectoral policies, individual rights and local interests;
Set environmental quality standards and criteria for water status.

From what has been described, I can say that there is no shortage of reasons to study this issue in an island context. Regardless of the perspective used, research on islands reveals a great thematic amplitude, since they can be analysed from different angles, and the discipline of Hydraulics can contribute to the study of “island sciences”, particularly with regard to hydraulic planning.

Sérgio Lousada

References

APA. (2018). Políticas, Água, Planeamento. Obtido de Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente: https://www.apambiente.pt/index.php?ref=16&subref=7&sub2ref=9#

Baptista, F. P. (2011). Sistemas Prediais de Distribuição de Água Fria. Lisboa: IST. Obtido de https://fenix.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/395142730852/Tese.pdf

Baldacchino, G. (2004). The Coming of Age of Island Studies. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geographie. V. 95, n. 3, pp. 272-283. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2004.00307.x

Baldacchino, G. (2006). Extreme Tourism: Lessons from the world cold water. Oxford: Elsevier, p. 4.

Baldacchino, G. (2007). Introducing a world of islands. In: Baldacchino, G. (Ed.). A World of Islands. Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island, Institute of Island Studies, p. 1-29.

Biagini, E. & Hoyle, B. (1999). Insularity and Development on an Oceanic Planet. In: Biagini, E. & Hoyle, B. (Eds.). Insularity and Development: international perspectives on islands. London: Pinter, p. 1.

King, R. (2010). A geografia, as ilhas e as migrações numa era de mobilidade global. In: Fosnseca, M. L. (Ed). Actas da Conferência Internacional – Aproximando Mundos Emigração e Imigração em Espaços Insulares. Lisboa: Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, p. 27-62.

Lockhart, D. & Drakakis-Smith, D. (1997). Island Tourism: Trends and Perspectives. London: Mansell, 320 p.

Royle, S. (2001). A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity. London: Routledge, p. 42.

Young, L. B. (1999). Islands: Portraits of Miniature Worlds. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, p. 2.

Island Freshwater Scarcity

Posted on 18 de March, 2023 | By caparicio

Oceanic islands are often at the top of the freshwater scarcity index; as paradoxical pieces of land, they are sea-locked but their fresh and brackish water supplies are land-locked. That is to say, in a metaphoric, analogic and geopoetic way, the tiny oceanic islands are fragile oases with limited freshwater amenities surrounded by a boundless desert-like salty ocean.

In addition to brackish groundwater and a lack of annually flowing rivers, some islands face a pollution of aquifers through toxic volcanic gasses, deforestation, desertification, and overexploitation of water resources (WR) through water-intensive monoculture crops and mismanagement of domestic water supplies. Even flashfloods can exacerbate limited freshwater supplies by dragging pollutants into water storage systems, such as cisterns. Islands receive proportionally more precipitation than continents due to their oceanic context, as they are directly under the influences of Tradewinds and westerlies. Conversely, as “sealocked” and relatively small pieces of land, they only collect rainwater from their area and cannot benefit from “WR externalities” such as large regional or continental aquifers or huge allochtone rivers with their source in more humid zones (i.e. the Nil). Consequently, due to their little size, their catchment basins are small with erratic streamflows with either sudden and devastating flash floods or no water flow at all during the dry season. The decennial “WR inertia” of small islands is limited to mitigate the interannual fluctuations of rainfalls which is a universal phenomenon on a hydroclimatologic mesoscale of about 10,000 km² corresponding to medium size islands (i.e. Cyprus) The driest islands are mostly located in the Red Sea, in addition to Socotra, Jerba, and the western Canary Islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura (Map 1).

Map 1: average precipitation per year over the period 1950-2000 on islands

The erraticism of variable oceanic weather patterns and terrestrial hydrological processes combined with a disconnection from large land-based water support prompts islands to reveal drastic signs of the worsening of climate and environmental changes before they appear on the mainland (Depraetere & Morell 2009). Also the geographical isolation of small islands and their limited physical size can make the effects of climate change and implications for water supplies more severe than on the mainland (Ratter 2018). The smaller and lower the island, the greater reliance on groundwater it has; a major drawback for islanders is the fragile equilibrium of the freshwater lens with the surrounding seawater and the difficulty of pumping floating freshwater without saltwater entering the supply; this is why Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is more than elsewhere a vital approach to fulfil an optimal use of the resource for the locally-based various economic sectors, overall health issues, and island biodiversity, in short for social development (Depraetere et al. 2020).

A lack of freshwater is also detrimental for agriculture, tourism and island life at large. For example, it is a common trait of islandness that only a few crop varieties are grown on small islands, making the effects of crop failure harmful for the economy and local food supplies (Royle 2004). Also limited specialized labourers on small islands (e.g. engineers) may not be able to provide continuous solutions to hydraulic infrastructure problems created by storms, to which small islands are especially susceptible (Braje et al. 2017, cf. also “stone gardening” to avoid soil erosion and gullies on sloping fields (Mieth & Bork 2004). The governance structure and level of political corruption of a given society directly affects the distribution of water supplies. Especially on islands where freshwater supplies are in private hands, limited access to water exasperates already existing income inequalities; islanders without “hydraulic citizenship” may suffer from a diminished ability to participate in society (Anand 2017). Conversely, the availability of low-cost water when subsidised by local authorities generally induces an over-consumption and waste of water resources.

But the picture is not only bleak. Studying island water scarcity sheds light on the coping mechanisms, adaptations, and innovation of islanders over centuries (Schön & Dierksmeier 2021). In some cases, islanders provide examples that could be implemented mutatis mutandis on other islands or the mainland; as such they should be considered as bellwethers to cope with ongoing environmental changes and evolution of the societies to deal with mitigation/adaptation to climate change. For example, on the Canary islands from 1500-1800 (Map 2), a separate water police force was implemented to protect water supplies, water-yielding plant species called “Fountain Trees” were carefully guarded, low-cost domestic solutions to distil water were employed (“La destiladera Canaria”), extensive cisterns collected rain water, fog moisture was collected from pine trees, academic societies (Real Sociedad de Amigos del País) awarded prizes for innovation technological solutions, and communities came together to protest for their needs until news travelled to the mainland to reach people who could help them (Dierksmeier 2020; Gioda et al. 1995A and 1995B).

Map 2: average precipitation per year over the period 1950-2000 on the Canarian archipelago and the Selvagens islands

Water scarcity on islands also affects religious and cultural practices. For example, the “DiNapolito’s hypothesis” tries to explain the putative relations between the sacred zones with ahu statues and freshwater, one of the most critical resources on Rapa Nui. The hypothesis suggests that the locations of ahu are explained by their distance from coastal seeps, demonstrating the vital importance of coastal freshwater resources (DiNapoli et al. 2019). Despite the fact that Rapa Nui receives 1,177 mm/year of water on average, surface and sub-surface WR storage are erratic due the porosity and permeability of the volcanic basement. The utmost sign of precontact Pascuan populations’ dependencies on water resources stands on the fact that the hypnotic gaze of ahu are screening the island hinterland and NOT the open-sea; it illustrates the tight entanglement of hydrological and societal factors in constrained insular geographical contexts.

Water scarcity derives from manifold geological and geographical challenges, with a long history of solutions to one of the most significant enigmas of island life.

Christian Depraetere & Laura Dierksmeier

References

Anand N, 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Braje, T. J. / Leppard, T. P. / Fitzpatrick, S. M. / Erlandson, J. M. Archaeology, historical ecology and anthropogenic island ecosystems. Environmental Conservation 33:3, 2017, 286–297.

Depraetere C., Morell M., 2009: “Hydrology of islands”. In Encyclopedia of Islands, edited by Rosemary G. Gillespie and David A. Clague, Encyclopedias of the Natural World, n°2, University of California Press, July 2009, pp. 420-425.

Depraetere C., Soulis K.X., Tsesmelis D.E., Avgoustidis G., Spilanis I. (2020). Impacts of climate change on the evolution of water resources in the context of the Mediterranean islands using as an example two Aegean Sea islands : consequences for touristic activities in the future. In The anthropocene and islands : vulnerability, adaptation and resilience to natural hazards and climate change. Lago : Il Sileno, 3, 143-182. (Geographies of the Anthropocene ; 2).

Dierksmeier, L. (2020), Historical Water Scarcity on the Canary Islands, 1500-1800 AD. In: S. Teuber, A. Scholz, T. Scholten, & M. Bartelheim (eds.), Waters as a Resource. SFB 1070, Tübingen: University of Tuebingen Press, 39 – 47.

DiNapoli RJ, Lipo CP, Brosnan T, Hunt TL, Hixon S, Morrison AE., Becker, M (2019). Rapa Nui (Easter Island) monument (ahu) locations explained by freshwater sources. PLOS ONE Journal 14(1). Publisher Public Library of Science, January 2019, 27 pages.

Mieth, Andreas. & Bork, Hans-Rudolf. (2004). Easter Island – Rapa Nui : scientific pathways to secrets of the past. Kiel, Germany: Ecology Center. 109 pages, 49 figures. (cf. Figure 7 page 18, aerial view of the freshwater lake of Rano Raraku).

Gioda A., Hernandez Z., Gonzales E., Espejo R. (1995A). Fountain trees in the Canary islands : legend and reality. Advances Horticultural Science, 9, p. 112-118. https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010078642

Gioda, A., Maley, J., Guasp, R.E., Acosta Baladón, A. (1995B). Some Low Elevation Fog Forests of Dry Environments: Applications to African Paleoenvironments. In: Hamilton, L.S., Juvik, J.O., Scatena, F.N. (eds) Tropical Montane Cloud Forests. Ecological Studies, vol 110. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2500-3_10

Ratter, B. M. W. Geography of Small Islands: Outposts of Globalisation (Cham 2018).

S. A. Royle, A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity (London 2004).

Schön, F. & Dierksmeier, L. (2021), Water Scarcity at Sea: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on the Preservation of Freshwater on Volcanic Islands. In: T. Schade, B. Schweizer, S. Teuber, R. Da Vela, W. Frauen, M. Karami, D. Kumar Ojha, K. Schmidt, R. Sieler, & M. Toplak (eds.), Exploring Resources. Tübingen: University of Tübingen Press, 157 – 182.

Tourism, Culture and Island Identity

Posted on 17 de March, 2023 | By caparicio

The very spatial limitation of islands can create an idea of self-containment that is reflected for tourists (in their perception of visiting a ‘complete world’) but can also more clearly connect their inhabitants to the place experienced (Grydehøj; Nadarajah, Markussen 2018). Islands haunted by tourism share an awareness of their limits both in cultural terms -their dissolution in a global market of holiday flows- and also in terms of the sustainability of their territory. Stephen A. Royle ( 2009) identifies this awareness in the essential limitation of islands whose cultural references can be translated or adapted to welcome the receiving public, even creating a particular concept for the visitors’ identity – for example, in Hazel Andrews’ (2011) study for the English visiting Magaluf in Majorca. The image of village to be preserved that these places of residence defend will, however, also always be an indirect product of tourism, a counterpoint generating authentic pre-tourist images that reuse the myth of insular isolation to defend a local identity threatened by globalizing tourism. However, as we have seen, the history of the islands is often one of constant contact. According to Eduardo Brito Henriques (2009: 43), what they share is not isolation but the hybridization to which their ports and their maritime vocation lead.

The debate on the cultural affectation of tourism in island environments shares its positions with that which takes place in the wider framework of cultural anthropology, and in which, roughly speaking, we can identify two positions: that of those who see in tourism, a form of acculturation of the local and that of those who understand – from different positions – that tourism can function as an engine of cultural preservation or of creation of new cultural forms. In the first position, we would mainly find analyses on how cultural commodification in island environments causes the modification of the local culture which, as Michel Picard (1996) has already noticed from his studies in Bali, changes when it becomes a performative representation for tourists. At the same time, Keith G. Brown and Jenny Cave (2010) note that they necessarily convert the relationship between tourist and resident into a relationship between consumer and producer, who can adapt their product to the expectations of the former. Access to local culture is therefore reserved for a few demanding tourists and often those with high purchasing power who, for example, when they arrive in Mallorca visit the tomb of Robert Graves in the picturesque – and expensive – municipality of Deyà and do not go out on the streets decorated with German or British flags in Magaluf or El Arenal.

Studying cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands, Michelle MacCarthy reflects on the uses of the concept of authenticity in the valuation of cultural products consumed by tourists, an authenticity that its very presence could corrupt. However, in a constructivist position of the cultural element – she concludes -, authenticity as such that only exists as a projection of the tourist himself, is itself a tourist product sold by cultures in a constant process of evolution. From this point of view, Antoni Vives and Francesc Vicens (2021) analyse the link between tourist culture and local identity, and – so they believe – it is not very useful to understand tourism as a process of acculturation of pure and immobile pre-tourist identities. Tourism would also import complex and creative forms of cultural contact, which emerge – as Michel Picard also concluded from Bali – through the creation of new forms of modern cultural production.

Also in its environmental dimension, tourism promotes -since the first attempts to invent nature as a place of contemplation for visitors (Martínez-Tejero and Picornell 2022) – a patrimonialization of the natural element that has a double effect especially relevant in tourist insularities. On the one hand, it transforms nature into landscape, cancelling out, for example, the productive relevance of the rural or the need to respect changes in the environment and its resources. The drive to visit the patrimonialized landscape environment ends up, in a perverse paradoxical circle, raping the nature it celebrates, motivating urban exploitation, the media, the over-occupation of the territory. On the contrary, it generates an awareness of the very limits of the territorial, but in which these do not only refer to the awareness of the coastline, but also, to an evaluation of the very materiality of the land that derives, at the same time, in two interconnected registers: the generation of an ecological discourse where the island identity is largely linked to the natural space and, likewise, in a certain essentialisation of this nature as a place of reception of the roots of resident cultures that can lead to an almost nostalgic idealisation of pre-tourism as authentic, sometimes ignoring the stories of transit that, as we have seen, often condition the island histories and their most interesting literary determinations in terms of methodological innovation. Considering the terrain, the oppressions of the labour market, the constant reinvention of the local in its tourist projection and/or resistance, the global imaginary of the insular seems even more a literary construction, real in its ability to attract visitors and configure looks, as well as to evaluate how these looks are readjusted or answered by the local culture.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Andrews, Hazel (2011). “Porkin’ Pig goes to Magaluf”. Journal of Material Culture, 16: 2. 151-170.

Grydehøj, Adam; Nadarajah, Yaso; Markussen, Ulunnguaq (2018). “Islands of indigeneity: Cultural Disctinction, Indigenous Territory and Island Spaciality”. Area, 52(1): 14-22.

Martínez-Tejero, Cristina; Picornell, Mercè (2022). “From Pleasant Difference to Ecological Concern: Cultural Imaginaries of Tourism in Contemporary Spain”. Luis I. Prádanos, A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Londres: Tamesis Books. 195-205.

Picard, Michel (1996). Bali: Cultural tourism and touristic culture. Singapur: Archipelago.

Royle, Stephen A. (2009). “Tourism Changes on a Mediterranean island: Experiences from Mallorca”, Island Studies Journal, 4: 2. 225-240.

Vives Riera, Antoni; Vicens Vida, Francesc (2021). Cultura turística i identitats múltiples a les Illes Balears. Passat i present. Barcelona: Afers.

Tourism, Insularity and Sustainability

Posted on 17 de March, 2023 | By caparicio

The territorial limitation of islands makes them more aware of the limits of their resources in the face of tourist overexploitation. In the critical bibliography, however, two almost opposing trends can be identified: those who detect the risks of tourist overexploitation of islands, and those who identify tourism as a possibility for development that insularity could hinder for other tourism industries. The concept of ‘resilience’ is often discussed as a specific virtue that would enable tourism to support the social and ecological footprint more than other environments and diversify the knowledge needed to sustain itself with its own resources (McLeod; Dodds, Butler 2021). The need to “support” this footprint, even when it threatens the social, ecological and cultural balance of the environment, is related to the possibility of “development” of environments that have not been able, by their peripheral or remote condition, to become industrialised. According to Dimitrios Buhalis (1999), tourism would reduce the prosperity gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. This decrease may have as a counterpoint, he also admits, inequality in access to the capital generated by tourism when the majority of residents participate only in the wealth of tourism from precarious jobs, their own or, in general, conditioned by the multinationals that influence tourism demand, access to the island and even – if the political power allows it – its planning and accessibility. Somewhat more nuanced and critical views are those who consider the fragility of many island ecosystems subjected to a great exhaustion of resources – for example, water – due to the massive arrival of visitors. In considering the impact of climate change on island tourism environments, starting from the particular case of Malta and Mallorca (Calvià), Rachel Dodds and Ilan Kelman (2018) propose different action plans needed to protect environments to make them safe for tourism, but without questioning how tourism, in fact, also contributes to climate change and the natural degradation of many of the environments in which it occurs. Sustainability is thus defined not only as a necessity of tourism in relation to the territory in which it operates, but as a strategy which allows adaptation to changes caused, among other factors, by tourism itself.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Buhalis, Dimitrios (1999). “Tourism in the Greek Islands: The issues of peripherality, competitiveness and development”, International Journal of Tourism Research, 1(5), 341-359.

Dodds, Rachel, i Kelman, Ilan (2008). “How climate change is considered in sustainable tourism policies: A case of the Mediterraneal Islands of Malta and Mallorca”, Tourism Review International, 12, 57-70.

NcLeod, Michelle, Dodds, Rachel, and Butler, Richard (2021). “Introduction to special issue on island tourism resilience”, Tourism Geographies, 23: 3, 361-370.

ISSN 2975-9331

Category: Practices