Place in the writing of history is used as a method for isolating and analysing any individual, or group use of place. A method of understanding how place, as opposed to being a point of relation between active agents, and how it structures and shapes experience can be based on private and public boundaries. These public and private boundaries exist in the physical and non-physical dimensions and are used to legitimise the meanings and use of place.
Legitimisation of places occurs for specific reasons however, and this legitimisation occurs in a context of contestation. People can only feel the need to legitimise use when the existing use is being called into question. This is where the relevance of private and public places can help extrapolate meaning from these points of contested use of place.
As a formal practice of legitimisation, people establish borders to establish members relative to these borders. These borders establish private and public boundaries that not only structure methods of identification within these boundaries, but reflect an individual’s identification with these boundaries on personal terms. Gabriella Modan infers that a sociolinguistic appreciation of conversations within her community of Mount Pleasant is a useful way of understanding the discourses of inclusion and exclusion in operation. The specific use of terms implies a method of isolating people into certain stereotypes, which helps inform Gabriella of the way different groups in ‘her’ community legitimise their use, or questions others’ use of certain places. Gabriella also makes note that this legitimisation helps certain people identify with others, and also reflects a historical socio-spatial awareness of individuals, who construct urban and suburban identities for themselves.
This construction of urban and suburban identities, reflect a historical appreciation of the individuals who attempt to legitimise their own use, or perceived similar usage of places. This perceived similarity in use does not come from anywhere, and reflects the historical nature of the construction of identity. People from different geographies bring different assumptions concerning use of place, and in trying to establish a moral high ground, seek to legitimise use as a way of consolidating and understanding their own experiences in a positive light. This in many respects coincides with other individuals’ understandings of use of space, and establishes community consensus.
A further historical appreciation, and possibly a better way of understanding the private and public boundaries that exist historically, and how identity, inclusion, exclusion, borders and history relate to each other can be found in John Tosh’s article on the historical origins of ‘Domesticity’ and ‘Masculinity’. Tosh explains the ‘home’ as a place through which construction of identity is both a social and individual process.
Tosh makes reference to the idea of agents constructing their realities through embedded cultural assumptions in his analysis of the home. The home as the pre-industrial and right through industrialisation epitome of ‘private’ was a domain through which Victorian ideals became self-perpetuating. A masculine public domain was constructed in which certain methods of conforming were expected to be adhered to and the private construction of the home was more feminine, with its own set of assumptions. Mike Crang points out “The routine spaces of homes speak to us about the sort of social relationships that we believe in and the practices that maintain them…judgments about morality and sexuality are written into the fabric of the house through the creation of private spaces”
The home however, was not a passive factor in this construction. The social and individual understandings of public and private places could not be understood without the existence of those places. James Duncan makes the point that “landscapes are ordered assemblages of objects which act as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.” Inventing places pp39.
This is where the relationship between place and the public and private domains can become a little murky. Nothing with regards to places that can expand or contract their rules of inclusion of exclusion can ever be as simple as it seems. So while place is an intricate and indispensable factor in the construction of identity, and while the use of place as historical legitimization is also important with regards to identity, the way through which these places and justifications of the use of these places are constructed is entirely, if not eternally maneuverable.
It is difficult to understand this maneuverability without regards to the historical origin of these factors. While Modan points out a modern conception of the private/public domain through her revelation of urban and suburban identities, and Tosh enlightens us with his Victorian conception of the industrialising home, it is necessary to understand this private/public construction of identity with regards to historical change and the many factors which can contribute to that.
Joshua Meyrowitz argues that the use of media in the home over time has changed the way we communicate with each other, and hence how we perceive each other. Lynn Spigel however launches a different kind of argument. While both look at changing use of technology over time and its affects, Spigel more relevantly explains that technology has changed the way individuals relate to their spaces/places, and this influences their social interaction and the way in which they construct identity.
In a historical frame, the argument can be formed that there are social, individual and place based constructions of identity, that change over time and depend on the use of each of these conceptions of social and individual, and that these understandings have place-centric origins.
Bibliography.
Gabriella Gahlia Modan, Turf wars: discourse diversity and the politics of place (Melbourne: Blackwell, 2007), pp88-106
John Tosh, ‘introduction: masculinity and domesticity’ in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999),
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Lynn Spigel, ‘the suburban home companion: television and the neighborhood ideal in postwar America’, in Linda McDowell, Ed, Undoing Place? A Geographical Reader, (London: Arnold, 1997) pp39-46.
James Duncan, Constructing geographies: identities of exclusion, Chapter3: Elite landscapes as cultural (re)productions: the case of Shaughnessy Heights, in Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography Ed Kay Anderson and Fay Gale, (Longman Cheshire: Melbourne, 1992), pp37-50
Hilary Winchester, The construction and deconstruction of women’s roles in the urban landscape, Chapter9 in Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography Ed Kay Anderson and Fay Gale, (Longman Cheshire: Melbourne, 1992), pp139-155
Joshua Meyrowitz, No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behaviour, Oxford UP: NY, 1985, pp 115-125
Mike Crang, Cultural geography, London: New York: Routledge, 1998.
Joan Williams, From Difference To Dominance To Domesticity: Care As Work, Gender As Tradition, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Volume 76, pp 1441-1495 (2000-2001).
Australian Cultural Geographies, Ed Elaine Stratford, Oxford UP, 1999.
Comments
Luke, it’s obvious that hard thinking went into this piece. However, it’s very densely written and hard to follow: so much so that I was confused at the end as to the extent of what you wanted to say. There seemed to me to be strange ellipses between some of the points you made. For example, I couldn’t understand what you were trying to say through your use of quotes by Crang and Duncan. The length and complexity of many of your sentences also had me reading and re-reading them several times to try and work out exactly what they meant.
After reading your discussion a few times, it seems to me that your argument was the following:
The criteria that divide public and private places change over time due to individual and social factors. You can’t simply consider these criteria in the abstract, however, because places have a material existence of their own. And you also have to consider the broader historical forces (e.g. changing technologies) which influence the way anyone distinguishes between private and public place at a given point in time.
I have a few questions about this argument. Firstly, if you were indeed suggesting that the material existence of places limit how we relate to them, why did you insist that the division between private and public place is ‘entirely manoeuvrable’. If one has to take into account the material existence of places, doesn’t that impose some limits on the ways in which understandings of private and public might be applied to them? And if not, why did you draw our attention to physical existence of place: what point were you trying to make there?
Secondly, you seemed to be suggesting that Tosh’s discussion ignored the effects of ‘historical change’ on the public/private distinction in the mid-Victorian era. This certainly isn’t my reading of his work. He argues that the increasing location of workplaces outside the home had a profound influence on the way the private and public were understood during the Victoria era. Isn’t that an example of using historical forces to help explain the manoeuvrability of the private/public distinction?
The questions I’ve just raised may well be based on a misunderstanding of what you were trying to argue here. If that’s the case, it highlights the need for you to simplify your writing style and argument in future. Outline your key points at the outset of your discussion, and then clearly follow through on them over the course of your discussion. If you don’t, your hard thinking translates to an overly difficult time for your reader, and obviously detracts from the comprehensibility of what you want to say.
Posted by: Melissa Bellanta | May 25, 2007 05:30 PM