89 LONG REIGNETH THE OTTERLY TEST: GENEALOGY AND SRI LANKAN BURGHERS IN A ‘POSTCOLONIAL’ WORLD Fiona A Kumari Campbell ... (T)he landscape functions as a scribe recording the passage of history of the nation and its people. The emotion attached to the landscape relates to its ability to release memory, allowing the past to exist simultaneously with the present. Thus a metonymic link between bodies, landscape and nation, in that they are all contiguous... function to temporarily replace one another... The landscape which initially unites bodies and creates an identity through place becomes repressed in the formation of the nation. …The thews and sinews of the body shaped by our relationship to our specific environment are covered over by the forging of a national identity. 1 1. BURGHERS WITHIN ‘SPACE’ BUT STILL LOOKING FOR A ‘PLACE’? The insights of legal geography have pointed to the intersection of law, space and power, whereby the spatial order of things (political, economic and cultural) are lived before they are recited and theorised. ‘Historical’ landscapes float in anamnestic temporal spaces of bygone passages that are enfleshed in the memory of those whose thews and sinews are meshed as sons and daughters of the soil. Indeed during in the nineteenth and twentieth century worlds of ‘post- colonial’ 2 shiftings and contestations, there were frequent explosions and implosions of space mediated through legal discourse. As Henri Lefebvre, remarks ‘… at the level of the immediate and the lived, space is exploding on all sides…Everywhere people are realising that spatial relations are social relations’. 3 This essay is about the explosion of (raced) identity. The powder Socio-Legal Research Centre/School of Human Services, Griffith University, Brisbane. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for reminding me of the necessity to make theoretical links more clear, even when at times they are less than certain. I wish to thank William MacNeil for encouraging me to branch out of my usual research terrain and explore ‘personal’ territory. Thanks to Ann Ingamells for comments on an early draft. Finally, with gratitude to Ian Duncanson and Nan Seuffert for their enthusiasm. 1 Mohanram Radhika Black Body: Women Colonialism and Space Allen & Unwin Australia 1999 p 5–6 2 By using the concept ‘post-colonial’ I acknowledge its double meaning- ‘after colonialism’ and the simultaneous continuation of colonial reproduction through social spatiality and cultural formations. 3 Lefebvre Henri ‘Space: Social Product and Use Value’ in Joel Freiberg (ed) Critical Sociology: European Perspectives Irvington Publishers New York 1979 p 290.