Senses of Place 0933452942, 9780933452947

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�ensu of Ploce

Publication of the Advanced Seminar Series is made possible by generous support from the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, Texas.

SCHOOL OF AMER ICAN RESEARCH AD

VANCED SEMINAR SER IES Douga 1 s w.. Schwartz, Gene ral Editor

Senies of Place CONTRIBUTORS

Keith H. Basso Department of Anthropology University of New Mexico Karen I. Blu Department of Anthropology New York University Edward S. Casey Department of Philosophy State University of New York, Stony Brook Steven Feld Anthropology Board of Studies University of California, Santa Cruz Charles 0. Frake Department of Anthropology State University of New York, Buffalo Clifford Geertz School of Social Science Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey Miriam Kahn Department of Anthropology University of Washington Kathleen C. Stewart Department of Anthropology University of Texas at Austin

"We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people

Senses of Place ldited by �teven feld and Heith H. Bono

who own it-for a little while." Willa Cather, 0 Pioneers!

SCHOOL OF AMERICAN RESEARCH PRESS I SANTA FE I NEW MEXICO

School of American Research Press Post Office Box 2188 Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2188 Director of Publications: Joan K. O'Donnell Editor: Jane Kepp Designer: Deborah Flynn Post Indexer: Douglas J. Easton Typographer: Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

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Contents

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Distributed by the University of Washington Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Senses of place/ edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. p. cm. - (School of American Research advanced seminar series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-933452-94-2 (cloth). - ISBN 0-933452-95-0 (paper) 1. Human geography-Philosophy. 2. Ethnology-Philosophy. 3. Geographical perception. I. Feld, Steven. II. Basso, Keith, 1940III. Series. GF21.S45 1996 304.2'3-dc20 96-31354 CIP � 1996 by the School of American Research. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card number 96-31354. International Standard Book Numbers 0-933452-94-2 (cloth) and 0-933452-95-0 (paper). First edition. Cover: "Road Taken. 95," by Carol Anthony. Craypas and enamel on gessoed panel. 0 1996 Carol Anthony. Courtesy the Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe. Photo by D an Morse.

List of Illustrations I ix Acknowledgments I xi Introduction I 3 Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena I 13 Edward S. Casey Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape 1 53 Keith H. Basso Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea 1 91 Steven Feld

4 An Occupied Place I 137 Kathleen C. Stewart

Your Place and Mine: Sharing Emotional Landscapes in Wamira, Papua New Guinea I 167 Miriam Kahn "W here Do You Stay At?": Homeplace and Community among the Lumbee 1 197 Karen I. Blu

viii I Contrnu

Pleasant Places, Past Times, and Sheltered Identity in Rural East Anglia I 229 Charles 0. Frake

Illustrations

Afterword I 259 Clifford Geertz References 1 263 Index I 283

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 7.1 7.2

Cottonwood tree at Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills Ulahi sings at the Wo:lu creek I 115 Gulu creek 1 124 The surgingfoo- ofSo:lo: waterfall, 133 Amigo, West Virginia I 138 Devil's Fork Creek, Amigo I 142 Sylvie Hess's place, Odd, West Virginia I 145 Lance Smith on porch, Amigo I 147 Bridge on the 'Migo-Rhodell road I 163 Sybil Gisewa and Hilarion Watiwati I 171 Tamodukorokoro, the fertile plain behind Wamira I 176 Marakwadiveta in the hills above Warnira I 177 Tauanana surrounded by her children I 181 Tauribariba, Dogura cathedral I 183 T he Dararugu stones in Worewore I 185 Robeson County, North Carolina I 203 The northeast Norfolk landscape 1 232 Advertisement for map of Norfolk County, 1797 I 242

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Acknowledaments

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The essays presented here were first written for a School of American Re­ search advanced seminar titled "Place, Expression, and Experience," held in March-April 1993. Because of length constraints, this volume omits one paper prepared for the advanced seminar, "Creating a Heterotopia: An Analysis of the Spacetime of Olmsted's and Vaux's Central Park," by Nancy D. Munn. Speaking from our position as conveners, we thank the seminar par­ ticipants for their essays, for their spirited discussions, and for their patience through the rewriting and publishing phase of the project. Their enthusiasm helped enlarge what was, for us at least, a more circumscribed dialogue about matters of place and making place matter. For their generous support of the advanced seminar, we thank the School of American Research and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The hospitality of SAR president Douglas Schwartz, conference coordinator Cecile Stein, and their staff made the meeting relaxed and enjoyable. For help with manuscript preparation, we are grateful to Frances Terry and to the staff of the SAR Press.

Introduction

Steven Feld ond Keith H. Basso

A

recent spate of writings on the subject of place, both within and across academic disciplines, obliges us to begin with a si mple ques­ tion: What is meant to be the contribution of this book? How does it differ from and how does it mesh with developing trends in con­ temporary scholarship? In particular, what were the aims of this group of authors in circulating their papers prior to an advanced seminar at the School of American Research in 1993, coming together in Santa Fe to discuss them, and then rethinking and revising them in light of the group meeting, readers' responses, and further attention to the growing body of literature? First, the broader setting. Readers interested in place are no doubt aware of valuable contributions made lately by cultural geographers, many of whom have adopted interpretive frameworks similar to those familiar to anthropologists. Some of these frameworks are pointedly humanistic (Buttimer 1993; Entrikin 1991; J. Jackson 1994), emerging from a lineage of inquiry into place and lived experiences, particularly experiences of rootedness, uprootedness, or transrootedness (Bachelard 1964; Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Cosgrove 1984; Lowenthal 1985; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). The cultural geographers' work, which tends to incorporate a good deal of modern philosophical thought, is often guided by ideas on "dwelling" described in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger (1971). These ideas are variously blended with social theory, sometimes producing syntheses bearing affinities to the socio­ logical notion of "placeways" developed in the work of E. V. Walter (1988), and at other times producing critical and deconstructive analyses for application in the fields of environmental design, urban planning, and architecture (Mugerauer 1994; Seamon 1992). An equally prominent trend in cultural geography is centrally con­ cerned with neo-Marxist cultural critique and with global postmodern

4 I

mm FILO ANO IEITH H. BA!!O the?ry (Harvey 1989; P. Jackson 1989; Soja 1989). Accordin gly, many of its proponents position their writing in relation to geographies of struggle and resistanc e, especially those writers who embrace issues of repres ntation, gender, a nd political actio n (D un can and Ley 1993; Keith : and Pile 1993; Massey 1994). Most of these authors are cle arly indebted to Michel_ Foucault's exposition (1970, 1979, 1986) of pan opticism and heterotopia_s, ai:1d t�ey take as their star ting points his spatial analyses of repression, illSt1tut10 nal power, and social control . Perspecti�es_ in cultural geography artic ulat e in var ying degrees with ?ther hu_mamstic studies of place written by historians, cr itics, and art­ ists: ill hterat�re and_ biography (Hiss 1990; Turner 1989), in folklore (Ryden �993), ill music (Stokes 1994), and in literary theory and a r t his­ tor y (Mi_tch el l 1994). And the cultural geography literature now includes per s�ecti�es from anthropology a nd a rchaeology in works exploring the relanons�ips_ be ween la nd scape and author ity (B ender 1993) and dia­ � logues with illd1genous peoples and heritage co nser vationists about the impor tance of protecting sacred sites (Car michael et al. 1994; Kelley and Francis 1994). Alo ngside the�e t�ends, and often enough in juxtaposition to them, _ the recent topicali �at10 n of �lace by c ultural anthropologists has mostly been c?ncerned _ with the�nzmg social identities. An important jumpingoff pomt for this enterpnse was a shor t collection of essays titled Place: \ �xrerience and Symbol that brought together ethnographers and human­ istic g eographer s. Most of these essays foc used on th e social well-b eing att:iched to the sense of rootedness in place -so much so that in the end editor Miles Richard son lamented that the e mphasis they gave to the rooted over the un rooted or the uprooted , to the in-pl ace over the out­ , of-pl ace, was at best problematical a nd perhaps "inauth entic" (1984 :66). Subse_quent _ work in anthropology has taken several steps beyond that startillg pomt by theorizing place l argely from th e standpoint of its contestatio n a nd its linkage to local and global power relations. What­ ever else may b e i volved , this development surel y reflects the now . ? acute world cond 1t1ons of exile, d isplacement, diasporas, and inflamed b ?r ders, to say nothing of the increasingly tumultuous struggles by in­ d 1geno us p eoples_ and cultural minor ities for ancestral homela nds, l and _ nghts, and retention of sac red pl aces. Th ese days, narratives of place once presented _ un �er sue� gentle rubrics as " national i ntegration" and "politi­ cal evolut10n are b eillg framed m decidedly harsher terms: as economic developm ent by stat e i nvasion and occupation, or as the extr action of transn_ation al wealth at escalating costs in human suffering, cultural de­ _ structio n, an� environmental deg radation (Bodley 1988; B urger 1990· ' Cultural Survival 1993).

INUOOUCTION I !

I n this light it is hardly surpr ising that anthropol ogists have come to worr y less about place in broad phil osophical or humanistic terms than about places as sites of power struggles or about displace ment as histories of annexation, absorption, and resistance . Thus, ethnography's stories of place and pl aces are inc reasin gly about contestation . And this makes them consistent with a larger n arrative in which previousl y absent "others" are now por trayed as fully present, no longer a presumed and L-­ s." These stories a re dista nt "them" r emoved from a vague a nd tacit "u black-lined borders e c n o e whos map d worl a on n pl aced a nd in motio ss, er ased by chaos, uene vag by ed g ud sm gly n asi re c n i e ar and boundaries dge 1988; De leuze nri e ck re B nd a ai dur (Appa ty n rtai e c un or clouded by 1988). o d Rosal 1988; rer Kapfe and Guattari 1986; Arj un Appadurai considers these a nd related matters in his introd uc­ tion to a 1988 theme issue of Cultural Anthropology, "Place and Voice in Anthropological Theo ry." At the outse t, Appadurai contrasts the practice of explicitly naming the locations to which ethnographers travel with the tendency to ign ore or assume the locations from which they come . Then he links this practice to the rhetorical problem of embedding a multiplicity of local voices in the more sing ular and synthetic voice of 1 anthropological authorship. Joining those two concerns, Appadurai and other authors in the symposium examine the metonymy of pl ace and idea, arguing that in the realm of rep resentations, geographical regions are not so much physically distinct entities as discursively constructed settings that signal par ticular social modalities: I ndia becomes hierarchy, New Guinea exchange, Africa segmen tatio n, and so forth. I n a similar vein, Mar garet C. Rodman's American Anthropologist ar ticle, "Empowering Plac e: Multilocality and Multivocality" (1992), reviews and critiques the power positions and assumptions underlying e quations L of "pl ac e" and "location." Rodman recommends studies of place that take discontinuities a nd multiplicities of voice and action into greater ac­ count. Such studies, she cont ends, must reject "boundedness" models of culture and the ways they p rivilege the authority of persons in positions of power. In a more recent theme issue of Cultural Anthropology titled "Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference;' edito rs Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson likewise see the need for a reevaluation of the "assumed iso­ morphism of spac e, place and culture" (1992:7), a reassessment based on critical theorizations of space "embodied in such notions as surveil­ lance, panopticism, simulacr a, deterr itor ialization, postmodern hyper­ space, borderland s, and marginality" (1992:6). Joining with other critics of anthropology's histor ical tendency to favo r representations of con­ tained people, places, and identities, Gupta and Ferguson call for an

6 I HEYEN FELD AND UITH H. BASSO

anthrop ology of _space _grou nded in 0 f b oundary erosio n ' diasporas and

an understanding o f the realities di sp ersa1 , mobility and m ovement. . e this - gm They tma space as one "beyond cuIture," wh ere stabilize d ter ritori. es are repIaced by hYbri·d and flw.d zones such as borderla nd s ' which are characteri. zed by p1�ce m . cy (see al · deter mma so Gup ta, F erguson, and Rouse 1992· ' Appadurai 1992 proposes the notion o f "ethnoscapes" as a res ponse to the bounded c ulture synd rome ; Cliff , . ord 1992 critiques . g anthrop ology s pri. vilegm of dwelling over travel) More recently still, an anth oIogy tlt . 1e d The An thropology of l.Andscape: . P.ersp�ctwe � on P /ace and Space (Hirsch and O' Hanlon 1995) has appea red ' sh owmg h ow d iffere nt Iines O f though t on th ese topics have been de • Bn. . velop·mg m t 1sh so ci. al anth�o p_oIogy. D eriv . ed fro:11 a co�erence at the London Schoo l ofEconorrucs m 1989, the collec t10 n begms with an essa t he co ep of land s cape by an a rt historian. It is followed by nin[ :t�og ra��c � c apters treating dimensions of pla ce concep ts and spat.a I l his tory m the Am azon, Ma dagascar, India, Israel, Mongolia, Fi ji, ab or iginal Australia, and Pap . ua New Gumea . As E ri.c Hirsc . h .md1. cates in his mt · roductor y overvi. ew eth ' nography can contri. bute much to unpacking the Wiestern 1andscape co . ncep t, not only as i. t has mflu ence d artistic . ns Of d v1· sual r epresentatio · 1stan t worIds but also as it shapes the imaginat.ion of rur· al Places as fixe d and i. mmutable "elsewheres." In doing so ' Hi. rsch suggests 'anthrop ology · h t provi. de-contra more static, abso . rrug lute, or pre dorrun . antly visual ap proaches - a t . n oflandsc eori. zat10 h ap as e c u1tur al p rocess that . is dYnarru·c, muIt • isensual, and constantly oscilla ting between a "fcore ground" 0f ev e d ry ay Ii ved emplacement and a "back,, . ground of social po tential (see also Tilley 1994). Few of the works J·ust mentio · ned had been publ.ished m . the spring of 1990 ' wh en we �onc . eiv ed the idea o f a S cho ol o f American R esearch advance d serrunar on "Pl ace, Expressi. on, and Exp er ience " Most . o f th e th emes we have cited . r to us then, a . were £a milia s were som e of their antecedents but th se were not what we talke d ab ou t . Rath er, we were struck b s�meth;g more ba sic : t ha t while cultur al anthrop olo g1. st s h ad cer tainly y done useful re sea rch on place and places e' thnographic accou nts that were centered on n ative constructions ofparticular loc ali· t1. es -wh"ICh i.s to say th. e perc�p tt· on and exp eri. ence of place -were few and fa r betw n. Th'. ression remained int act until the time of our meeti ng dur:g the ;::;:ys of March and th e first days of April 199 3 although by then some welcome e xceptions to it: su� h as Fred My ,' ers s Pintupi Coun try, Pintupi Self (199 1) and James Wiemer s The Empty Place (1991), had become well known. Because long-term ethnograPhi • . c fi1eIdwork wi. th a st rong Iingwsu fco cu s was the main shared feature o c four own .mtellectual biographie s, we

INTRODUCTION I 7

found our selves imagining a project that would honor the basic anthro­ pological commonplace that where m eani ng and experienc e are con­ cer ne d, ca reful e thnography-and with it careful attention to language and language use-is basic and essential. To that end we invited ou r col­ leagues to explore in cl ose detail cultural processes and practices through which places are rendered meaningful-through which, one might say, places are actively sensed. We a sked for lengthy es says (at least by an­ thology standards) that gave top p rior ity to forms o flocal knowledge and to localized form s o fexp ression. And we exp ected th e essays, when con­ sidere d all together, to ser ve as a sp r ingbo ard for profitable discussions ab ou t the complex ways in which places anchor lives in soc ial forma­ tions ranging widely in geographical l ocation, in economic and p olitical scale, and in acco mpanyi ng realms o f gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Because the two o f us would b e wr iting about peoples typically viewed as among anthropology's most traditional and stereotypically exotic int erlocutors-Apac he Indians a nd rainforest Papuans -we felt strongly that the book should contain cont rastive essays about very dif­ ferent g roup s of Native Americans and Papua New Guineans, particu­ larly tho se whose renderings of place relied less on highly aestheticize d na rr ative and poetic forms. Thu s we invite d Ka ren I. Blu to p r esent her research on the history of multiple claims to pla ce h eld by Lumbee I ndians and their African-Amer ican and Anglo -American neighbo rs in North Carolina, and Miriam Kahn to discuss the Papuan world o f the coas tal Wamirans, a world where myth s and memor ies are voice d in ma­ ter ial ways, including the placement o f stones The essays by Blu and . Kahn showed us conspicuously different modes of imagining and en­ acting place, makirtg it clear, among oth er things, that th ere were no monolithic Native Amer ican or Melanesia n modes o f dwelling. A more radical way to create sharp textual juxtap ositi ons, we felt, was to emphasize places and populations who se geographical closeness and presumed familiar ity made th em, ironically, more, not less, "o ther " and remote, at le ast in ter ms ofconventional ethnographic wr iting. W ith this in mind we invited Kathleen C. Stewart to discuss her work on Appalachian material and nar rative voicin gs ofruined places as tropes o f marginali ty. We also asked Nancy D. Munn to present her research o n the ' histor y of creating New York Ci ty s famed Central Park, and Charles 0. Frake to discuss his work on the histor y and ethnography of the English count ryside. All th ree es says p resent ed us, agai n, with stylistic and sub­ stantive differ ences irI the activities, p rac tic es, and imagiriations invo lved in makirig places bot h meanirigful and multidimensional. Motivated by our interest irI secu ring fi ne -grained ethnographic de­ scr iptions from our authors, we did not direc t them to theor ize place irI

8 I HEYEN FELD AND KEITH H. UIIO

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abstract ways. At the sam e time, we feared that witho ut some attention to th� hi st?rical d philosophical under pinnings of writin gs on place, � our dis�ussions nught descend into a w elter o f p articulars. For this reas on _ we invited �o di stinguished theorists to speak to and through our more e th n ographic explorations. One, Edward S. Casey, is a philosopher long _ co1:c_ erned with th� phenomenological acco unt of place, and his re cent writing ? n the topic (Casey 1993) is st rongly engaged i n d ialogue with both soci al theor y and ethnographic inqu iry. The other, Clifford Geer tz, is well k°:own for his ethnographic writi ng s on Indonesia and Morocco and for h is theoretical i nfluence on symb olic and interp retive t rends in cultural anthrop ology. By having Ca sey and Geertz bracket and criss­ cross our ethnographic accounts, we w ere sure to d raw out the tensions be�een phenomenological and her me neutic positions in social theor y, particularly the ten�ions inherent in the contrastive ways in which they accou nt for per ception, m eaning, exper ience, and i nven tion. Add ition­ ally, we ?oped , Cas�y's and Geertz's persp ectives would help us confront and clarify as sumpt10ns ab o ut the familiar and the exotic, the nearby and t�e rem te, the entral and the periphe � ral, the "modern" and the "tra­ � d ition al, th e umversal an d the particular, the local and the global, the emplaced and the d isplaced . In g�neral th �n, our book is ethnograp hic, its primary purpose bei ng to des cribe a�d inter pret so e of the wa ys in which people encounter � places, p erceive t?em, and mvest them with significance. We seek to move beyond fa�il� genera_lizations abou t places being culturally con­ structed by describmg specific ways in which places naturalize different w ?rlds of sense. _Further, w aim to equat e such ethn ographic evo cati � ons with local theor ies of dw�lling-which is not just livi ng in place but also encompasses way s of fusmg se tting to situation, locality to life-w orld . We t�e seri_ ou sly the challenge to ground these ethnographies closely in the � ialogues with local voice s that animated them in the first _ place that is, we take seriously the challenge to re 11 rang gister a fi:-UJ.1 • . e o f dis ' cursi· ve �d non�iscursive modes of expressio n through which everyday and p oetically heightened senses of place are l ocally articulated . ,v, we as ke d fcor ess ays t hat descri· bed how spe cific expressive practices and perfc or mances ·imbued act s, events, and obj. ects wit . . . h sign ificance, thus illunu· natmg · di.f_ fcerent ways m · which place is voic ed and exper ience d· In the p ro cess of · , perfcornun illust ratmg · g, num . icki . . ng' and evoking sueh desc · · riptions our aut hors d raw upon a broad ra nge of local symbo lic maten· als-ver'b al, . visu . al , mu si. cal , oral, graphic and written - and present th em thr ugh a varie ty of essay writing st; _ � les. In doing so they loca te t he mtricate strengths and fragili.ti.es that connect places to soci'al im · agm · ati· on and pract i· ce, to memor y and desire' to dwe lling and movement.

INTRODUCTION I 9

Having so strongly announ ced our commitment to ethnog raphy, it may perhaps seem contradictor y that we started our d iscussions at the advanced semi nar, and now be gin this b ook, not with an ethnogra phic essay but with a philosophical accoun t of place. This is n ot me ant to privilege a specific theoretical vantage point but rather to invoke the necessity of a deeper and more engaged anthrop ological d ialogue with the philosophy of place. Toward thi s end , Edward S. Casey renund s u s, in ways yet different from those he took up in Remembering (1987) and Getting Back into Place (1993), of how the intimate relationship between embodiment and emplacement bri ngs the p roblem of place i nto close resonan ce with the anthropological problem of k nowi ng "local knowl­ edge." Followi ng the lead of Merleau-Ponty, Casey examine s how to be in place is to k now, is to become aware of one's ver y conscious ness and sensuous presence i n the worl d. F rom there Casey argu es tha t t�e exp er i ence of place is no se condary grid overlaid on the p resumed pri­ macy of sp ace. Rather, he con tends, place i s the most fundamental form of emb odi ed exp eri en ce -the site of a powerful fusion of se lf, sp ace, and time. D rawing on some of the same phenomenol ogical wor ks that compel Casey, we ourse lves continue the dialogue in separate essays explor� ng the implicati ons of what "Western Apache and Ka luli people ha ve m mmd when they say that their lives are "like a trail" or "like a path ." In the disti nct and d istant social and physical world s of Southwestern desert and Pa puan rai nforest, places are evok ed through po etic m eans. We fin d Apache stor ies and Kaluli son gs that hol d and unleash wisdom, that em­ bod y memor ies in manners of voicing, and that animate the sensuality of place as both lands ca p e and sou nd scap e. Ou r essays also emphasize the significance of local placenames , and how i t is that toponyms, when em­ ployed in cer tain contexts, contribute to the c reation of senses of place r ich in moral, cosmological, and biographical texture. Kathleen C. Stewart's contr ibution on Appalachia deals too with the felt intensity of places and their complex sensuous components. But she descr ibes a d ifferent sense of place -g ritty, ed gy, troublesome - as she travels through spaces of loss and margi nality in the "hollers" of West Virginia. Stewart challen ges u s to pictu re a rather close-by world made increasin gly remote by class and power cleavages, a world where histor y lies inscr ib ed in mined landscapes of trash and is performed daily in hard talk and sad songs. Evoking the h erreal sp aces of poetic intensification that she hears in Appalachian voices and sees in local yards of rubbish, Stewart writes against the fl atness of ethnographic realism, di spelling any eas y natu ralizatio n of place as rooted contentment, any simple natural- L-­ ization of nostalgia as romantic desire. Hers is a disturbing confrontation

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10 I STEVEN FELD AND KEITH H. BASSO

wi th ways in which emplacement and displacement invol ve distractions, and heightene d anxieties. Miriam Kahn begins wi th a co mmon an d often taken-for-grante d a�pe ct of pla ce : the sc enario of going an d coming, the p ubl ic exhibi­ tlo� ?f entangling and disentangling. Asking why the mana gement of arnvmg an d leaving is s ometimes so poignant, Kahn p roceeds to ex­ � lore th� emotional contours situate d in her own experiences of settling mto, takmg leave of, returning to, and a gain departing Wamira villa ge in Papua _ New Guinea. Not s ur prisin gly, Wamirans ha d their own compli­ cate d ideas about how thes e dramatic disp lay s s hou ld be publicly enacted. �hn.s essay uses the autobiographical vo ice to articulate her engagement �Ith �anuran s entimentality and s ociabili ty, arguing for a dditional ways I� which p eople an d pl aces are bon de d t hrough feelingfu l s peech and ac­ tions. �aren I. �lu's essay explores the histor y and ethnography of thre e spatially and mteractionally overlappe d an d interlocke d communities in ea st_e rn Nor �h Carolina. The re, in Rob eson County, group s o f Lu mbee Indians, Afncan Amer icans, and Whites all stake claims for a " home pla�e," fo_r group identities tied to particul ar tow ns an d lan dscap es. These resilient 1dent1t1 es - and the loca les to which they are atta c he d- are more than a little complex, having been shape d by s hare d yet separate histor ies, �neq ual acces� to economic and political po wer, an d different de grees of mvolvement m local, county, and national event s. Bl u takes us up an d aroun� the road� of a pl ace thick with impacts, a region whose inhabi­ tants live deeply immerse d in pers on ificati ons, ambiences, an d memor ies. S he revea ls how s truggles an d uproote d m oments are endlessly coun ­ tered with a ctions meant to ens ure a sense of home. Cha�les 0. Frake �nds the collection by m usin g over a "trouble ­ ,, som e tnbe --:-th � E n gl is h - and their rural world of East Anglia, where the co �ntrys1de 1s loc�y cons titute d as a unique an d telli n g q uaintness. Frake mter prets a variety of local mater ials -fro m placenames to local pub talk, fro m _ guide books to O rdnance Surv ey maps, from county r ecor ds to E n glish novels -to p resent a complex re pres entation of place. He concludes �1th an ethnographic readin g of "imp rovement " that re ­ veals how_ local ideas of res toration and planni ng are imagine d to opp ose other notions of mo dernization. In his afterwor d to the book, Cliffor d Geertz reflects on some issues ou r ethnog raphi. es of place ent ail. Firs t, becaus e place · "makes a poor · i. ts lo abstract1on," exp1ormg cal specificities and resonances i s likely to prove more frmtful than searching for commo n denominators. S econd and p aralle l t o the first, no matte r how strongly current worId c ' on d'1t1· ons . acy of places argue for the pnm as sites of power struggles and d"1s a ggreexcesses,

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INUODUCTION I II

gation, s enses of place are "barely diminished in the mo dern world." In­ dee d, displace ment is no less the source of powerful attachments than are ), exp er iences of p rofound rootedness. And las t, in a phrase thick enough to ser ve as this volu me 's epigraph an d bump er stick er, "no one l ives in the world in general." What could be truer of placed exp erience - s ecure or fr a gile, pleas urable or re pu gnant, co mforti n g or unsettlin g- than the taken-for-grant ed q uality of i ts i ntens e particul arity? Senses of place : the terrain covered here inclu des the relation of sen­ sation to emplacement; the experienti al an d expressive ways places are known, imagi ne d, yearned for, hel d, remembere d, voiced, lived, co�­ teste d, and s tru ggle d over; and the multiple ways places are meto nyrru­ cally and metaphorically tied to identiti es. We begi n by asking how people are dwel ling and how ethnographic accounts of their mod�s of dwelli ng might enrich our sense of why places, how ever va gue, are live d out in deeply me anin gful ways. Forging an intellectual path of their own alongside humanistic and critical p os tmodern tendencie s, thes e essays reveal that as e�pl e fas h­ f ion places, s o, too, do they fashion themselves. People don t JUSt dw ell in comfort or misery, in centers or margins, in place or out of place, empowered or disemp owered. People everywhere act on t he i nte gr ity of their dwellin g. Thus, allegor ies that inform and guide the conduct o f waywar d Ap aches, puzzle d songs and refigure d gender positi ons flowing fro m waterfalls in a Papuan rainfores t, a ggravat ed lives i n the West Vir­ ginia hollers, anthro pologists and locals embraci ng each other 's h?me ­ sickness in Papua New Guinea, reme mb ered fables an d he gemomc ac­ comodat ions in multiethnic North Caroli na, protection soci et ies and le aving the right things off of m aps in rural Eas t Angli a - all these are as i nstructive for geogra phies of disrupti on and contestati on a s fo r hi s­ tor ies of creativit y an d resilience. Whether they are embe dde d i n dis ­ courses of sensuous beauty or ugliness (Feld and Stewart), in di scourses o f morality an d theft (Basso and Blu), or i n discourses o f nos talgia and lon gi n g (Kahn and Fra ke), stru ggles ar isin g from loss and des ires for con­ trol are always pla ced. O ur essays find those placements in cartographies mapped, s ung, or storied, in environments pile d high in trash or meticu­ lously hedged, i n local knowledge of well-atten ded paths or roa ds m a de vague by havi n g no names or too many, and in the voicin gs of dee p aphor ism, memorial poes is, heate d back talk, letters from home, s pe eches with choke d-back tears, humorous quips, tru e-to-life fictions, and what goes without saying.

1

How to Get from Space to Place in a fairly Short Stretch of Time Phenomenoloaicol Proleaomeno ldward t Casey

All existing things are either in place or not without place. -Archytas, as cited by Simplidus The power of place will be remarkable. -Aristotl,, Physics, Book IV

Space is a society of named places. -Claud, Uvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind Nothing could extinguish the fact and claim of estate. - W. E. H. Stanner, "Aboriginal Territorial O,ganization"

I

t is sensible, perhaps even irresistible, to assume that human experience begins with space and time and then proceeds to place. Are not space and time universal in scope, and place merely particular? Can place do anything but specify what is already the case in space and time? Or might it be that place is something special, with its own essential structures and modes of experience, even something universal in its own way? These are questions I shall address in this chapter, and I will do so by way of phenomenology. The insistently descriptive character of the phe­ nomenological enterprise in philosophy rejoins the emphasis in anthro­ pology on precise description in the field (which has never prevented considerable speculation in the chair!). There is much more that could be said about the convergence of anthropology and phenomenology, but in the limitations of this essay I shall attempt only to show how phe­ nomenology as I practice it treats the question of place; anthropological implications will be adumbrated but nowhere fully pursued. Phenomenology began as a critique of what Husserl called the "natu­ ral attitude;' that is, what is taken for granted in a culture that has been in­ fluenced predominantly by modern science-or, more precisely, by sci­ entism and its many offshoots in materialism, naturalism, psychologism, and so forth. (And anthropologism: in the Prolegomena to his Logical Investigations [1970), Husserl addresses "transcendental anthropologism.")

14 I EDWARD !.

um

One belief endemic to the natural attitu • de concerns the way places relate . . to w hat is . commonly called "space.,, 0nee it is assum ed (after Newton �d Kant) that space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori . compart• . m status places become the mere apportiorungs of space, its ' . m entalizati. ons. · In�eed, that places are the dete rminations of an already existing . monolith of Space has become an artic . so much so i faith 1e o f sci.entif1c ' that two recent books m · anthropo1ogy that bear expressly on plac e. both quite valuable works m · many regards-espous e the view that place ,, . something is posterior to space, even ma de f rom space. By "space is meant a i . .. neutral, pre-given . 1ant1es medium, a tabula rasa onto wh.1ch the part1cu 0f cu1ture and history come to be mscn . place as the presumed ·be d, with · , resu1t.,n c we find this view, · ror example, m Jam es F. Weine r s richly sugges. . . tive ethnography of the F01 of Papua N ew Guinea, The Empty Place: "A . ,s place , . society names schemat1c ally r.mage a people s intentional trans. of their . c . rormat1on hab.Itat from a sh eer ph ys1cal terram . mto a pattern of histone . ally expenenc · ed and constitut . ed space and time... The be. g of plac . . stowm e names constitutes F01. exist . . ential space out of a blank environme . nt" (Weiner 1991:32). . ,, and the The idea of transfermat.ion from a "sheer physical terram . . mak.ing of "��istenti.al space" -which is to say, place-out of a "blank . . h there is some empty and innoenvironment entails that to begm . wit . cent spat1a . l spread • waitmg, · · as it were, for cultural configurations to �e?der it . pIaceful.But when does this "to begin with" exist? And where . 1s it !ocate d;, Answ ers t0 both questions wi.11 gene rate a vicious regress of the k.md at sta · ke m . Kant's fi.rst antmomy: to search for a first mom ent in . . either time or space is · to mcur · shipwreck on the shoals of Pure Reason.1 • firom Fred R.Myers, s oth erwis e re0 r consi.der the followmg · c1 aim . . al people of Centr al Australia markable ethnography of desert ab ongm . Pi.ntup1. Country Pintuipi Self: "The process by which spac e becomes 'coun, . try, by wh.ich'a story gets attached to an ob�ect, .1s part of the Pintupi . ha bi.t of mm • d that looks behind Ob� ects to events and see s in obi ects a · J . sign of somethmg els ,, e"_ (Myers 1991 :67).Here we are led to ask, W hat . . ston. es get are these "ob�ects behmd which events 1urk and to which attached;,. The neutral.ity 0f the term O b· ')ect suggests that the first-order . erse are . · the uruv i·tems m denuded thmgs-d enuded of the very "secondar ualities" . he demea _ ng term f Galilean-Cartesian-Lockian ? ru discm:r!) that w��1 _ma�e them fit subj ects of events and stories. W e wonde r, fiurther w hat 1s this "process bY which space becomes 'country', " ,, . "cultur by w h.ich space 'is alized , and by wh.ich ".impersonal geography" ,, b ecomes "� home, a ngurra (Myers 1991 :54).2 Myers mt1mates that all sue h transrorma c t1ons are a matter of the "pro-

HOW TO GET FRON !PACE TO PLACE I I!

n" -of det erminate social j ection"-or, alternatively, of the "reproductio system of significant places as actions and structures. "Country" is the nts "a proj ection into symbolic specified by the Dreaming, which represe 1991:47). And the structure space of various social processes" (Myers orphic with the landscape of of the Dreaming in turn-a structure isom upi society reproduces itself th e country-is "a product of the way Pint phrase "in space and tim e" in space and time" (Myers 1991:48).The ing medium. Having no is telling: the reproduction is in some preexist esumptively empty medium inhe rent configurations of its own, this pr fact of what? what fact?) by must be populated after the fact (but the cularities that belong to processes that impute to empty space the parti ngs to space ; particularity, the Dreaming. G enerality, albeit empty, belo n m eet only by an appeal to albeit mythic, belongs to place; and the twai ex post facto. a procedure of superimposition that is invoked , as Myers himself avers: But the Pintupi themselves think otherwise iple features is logically "To the Pintupi, then, a place itself with its mult we to b elieve? The theo­ prior or central" (Myers 1991 :59). W hom are ral attitude bristling with rizing anthropologist, the arsenal of his natu into space? Or the aborigine on the explanato r y proj ectiles that go off coherent collocation of pre­ ground who finds this ground itself to be a e and in the Dreaming given places-pre-given at once in his experienc logist, Space comes first; that sanctions this experienc e? For the anthropo no means trivial. for the native, Place; and the difference is by between the anthro­ It is not, of course, simply a matter of choosing if the Pintupi had as espologist's vantage point and that of the nativ primacy of space e iv parat chosen to participate in a debate on the com ss concern. As an e expr own versus place.Nor is any such primacy Mye rs's e over against spac for e anthropologist in the field, his task is not to argu lace means -in-p being what place but to set forth as accurately as possible a cul­ ating e tr n e wh n e v e to the Pintupi.Just there , however, is the rub: leans gist opolo anthr e th , ture for which place is manifestly paramount im­ an (by that and e plac to on a concept that obscures what is peculiar gist's opolo anthr e Th ss e arin . plicit cultural fiat) even implies its second virtu­ e priority of space ov er place is th h whic -in e urs disco tical e theor nt. e itm comm e ally axiomatic-runs athwart his descriptiv lieve-both anthro­ The question is not so much whom we are to be we are to believe. what ut h-b pologist and natives are trustworthy enoug mute and blank a from starts Are we to believe that human experience r there," "along e "ov ," "near as "space" to which placial modifiers such sumably sooner e pr later: or r e that way," and "just here" are added, soon that the world e v e li e b to we e ar in p erc eption and later in culture? Or flats, in fele and rills, runs, comes configured in odd protuberances, in

16 I EDWUD I. mn

and do :m, as the Kaluli might put it (Feld, this volume)-all of which _ ;!1"e trait s of pla es? (Ironically, in th is vi ew flatness and, m ore generally, � featurelessness belong to place to begin wi th.) _ I t�ke the second view as just stated to be both more accurate as a de­ scnpt�on and more valuable as a heur istic in the understanding of place. In domg so, I join not only the Pin tupi and the Kal uli b ut also certain e arly �d late figures in Western thou ght . Both Archytas and Aristotle Proclaime d that P1ace is· pn· or to sp ace, and, more rec ently, Bachelard . and Heidegger have reembraced the conviction. All fo ur thinkers sub­ _ scr ib e to what could be called the Arc hytian Axiom: "Place is the first 0 f all_ thi ngs." 3 In bet ween the ancients and the postmoderns there was a penod of p reoccupat ion with space - as well as with time conceived of _as sp ace 's cosmic par tner. But how m ay we r etr i eve a sens: of the p r i­ ority ? f P ce by m ans �� other than arguing from a uthority (a s I have just � don� m citing certam congenial W es tern th inkers) or arguing agains t au­ � hority (�s occ urs when moder n science is pilloried, which Husserl does m attackmg the natural attitude)? My suggestion is t?at we can retri eve su ch a sense by c onsider ing what a phen?menol gical approach to place migh t tell us. Even if s uch � an ap� roach 1s not without its own prej u dicial commi tm ent s and ethno­ ce�tri� stances, it is an appro ach that , in its devo tion to concrete de­ scription, �as he advantage of honori � ng the actual experience of those who p rac tice it. In this regard it rejoins not only the anthrop ologist in th fiel d b t the native on the land: both have no c � � hoice but to begin with experience. As Kant insisted, " th ere can be no doubt th at all our knowle dge begins ith_ experience " (195 0 [1787]: Bl). � �or K�nt, to be§,n with means to be instigated by. Thus he mu st add the qualificati on that th ugh all our knowl edge begins wi th e xper i � ence, it _ d oes n ot follow that it all anses out of e xperience" (Kant 1950 [1787]: Bl). Knowled e of any rigorous sort do � es not derive from experi ence. �nt makes this perfectly clear � his Anthropologyfrom a Pragmatic Poin t of arguably the first theoretical treatise on anthropology in the Wes t: General knowle dge must always precede local knowledge - . . [because] wi· tho ut [ gene al knowledge], all cquir d � knowle dge can only be a fragm entar y experiment and not a sci� ence.;4 This paradigmatic Enligh tenm ent statement sets the stage -indeed • still holds the stage m . · many ways - fcor th e idea that space precedes place· Spa ce, being the most pervasive . . . . o f cosrruc me dia, is considered that about which we must have general k now1edge, whereas we possess merely loca l knowledge about p1ace . . But what if things are the other way ar o und?· W hat i·f the ver y . i:dea of spa ce is p oster ior to tha t of place• perhaps even denv · e d firom it?· W h at if local knowledge -which in Geert ' z s appropna· te1Y p1eona . ' stic

;''ew,

KOW TO GET F�OH SPACE TO PUCE I 17

"presents locally to l ocals a local turn of mind" f1983:}2)­ precedes knowledge of space? C ould place be general_ and s�ace p�­ tic ular? Phenom enol ogy not only moves us to ask these rmpertment anti­ Enlightenment questions but also provides reas ons for believing that the answers t o them ar e affi rm ative. In a phenom enological account, the crux in matters of place is the role of perception. Is it the case, as Kant believes (along with �ost m?d­ ern epistemologist s), that percep tion p rovides those bare startmg-p omts called variousl y "sensa tions;' "sense data," "impressions," and so for th? O r is something else at work in pe rcepti on that conveys m ore about place_ than mere sensory signals can ever effec t? It is certainly true-and this is what Kant emphasizes in the idea of "beginning with" - that sensory inputs are the occasions of the perception (eventually the knowledge) of concrete places. These impingements-as connoted in the term Empfin­ dungen, Kant's wor d fo r "sensations"-alert us to the _ fact that �e are perceiving, and they convey cer tain of the very q u�ties (mclu� �h e secondar y qualities) of the s urfaces of wh at we perceive. But their pom­ tillistic charac ter ill equips them for supplying anything like th e sense of being in a place. Yet we do always fmd ourselves in places. W e find ourselves in them, however different the places th emselves may b e a nd however differently we construe and exploit them. But h ow do we gr asp this in of being in a p artic ular place : this preposition which is literally a "pre -position" inasmuch as we are always already in a place, never not 5 empla ced in one way or another? If perception is "primary" (as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty m­ sist), then a significant p ar t of its p rimariness m ust be its ability to gi�e to us more than bits of information about the ph enomenal and epi­ phenomenal surfaces of things-and more, too, than a convic tion that we are merely in the p resence of these surfaces. Beyond what Husserl calls the "hylet ic" factor, and Merlea u-Ponty, "sensing," there must be_, as an ingredient in perception from the start, a conveyance of what bemg in places is all about. Merleau-Ponty considers this conveyance to be depth-a "primordial depth" that, fa r from being imputed to sensations (as Berkeley (1934], for example, had held), already si tuates them in a scene of which we o urselves fo rm p art . Husserl's way of p utting it is th at "every exp erience has its own horizon" a nd th at we continu ally find ourselves in th e midst of perceptual horizons, both the "internal" hori­ zons of p articular things (i. e., their immediate ci rcumambi enc e) and the "exter nal" ho rizons that encompass a given scene as a whole.6 But precisel y as surrounded by depths and horizons, the perceiver finds herself in the midst of an entire teeming pla ce-world rather than in a confusing kaleidoscope of free -float ing senso ry data. The coherence of loc uti on,

HDW TO GET FRO" SPACE TO PLACE I 19

18 I EDWARD S. CASE!

p erception at the primary level is supplied by the depth and horizons of the very place we occupy as sentient subjects. Th at is why we c an trus t this coherence :"ith wha,� S antayana (1955) called "animal faith," and Husserl (1982: sec�10n _103), primal belief (protodoxa)." We come to the world­ w e come mto It and keep returning to it-as already placed there. P laces e not add�d to sensations any mor e than th ey are impos e d on spaces. ;oth sens ations and sp aces are themselves emplaced from th e very first moment, and at every subs equent moment as w ell. There i� no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place, and to be m a place is to b e in a pos ition to perceive it. Knowledge of place is not then, subsequent to p erception- as Kant dogmatical ly �ssumed-but 1s mgredient in perception its elf. Such knowledge, genu­ �-ely local knowledge, is its elf exp eriential in the manner of Erlebnis, lived exp_en· enc e,_" rather than o f E vf. a hn.mg, the alre ady elapsed exper i'J ence that Is the object of analyt ical o r abs trac t knowledge. (Kant, signifi­ cantly spea�s _o1:1y of Eifahrung.) Local know ledge is at one with lived '. exp_ e nenc e if I t 1_s mdeed true that this know ledge is of the locali ties in - whICh the knowmg subj ect lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in. I_ am �ot proposing a mere ly mute level of experience that p assively rec eives srmple �d senseless data of place. Perception at the primary le vel Is s�es th et1c-an affair of the whole body sensing and mov ing. !hanks to its inherent complexity, bodily perceiving is directed at (and IS ade�uate to) things and places that come configured, often in highly complicated ways. Moreov er, the configuration and complication are a�eady meaningful and not som ething inter nally r egis tered as sensor y g ivens that lack any sense of their own: the sensory is senseful. Nor do�s t he mheren� meaningfulness of what we perceive require the in­ fusrnn of �etermmate concepts locat ed higher up the epistemic ladder. The perce!ved po�sesses a core of immanent sense, a "noematic nucleus" �n Husserl s techmcal term (1982: section 91). Because this senseful core is ac tively grasped, it foll�ws �?at ?erception is never entirely a matter " of what Kant calls_· rec_ept1v1ty, as if the perceiving subj ect were mere ly passive. Not o�y 1s pnma�y _ perc�pti�n inseparable from my riad modes of co cre e a_ c_t1on, but 1t 1s 1t�elf a kmd of passivity in activity" (Husserl � � .108, his italics). To perceive synesthetically is to be active ly passive · !9?3 It is to_ b e absorptive yet constitutive, both at once. It 1s also to be constituted: cons titute d by cultural and social struc­ tures that sed iment themselves into the deepest level of perception The p rimacy of perception does not mean that hum an sensing and m�ving are p�e cultur al or presoc1a l. No more than perception is bu ilt up firom · - . a tOffilc sensat ions 1s 1t const ructed from brute givens unaffe cted by cul'.

tural

p rac tices and social ins titutions. On the contrar y: these practices per vade every level of pe rception, from the quite im­ plicit (e.g., tacitly g rasped ou ter horizons) to the extremely explicit (e.g., the them atic thing perceived). The perme ation occurs even-indeed, especially-when a given percep tion is preconc ep tual and prediscurs ive. To be not y et ar ticulated ID concep t o r word is not to be noncultur ally cons titute d, much less free from social cons traints. Hence, the pr imacy of perception does not entail the pr iority of perception to the g ivens of cultur e or society, as if the latter were s eparable contents of ou r being and experience: the se g ivens become infusions IDto the infrastr uc tures of p erception itself. The primacy of pe rception is ultimately a pr imacy of the lived body- a body that, as we shall see in more detail later, is a cre ature of habitual cu ltural and social processes. But perception remains as constitutive as it is constituted. This is espe­ c ially ev ident when we perce ive p laces: our immersion in them is not subj ection to them, s ince we may modify th eir influence even as we sub­ mit to it. This IDfluence is as m ean ingful as it is sensuous. Not only is the sensuous sens eful, it is also place ful. As Fel d (this volume) put s it, "as place is sense d, senses are placed; as p laces make sense, senses m ake place." The dialec tic of perception and place (and of both with meaning) is as intr ic ate as it is profound, a nd it is never- ending. Given that w e are never without perception, the existence of t his dia­ lectic means that we are never without emplace d exper iences. It signifies as well that we are not only in places bu t of them. Human be ings-along with other entities on ear th-are ine luctably place-bound. More even than earthlings, we are placelings, and ou r very pe rcep tual apparatus, our sens ing body, refl ec ts the kinds of places we inhabit. The ongoing reli­ ability and general veracity of percep tion (a relia bility and veracity that countena nce considera ble exper iential vic issitudes) entail a continual at­ tunem ent to place (also exp er ienced in open-ended var iation). But if this is true, it sugges ts that place, ra ther th an being a mere product or portion of space, is as primary as the p erception that gives access to it. Also suggested is the heretical-and quite ancient-thought that place, far from being something simply singular, is something ge neral, perhaps even univ ersal: a thought to which we shall return. and ins titutions

I

Nature makes itself specific. -Kant, The Critique ofJudgment

e ID It is charac teristic of the modern Wes tern mind to conceiv e of spac ati­ m e th a m r fo rch ea s nt e te h t e insis nc e -h nce e ss e terms of its formal e ndi, ss a G , re Mo on, t w e N r ons. Fo ti la e r l a ti a sp e pur cal expressions of

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Critique of Pure Reason. 8

One way to avoid the high road of modernism as it stretches from the abst�act physics of Newton to the critical philosophy of Kant and beyond 1s to reoccupy the low land of place. For place can be considered either premodern or postmodern; it serves to connect these two far sides of modernity. To reinstate place in the wake of its demise in modern Weste�n thought-where space and time have held such triumphant and exclusive sway-one can equally well go to the premodern moments de­ scribed in ethnographic _accou�ts of traditional societies or to the post­ modern mome�t of the mcre�smgly nontra ditional present, where place h� been returrung as a remv1gorated revenant in the writings of ecolo­ g1st_s �nd la�dscape theorists, �eog�aphers and historians, sociologists and political thinkers-and now, m this volume, anthropologists.

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HOW TO GET FRON SPACE TO PLACE I 21

20 I EDWAlD I. um

�esc�rtes, and Galileo, space was homogeneous, isotropic, isometric, and �rutely (or, at least, indefinitely) extended. Within the supremely in­ different and formal scene of space, local differences did not matter. Place itself did not matter. It was not for nothing that Descartes pro­ po_sed in hi� Principles of Philosophy that matter and space were the same thmg-which meant that space had no qualities not present in matter, whose own primary property was a metrically determinable pure ex­ tension. Place was simply a creature of such extension, either its mere s �bd�vi�io� ("ir_it_er �� iace� or volume) or a relationally specified loca­ tion m it ( pos1t1on ). In his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton still recognized "absolute" an d "relative" places, but both kinds of places were only "portions" of absolute space, which was where all the action (e.g., gravitational action) was to be found. On the basis of absolute space, places were apportione d and mapped out: just there is the conceptual root of the paralogism I detect in certain recent anthro­ pological treatments of place and space. In this early modern paradigm shift, there was little space for place as a valid concept in its own right. As a result, place was disempowered: all the power now reside d in space-and in time, the second colossal con­ cern of modern thought. Although time was hel d to have direction, it was a� essentially devoid of content as was space. A century after Newton described space and time as "God's infinite sensoria," Kant consi dere d them to be "pure forms of intuition" locate d within the finite human subject. By_ this act of internalization, Kant sealed the fate of place even more _ d rastic�y: at most, the human subject had "position" in the space and time of its own making. But place was of almost no concern in the

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Do we not sense from the outset a certain difference, by virtue of which locality belongs to me somewhat more essenti�lly [tha� for example, size an_d weight]? ... Men and animals are spatially localized; and even what 1s psychic about them, at least in virtue of its essential foundedness m what is bodily, partakes of the spatial order.

- Husserl, Ideas Pertaining co a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenolog1cal Philosophy, Second Book; his italics

How, then, do we get back into place? In the very way by which we are always already there -by our own lived body. Ironically, Kant was the first Western thinker to point to the importance of bodily structure for emplacement. In his remarkable precr�tical essay o� 1768, "?n the First Ground of the Distinction of Material Reg10ns m Space, he argued that the two-sidedness-especially the two-handedness-of the human body was essential for orientation in "cosmic regions" of surrounding sky or earth: Even our judgments about the cosmic regions are subordina�ed to the con­ cept we have of regions in general, insofar as they are deterrnmed m relation to the sides of the body....However well I know the order of t�e car­ dinal points, I can determine regions according to that order only msofar as I know towards which hand this order proceeds .... S1rrularly, our geo­ graphical knowledge, and even our commonest knowledge of the posi�ion of places, would be of no aid to us if we could not, by reference to the sides of our bodies, assign to regions the things so ordered and the whole system of mutually relative positions. (Kant 1928 [1768]: 22-23) 9

The bilateral body is singled out, then, just when it is a ques�ion of orientation in regions ( Gegenden), where places are concatenate? m for­ mations that resist the ascription of pinpointed location. Could 1t be that the bo dy is essentially, and not just contingently, involved in matters of _ _ emplacement? _ _ . Kant's prescient observations about the body m its basic bilaterality anticipated and complemented Robert Hertz's brilliant speculations on the cultural significance of right- versus left-handedness (Hertz 1973 [1909]: 3-31) Both Kant and Hertz subscribed, tacitly if not explicitly, to a more general principle: that the human body's brachiated and multiply articulated structure renders it a uniquely valuable vehicle in the estab­ lishment of place. Precisely by allowing us to make a diverse entry into a given place-through hands and feet, knees and hips, elb ows and shoul­ ders-the body insinuates itself subtly and multiply into encompassing regions. If the body were an inert and intact thing with no moving parts, a fleshly monolith, it could be graspe d as something sheerly physi­ cal that is punctually located at a given position in space and does not reach out farther. This is how Galileo construe d all bo dies: as inert, non­ self-moving entities submitting to the laws of gravitation and motion.

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l2 I EDWUD S. CASE!

B ut on ce a Korper (body as physical obj ect) has b eco me a Leib (body as lived)-on ce there is resurrection in th e body, as it were-m ore than m er�ly punctiform positioni ng in empty space (and at an equally stig­ mat ic moment in time) is at stake. This is what Kant discovered-and t h en quickly forgot. It is also what Hu sserl and H er tz redis covered a cen­ tur y and a half later. The several members of a lived body move not randomly but by what e rleau -Ponty calls "cor poreal intentionality." Thanks to this intention­ � ality, t he lived body integrates itself wit h it s immediate en vironment :�at is �o say, it s concrete place. The integration is effected by variou� mtent10nal threads" that bind body and p lace in a common complex of relations.10 But none of this pervasive integumentation between body and p lace w uld be possible without the freel y moving members of t h e ? body as it situates itself in a particular place , remembers itself in t hat place and so forth. !he lived body-t h e body living (in) a pla ce-is : thus the natural subject of perception" (Merleau-Ponty 1962 :208). The _ �xperience of perceiving that I disc ussed earlier requires a cor poreal sub­ j ect who lives 1 a place through perception. It also requires a place that is � ame nable to this body-subj ect and that extends its own influen ce back ont� this_su�j ect. A place, we might even say, has its own "operative in­ _ tent10nal�� that �hcits and responds to t he corporeal intentionality of th� p erceiv mg subj ect. Thus place integrates with body as much as body with place. It is a matter of what Basso calls "interanimation." 11 Other aspect s of the lived body are at stake in being-in-place each of th�m speci�ying further what first caught Kant 's keen eye. First: vari­ ous kinesthesias and synesthesias-as well as sonest hesias, as Feld insists m this volume-allow bodily self-motion to be regis · tered and enr iched . · ulti mately constituting what Husserl terms the "aesthesiological body': This body itself serves as a "field of l ocalization" for the manifold sen·­ suous presentations (including sonorous ones) that stem from a p articu ­ �ar place bu\;re registered by (or with) a lived body that fmds itself m that place. Second, _immanent bodi ly dimensionalities of up/down, . front/ back, right/ left-explicitly recognized by Kant, who w as in clined, however, to reduce them to t he three Cartesian coordinate s-help to conne t body with th e placial settings � of these same three dyads.° Thi rd, the conc reteness of a lived body, its density and m ass, answers to the thick conc reteness of a given place, but t he difference b etween the two c�?creuons is _jUst as critical because it sets up a " coeffi cient of ad­ _ versity (Sar_ tre 1?65 :590) that makes ordinar y perception itsel f possible. Fou r th, a given lived body and a given experienced place tend to present themselves as p_articu�a :_ as j ust his body in j ust this place. Each t hus ac­ r � tively partakes m the this-here, -which does not , however, exclude sig-

HOW TO GET FlOK SPACE TO PLACE I ll 14 nificant variations, ranging from bi-gendered to bi-located bodies. And fifth, the porosity of the skin of an organic body rejoins, even as it mim­ ics, the openness of the boundaries of places; there is a fl eshlike, pneu­ 15 matic structure sha red in a common "fles h of the world." Were the body varieties no r grasp a windowless m onad, it could neither n egotiate th e these same places And lf. e its nd u fo it h c whi n i s e c la p e th of s ce n e al v the them in turn. er nt e to is body e th f i windows own eir th ave h to ave h In addition to t hese five fac tors, we n eed to recognize the crucial place m ay cer­ interaction between body, plac e, and motion. A given not mean th at it is tainly be perdur ing and consisten t , but this does simply something inactive and at rest-as is all too oft en assumed. Part of the power of place, its very dynamism , is found in it s encouragement of motion in its midst, its " e -motive " (and often explicitly emotional) bodily motion th rust. Indeed, we may distinguish among t h ree kinds of p ertin ent to place. The fi rst and most limited case is staying in place. Here the body remains in place, in one single place. Yet such a body in such a situation is n ever entirely stationary except in extreme circum­ stances of paralysis or rigor mor tis. Even when staying in place, the body changes the position of some of its parts, however modestly: mov ing its limbs, rotating its h ead, twiddling its t humbs. The body twitches in place. Mo reover, an unmoving body may still move if it is transported by back. Toyn­ another moving body: th e d river of a car, the rider on horse 16 bee remarks that Bedouins riding on ho rses " move by not mov ing." We might say that the body of the Bedouin stays in one position, yet the locus of this position -where " locus" signifies a position in its capacity to change pla ces in space-it self changes as the mount moves between different places. 17 The second case, moving within a place, is the circumstan ce in which I move my whole body about a given place while still remaining in it. Insofar as I am typing t his manuscript, I am in one position; but when I get up to pace, I move around in the room I am in. I move within a cir­ le body cumscribed "spac e" defined by the walls of the room. The who en by tak moves in the whole roo m . Si mila rly, much ceremonial action is p bodies moving in set ways within entire presc ribed places: kivas, lazas, longhouses, tem ples. Finally, moving between places denotes th e circumstance in which bodies travel between different places. No longer is movement cir cumscr ibed by the restrictions of a single position or one place ; now it ranges among a number of plac es. In this case, the motion is a genuin e transition and not just a transportation.18 The most salient instance is the journey, and cases in point are emigrations, pilgr i mages, voyages of exchange, and no madic r circulations. In all of th ese, the bodies of the journeyers follow m o re o

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preordained routes between particular places: for example, the pil­ g rimage route to Santiago de C ompostela as it connects various interim places throug�out western Europe. The b ody's active role is most evi­ _ dent m the literal legwork of circ umambulati ons and other forms of peregrination, but it is no less present in the building of homes teads in the land of emigration or in the setting u p o f temporary nomadic en­ campments. Just as staying in place cor res po nd s to position, and moving the whole body within one l ocus ans wers to place pro per, so moving be­ tween places corresponds to an entire region, that is, an area concat enated by peregrinati ons between the places it connects. T�ere is much more to be said abo ut th e role of the body in place, especially about how places active ly soli cit b odily moti ons. At th e very least, we ca n agree that the living-m oving b o dy is essential to the process o f empla cement: lived bodies be long to p laces and hel p to co nstitute them. Even if such bo dies may be displa ced in certain respects, they are never placeless ; they are never only at discrete positions in world time or space, though they may also be at such positio ns. By the same token, however, !!laces belong to lived bodies and depend on them. If it is true that "the b o dy �s our general medium for having a world" (Merleau-Ponty 1962:146), It ensues that _ the body 1s the s pecific medium for experiencing a place­ world. The lived body is the mater ial condition of possibility for the place-world while being itself a memb er of that same world. It is basic to place a�d part of place. Just as there are no places without the bo dies that susta m and vivify them, so there are no lived bo dies without the p�aces they �abit and traverse. (Even ima ginary places bring with them virtual bo dies - "subtle bodi es" in an ea rlier nomenclature.) Bodies and places are connatural terms. They interanimate each other.

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We may suggest that the day will come when we will not shun the ques­ tion whethe r the opening, the fi:ee open, may not be that within which alone pure space and ecstatic time and everything present and absent in them have the place which gathers and protects everything. - Heidegger, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking"

Places gather: this I take to be a second ess ential trait (i.e., beyond the role _

of the lived body) rev�ale � by a phenomen ological topoanaly sis. Mini­ _ mally, �laces gath�r things m their midst-where "things" connote vari­ ous arumate and manimate entities. P laces also gather experiences and histor ies, even languages and thoughts. Think ofily of what it means to go b ack to � place you know, fmding it full of memories and expecta­ _ tio ns, old th mgs and new things, the familiar and the strange, and much more bes·d i es. What eIse ·is capable of this massively diversi·fiie d hoId·mg . . . . 'Certai'nly not mdividual human subj ects construed as sourc es of action.

"proj ection" or "rep roduction" -not even these subjects as they draw upon their b odily and pe rceptual powers. The p ower belongs to place itself, and it is a power of g athering. By "gathering" I do not mean merely am assing. To gather placewise is to have a peculiar hold on what is presented (as well as represente d) in a given place. No t just the co ntents b ut th e very mo de o f containment is held by a place. "The hold is held." 19 The hold o f place, its g ather­ ing action, is hel d in quite special way s. Fi rst, it is a holding together in a particular configurati on: hence our sense of an ordere d arrangement o f things in a place even when those thing s are ra dically disparate and quite conflictual. The arrangement allo ws for certain things -people, ideas, and so forth-to overlap with, a nd s ometimes to occlude, o thers as they recede or come for ward together. S econd, the hold is a hol ding in and a hol ding out. It retains the occ upants o f a place within its b ounda ries : if they were utterly to vanish and the plac e to be permanently empty, it would be no place at all but a v oid. But, equally, a place hol ds out, beck­ oning to its inhabitant s and, ass embling them, making them ma nifest (though not necessarily manifest to each o ther, or to the same deg ree). It can move place-hol ders towar d the margins of its own presentati on while, nevertheless, holding them within its own ambiance. Third, the holding at issue in the gathering of a place re fl ects the lay­ out of the local landscap e, it s c ontinuous contour, even as the out lines and inlines of the thing s held in that pla ce a re respecte d. The resul t is no t confusion of container with containe d but a literal configuration in which the form of the place -for exa mple, "mountain;• "mesa," "gulley" -j oins up with the sha pes of the thing s in it. Being in a pla ce is b e ing in a configurative complex o f things. Fou rth, intrinsic to the hol ding o pera­ tion of place is keeping. What is kept in place primarily are experiencing b odies regarded as privilege d residents rather than as orchestrating forces (much less as mere registrants). My body-in-place is less the metteur en scene than itself mise en scene-or rather, it is both at once, "passivity in activity" (Husserl 1973). And last, places also keep such unbo dy like entities as thoughts and memories. When I revisit my hometown of Tope ka , Ka nsas, I find this place more or less secur ely hol ding memories for me. In my pre�ence, it releases these memories, which belong as much to the place as to my brain or b ody. This kind o f keeping is esp ecially pertinent to an intensely gathered la ndscape such as that of aboriginal Australia -a landscape that hol ds ancestral mem or ies o f the Drea ming. Ye t even when I recall peo pl e and things a nd circ umsta nces in a n or dinary place, I have the sense that these various recollecta have been kept securely in place, harbore d there, 20 a s it were.

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HOW TO GET FROH SPACE TO PLACE I 27 26 I EDWARD I. CASEY

Gathe�ing �ives to place its peculiar perduringn ess, all owing us to r turn t o it !ram a nd a gain as the same place and not j ust as th e sa me posi­ � _ tion or sit e For a place, m its dynamism, do es not age in a syst emati­ : cally changmg way, that is, in accordanc e with a preesta blish ed sch edule o f growth and declin e; only its tenants and visitors enactors and wit­ n ess s (in cluding myself and others in th ese va rious ;oles ) age and grow � old m this way. A place is generative and regenerat ive on its own sched­ ule. F om it experiences are born and to it human beings ( and other � o rganis ms) retu rn for empowerment, much like Anta eus touching the e arth for renewed strength. Place is the generatri.x for the collect ion, as well as th e recollection, of all that occur s in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajecto ries of in animat e things. Its power consists in _ _ gath ermg these hves and thmgs, each with its own space and time, into on e arena of common engagement .

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Husserl's essences are destined to bring back all th e living relationships _ of experienc e , as the fisherman's net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed. - Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

It should be clear by now that I do not take place to be something simply physical . A place is not a mere patch of ground, a bare stretch of earth , a sedentary set of stones. What kind of thing is it then? The"what is" locu­ ti on --: Aristotle's ti esti question - combined with"k ind of " suggests that there is some smgle o �t �f thi ng that place is, some arch etype of Place. � B ut whatever place is, it is not the kind of thing that can be subsumed u nder already give� universal notions-for example, of space and time, s ubstanc e or caus ality. A given place may not permit, indeed it often de­ fie s, su�sumption �nder given categories. Instead, a plac e is something for whic h we contmu ally have to discover or invent new forms of under­ standing, n e� concepts in the literal sense of ways of"grasping-together." A place 1s more an event than a thing to be assimilated to known catego ries. As an event, it is unique, idiolocal. Its pec uli arit y ca ll s not for assumpt10n mto the already known- that way lies site, which lends predications, uses, and interpretations -but for the �tself_ to �redefined _ rmagmat1ve constitut10n of terms respecting its idiolocality (these range fro m placena mes to whole discourses). The "kind" at stake in"kind of " is n ei ther a genus no r a species, that is, a de terminate concept tha t ruIes over . . its mstance s, but something operating across margins, laterally, by means . . . o f h omo1ogy or smu1.1tude. Yet place q ua kmd remains something spe . . . asmu ch as 1t a lters m keepi ng with its own changm·g constituents. cifiic m . . The kind m questi. on, the answer pertinent to the "what is"· question · , is ·

more a type or a style than a pure concept o r formal universal. While suc h a concept or u niversal is fixed in definition (if not always in application), a type or style connotes an open manifoldness, a unity-in-diversity, and not a self-identical unity. Further, a type or style a dmits of degrees­ so sensitively that a change o f a few degrees may bring with it a change in identity, as when analytical Cubism g ave way imperceptibly but sud­ denly to synthetic Cubism. In the case of place, then, the kind is itself kind of something, rather than a defi nit e sor t o f something. This is w hy we spea k o f places in phrases like "a clean well-lit place," "a place for recovering one's sanity;' "a Southwestern landscape," or "a Southern plantation." The indefinite article employed in these locutions bespe a ks the indefiniteness o f the kind of thing a plac e or region is. Such indefini teness-not to be con­ fused with indeterminacy, much less with c haos-is in no way incom­ patible with the ostensive definiteness o f demonstrative pronouns and adverbial locatives, t hat is, those "essentially occasion al expressions" that are so frequently used to refer to p a rticu lar places or regions : "j ust here," "in this place," and so forth. I would even say that the open-endedness of place, its typological status as morphologic ally vague, its de-finition, cre­ ates the semantic sp ace within w hic h definite demonstrati ons and exact localizations can arise. 22 Rather than being one definite sort of thing-for example, physical, spiritual, c ultural, social-a given plac e ta kes on the qualities of its occu­ pants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurre nce a s an event : plac es not only are, they happen. (And it is because they ha ppen that they len d themse lves so well to narration, whether as histor y o r as stor y.) Just as a particular place is at least several kinds of things, so there are many sorts of places and not one basic kind only- one supposedly s upreme genus. Sorts of places depend on the kin ds of things, as well a s the actual things, that m ake them up. A biochore or b iotope directly reflec ts the c haracter of its con­ stituents, that is, its soils a nd fl or a an d fauna ; an agora is qualified by the people who pass through it or linger there; a dwelling is characterized less by its architectur e than by the quality of the life that is sustained in it. If, as Wallac e Stevens put it, "a mythology reflects its region", then a region reflects both w hat is held toge ther there (its "contents," its co­ tenants) and how it is so held. A place or reg ion is metaphysic ally neutral inasmuch as it do es not possess some given substrate, a "ground" that wou ld be metaphysically definite enough to determine the place or reg ion as j ust one kind of entity. And if there is no such preexisting ground, then the mode l of adding successive strata o f meaning ( a dded by cultures or minds, ac tions

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