Senses of Place

Senses of Place. Edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. (Santa Fe: New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 293, introduction by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, afterword by Clifford Geertz, illustrations, references, index. 40. 00 cloth, 18. 00 paper) One of the extraordinary shifts in value in the United States, since the 1960s, is from space to place. Space once meant something glamorous. It evoked images of the open range, the beckoning horizon, the big sky-freedom and endless opportunity. Place, by contrast, suggested limitation-social and geographical constraint. Now, in both popular and academic esteem, the reverse is true. Space is somehow bad: it evokes the abstract and the impersonal, and is even tainted by the odor of imperialism. Place, by contrast, is embodied virtue-modest, in touch with one's roots, deeply personal, communal, and human. Space is elitist, for not everyone is equipped for the stress and strain (and exhilaration) of mobility and conquest. Place, by contrast, is populist, for we all-no matter how humble-can make a home for ourselves. Space is history-the old political history of change and movement; place is folklore. History now strives to be more static, more like ethnography and folklore. Folklore? It is the king of the heap! Senses of Place is an example of the present love affair with place-the triumph of folklore. It is made up of papers delivered at a seminar held in 1993 in Santa Fe. All contributors are anthropologists, except Edward S. Casey, who is a philosopher. Folklore and its cousin ethnography eschew abstraction. Their story-telling and descriptive methods are eminently suited to their subjectplace. The most rewarding part of the book is the rich ethnography. Still, since the contributors are academics, abstraction of some kind remains de rigueur. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty figure prominently in Casey's paper, where they may be expected. But elsewhere, too, they make an appearance serving no clear purpose other than that of establishing one's scholarly credentials. Disturbing to me is an uncertainty of tone in a couple of papers. How should the scholar present him or herself? As a sophisticated person, which nowadays means a postmodernist person, or as just a storyteller like the storytellers in one's study group? Trying to have a footing in both worlds often makes painful reading. Discourses are altogether too obtrusive, overshadowing talk and conversation that, in this kind of study, ought to have the stage all to themselves. It appears that no matter how fond one is of an alien culture, how one wishes to be non-Eurocentric, one is still bound unnecessarily to the method and vocabulary of currently fashionable, European salons. The places studied in the book are: an Apache landscape in east-central Arizona, a rainforest landscape in Papua New Guinea, a despoiled landscape of hills in southern West Virginia, sunny and dry Wamira in Papua New Guinea, Lumbee (Indian) places in North Carolina, and flattish East Anglia, England. Very different they are, yet also similar in their dependence on narrative, and, to a lesser degree, on other aesthetic-emotional means of construction, such as song and dance, ceremony. Storytelling seems to be the universal means of place-making. Stories are of events-something significant or important has happened here-that have the power to transform object and area into place and landscape. …