Andrew's Wiki
Textures Of Place

Place

• “A surface is, after all, where subject and object merge.”
• Texture = context and textile
  • weaving together of coherence; “ordered complexity”
  • similar to language
  • the feel of something: as experienced, multi-sensory
  • surface and depth at the same time
• Texture of place means surfaces, processes, structures, histories, as well as the linguistic contexts of the place
• Place = “the weaving together of social relations and human-environment interactions”
  • the mutual interweaving of social contexts from spatial ones and vice versa
  • both material and symbolic properties
• For last few decades has been devalued by social scientists but is now back in focus
  • now about “landscape” “territory” “region”
  • New Western History, American studies, philosophy, sociology (“a cultural artifact of social cohesion and conflict”), anthropology’s new interest in empowering places, lit crit on the influence of space…most examples are from the 90s and he doesn’t have one true one from lit!

Geography

• Geographers and other disciplines: history, philosophy, anthropology
• Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place which said geography must deal with the relationship between the two, sparked a new current in humanist geography but also in academia in general
  • But clearly this book is about place…
• Humanist Geography
  • Human movements in the landscape
  • What it means to be “placed”
  • Watershed: 1978’s Humanist Geography essay collection ed Ley and Samuels
    • “A humanist geography is concerned to restore and make explicit the relationship between knowledge and human interests. All social constructions, be they cities or geographical knowledge, reflect the values of a society and an epoch, so that humanist geographies reject out of hand any false claim to objectivity and pure theory in the study of man. Such claims, most notably those of contemporary positivism, negate themselves through their lack of reflexivity, their unself-conscious espousal of value positions.”
  • “Humanist geographers studied landscape iconography, mental maps, environmental perception, and everyday geographies; they employed a range of methods, including phenomenology, ethnography, and hermeneutics. Emulating their late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century counterparts (George Perkins Marsh, Vidal de la Blanche, J. K. Wright), they examined literary texts, art, photography, and film.”
  • Lyrical writing, “richness” of particular locales, Wright’s “words or phrases that contain emotional connotation”
  • Humanist geographers ask, “What is the nature of human experience? How do place, landscape, and space define and provide a context for this experience?” xv
    • me: note how you see landscape is only a “context,” right?
  • Phenomenology: Husserl’s “philosophical science” of finding the laws of human spiritual and psychological experience; usually followed b/c an alternative to positivism; but of course even Husserl was convinced you would find eternal truths once you peeled back the a priori hiding them.
  • Humanist geographers also study politics: remember the “everyday wonder” about place; finding out meanings you take for granted; its relationship to group identity
  • Emphasize the social construction of place and create “cultural contexts”
• Changes in humanist geography over last 30 years
  • No more universals
  • No more Heideggerian lifeworlds, dwelling
  • Often people aren’t calling themselves humanist geographers anymore b/c seems to imply universalism so they call themselves cultural geographers or historical geographers
  • Emergence of “critical humanist geographies” during 1970s
    • why? b/c critical of previous empirical and positivist approaches
    • Buttimer: dialogic approach of insider/outsider
    • Tuan: “topophilia” getting to know space is getting to know yourself
    • how do social gestures and utterances create space
  • 1980s and 90s: ideas rapidly coming in from cultural materialism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonial theory
    • After all that hullaballo, sitting down to a “contextualist approach”
• Contextualism: neither claims objectivity nor espouses complete antifoundationalism, but instead looks at the interplay of place and language, the different “contexts” of geographical experiences inflected by identity groups (race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, etc), so you’re looking at “where individual meanings and social practices are produced” xvii
  • Can use historical research, case studies, ethnography/fieldwork, textual analysis, participant observation
  • All while keeping the focus on individual experiences of place on the one hand and the theory of place on the other
• Major change, around 80s: changing from a scholarly detachment that sometimes looked like old-school spatial analysis to look at “man’s” experience in place, to an awareness of the politics of place (how authority plays out in place)
  • 1980s=90s saw experiments in antifoundational geography (against grand theories of Marxism, structural functionalism, etc; and against any approach that relies on stable human subject of the Enlightenment or universal values)
    • New understanding of human subjectivity, the role of language, and “Western” received ideas xviii
    • Now about plurality, diversity: geography is “tolerant” and “pluralistic”
    • a push towards narrative rather than analysis
    • now about geography + humanities

Essays

• A lot about topophilia: loving the land, bringing it offers, etc
  • (ridicule)
• How zoning laws create us v them
• Museums rewriting history
  • are you surprised if I tell you the author had visited a GERMAN museum? again, jeez, you aren’t subtle are you?
• Ghost towns are more convincing when they let the town die and decay than when they’re realistic
• How turn of the century geographers were racist social Darwinist freaks
• Paul C Adams on the “walking” sense of place: as transcendent or an exile, while New Urbanism will break out of this dual evil
• Patrick Mc Greevey? on “the void,” the unknown, to urge us on to a version of defamiliarization
• Tim Cresswell on the “vagrant” and “tramp” as people don’t traverse space in normative ways, terms invented to exclude people not obeying the rules
• Yi-Fu Tuan, cosmos versus hearth
  • ordered, cozy safe familiar local, direct experience; abstract, impersonal, inaccessible, freedom, largeness 319
    • yet the hearth can be a prison, and it is where the rudest onslaughts always occur, rather than in the streets (this is a neat observation! why do modernist characters leave home? clearly the hearth is more oppressive and dangerous than the streets)
  • correspond to body and mind
  • in the ideal space they will overlap: think about reading in a comfy chair: your body is nested but your mind is floating free
  • the ideal seminar room would be a cozy room with a hearth, coffee, banana bread, a fire, but the ideas would be “un-homelike”
  • He has a book about this, Cosmos and Hearth
• All of these people could clearly use to read some lit critics on Russian Formalism or the flaneur, and we could listen to them on map history…and maybe something else
• Some want to find some engine that will produce absolutes, while others are totally against it and are all about the Particular Place instead