Abstract
Place presents itself to us as a condition of human experience. As agents in the world we are always “in place,” much as we are always “in culture.”1 For this reason our relations to place and culture become elements in the construction of our individual and collective identities. The modern scientific view and the associated technological advances in communication and transportation have transformed our sense of place. Associated with this transformation is our greater awareness of the fundamental polarity of human consciousness between a relatively subjective and a relatively objective point of view.2 The former is a centered view in which we are a part of place and period, and the latter is a decentered view in which we seek to transcend the here and now. Our awareness of the gap between the two perspectives is a part of the perceived crisis of modernity. When we assume a decentered attitude toward a world that includes ourselves, our individual projects may seem meaningless and absurd.3 Our ability to adopt such an attitude, however, does not diminish the role of place as a basic condition of experience.
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Notes
Yi-Fu Tuan, “In Place, Out of Place,” in Miles Richardson (ed.) Place: Experience and Symbol (Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications of the Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 1984), pp. 3–10
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977)
David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (eds) Dwelling, Place & Environment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
Robert D. Sack, “The Consumer’s World: Place as Context,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 78, 1988, pp. 642–64
Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 33–54.
My discussion of a centered and a decentered view is based upon the arguments of Thomas Nagel in The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, pp. 217–23; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
F. Lukermann, “Geography as a Formal Intellectual Discipline and the Way in which It Contributes to Human Knowledge,” The Canadian Geographer, vol. 8, 1964, pp. 167–72
Joe A. May, “On Orientations and Reorientations in the History of Western Geography,” in J. David Wood (ed.) Rethinking Geographical Inquiry (Downsview, Ont.: York University Geographical Monographs, 1982), pp. 31–72.
Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
Nancy Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, translated by Robert B. Kimber (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 20.
Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Cole Harris, “Theory and Synthesis in Historical Geography,” The Canadian Geographer, vol. 15, 1971, pp. 157–72.
F. Lukermann, “Geography: De Facto or De Jure,” Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science, vol. 32, 1965, pp. 189–96
Robert D. Sack, Conceptions of Space in Social Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 197–201.
Stephen Daniels, “Arguments for a Humanistic Geography,” in R. J. Johnston (ed.) The Future of Geography (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 143–58
Susan Smith, “News and the Dissemination of Fear,” in Jacquelin Burgess and John R. Gold (eds) Geography, The Media, And Popular Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 229–53.
There has been a long tradition of concern with this issue in anthropology, especially with regard to ethnographic descriptions. Two recent discussions that have direct relevance to the arguments in this book are Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” and James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in James Clifford and George Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 27–50
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© 1991 J. Nicholas Entrikin
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Entrikin, J.N. (1991). Introduction. In: The Betweenness of Place. Critical Human Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21086-2_1
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