Elements of "Place Theory"
“If a given
combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is
beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea
or feeling I attach to it.”
--
Charles Baudelaire
Place is also a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the
world. When we look at the world as a world of places we see different things.
We see attachments and connections between people and place [. . .] Here
‘place’ is not so much a quality of things in the world but an aspect of the
way we choose to think about it—what we decide to emphasize and what we decide
to designate as unimportant. . . (Cresswell,
Tim. Place: A Short Introduction.
Malden,
MA : Blackwell Pub., 2004. 11)
*****
Epistemology: study of the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions
and foundations, and its extent and validity.
Is
what we know about a place real?
‘habitus’
--socialised norms or tendencies that guide
behaviour and thinking.
“the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of
lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to
think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them” (Navarro 2006:
16).
Pierre Bourdieu:
“the
habitus is the product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those
products of collective history that are the objective structures (eg, language,
economics, etc..) and is able to reproduce the form of lasting dispositions in
all organisms (which can, if you will, call individuals) permanently subject to
the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence ”
Habitus is neither a result of free will, nor
determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two
over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and
that shape current practices and structures and also, importantly, that
condition our very perceptions of these (Bourdieu 1984: 170). In this
sense habitus is created and reproduced unconsciously, ‘without any deliberate
pursuit of coherence… without any conscious concentration’ (ibid: 170).
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste. London, Routledge.
Navarro, Z. (2006) ‘In Search of Cultural
Interpretation of Power’, IDS Bulletin 37(6):
11-22.
******
It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly
disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity...as by a series of
paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question
Who am I? than by some riddle as Where is here?
Northrop
Frye, The Literary History of Canada
“It's only by our lack of ghosts / we're haunted.”
Earle
Birney “Can. Lit.”
Henri
Lefebvre
Space
is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the realisations,
inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series of times,
the rhythms or the city, the rhythms of the urban population...the city will
only be rethought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we have properly
understood that the city is the deployment of time.... of those who are its
inhabitants (Lefebvre 1967e:10)
It
is a question of discovering or developing a unity of theory between fields
which are given as being separate,...Which fields?...First, the physical,
nature, the cosmos, - then the mental (which is comprised of logic and
formal abstraction), - finally the social. In other words, this search concerns logico-epistemological
space - the space of social practices, - that in which sensible phenomena are
situated in, not excluding the imaginary, projects and projections, symbols,
utopias (Lefebvre 1974a:19).
Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”
—1.
Place is a process
—2.
Place is defined by the outside
—3.
Place is a site of multiple identities and histories
—4.
A uniqueness of place is defined by its interactions
(quoted
in Cresswell, 74)
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