temporality and place

reading list three: theoretical grounding
Below is a list of readings that I am preparing for my comprehensive exams. As is, it is a work in progress.

Suggestions for further readings (and/or comments on inclusions) are welcome.

Azaryahu, Maoz, and Kenneth E. Foote. 2008. “Historical space as narrative medium: on the configuration of spatial narratives of time at historical sites.” GeoJournal 73 (3): 179-194.

The telling of history in space (historical sites) differs from all other mediums of storytelling, which do not attempt to embed narrative into particular locations. “Anchored and constrained” by places, they use 3 main strategies: markers/plaques (spatial-temporal constrained events), route/path to mark for chronology, complex spatial-temporal sequences generally simplified by marking key moments or places in the narrative, or divided and narrated by themes. Hybrid narrative strategies also utilized. Co-authorship, no guarantee visitors read complete narrative, narratives composed and configured over long periods (thereby re-constructed by socio-political pressure) make story-telling at historic sites/landscapes different than other forms of narrative and are also understudied. Article asserts importance of looking at “how spatial narratives of time intersect with other narrative forms to shape conceptions of space, place, and history” (193). Opens up thought for: whether there are other (more effective) ways of telling narrative of/in landscape? Need for experimentation beyond plaque to incorporate/convey the palimpsest of narratives that exist in/across place.

Basso, Keith. 1996. “Wisdom sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape.” In Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K. Basso, 53-90. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

Apache wisdom is the accumulated understanding of places across the landscape, where meaning of particular sites is derived from relationships to/with/in those sites (as communicated through stories). Apache places are imbued with such powerful (and well known) meaning that mention of a particular site can serve as reference to a particular teaching and act as a guide for self-reflection. That is that the physical landscape is entwined with mental and imaginative processes, it structures ways of thinking, being, and knowing how to live and act. This “interanimation” permits meaning to be generated out of place, however places only say as much as individual animators allow. Water operates as symbol of knowledge and knowledge acquisition, places must be consistently drunk from in order to develop and sustain wisdom – and places act as receptacle for such wisdom. Cultural constructions of place instruct material and organizational realities. Human lives are organized and understood through the ways individuals experience and sense place (their lived environment), through understanding this basic reality of how place is experienced reveals wider cultural forms. That is places are made, performed, and reproduced, the mechanisms through which places are made differ across cultures.

Bender, Barbara. 2002. “Time and landscape.” Current Anthropology 43(S4): S103-S112.

Bender proposes: 1) Landscapes do not stand still they materialize through time. Time is not uniform as implied. Different types of time nested in one another, meaning created from each other: seasonal (cyclical/repetitive), event-driven, ceremonial. 2) Landscapes and time are subjective: understandings are socially, historically, and politically derived (and socio-politically charged). Western discourses are created from/construct time and place. Bender calls for “more open-ended theorizing that questions disciplinary boundaries and recognizes the untidiness and contradictoriness of human encounters with time and landscape” (S106) recognizing that “landscapes refuse to be disciplined; they make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (history) and space (geography) or between nature (science) and culture (anthropology). Academics have been slow to accept this and slow, too, to notice the volatility of landscape. A person may, more or less in the same breath, understand a landscape in a dozen different ways” (S106). “What I have attempted to sketch is ways of talking about time and landscape that no longer privilege the visual over other senses or the mind over the body but instead work with an embodied phenomenological approach to time and landscape married to a larger political understanding—one that attends not only to how people are socialized through their daily (times) encounters but to how they negotiate, question, and create those encounters that recognizes not just experiences of time and place rooted in familiar landscapes but the dislocated but nonetheless always physically grounded experiences of people on the move. People relate to place and time through memory, but the memories may be of other places and other times.” (S107) People engage with landscape in complex and contradictory ways, how they move towards a sense of place and belonging (or, sometimes, not-belonging) and how they creatively rework the past in a volatile present (S107) plurality of place – based on social location, emplacement, and particular moment.

Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Bennett explains that all things vibrate, organic things but also metals, plastics, and trash; they’re vital, energetic, lively, quivering, vibratory, and evanescent. She “believe[s] it is wrong to deny vitality to non-human bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp. I believe that encounters with lively matter can chasten my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests” (122). All matter has the potential to affect and be affected; this recognition reveals the life embedded at multiple and various scales temporally and spatially. She suggests that a particular attention paid to vibrancy of matter allows for different kinds of engagements with the world and allows for more ecological modes of existence to be realized. Furthermore, it allows for “greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans”(112). She questions whether a more thoughtful consideration for the place of humans within / amongst matter would alter the ways that we consume and produce. The life that Bennett realizes in/of matter, speaks to the ways that the world (and place) comes together. Much like Massey’s (2005) ‘throwntogetherness’ of place, Bennett asserts that “stuff happens” and unexpectedly so in the world; that the non-human is entangled in human political lives. She looks to ‘small agency’ of the non-human such as earthworms, hurricanes, viruses and views them political actors affecting human politics through her understanding of political activity as an ecosystem of entanglements and common problems as the source of constructing publics. Humans are not and cannot be removed from a state of nature. Bennett complicates political agency / place of nature by bringing to the fore the nuanced interplay of politics and nature; how humans are connected to the world and how the world is connected to us.

Campbell, Claire. 2017. Nature, place, and story: rethinking historic sites in Canada. Montréal: McGill-Queens.

Campbell interrogates the interplay between “public history as it affects and involves the natural environment”(6) by examining 5 historic sites located across Canada as a patchwork presenting a narrative of Canadian history. She asserts a “need to reimagine the older landscapes that inspired, influences, and framed human decisions in the past, to understand not only how our history took shape but the origins of the environmental issues which we now face” (6), and positions the landscape in which historic sites are located as actors that “guided”, “encouraged”, and “thwarted” human activity – that has been and continues to be part of the human experience. Environmental history often left out of historical narrative of these bounded sites while imagery of iconic Canadian wilderness is entrenched in their character. There exists great potential to humanize environmental history beyond scientific data through more inclusion of the complex relationship between humans and place within narratives of historic sites. Campbell links environmental pasts to environmental futures in this book she: follows relationships with ‘nature’ showing alternative history at sites; integrates sites spatially and temporally using history relates regional landscapes to national stories; argues that sites are not as bounded but foundational to understanding our relationships with environment. History of what sites attempt to portray but history of creation of historic site itself embody practices of sustainability, value of environmental history in Canada.

Carsten, Janet. 2008. “Introduction: Ghosts of Memory.” In Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, edited by J. Carsten, 1-35. Malden: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470692301.ch1

Carsten examines the interconnections of different forms of relatedness in the present, memories of the past, and the wider political contexts in which they occur. Relaying the past and imagining the future is a complex interweaving of: memory, personal biography, family connections, and political processes. Personal and family histories mark difference to wider local and/or national narratives, they are connected to and reveal political formations. Furthermore, they may also serve as challenges to official narratives of history / heritage. Carsten asserts that tracing family histories reveals the “mobile and permeable boundaries between imagined selves and imagined communities” (5) and provides greater texture and nuance to politics of memory. She interrogates ways that kinship histories can explain processes of political affiliation and identity making.  Kinship and memory are intertwined and are anchored in specific sites; the emplacement of memories is fragile, without which relationships are precarious. Kinship and memory operate together as a regenerative practice that can rearrange and restore the past, and also offer alternatives for social futures. Personal, familial, and national histories are interwoven, what is present/absent reveals political and moral stances. Differential knowledge held by family members tells of the fragmentation of narratives, they are oral histories that are continually being made and remade. The “accumulations, losses, and restorations of memories of relatedness are part of the very fabric of national identity-making as much as they constitute more intimate narratives of personal or familial history” (25). There is an important distinction between choosing not to transmit knowledge/memory and being prevented from transmitting it. Tracing of kinship memory can reveal the remaking of national borders and identities spatially and temporally.

Casey, Edward. 1996. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K. Basso, 13–52. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

“More even than earthlings, we are placelings, and our very perceptual apparatus, our sensing body, reflects the kinds of places we inhabit” (19). Emplacement – living bodies and places “interanimate” each other through: (1) Kineaesthesis– senses of place register in body (2) dimensionality (ie up/down) – connect body with placial setting (3) bodily makeup – mass, density (4) particularity of body –each partake in “this here” (5) porosity of skin – mimics/rejoins openness boundaries of places. Therefore must pay attention to complex of body-place-motion: staying in, moving within, moving between place. Place as an event – they “happen”, take on qualities of people present. Places “gather” and “keep” – permanency of place – allow us to return to: configurative complex of things (memories, histories, languages). Perception of space-time influenced by place. Places have  “external horizon” – they open out as enclose. Thus, what is locality? Rethink knowledge of place through means of knowing our bodies. “Places gather bodies in their midst in deeply enculturated ways so cultures conjoin bodies in concrete circumstances of emplacement” (46).    

Casey, Edward. 1997. “Place Memory.” In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, edited by E. Casey, 181 - 215. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  
Recognizing, reminiscing imply a particular emplacement recognized by bodies. Memories do not simply occupy place, but make place is part of the memory itself; there is a “placement of place” in memory. The body and bodily experiences is the mediator between mental aspects of memory and remembering, and the physical features of place. Bodies are enmeshed in the world; they feel familiarity with/in places and become attuned to places. Familiarity in place alleviates dislocation and disorientations, enabling a sense of security; the body is an organizational centre that situates us in place and informs us to know how to be, which in turn anchors memories. Moving through places the body “imports its own emplaced past into its present experience” (194). Landscapes evoke memory through: (1) variegation- diverse terrains that slow or impede movement; (2) sustaining character  - perimeter which contains and field that holds up; (3) expressiveness – evocative of emotions which is linked to remembering. All of which reinforce remembering of experience of being in place.  Casey asserts “rather than thinking of remembering as a form of re-experiencing the past per-se, we might conceive of it as an activity of re-implacing: re-experiencing past places. By the same token, if it is true that all memory has a bodily component or dimension the memory bearing body can be considered as a body moving back into place” (201-2). Casey considers the parallels (and entanglements) between place and memory and how they serve to reinforce one another. At the base level they bring together the disparate into unity. Place and memory can both be experienced through: (1) horizons – intertwining separate places both internal (porch / bodily, pictorial, verbal) and external (farm field / reminding, recognizing, reminiscing, bodily memory); (2) pathways – which have multiple modes of entry and can follow routes and structure or interrupted by ruptures, detours; (3) things – make up the content of and bring together place and memory. Materials put the past in place. Casey offers, “localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates” (215).

Chua, Liana. 2015. “Troubled landscapes, troubling anthropology: co‐presence, necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(3): 641-659.

Chua explores the sorts of knowledge produced by the condition of co-presence in a Sarawak villages that are being displaced by the construction of an infrastructure (dam) project. The landscape where they live is embedded with memories and morals has rapidly turned from sites where people move through to map geneaologies, relationships, rights and obligations to a construction zone that is shaping this same landscape for a “future without them”. Villages in a liminal space not yet a ruin, not a living village: people are oriented elsewhere whether it be new village, big city, or elsewhere. Before, the paths in and inbetween villages sites were places of relationship building and ‘conviviality’ now they are sites of conflict and encounter with those who have different aims. Displacement and questionable futures altered relationships. Such example of rapid change in landscape and alteration in interpersonal relationships make difficult to disentangle and realize co-presences beyond that of the ethnographer and other. Chua problematizes ethnographers ability to truly understand situations but are often only able to give insight on what they can ‘pull off’ due to their own entanglements/enmeshments in particular circumstances. Further, she peoples the temporality of place, and how relationships between people alter based on the alteration of their connection/relationships to place. 

Climo, Jacob and Maria Catell. 2002. “Introduction: Meaning in Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives” In Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, 1-38. New York: Altamira Press.

Cattell and Climo interrogate the multiplicity and complexity of the way that memories shift, create, and sustain meanings. People are disconnected from the past, when there are no more living memories; this is history. Ethnography accounts for ongoing social processes; and conducting participant-observation allows Anthropologists the unique perspective to document the creation, transmission, and significance of memories and their shifting meanings. Memories are cumulative and malleable. This article presents four themes for consideration of the cumulative and malleable characteristics of memory and meaning. (1) The memories of individuals and their subjectivity as important to personal and social identity; memories are interpretive, emotional, organic, social processes that integrate past, present and future constructions of self in order to meet needs of present self identity. (2) Memories are contained not just in human brain but everywhere; memories are contained in spoken language and their symbols, conjured through bodily processes that are otherwise inexpressible, found in objects, sites, places, life stories are mediated through constructions of social processes. (3) Processes of social memory maintain, seek, construct meaning from past in order to gain something from it. Memories themselves and their meanings are contested; processes of remembering and silencing are utilized in order to gain/maintain political and economic power; memories heal; provide sensuous information to provide connection to past and offer idea of continuous identity. (4) Identities are memorialized and challenged through voices and texts; who owns stories. Memory does not provide facts but emphasizes meanings. Personal and collective identity, social processes, and hegemonic relations are entangled in telling and recovery of the past. Studying memory requires narrative approaches with theoretical foundations to understand its diverse and intricate implications and influences. The study is open to creativity in order to find a comprehensive theoretical approach.

Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do glaciers listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Cruikshank examines ways of knowing in relationship in/on/to landscapes particularly in relation to human experiences with glaciers and their “intangible connections to recent human history” (3). As glaciers are understood as a sentient landscape “that listens and responds to human indiscretion” (142) they have complex relationships with Indigenous peoples, and interpretations of them continually shift with natural and social processes. Thus rectifying assumptions that local knowledge is fixed and unified, and exposing their vitality. This ethnographic work looks to the conflict between Indigenous oral histories that account for a vitality of glaciers that understands them as having the ability to listen and see, and documented colonial accounts which understood glaciers as inanimate lifeless objects. She explains this encounter as: (1) beginning with colonial missions to northwest of North America starting at the end of the ‘little ice age’; (2) Europeans seeing glaciers as wild and Indigenous peoples viewing them as familiar spaces influence different interpretations of the environmental changes and social disruptions; (3) conflict between these two views reveal wider understanding of debates surrounding human-environment relationships; (4) in summation this reveals landscapes as markers of human history. Cruikshank works at multiple scales spatially and temporally and connects them all into understanding that they are not different but aspects of an on-going process of conquest and resistance. She brings together these disparate encounters and understandings to show the circulation and influence of different ideas. The text offers different perspectives, which problematize understandings of nature while also allowing for incorporation of indigenous narratives and worldviews.

Foote, Kenneth E. 2003. Shadowed ground: America’s landscapes of violence and tragedy. University of Texas Press. 

Foote explores relationship between space and memory through an interrogation of the way landscapes are represented through memorials, plaques, graveyards, etc. and aims “to consider the larger issue of how people view violence and tragedy over long periods of time and develop a sense of past” (5). He asserts that management of these tragic landscapes orientates national identities towards violence, he categorizes sites as: (1) public commemorations; (2) mark event’s location; (3) unused and remove traces of event; (4) used without recognition of event. However, Foote recognizes that sites do not fit neatly into one category, as meanings attached to sites and events change through time based on changes in social understandings and context, which in turn alters the physicality of the site. Ample space is given throughout the text for narrative, which emphasize the dialectic relationship between private grief and public space. Foote advocates for memorialization of sites due to their ability to assist in grief, or conversely the lack of public commemoration or recognition exacerbates grief.  Approaching from another angle, Foote looks to how these same places are embedded in constructions of identities and traditions. The social meaning of place correlates with reified local and national narratives, and asserts that American national identity is shaped by and emergent from responses to tragic events. Additionally, he considers sites as nodes in conversation with one another that exists as part of a larger project communicating wider ideals of national heritage, identity, and values.

Gable, Eric and Richard Handler. 2003. “After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site.” In The Anthropology of Place and Space: Locating Culture edited by Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, 370-386. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Heritage sites require to be interpreted as authentic in order for their power to be legitimated. They are a form of cultural salvage wherein they position themselves as the best mode to preserve what will be otherwise lost. They are recognized as the official collection of what remains and of what is “really real”. Interactions with ‘authenticity’ of heritage sites construct public conceptualizations of authenticity, which makes public skeptical of authenticity. Public questioning of the epistemology of authenticity reveals elusiveness to the achievement of authenticity. Gable and Handler assert that the Colonial Williamsburg heritage site maintains its authority through a careful management of presenting fact and fiction as indiscernible realities. It presents itself as credible and authentic representation of the past through its commitment to the truth through details of the real past of ‘documented’ facts. It does not need to be a perfect copy but needs to be deemed acceptable by visiting public that is it needs to be convincing. “Natives exhibit what to us is a kind of divided consciousness. On the one hand, they continue to be preoccupied with the past as the last refuge of the really real. On the other hand, some of them, at least, allow for the possibility that the really real is a myth. Yet, according to them, it is “myth” that, if institutions such as Colonial Williamsburg and the American nation itself are to survive and prosper, people must believe” (383).

Gordillo, Gastón R. 2014. Rubble: The afterlife of destruction. Duke University Press.

Ruins are abstracted from present and articulate particular projections (of elite actors) of the past. Informed by processes of ruination, Gordillo conceptualizes rubble as the “material sedimentation of destruction” in order to unsettle reifications of ruins. Out of being disorientated by the entanglement of debris created through/by different epochs and processes Gordillo approaches rubble as nodes from which to examine, what Benjamin termed, ‘constellations’. “Constellations point to processes that are stored in objects but that are also outside of them”; they serve as a vein through which to examine the presence of history throughout / across landscape and inform understandings of places as nodes rather than containers. Movement between nodes entangles other nodes, reveals the multiple historical forces and processes that affect the same landscape. Thus, Gordillo does not produce in depth localized ethnographic accounts but rather produces an ethnographic that questions foundations of, or ‘thinks against’, what ruins are known to be. Examining afterlife of rubble, how it is maintained, restored, the stories told about it reveals the affective dimensions of ruins, exposing how the same can be glorified, feared, or ignored. Some rubble fetishized in way that obscures its processes of destruction of its own materiality and of human lives. Gordillo’s revelation of the power that exists that fear ruins and ruination points to rubble as an invitation to remake the world. Through the conceptualization of rubble able to integrate temporality of places (landscapes) into understandings of history of the present, recognize the construction of affective attachments to sites (and ideals), which obscure violent histories and processes, which were the cause of destruction and dislocations.

Gordon, Avery. 1997. “Her Shape in His Hand.” In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, edited by A. Gordon, 3-28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Gordon recognizes that life is complicated beyond the multiple socio-cultural elements that interact and influence lives but that different modalities exist through which people experience the world, and generate meaning. Particular attention is paid to the traces and absences that are generative of social realities. “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place.” (8) Much like the work of Ann Stoler, Gordon pays particular attention to the embeddedness of structures in social lives and the reach of their forces beyond the formalities of institutionalized systems. Instead of examining what it is that people left with Gordon examines the mechanisms through which these insidious powers dominate psyches and experiences; she looks at the shapes of forces and lost people’s relationships to/with it for instance – slave owner –slave, and what traces  of power are left behind. The forces on people, though undocumented, known to have happened can imagine and feel their stories. To study hauntings is to exploring the mediation linking institution/individual, history/biography. It is to acknowledge that the systems seemingly remote or removed from our lives determine our life stories and experiences. Such ghosts and hauntings are all a part of social lives, and to ignore it is to discount the complexity of lives. Gordon asserts that in order to recognize such realities requires a change to how we approach ghostly matters by calling to question: which stories get written about that relate power, knowledge and experience; how do ghostly matters (which intertwine fact fiction and desire) put into question ethnographic authenticity; reflexivity concerning systems but also the invisible nature of  absences being investigated. Gordon does not offer particular methods through which to approach such research but rather calls for a “different way of seeing, on that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique, one that is more attuned to the task of “conjuring up the appearances of something that is absent”. (24) What happens when we follow ghosts?

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23. 

Space is not a neutral grid wherein cultures and people can be located as areas on a map. Space has been naturalized as something that contains people with particular identities separated by borders. Gupta and Ferguson “call for the move away from seeing cultural difference as the correlate of a world of peoples whose separate histories wait to be bridged by the anthropologist and toward seeing it as a product of shared historical process that differentiate the world as it connects it”(16). And consider four sites that problematize reified notions of an isomorphic relationship between space, place, and culture: border inhabitants and those who continually cross borders; differences within localities including multiculturalism and subcultures; postcolonialism’s influence on cultures; social change and cultural transformation in situated in the interconnectivity of spaces. Communities and places have always been built through interconnections; colonialism needs to be understood for through the movement and interconnection of people but as the displacement of one form of interconnection for another. There is a need to understand the political underpinnings of the construction of space; how meanings are established, power dynamics of place making and contestation of place. As places are interconnected and interdependent, socially, culturally, and economically, it is of greater value to interrogate the processes through which difference is constructed than to examine difference between geographic locales.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2003. “A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town.” In The Anthropology of Place and Space: Locating Culture, edited by Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, 363-369. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 

Herzfeld ruminates on the conflicting ways that history and the past are experienced and presented in the Cretan town of Rethemnos by paying particular attention to architectural features of the “old town”. The definition, maintenance, and value ascribed to particular types of buildings and their features as material heritage differs between locals and heritage designators/city government. Certain elements of Venetian and Turkish architecture are designated historical to the city and their preservation is praised as allocated money, other of their elements are obscured, demolished, or hidden dependent on the reconstruction of the past / historical narrative that is being promoted. Many locals define places without the presence of outside (Venetian or Turkish) influence to be “pure” and “natural”. Disagreements over what is of historic value between conservation authorities and locals have interfered with everyday life and has resulted in violent disputes. Questions who an what determines the telling of history through time, and which parts of past are allowed presence into the future.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Edited and translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. First Published 1974.

Space is an active process that is continually produced and reproduced through intricate interrelationships between objects and products. Place cannot be understood as a container but as the processes that occur in/through time, not simply as places themselves or for the organization material objects. At the core of Lefebvre’s theory is the division of space into three facets, wherein each relates to and influences the others simultaneously: perceived space (production of materials), conceived space (production of knowledge), and lived and endured space (production of meaning). This triadic relationship cannot be synthesized, any determinations of such merely preserves the initial contradiction of the tri-dimensionality and set up new contradictions. Space is not a natural given that contains things and people, but is a powerful force in the creation and maintenance of social relations – it is a politically contested field that informs who people are. Another entry into understanding the triadic relationship of the production of space: relative space (relationships between objects), relational space (emotions and affects contained within objects), absolute space (individuation or personal meaning). Abstract space masks power differentials as it produces, imposes, and reinforces social uniformity that is through the creation of environments that ensure a particular functioning of society. As Lefebvre asserts that space is experienced through the body, and bodies are tuned/moulded through their interactions and reactions to environments, people and cultures are ultimately a product of space. However, Lefebvre asserts that understanding of space as having power over bodies is the fetishization of space. In order to reveal embedded social relations space itself should be analysed, not things in space, for its form, function, and structure. There are social realities embedded in the history of space; the rhythms of humans (cultural practices) have been inscribed on space.

Low, Setha. 2009. “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place.” Semiotica 175 (1/4): 21-37.

Low determines that considerations of embodied space, language and discourse, and transnational / translocal spaces are missing from theorizations on the co-production (social production/construction) of space. With these absences focus is directed to binary of space/place and “imprisons” people in location while discounting the movement and agency of individuals. The body is left out of spatial analysis due to the messiness of its dualism as subject and object as well as its material and representational aspects. Consideration for embodiment allows recognition that people are mobile spatiotemporal units having individualized agency that is influenced by cultural practices, which in turn gives meaning to forms; individuals movements produce place. Language creates and reproduces realities for creation of certain types of spaces. For instance discourses of fear used in response to political-economic forces produce the desire and reality for families to live in gated communities. Through paying attention to the movement of individuals the pathways between places come into view; social relationships, cultural and political contexts move with individuals and are not tied to particular places. Meaning becomes transferred into/onto new sites creating new relationships in/with space. Low considers that space is “what people do, not what they are”: “Social relationships are the basis of social space, yet these relationships necessitate materiality, in the form of embodied space and language, to work as a medium of discussion or analytic device.” (34)

Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.

Space is dynamic and unfinished, it is not a surface or container. Rather, it is an “event” wherein multiple layers (both concrete and abstract) of co-existence intersect where the only constant is change. “What is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now” (14): In the same vein as Gupta and Ferguson Massey asserts that space is not isomorphic with society, however it is central to understanding plurality and change since it requires engagement with multiple existences. Space is a product of social relations and conceptualizations of space transform and influence relationships and engagements in/of the world: (1) space is constructed through interactions informed by relationships; (2) space is a possibility that gathers distinct trajectories and realities in unexpected ways or moments of “happenstance”; (3) space is constantly being constructed wherein even the permanent and stable require making and remaking. Space cannot be travelled through, even momentary presence effects and alters the makeup of space. Spaces cannot be mapped, maps tame space. Space as political: (1) there is no community but multiple processes of negotiating difference which are context specific and continually being invented; (2) there are no rules of space: political positions do not indicate where/how spaces are open and closed there is difference for people vs. capital vs. etc.; (3) the previous 2 ruminations necessitate consideration for wider spatial connectivity, which opens up questions of political responsibility.

Morphy, Howard. 1995. “Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past.” In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by E. Hirsch and M. O'Hanlon, 184-209. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  

Morphy examines Yolngu understandings of movement-landscape-ancestral past. Landscape is the mediator between the present and ancestral past; places reveal information. Moving through them is a vital process of discovering meaning of place; allow for ancestral mapping, sediment of history, sentiment on/in landscape, individuals acquire conception of landscape. Places as part of network connecting between within them – follow chain to see connections and continuity. To move in/take over place not via myths, but act as if taken over by new land. Preserve “heritage” or illusion of continuity between people, place, and ancestral past; landscape is key mechanism to create connections. Triadic understanding of place: individual, ancestry, and current world. “Interaction with the landscape is part of the process whereby the dreaming as a component of the cultural structure of Aboriginal society is produced” (187). Myths represent and are represented by the landscape. “Human identity thus is shared with something that has an existence independent of the person and which has the same origin: the ancestral past” (205).

Munn, Nancy D. 1992. “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21(1): 93-123.   

Munn inserts the conceptualization of time as vital to understandings of place. Time is co-constructed with space through socio-cultural processes; time is lived in not only conceived and perceived. Time-reckoning often implies stasis of time through use of reference points as measurement, for instance questions of when, how long, and how many. Questioning how fast implicates bodily activity and infers that bodies have relationships with time, that is the body moves between its own time and imposed world time, demonstrating the temporality of time and time-reckoning. Munn refers to this as temporalization wherein actors are not only “in this time (space-time) but they are constructing it and their own time in the particular kinds of relations they form between themselves (and their purposes) and the temporal reference points (which are also spatial forms)” (104).  Thus, experiencing the “presence of time” is central to time reckoning, and culturally constructed. Interconnections of past-present-future, are fundamental to temporalization, “people operate in a present that is always infused, and which they are further infusing, with pasts and futures” (115). While the past in the present is acknowledged, the future in present often goes unrecognized. Munn claims the future depends more on representation in the present, as it is “only not yet”, while accepting its analytical and methodological difficulties. She calls for analysis of a radical present that attends to strategic temporalizations, which reveal the processes and knowledge that construct [space-]time. Processes through which knowledge of the past (and future) are produced are nodes of social negotiation and/or political conflict.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects:  ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1-18. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.01527.x

After an armed conflict refugees inhabit a place deserted by enemy community, the only social relations that remain is interaction with objects left behind which they refer to as loot. Search through evacuated homes to pick through and make a new home evokes imagination of how others may have lived. Looks at affect created out of building lives out of abandoned place of enemy: understand people as producing and transmitting affect relationally with others and objects. Spaces and objects “exuded a feeling of melancholy” (11). Feelings would not be same if occupation/use of space had not had such controversial. Affective experience beyond subjective emotion and self, people living in ruins of lives of others, everything was sited, dated, politicized and interpreted by people living there. “Melancholy is loss of the self to the self, the loss of a sense of the self as clean and pure” (17). Affect of ruin expands horizontally in “uncontrollable and unforeseen ways”, also rooted vertically as it is a site of an event memorialized.

Palmer, Andie Diane. 2005. “Chapter 6: Memories” In Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse, edited by A.D. Palmer, 161-183. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Palmer looks at two distinct narrative styles present among Secwepmc discourse: confidential chronological life stories told at AA meetings and non-chronological “telling my life” narratives. AA narratives ordered around years of sobriety, are static stories not open to be reinterpreted or carry meaning or lessons beyond value of clean identity; passive narratives with passive audience that do not allow growth and change of individuals. And as film on AA narratives makes clear ties people to former selves rather than being able to live beyond past narratives. “Telling my life” narratives are discontinuous, tied to places not chronologically ordered or tied to other life events; stories are spatially anchored as way of maintaining connections to land and resources and allow for individual growth and reflexivity; that is the telling of stories allows for new stories to be told. Transmission of knowledge and experience requires keen attention of audience to intersections of relationship of self with narrator as well as with place. Place of listener is to interpret who meaning of story is intended for. Through teasing apart differences of chronological versus spatially anchored narratives Palmer considers the real possibility that chronological narratives told by Secwepemc people may not convey the same information emically as they do to those enculturated in Western ways of knowing.

Portelli, Allessandro. 2006. “What Makes Oral History Different?”

In, Oral History Reader, edited by R. Perks and A. Thompson, 48-58. New York: Routledge.

Portelli outlines what oral histories provide that text cannot. Orality: loss in transcriptions of tone, volume, rhythm, speed, emotion (and interactions) carry meaning and connotations, understood through listening not reading and express what narrator is unwilling/unable to. Narrative: focus of story details reveals relationship/meaning of/to narrator. Boundaries of genres, inside / outside narrator, individual / group blur personal ‘truth’ with shared ‘imaginations’. Events and meaning: reveal subjectivity (beliefs, desires, & memories) of events; more about meaning and relationships. Credibility: differ from text. May not be factually ‘true’ but psychologically / emotional ‘true’. Alterations in tellings over time reveal sense making of past. Objectivity: incomplete and never told same; results from relationship with researcher which affects all other sources. Speakers: “instead of discovering sources, oral historians partly create them”. Implicit in oral histories accounts are subjectivities: a fuzziness that details informant as historian along with historian as source; “telling of the story is part of the story being told”. Ultimately, oral histories confront / reveal the layers of experiences / imaginations / partialities / desires / truths / beliefs that influence historical realities.

Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to nothing: The meaning of lost places. CUP Archive.

Read communicates human relationships to place through examining the places that people have been dislocated and/or severed from. These ‘lost places’ are understood by people as important relationships, and are grieved for similarly to losing a loved one. Read notes that people “are able and feel the necessity to turn space into place, to identify a site as being in some way different from another site, to erect mental boundaries around it, to live or work in it, to call it home”(2). Through affective descriptions of relationships to lost places, and individuals return to sites (or evocative imagination of such a return), Read demonstrates the emotional attachment to place, which is constructed and enmeshed in lives through personal and collective meanings including but not limited to values, beliefs, institutions, and ideologies. Examples used throughout highlight the dominance of political and economic mechanisms in determining how/why places are lost, for instance to infrastructure projects or after state refusal to protect against/rebuild after natural disasters, and how people are alienated from them. Emotional connections are based on the ways through which place is constructed. Through story-telling Read conveys the differences (and convergences) in attachment to place across genders and cultures (Indigenous peoples versus settlers). Emotional dimension (how people experience their reality) fails to be included in public policies, environmental assessments, and heritage conservation.

Read, Peter. 2010. “Reanimating lost landscapes: bringing visualisation to Aboriginal history.” Public History Review 17: 77-88.

Read presents a case example showing how the ability to visualizing the temporality of space informs understandings of human experiences / realities. Beyond realizing the change in a landscape’s topographical composition, through a visualization of navigation through space places humans within it and conveys their relationships to/with space and each other. Read considers an Aboriginal camp in the centre of Sydney that persisted through dense urbanization into the 1950s. His team constructed a 4-D (3-D + temporal change) animated reconstruction of movement through the landscape, which conveys not only how settlement was invisible to non-Aboriginal peoples but also its appearance of undesirability to them. Animations recreate Aboriginal manoeuvrability through space, their ability to maintain traditional lifeways including spiritual practices, as well as traditional economies. Visualizations also demonstrate how interactions with white settlers were necessary/undertaken. Answering not only why the settlement persisted but also how. While not all researchers can afford the costs associated with the animations that Read has outlined, what this example calls for is the need to visualize being in space in considerations of environmental change. Visualizing (or imagining) the topography in alternate temporalities, and the ways through which it was navigated, reveal different sets of knowledges / considerations / relationships of people with each other and with place. Does much of the same work as a material heritage site, but virtually.

Robertson, Leslie A. 2005. Imagining Difference: legend, curse, and spectacle in a Canadian mining town. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Robertson uses different iterations, understandings, and utilizations of the legend of the curse on Fernie, BC as a thread for examining how individuals experience race, gender, class, and situate themselves within a small town. Robertson shows how the curse legend has been altered through time, and between generations, individual histories and experiences are embedded in connections to and tellings of the curse. Personal understandings and tellings of the curse narrative reflect and reveal differences as well as processes of othering, while also showing mechanisms of colonialism and settlement of Western Canada in the early 1900s. Following the various accounts of this curse narrative, in a small town that is typically viewed as a homogenous place, reveals the complexity of differences between people and constructing the meaning (and experience) of place. Ultimately, these narratives are utilized as a way to conceptualize / envision what Fernie is and what Fernie could be, for example: the documented versions of the curse legend used to promote Fernie as a significant historical site for tourism purposes; to explain Fernie’s economic situation; to understand Indigenous-settler relations.  Show different layers of palimpsest but also inability to work with / realize all layers existent. Not all layers are visible to everyone (able to convey) no matter how committed to finding them.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial debris: reflections on ruins and ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 191-219.

Stoler interrogates the process of ruination beyond its material (and often romanticized) understandings to recognize the afterlife of the structures that ruined landscapes and peoples; insidious forceful structures continue to endure in socio-political forms well beyond the lifespan of their original formation. Stoler asks what is it that people are left with, and points to examining the lives of the people left to live in ruination. Using Fanon’s conceptualization of the poles of decay, with the breakdown of people at one end and the destruction of places on the other, Stoler asserts that each pole is possesses reactive traces of the other. “By definition ruination is an ambiguous term: both an act of ruining, a condition to which one is subject and a cause of loss. These three senses may overlap in effect but they are not the same. Each has its own temporality. Each identifies different durations and moments of exposure to a range of violences and degradations that may be immediate or delayed, subcutaneous or visible, prolonged or instant, diffuse or direct” (195-6). “The social terrain on which colonial processes of ruination leave their material and mental marks are patterned by the social kinds those political systems produced, by the racial ontologies they called into bring, and by the deficiencies and threats associated with them” (204). Ruins are not found but made, and must be called for what they are “ruins of empire” not “environmental degradation” or “industrial pollution”. Such claims displace place cause onto structure of capitalism when it was processes and project of the longue durée that made (allowed) particular places more susceptible to ruin than others.  Ultimately, she calls for attention to the “specific ways in which waste accumulates, where debris falls, and what constitutes ‘the rot that remains’” (211) in order to distinguish between “what is residual and tenacious, what is dominant but hard to see, …what is emergent in today’s imperial formations” (211). 

Thompson, Paul. 2017. The voice of the past: Oral history. Oxford University Press.

Oral history is a bottom-up record of the present with reflection (embodied message) of the past; situating people as central challenges power structures in existent historical records enabling new content and forms. Oral histories are co-constructed dialogues, which reveal relationships between history/community, information/interpretation, classes, generations, localities that consider context of telling, and in turn enable “radical transformations” to social meaning. Interviewer must recognize how orator understands/perceives dialogue. Oral histories are never told the same twice; intimacies between orator and listener, presence of others, have effects on extent to which social realities conform. The shifting nature of memory and the distortion of realities, including how people imagine what did (or will) happen, are forms of communication, which require consideration for social contexts and pressures to be read. The remembered past provides strength to historical records through: (1) significant and unique information; (2) recognition of individual and collective consciousness; (3) providing assessment of lived experience of historical meaning. It’s unique (and complementary) issues are: (1) questions of authorship (orators, interpreters); (2) mode of dissemination (single life story, collections of stories, narrative analysis of interview, reconstructive cross-analysis); (3) intention of form (analysis or interpretation). Thompson lays out 3 ways to evaluate oral history: (1) as text to identify repetitions of meanings; (2) tease out content (objective-subjective; biographical-emotional); (3) evaluate for reliability (read for consistencies, what is withheld or mythologized as symbolic evidence for attitudes). Its distinctiveness from personal memory is due to its ability to reveal layers of memories and consciousness.