Post #19 | What is a physical-symbolic border?

When we look at the geo-morphological framework of Lisbon region, we can observe that it is composed by two main mountain ranges – Sintra and Arrábida – which, according to ancient scholars, were two columns of the ancient world, as it was the Strait of Gibraltar, which is referenced as also having this supporting role.?

Faced with a representation of the world conceived as a flat and finite, or bounded expanse, these mountainous structures bordering the ocean take on the role of “border of the known world”. Over time, this border has structured the area surrounding the banks of the Tagus.?

From the moment the Portuguese decided to set off on the adventure that was the spice route by sea, it is experienced what has been the subject of scientific controversy since Antiquity, between the flatness or roundness of the earth. The discoveries ended demonstrating the hypothesis of a round planet, and this by going beyond what thus represents a “physical-symbolic border”. This physical motif of the mountain range is invested with symbolic values. This border will even be sung in the verses of the Lusíadas, by Luis Vaz de Cam?es, in the 16th century, and personified by the mythological character of the giant Adamastor.

Figure 1: Map of the territory of Lisbon representing the location of the two mountain ranges and their location vis-à-vis Portugal. Source: Isabel Marcos

We find this same mythology of the physical-symbolic border when José Saramago (1922-2010; Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998) articulates the categories of Myth, History and Fiction in his book entitled “A Jangada de Pedra” (1986). He seems to pose a strange prophecy, which is also a statement, at the imminent moment of Portugal's entry into the European Union. In his book, he transfers the structuring role of the two mountain ranges (Sintra and Arrábida), a role that is both attractive and repulsive, to the mountain range of the Pyrenees. Indeed, in this work, the Iberian Peninsula is detached from Europe as a strange separation of continents, and then drifts closer to the former colonies, on the other side of the ocean. Thus, in this novel, the author relies on a physical-symbolic border between the "Iberian region" and the European Union, as starting point for the detachment of the first and its regrouping in a truly socio-cultural Iberian territory.

To summarize the notions involved in the two parts of this example, let us remember that the specific characteristic of this type of border (physical-symbolic) is to contain a dynamism within itself, simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

??Repulsion and attraction in relation to the ocean: sometimes the mountain ranges constitute an impassable edge, and sometimes the collective destiny of the Iberian Peninsula depends on going beyond this border (first globalization by sea in the era of the discoveries).

??Repulsion also in relation to Europe and attraction towards another cultural basin (the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking ex-colonies).

The boundary-setting is therefore read first from the activity of a pregnant form, a form invested by a certain field or motricity (physical, biological, or symbolic), and which becomes a driving force for the behaviour of the various groups. In turn, this pregnant form releases influxes that invest socio-cultural groups. These flows have already been called elsewhere “morphogenetic gradients” (Desmarais, 1995: 93) and refer more broadly to the notion of “dynamic systems” (Morier, 2015).

The boundary-setting thus defined has a close link with the concept of “vacuum”, defined as an “organizing centre” (Desmarais, 1995; Ritchot, 1985; Marcos, 1996). These vacuums “structure the surrounding inhabited spaces by attracting and repelling the trajectories of actors” (Desmarais, 2007: 216). These objects have “a double morphodynamic and semiotic dimension. This makes it possible to reduce the diversity of the organizing centres to the more abstract unity of a meaningful form whose internal dynamics ensure the spatial actualization of symbolic meanings. This is how, through vacuums, cultural values permeate the inhabited spaces and spread through it” (Desmarais, 2007: 218). Moreover, “vacuums break the homogeneity of geographical expanses and initiate a sequence of qualitative differentiations” because they are invested with symbolic meanings, they “locate fundamental prohibitions”, they are attractive and repulsive.?

Let us recall the image of a volcano in eruption causing the pregnance of magma to trickle down the walls of its salient relief, an image which, for Thom, brings together in the most concentrated way the interplay of pregnacies and saliences.

In this post, the notion of "physical-symbolic border" is defined as an organizing centre. On the one hand, this type of border structures the surrounding inhabited space and produces a series of qualitative differentiations at the origins of the urban structuring of Lisbon. On the other hand, this same centre acts as a generator of socio-cultural behaviours, which sometimes are of veneration, through rituals, other times going beyond this border by crossing it, initiating the deployment of a process of globalization by sea.