You are all familiar with the Amish communities in America. And some of
you are familiar with their traditions. Some of them have been displayed by the
cinema or by television programs. They tend to show the importance of community
work. One example is that presented by the Hollywood film (I think is called The
Witness) with Harrison Ford. There is a couple that marries and the community
joins up to build them a barn.
When the barn was being build, all the community
was there, working together, reinforcing there social bonds and identity,
performing their traditions, communicating and perpetuating their world views.
It was a social event of structural importance for the community as a whole; after
being built, the barn was useful only to the married couple. So, the building
process was socially and ideologically meaningful for the community and once the structure was finished it was only economically meaningful for a specific family. This exemplifies, I think, the social
importance of building.
The building processes are essential to understand the social role of
enclosures. However, that doesn’t mean that we have to imagine, as for our
example of the Amish barn, that we have a first construction phase of communal
interest followed by a use phase of restricted interest. The long temporalities
of some ditched enclosures and the evidences of continued constructions (new
ditches, recutting of ditch filling, sometimes during long chronologies, like
in Perdigões) show that there is not an easy separation between a period of
building and a period of use.
The merit of this approach to building processes is precisely that:
building is already using in social and symbolic terms. In fact, the social,
ideological, economic role of building stars in the moment of its idealization
and design and continues during building/using phases. A perspective that have
been absent from the traditional theoretical approaches to enclosures in
Portugal (and in Iberia).
