Here's the map I made in 1976 (at age 33 or so) of my 10-12 years-world, to illustrate what I meant:
There are many people who are born, grow up, and live their lives all in one place or community. In fact, this used to be the default. All of us, to the contrary (along with many others in these modern times), have moved many times.
- What, beyond the necessity of making a living, has drawn us to the various places where we have made our homes?
- What has called to us in each place?
- And did the places meet our expectations, needs and desires, or not?
- Have the places we have lived been satisfying and nurturing, and if so, why?
- And whatever else comes to mind!
There was a Question in October 2022 that pondered "Geography As Destiny" and prompted me to an exploration of Genius Loci, and a reading of Genius Loci: An Essay on the Meanings of Place John Dixon Hunt (2022):
Places can be, we might say, 'inhabited' in profound ways. Sometimes it is simply that certain places usefully activate parts of ourselves that we had not realized before or elsewhere. We acquire a sense of place through a variety of conscious and unconscious contacts — what we read, what we see in art or photography, where we go, or even what we miss in a given site — and by comparisons that we make between places. We rely upon a miscellany of ideas and associations. (9)...the idea that genius loci does not exist in itself, and that individuals craft for themselves the meanings and spirit of a place. (135)
One of the identities I can claim is that of geographer: long-time student of Places and landforms and ecologies and environments and biomes and physical processes ... at scales of the global, the continental, the regional, the local.
Space is the STAGE upon which Stories unfold and play out, and so generate histories and herstories. And Space encloses a lot of Places. I've been a collector of materials about Places since forever, so one of my first impulses was to ask the library what it has that bears upon the understanding of Place, and to embark on a virtual (sometimes even actual) reorganization of the library shelves, co-locating materials that may have some sort of conversation with one another. I'm often quite surprised at the juxtapositions that emerge and begin to gabble, and at the breadth of the subject matter included.
And there's a profound temporal component in considering one's lifetime of experiences of inhabiting places: those of the past exist in memory, in one's own memories of being there and then. Going back is not an option: the remembered locus is ...gone, and its magic has been replaced by something devoid of one's remembered essence. But the memories turn out to be quite marvelously detailed
Back in the days when I taught Human Geography, I asked students to draw maps of their worlds when they were 10-11-12 years old —to explore the territory they inhabited then. The results were luminous excavations and presentations, and several expressed their delight in finding that they had such granular memories.Here's the map I made in 1976 (at age 33 or so) of my 10-12 years-world, to illustrate what I meant:
Once I start thinking about it, Place is overwhelming as a linchpin of my consciousness. Or so I was thinking as I set out on the morning's trash pickup, realizing that my sense of this Place includes about 20 miles of road at the end of the St George peninsula, a Place in which I have an identity in its complexities, and a feeling of belonging in it, and even to it.
The size and scope of a Place may be as small as a house, or as large as a Region (New England, or Appalachia). It might be a Place visited (for me, Paris, Brittany, western Newfoundland), or (why the hell not?) an imaginary Place, like Brideshead or Downton Abbey, where one has been a fly-on-the-wall voyeur...
I made a catalog of my own succession of Places where I've lived:
Eleven locales (well, Places), each an adventure of finding (constructing?) one's footing, one's place, one's identity. I think positively about each of them, recognizing the complexities that I somehow managed to navigate. None of the ten were missteps, each was an opportunity to develop and become whatever I wanted to, though in retrospect I wish I'd been more fully conscious of/toward what was going on around me... And each came to a more or less decorous end
- 42 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA 0-10 years
- Andover MA10-12
- San Pedro CA 13-14
- Chadwick School 15-17
- Harvard 18-21
- Sarawak 22-23
- Stanford 24-28
- Nova Scotia 29-47
- Simmons 48
- Lexington VA 49-62
- St George ME 62-80
Place could be seen/read/experienced as the CORE, the armature around which everything else has been wound. For me the parade of Places to which I have been attached surely starts at 42 Quincy Street, and reaches southward toward Duxbury, and across the Charles River to Boston ... outward to southern New Hampshire (Mason, Wilton) ... some summer weeks with Alice and Wick in Minnesota ... and then to Shawsheen Village in Andover and its so-clearly-remembered geography ... and drives to California in 1955 and 1956... Two years at 1365 Paseo del Mar, San Pedro (a cross-country drive with brother John in 1957), then three at Chadwick School, with vacation excursions to El Cerrito and Berkeley and San Francisco ... Christmases in Weston MA (flying across the country, watching the landscape beneath)... and then back to Cambridge and Boston for 4 Harvard years ... and then to Sweden, and then on my return to a fateful meeting on Irving Street... and to Emerson Basement, where Betsy and I wrangled IBM cards ...and climbings of mountains in New Hampshire, and Sprucehead ME honeymoon ... and then to Hilo HI and Waiakea Uka .for 3 months... and then to Sarawak and Melugu and Simanggang and Kuching ...and halfway around the world, back to New England ...a drive to Montreal, to California and Stanford and Menlo Park ...and Death Valley, and British Columbia ...and then Nova Scotia... and a Stanford sabbatical with another cross-continental adventure, and then another sabbatical at Northfield Mount Hermon ...and to Simmons and Boston and Cambridge ...and to Lexington VA ...and eventually to St George.
Two wonderful books that explore the lexicon of landscapes and places:
Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape Barry Lopez 2013Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape Grady Clay 1998
The first thought on Tuesday morning was that sounds may be evocative of Places, and that iconic images can store memories of Place: there's an element of synesthesia that often accompanies Place. Gamelan music does that for me —though I've never been to Java and Bali— and in fact I could mine my audio archives (vinyl, CD, mp3, YouTube) to find many exemplars, in which the sound has a strong spatial signature/association for me (as a long-time student of the musics of Places; I remember things like where I was when I first heard xxx (White Rabbit: in the Peace Corps office in Sarawak; John Fahey: at a party in Berkeley a few days after we returned from Sarawak ...etc.)) . One lives someplace, and the sense of Placeness changes size, shape, dimension as time passes. ...Autobiographical may be the best approach...
And if sound works that way, how about smells? If I try to excavate smell-Place memories, the first that comes to mind is the quintessence of San Francisco: sourdough bread... or the slightly wet-wool smell of the Cambridge Church of the New Jerusalem... And of course there are images that are personally indelible and iconic, capable of transporting one into mindspaces associated with personally significant Places. Some are virtual clichés —the Golden Gate Bridge for anyone for whom San Francisco is a Place of significance, for instance. For me, a photograph of Harvard's preposterous Memorial Hall has that sort of iconicity, reaching as far back as memory itself, across the street from 42 Quincy Street. And touch also works that way —the stairs at Horton Landing (their number, their angle and tread width, the feel under bare or sock feet...), the banister with a divot missing...
Consider the granularity of such a Place,
and its fractal nature:
the closer you look, the more detail appears...
Perhaps the point here is that Place is a very personal construction, not readily transitive, and tied into the mysteries of how memories are made, stored, called up/evoked by experience and imagination. Real mysteries herein.
My friend Ken Stallcup observed of Los Angeles that distance isn't defined by the usual Cartesian frame, and that a Place is 'close' if you've been there, but much farther if you've never. If you've been somewhere, it has a reality for you, but that reality is absent for you if you only know it as a place name, devoid of personal experience. Thus, Pacoima and Encino and Compton have no Placeness for me, but Palos Verdes and San Pedro and Santa Monica and Topanga are definite Places, with swarms of associated memories.
I observe that quite a few of my Places have books associated with them, some recently acquired (because of some curiosity) and others of hoary provenance. Both sorts are really in service to my long-term engagement with Places of significance. So there are Boston books, and California books, and Sarawak books, and Nova Scotia books, and even some Lexington VA books. And of course lots of Maine books, all the way back to The Country of the Pointed Firs (which has followed me everywhere for 60 years...).
Today I got a couple of essential and classic Boston books from the shelves: Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1964) and Walter Muir Whitehill's Boston: A Topographical History (1968), and was back there/then for a while. And not far away was the remarkable Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England Christopher Lenney (2003) (a handbook for those who see New England as a Place and want to explore its lineaments in detail).
And then I was reminded of other collections that are part-and-parcel of Place: of the rather large trove of fold-up maps, and of the atlases, and of the aerial photography books, and of the extensive photographic documentation of Boston that Betsy and I did 1963-1965... another life's work beckons.
John's original Question began with where one had lived, but I'm enlarging the scope and reference to include Places in which one invests significance and in that sense inhabits. That offered me a fork in the road: the Lady or the Tiger? The landscape of constructed places (Disneyland, Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, Dollywood, Knott's Berry Farm) (a project on the Semiotics of Fantasylands awaits) (remembering the marvelous Anima Land near Sussex NB [for the Jung at heart?])
...or...
following a me-centered Cambridge-Boston Significant Places exploration, with next acts of Andover and Southern California, in which I start to unpack just how each of them is/was/became a Place for me.
Both of those branches are laid out on yellow pages, too much detail to try to transcribe at the moment. But it was fun dumping those memory files. I've made a page of links to stuff I happened on while thinking and writing about the above, and they may be useful in future expansions...
Place... a subject I could go on and on and on with. And now I have another week to ...overprepare.
And so I start to imagine that we might once again DRIVE to California in March-April 2025, visiting a succession of Places (the roster still to be imagined) and contriving to see Persons along the way, while they're still extant. The itinerary needs careful consideration.
Interactive Map of Middle-Earth LotR Project
Ursula K. Le Guin * Maps of Earthsea
Map of The Kingkiller Chronicle (Patrick Rothfuss) by sasasapes on DeviantArt
Map of Pony express Route and List of Stations
View of the World from 9th Avenue by Saul Steinberg, 1976
American Woolen Company Wikipedia
American Woolen Company, Andover, Mass. Digital Commonwealth
Andover Stories: Sacred Heart School in the Heart of Shawsheen andovertownsman.com
Bread and Roses 1912: The Strikers and their Allies and Adversaries
These images powerfully evoke Places for me:
Grand Pre and Hortonville, Nova Scotia
How to corral the last 6 or so days of explorations of Place, collected to yellow pads as threads of discovery and new rabbit holes... might as well try to transcribe in chronological order and then see if the bits will array themselves with judicious editing.
Google Earth and Google Maps grant us visual access to our significant Places, so very different from what was possible/accessible 25 years ago. Places do have spatial (and, as we'll see, temporal) coordinates, though the Question as posed is much more directed toward personal psychic investments in Places, and toward evaluations of subjective understanding. My responses to John's bullets have been almost entirely framed to the 5th bullet, the "whatever else comes to mind."
So WHY have the Places been "satisfying and nurturing"? Because I made them so by my actions. And because I've been fortunate in so many ways, at every step.
Some aspects of Place are indelible; and Place and Time are conjoint. Thus, there's a stretch of about 4 weeks in July and August when our early yellow apple tree drops its fruit, and several deer visit every day. For them, it's a Place, a location they know. But how? Different deer from year to year —now a young buck with first-year antlers, sometimes accompanied by a doe of similar size (last year's yearlings?). Last year a pair of young bucks. A placetime for this herd, each year a different set, but how do they know?. And yesterday EIGHT deer showed up to eat apples:
John's Question began with where one has lived, but I'd argue for enlarging the scope and reference to Places in which one invests significance (feels personal attachment to, thinks of as a paragon of xxx, retains visual memories and memorial visions of), and in that sense inhabits. One lives someplace, and sense of Placeness changes size, shape, dimension as time passes.
Wherever you go, there you are ...and you compose a life there, for a time. And then some combination of circumstances may relocate you: a choice, the conclusion of a temporal envelope (viz: college years), something external like changing jobs or taking on a responsibility... (we came to St George because of Alice and Wick, came here via 20 years at a Sprucehead summer place, and then built the St George house on Wick's retirement).
Maybe "why did you leave?" is worth considering as a piece of the puzzle, and of one's own Story. For me, I surely loved and was comfortable at Horton Landing the Place, but restive re: Acadia, and with teaching as I had constructed it. And so the Library School path opened up.
1992 (when I was finishing the Simmons episode) was a year with several months of uncertainty as I tried on several possible Places without successful attachment, the 'job market' being not very rich at the moment, and I being an odd commodity in that market ...watching the ads and sending out resumés to try to match what librarian jobs seemed to want.
I got to thinking about constructed Places, like the theme parks I've known, including Disneyland (last visited in 1961) and its Florida successors (none of which I've visited, nor would I), and Knott's Berry Farm ("the oldest themed amusement park in the world... If you're wondering what happened to The American Dream, it's right here...", last visited in 1955), and Henry Ford's entirely bogus "Greenfield Village", claimed as a "Museum of American Innovation"
...Here, 300 years of American perseverance serve as a living reminder that anything is possible.
For me, the Place-ness of Boston has changed during my 80 years of experience: Boston's influence has waxed and waned and twisted and turned, but 'Boston' has exerted a varying FORCE upon me all my life. Now it's all but faded, and there are only a few things I'd go there for, or do since I was there anyway... but it isn't that long ago that I did a mini-Project on doorways on Beacon Hill and the mind churns with bits of memory... the Swan Boats in the Public Garden, the trip on one of the last voyages of the penny ferry to East Boston in 1952 or so (my father thought it important for me to experience that piece of the Boston he'd known since 1899). And once Pandora's Box is cracked open, all sorts of place-based memories tumble out and dance around.
The importance for ME of Cambridge (as central point, as origin) is extraordinarily complex —in time, and in attention, in how I navigated the landscape ...using the MTA subway myself at age 9-10 to go to the Telepix Cinema on St James Street in Boston.. and the whole separate set of 1960s memories... Bartley's Burger Cottage, Harvard Bookstore, Briggs & Briggs, Bob Slate, Leavitt and Pierce, Crimson Camera, Ferrante-Deghi, the Hayes Bickford, Brine Sport, Paperback Booksmith, Sage's, the Coop ... and on and on. Mo Lotman's Harvard Square collects a lot of that.
And a similar cascade of memories for Andover, and the story of the planned "garden community" of Shawsheen Village, built to the specifications of William Wood, President of the American Woolen Company ("We Weave the World's Worsteds", at the time the world's largest textile company), with opulent main offices in Shawsheen until Wood's death in 1926, at which point the American Woolen Company repaired to downtown Boston... and by the time I lived there 1953-1956 the main office building was the home of Sacred Heart Academy, a boarding school for grades 4-8, 250 kids presided over by 15 Brothers...oh the stories...). And so on.
And then in 1956 I was whisked away to exotic paradise in Southern California... another vast collection of Place-centric memories that are a joy to begin to unpack...
About that point, just 4 days ago, we hatched a scheme to make another transcontinental trip in the early spring of 2025, with the intention to visit friends in their places, people we'll probably never see again. And of course one element in that is ...a new car... And another is the intention to go slowly, and seek out Places to visit, photograph, etc.
Another line of thought is of Places in fiction, where the setting is a character in its own right. Trollope's Barsetshire, Kingsolver's locale for Demon Copperhead. Oh so many others to which one can be transported ...to the Galapagos with Charles Darwin, to Southeast Asia by Alfred Russell Wallace, to South America by Alexander von Humboldt...
Amitav Ghosh: "...a 'sense of place' is famously one of the great conjurations of the novel as a form... " (67) He cites Maycomb Alabama of To Kill a Mockingbird : "...becomes a stand-in for the whole of the Deep South" ...which might also be said of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpah County.
Placeness is rarely not an element in our perception of the world and our places within its geographical frame. So it seems to me that inhabiting is at the core of the Question. A lifetime of going from Place to Place, a complex pathway among Places of greater and lesser significance, recognizing and reveling in the Placeness of where one is, and where one has been, on the path to the Here and Now. One could build a whole philosophy with those materials. Isn't that just what Walt Whitman did?
An hour or two spent poring over a Road Atlas of North America... all those thousands of named places, cities and towns connected by roads and railroads. What is the Placeness of Stratford Ontario? (a place I've never been, and have no wish to go, but I know people for whom it's a Mecca). The magic of placenames, like Skaneateles, the name of which fascinated me when Alice and Wick mentioned it as we passed by in about 1950 or so, on the way to Minnesota...
And then I think of Robert Frank's The Americans, many of the iconic images in which are distillations or perhaps tinctures of the vast complexities of 'America'; and Disfarmer's Heber Springs Arkansas portraits are almost an inverse case: the people of the surrounding area came to Disfarmer's studio to be photographed. We get to see what they looked like, we get to read their faces, speculate on their lives and personalities, and so absorb a sense of Place. The same for Walker Evans' photographs that accompany James Agee's text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...
Other photographers who are concerned with Placeness: John Alinder (Sävasta, a town in Uppland, Sweden 1910-1932),;Beth Moon's Ancient Trees where each IS a Place itself, a pilgrimage destination; and Kevin Kelly's Vanishing Asia, a 3-volume record of his photographs as a world traveler 40 and more years ago. Also: To Save a River about our own Ducktrap River; Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip; Eugene Atget's Paris; and Berenice Abbott's New York. And for me, the Paris cemeteries of Père La Chaise and Montparnasse... For some, Eliot Porter captures the essence of Maine; for others, Peter Ralston...
As for other places of personal significance, Home Kitchen Cafe stands out.
Some people create and curate bucket lists of Places, not something I've ever done (Maureen suggested the bucket list as a Question, but we never got to it).
Some others that spring to mind: the Newport Folk (and Jazz) Festivals, Monterey Pop, Woodstock are all musically significant places for some people, though I was never anywhere near any of them myself.
I have known a lot of library Spaces, and beyond the actually-visitable libraries, consider also L-Space as conjured by Terry Pratchett, and Borges' Labyrinths... which raises also the subject of imaginary Spaces: Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask, the whole Hogwarts oeuvre, the world of Lord of the Rings, Time Bandits, Pilgrim's Progress, Lyra Bevilacqua's Oxford... — all of them 'imaginary'.
Here's one of those cases-in-point of how I roll.
On July 27 I was considering Place in relation to fiction, and I came across and ordered Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres Anders Engberg-Pedersen (2017). The fact that it was MIT Press is probably what convinced me to lay out $22.70... intersecting with one of my own significant Places (The MIT Press bookstore in Cambridge, which I've frequented for years and within which I have always found books that enlarged whatever I was thinking about at the time).The book arrived yesterday, as I was casting about for sources that examine Place in other than the obvious and pedestrian ways, noting to myself that
Place is a personal construction, more complex by far than just location, and encompassing all that personal and subjective evaluation and knowledge that makes a Place significant... MY Harvard space (Cambridge space, Palo Alto space, Nova Scotia space, St George space) is different in details and internal complexities than anyone else's, as I've said above, perhaps repeatedly...)And here are a few snippets from the book:
...what does it mean to consider the map of a reality that does not exist? Simply. it is tantamount to affirming the reality of fiction and to positing fiction as a dimension of reality. (30) (think of Joyce's Ulysses, built on the map of Dublin on a particular day)Walter Benjamin: ...for years, I confess, I have been caressing the idea of graphically organizing on a map the space of a life —bios... (37)
...As far as I can tell, both procedures that are currently used to produce literary maps are limited in their output as well as in their explanatory power: [1] reading and analyzing individually, text by text, and with hermeneutic methods, vs. [2] not reading and analyzing enormous corpora with big data/macroanalysis tools... (65) [this long before AI was one of those tools ...though there's a long history of computer textual analysis, back to the General Enquirer project we bumped up against in Emerson Basement in 1963...]
...and at that point I wondered to the yellow pad if there was a "Hermeneutics of Place" ... and sure enough good old google confirmed that there's a literature addressing exactly that. And Amazon came up with Place, Space and Hermeneutics (Contributions to Hermeneutics, 5) Bruce B. Janz (2017) ...buy new for $179.99, or used for $160... And then I found a pretty comprehensive review by Sanna Lehtinen in the rather dauntingly titled Phenomenological Reviews. The publisher (Springer) offers a Table of Contents for the 38 chapters, and mirabile dictu some of those chapters are available as pdfs via researchgate.net!
Is Place a Text? (Janz)So what about this hermeneutics thing, and my Bourgeois Gentilhomme par ma foi moment, when it occurred to me that I've been working all my life with a generally hermeneutical stance toward making sense of the world... From Sanna Lehtinen's review:...The central transcendental question of hermeneutics, which is something like "How is understanding possible at all, and how is it implemented practically" quickly moves to what seems to be a similar question, but which is not: "How do we explicate the most ubiquitous image of the site and context of understanding, the text?"Gaston Bachelard's Places of the Imagination and Images of Space Christina Chimisso
...Notwithstanding the variety of emotions that Bachelard connected with particular places, his hermeneutics of place is above all about 'healthy' day-dreaming, and about places that suggest peace, silence, safety, rest and intimacy. The house (or home) [la maison], in all its embodiments, plays a major role. The house 'shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace' (Bachelard 1994 [1957], p. 6).Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Space and Place Pauline McKenzie Aucoin
...Place is a "framed space that is meaningful to a person or group over time" (Thornton 2008, 10); a presence that comes into being through human experience, dreaming, perception, imaginings, and sensation, and within which a sense of being in the world can develop. It involves culturally meaningful sites whose significance rests in lived experience: with naming, local events and conflicts, the attachment of stories, experiences of affect, and the affixation of meanings and memory to locations, landscapes, built environments, and places of the body.(of Geertz): ...culture is "an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (1973, 452). Consisting of all aspects of material culture, ideas, and human behaviour — in his words "arguments, melodies, formulas, maps, and pictures ... rituals, palaces, technologies and social formations," cultural worlds do not in Geertz's view consist of "idealities to be stared at" (1980, 135), but rather texts to be interpreted that can best be approached through the study of symbolic processes, language, and meaning.
Place, Life-World and the Leib: A Reconstructive Perspective on Spatial Experiences for Human Geography Thomas Doerfler and Eberhard Rothfuss [quite inadvertently, this pdf has the whole text of the volume...]
...Place-phenomenology demands that we seek to discover the world as it is experienced by those who are involved and situated in it. It is about the human experience of spatial dimensions and aspects of the world, its symbolization and the meaning which people attach to their socio-spatial experiences.Digital Virtual Places: Utopias, Atopias, Heterotopias Golfo Maggini
Physical and virtual environments: Meaning of place and space David Seamon
...To study human beings phenomenologically is to study human experiences, behaviors, situations, and meanings as they arise in the world of everyday life. For occupational therapy and science, one significant phenomenological topic is the lifeworld—a person or group's everyday world of taken-for-grantedness normally unnoticed and thus hidden as a phenomenon......those ought to keep me busy for a while....One integral dimension of the lifeworld is place, which can be defined as any environmental locus that gathers individual or group meanings, intentions, and actions spatially... Relph argued that the existential crux of place experience is insideness—in other words, the more deeply a person or group feels themselves inside an environment, the more so does that environment become, existentially, a place.
...research on rural older people conducted by gerontological geographer Graham Rowles (2003). Emphasizing that their lifeworlds typically involve strong emotional attachments to place. Rowles identified three dimensions of place related to Relph's theme of existential insideness: first, physical insideness, a sense of being physically entwined with the environment; second, social insideness, whereby older people feel an integral part of their community through social relationships and exchanges; and, third, autobiographical insideness, the ways in which places and place qualities coalesce into an nvironmental mosaic relating to and marking out one's personal and communal history in relation to those places...
...the central parameters of hermeneutic thinking: empathy and interest towards a vast variety of human experiences and advancing thought [yup on that one]...the term also denotes a general, even a more intuitive attempt to understand the constituents of particular human actions. [yup on that one too]
(quotes Christina M. Gschwandtner:) "place is always interpreted. There is no objective, neutral, or "pure" place." Place as such calls for an interpretation as it demarcates an already existing, culturally and historically tinged engagement with space....
(and from Clingerman 2016:) ...Anthropocene is a hermeneutical concept, which serves as an interpretive name for how the contemporary human-environment relationship is materialized and thought. (from Place and the Hermeneutics of the Anthropocene Worldviews vol 20)
(and from Malpas 2016:) Placing Understanding/Understanding Place, in Sophia vol 56
Abstract This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially 'topological' in character (where 'topology' is understood as designating the philosophical inquiry into place) at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being.The core of the hermeneutic approach is the attempt to INTERPRET productively what the senses encounter... to set the encountered in its multidimensional context, to extract and develop a sense of meaning in what's observed. Geertz's famous essay on the Balinese cockfight (here's the full text) exemplifies the hermeneutic approach.
Hermeneutics in an Age of Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Climate Change Denial: A Review of Clingerman et al. Interpreting Nature: The emerging field of environmental hermeneutics Patrick Howard (pdf) in Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 16 (2021)
Place Meant: Hermeneutic Landscapes of the Spatial Self G. V. Loewen (another of those titularly titillating but vastly too expensive books) (but I can get it at half price, very gently used...) (what would Alfred North Whitehead do?)
It's always a pleasure to snuggle up to a 98 cent word, to find a mot juste that exemplifies and otherwise nails a bundle of complicated thoughts and relationships. As Max Nigh memorably put it:
Name it and nail it. But just because we've named it doesn't mean we know anything about it.
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧
I was exploring Literature and Cartography for what it might have to say about Place and came across mention of periplus, a word I first encountered in The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, "an ancient sailing handbook", instructions for going from Place to Place between the Red Sea and Southeast Asia. The words 'rutter' and 'portolan' cover much of the same ground, "organized according to the principle of the list... one-dimensional maps, so to speak" (140)
...every periplus is initially just a wreath of proper names [of Places]. Each adventure sets itself in motion through the use of toponymy. (150)and some google action disgorged these links to follow up:Periplus WikipediaRutter (nautical) Wikipedia
Portolan chart Wikipedia
Loxodromic navigation Wikipedia
Rhumbline network Wikipedia
The search for geographical/philosophical senses of Place has been on my mind, and I seem to have found the Mother Lode:
Sense of Place: an overview ScienceDirectSense of place refers to the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular locations and environments, at scales ranging from the home to the nation. Sense of place is also used to describe the distinctiveness or unique character of particular localities and regions. Sense of place can refer to positive bonds of comfort, safety, and well-being engendered by place, home, and dwelling, as well as negative feelings of fear, dysphoria, and placelessness.Place: encountering geography as philosophy Tim Cresswell 2008 (pdf)
Place * Human Geography - Research Guides at Dartmouth College **** {best example I've seen of 2024-style Reference Librarian work, what I was imagining back in the day... I award Both Ears and the Tail}
PLACENESS, PLACE, PLACELESSNESS A website by Edward (Ted) Relph exploring the concept of place, sense of place, spirit of place, placemaking, placelessness and non-place, and almost everything to do with place and places; and A Place-Related Autobiography by Ted Relph
This is a short account of the various places where I have lived for at least several years, especially the early ones, because these have presumably informed my thinking. In contrast to much writing about place, which often emphasises roots, belonging and deep attachments, my place experiences can be appropriately described as peripatetic and multi-centred. I am not quite sure where I belong but I have always been engaged with where I am. I like to think this gives me both a resistance to nostalgia and a breadth of perspective but I could be wrong.Still further serendipity from Literature and Cartography led me to the "oldest map" (so far...):
The Oldest Map is Discovered in Abauntz Cave, Navarre, Spain History of InformationEngravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good foraging and hunting.A palaeolithic map from 13,660 calBP: engraved stone blocks from the Late Magdalenian in Abauntz Cave (Navarra, Spain) ScienceDirect
...a Magdalenian map in which the actual surrounding landscape, including mountains, rivers, and ponds, is represented. Some possible routes or avenues of access to different parts of the geography are also engraved on the landscape. The engraving seems to reproduce the meandering course of a river crossing the upper part of side A of the block, joined by two tributaries near two mountains. One of these is identical to the mountain that can be seen from the cave, with herds of ibex depicted on its hillsides, on both sides of the gorge in front of which the cave of Abauntz is strategically located.A 13,530 year old stone age map EvoAnth
Maps from Abauntz Cave researchgate.net
Maps in Stone & Clay Diane Savona
...The rock was initially discovered in 1994 but it took researchers about 15 years (2009) to decipher the meaning of the etched lines. According to the research team led by Pilar Utrilla from the University of Zaragoza in Spain, "All of these engravings could be a sketch or a simple map of the area around the cave. It could represent the plan for a coming hunt or perhaps a narrative story of one that had already happened."The Oldest Maps in the World Lapham's Quarterly
Those ancient humans who might have scratched directions in the sand or carved lines on wood were the first to practice the art of symbolic representation in the form of a map. From that point on, our ancestors all over the world scratched marks on walls and rocks, dipped their fingers into pigments, and gorged bones, shells, and horns to make marks of where they lived or where they were going.
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ Two weeks between Convivia gives me the Opportunity to gild as many lilies as I like, and to follow mysterious sights, sounds, smells (etc.) as if they too might bear upon the Question at hand. And sometimes I come to or articulate an understanding that I've had tacitly but not made much of. Or perhaps it's finding new words to explain, justify, congratulate self, and generally strut and preen. As this morning's yoga was lifting off, the Revelation came to me (and the yellow pad was there to write it down):
I Live in my Imagination That's the meta-realization, the takeaway from a fortnight of work on this Question, but shortly before, with the morning's first coffee, I inscribed on the current yellow pad this statement of my most basic take on the Question of Place :
One of my CORE interests, which I've been inquiring into and practicing with all my life, is geographical/spatial IMAGINATION:I can't fully reconstruct the steps that brought me to those crystallizations (and of course tomorrow there may be something quite different that explains everything...), but I was following up the Place-in-Geography thread above, wondering about how the discipline [that's the academic discipline, granfalloon though any always is] actually dealt with Place. There was an interesting flurry in the 1970s, nicely summarized in a snippet from a link sent by John McIlwain yesterday:
— how we construct and maintain and draw upon memories of space and place.Yup, that's me.
In the 1970s, a school of thought emerged in the humanities called post-structuralism; the main idea there is that there's no ultimate truth, and that meaning is culturally and historically contingent. People construct meaning...
(Amadeus Harte)Just before I read that, I'd copied this out:
...the 1970s ...a time of critical protest against theory-building, objectivism, quantification and other goals set by the profession during the previous decade... an effort to call attention to the lived experience of people in their everyday situations... a contrast to the familiar empiricist and analytical traditions of 20th century geography in this country....Place does not connote areal boundedness in a 'map' sense, nor is it defined by the visual, aesthetic, or functional criteria of external observers. Rather, it appears to connote centeredness, as experienced either by residents of a place or by the sensitive visitor who has become attuned intersubjectively to the lives of residents.
(Anne Buttimer reviews Relph's Place and Placelessness, in AAAG) (pdf)In the same vein and from the same mid-1970s mindspaces, Yi-Fu Tuan's Place: An Experiential Perspective (pdf) :
Place is a center of meaning constructed by experience. Place is known not only through the eyes and mind but also through the more passive and direct modes of experience, which resist objectification. To know a place fully means both to understand it in an abstract way and to know it as one person knows another. (152)... To live in a place is to experience it, to be aware of it in the bones as well as with the head. Place, at all scales from the armchair to the nation, is a construct of experience; it is sustained not only by timber, concrete, and highways, but also by the quality of human awareness.
Ted Relph's PLACENESS, PLACE, PLACELESSNESS website (noted in the section immediately above) is an excellent entry point from which to view the contemporary descendants of the mid-1970s style, and led me (via Ted Relph's 1990 article Yosemite as a Mythical Place, to placesjournal.org, which offers the complete backfile (from 1983 onward) of the Places journal, which I hadn't encountered.
Places Journal is an essential and trusted resource on the future of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. We harness the power of public scholarship to promote equitable cities and resilient landscapes....Founded at MIT and Berkeley in 1983, Places has been online and free since 2009.
The very first issue (1983) of Places had a piece by William Morgan Peyton Place Revisited (pdf), considering Grace Metalious as a "perceptive observer of the New England townscape", and connecting up in my mind with one of the first salacious books I read, aged 13, which I wasn't absorbing for its socio-cultural content... Anybody else???And my friend Daniel just sent a link to a YouTube video he characterized as "creepy and spooky", but I read as a Place documentary:
Steubenville OH
Other Place-oriented books from the shelves:
Invisible Cities Italo Calvino 2013 KindleYou Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination Katharine Harmon 2003
The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape Harm de Blij 2010
Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape Stephen Shore 2023
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ And so I'm nudged back to neuroscience, to explore just where in the brain the sense of Place may be found:
Hippocampus WikipediaHumans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation... The hippocampus, as the medial pallium, is a structure found in all vertebrates.[5] In humans, it contains two main interlocking parts: the hippocampus proper (also called Ammon's horn), and the dentate gyrus......it is suggested that a broader view of the hippocampal function is taken and seen to have a role that encompasses both the organisation of experience (mental mapping, as per Tolman's original concept in 1948) and the directional behaviour seen as being involved in all areas of cognition, so that the function of the hippocampus can be viewed as a broader system that incorporates both the memory and the spatial perspectives in its role that involves the use of a wide scope of cognitive maps.
Cognitive map Wikipedia
A cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment...Cognitive maps are a function of the working brain that humans and animals use for movement in a new environment. They help us in recognizing places, computing directions and distances, and in critical-thinking on shortcuts. They support us in wayfinding in an environment, and act as blueprints for new technology.
...Cognitive maps serve the construction and accumulation of spatial knowledge, allowing the "mind's eye" to visualize images in order to reduce cognitive load, enhance recall and learning of information. This type of spatial thinking can also be used as a metaphor for non-spatial tasks, where people performing non-spatial tasks involving memory and imaging use spatial knowledge to aid in processing the task.
...They are internal representation, they are not a fixed image, instead they are a schema, dynamic and flexible, with a degree of personal level.