Critiques of place centre around the notion that places are stable and unchanging, and inherently enable history to take place within them. Roberto Dainotto argues that ‘to claim that culture springs from a place means, after all, to naturalize a process of historical formation, and along with history to negate the historical forces, struggles and tensions that made a culture what it is’.
It is not necessarily a critique of the value of studying place to say that places are dynamic, but it is important to step away from the nostalgia associated with place and put it in its historical context, realising that when chronicling a place, it is not concerned with one set of experiences but differing experiences of as many people as are in it. There is often a unifying purpose of writing place, whether cultural, philosophical, political or personal writings. This raises the problem of the writing of place, in that it is generally from the perspective of one group of people, western academics, or at the very least, those who have the means of publishing. How do we write about a place when we cannot possibly know or comprehend the different experiences?
In addition to this, how do we deal with the changes a place undergoes and thus the change within a popular mindset? These are the effects of globalisation, or westernisation, the effects of technology and tourism. Doreen Massey states that a progressive understanding of place as a process recognises that places are linked to places beyond them, and should not be threatened by this. This seems like it makes historiographical sense – in analysing any text, and in analysing place as text, we need to put the place in context, as well as looking at it without it. While Doreen Massey discusses what is global within place, Joshua Meyrowitz looks at the effects of globalisation as creating placenessness, not as looking at place in a larger context. If we look at physical places in connection with social situations, we realise that is no longer necessary to be with people in a specific place to communicate with them. This questions the very importance of specific places to interactions, and the role of the physicality of space in determining actions. If we can do things anywhere, then what role does place play? To me, it changes the way I think about communication, I feel that I am free from the restrictions imposed by most places. However, it doesn’t affect the importance of place in interactions. This is evidenced by the notion of the ‘para-social’ new intimacy, which signifies that place has not changed in consequence, just in function. What the article also circled around examining was that while place can still be important, people are less aware of place than they were when it had a specific function, precisely because it has become more flexible.
When discussing place, many writers talk of people establishing themselves in place to avoid what Massey terms the vulnerability and insecurity people feel when they are not settled, that locality can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. However, Laura Agustin talks about migrant sex workers who are impeded from doing this, which allows them to transcend other constructs such as nationalism, and to a certain extent, cultural boundaries. Migration and travel can create a sense of globalisation whereby place is put into the context of other places and experiences, as opposed to the context of its own history, a large part of what Massey termed ‘global place’. However, this can lead to over-simplification. As places have different effects on people’s differing experiences, so do they put each place in its own new perspective.
As critiques of place try to establish a less homogenising effect in writings of place, George Seddon in his chapter ‘Placing the Debate’ refers to the renewed concern for the locally distinctive in addressing this problem. He speaks of this as being a revival of romantic values tied to a ‘perceived urban-metropolitan crisis’. David Harvey also refers to new urbanisation. Clearly urbanisation is causing increasing problems as community is influenced and changed. However, village existences do not necessarily translate into social interactions, as it does not address the overall problem. This raises the question of how much environment does really influence our personhood.
Thus the critics of place issues of re-evaluating place in other contexts, questioning the changing role of place and how much place affects who we are. It also questions whether regionalism or a more local view of place is the answer to decreasing homogenisation in writing place, and how we can write about place both using our own western perspectives and utilising others.
References:
Agustin, Laura, ‘Still challenging “place”: sex, money, and agency in women’s migrations in Harcourt, W. & Escobar, A. (eds) Women and the Politics of Place, (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press), 2005, pp. 221-33.
Dainotto, Roberto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities, (Ithaca: Cornell UP), 2000, pp.1-33.
Harvey, David ‘The new urbanism and the communitarian trap’, paper first appearing in Harvard Design Magazine, 1997, http:www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/1harvey.pdf, accessed 31 March 2007.
Massey, Doreen ‘A global sense of place’ in Massey, D. Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity) 1994, pp. 146-56.
Meyrowitz, Joshua, No Sense f Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (New York: Oxford UP), 1985, pp.115-25.
Seddon, George, ‘Placing the Debate’ in Seddon, G. Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape (London: Cambridge University Press), 1997.
Comments
Anna: You’ve provided quite a dense and thoughtful summary of many of the salient ideas raised by the readings this week. I got the sense that you had worked hard to compress what you saw as the key issues into this short summary. Both the dense wording and summary style you adopted made it difficult to read, though: it forced you to jump from point to point rather than develop a coherent line of argument about one or two things that interested you most. It also meant that ultimately you didn’t impart much of a sense of your own engagement in the issues raised. In your last paragraph, you simply told us what other critics of place have said, not what you thought about it. And that was a shame, because it meant that this piece wasn’t as thought-provoking for your readers as it might otherwise have been.
Posted by: Melissa Bellanta | May 9, 2007 12:23 PM