Tokens or Totems? Eccentric Props in Postcolonial Re-enactments of Colonial Consecration

Abstract

During colonial expansion the ceremonial insertion of archetypes of European civilisation into terra nullius served two opposing ends: to make visible territorial claims and to conceal the illegitimacy of these claims. While aware of this ambivalence, modern texts re-enacting colonial spectacles of territorial consecration are not always wholly critical of European cultivating zeal but may also trace a genuinely idealistic impulse in it. The films Fitzcarraldo and The Piano and the novels Oscar and Lucinda and Remembering Babylon are cases in point. They rewrite colonial history by telling intricately ironical stories of failure and ascribing special sacredness to the settings as well as to the mementos of the defeats they recount. CRUCIFIXES ON mountaintops are a common topographic feature of Alpine Europe. They were first erected in the fifteenth century either to mark crossroads and borders of pasture land or to avert natural catastrophes believed to be brought on by evil forces. During the plague epidemics between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when fear of contamination caused people to shun larger congregations in the valleys, believers would gather around crucifixes in the mountains for mass, a practice which has been retained ever since. After World War II, the function of summit crosses changed again when the presence of the Allied Forces in Bavaria, the Tyrol and Northern Italy prevented homecoming soldiers from openly mourning their fallen comrades within the precincts of their home towns. Instead they took to the mountains, carrying with them crosses which they would erect on ever more inaccessible points as expressions not only of their faith but also of their patriotism. 1 Nowadays the history of mountaintop crucifixes is largely unknown to the general public; their ubiquity is readily taken for granted. The whole matter of mounting them, while once seen as a heroic personal feat, has become an entirely anonymous affair, a matter mainly of aeronautic exactitude. Mostly the crosses, no longer carved from wood but made from stainless steel,