Britny Ching
ARCH 371
Place and Placelessness
Place and Placelessness is an adaptation of Edward Relph’s 1973 doctoral dissertation on Geography. Relph was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto in the early 1970’s. His topic of a sense of place was not his initial topic. Initially it concerned the relationship between Canadian national identity and the symbolic landscapes of Canada. But he allegedly became frustrated with the topic because of the lack of philosophical references to a comprehensive definition and understanding of space. Relph chose to frame the methodology of his dissertation through a phenomenological lens. Phenomenology is a study of consciousness and of human experiences. The aim of this philosophical study is to clarify the means of everyday human experience that normally goes largely unnoticed. Essentially it can focus on that which is normally taken for granted and assumed. In the application of phenomenology to place, Relph examines the human experience of space and place from both the taken-for-granted perspective as well as the perspective that place is an intrinsic dimension of the human condition. In chapter 1, Relph defines the concept of place. He analyses place as first an foremost
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This is the important differentiation between ‘identity of’ place and ‘identity with’ place, saying that the identity of place is how it is uniquely different from other things while the identity with place is the degree of attachment that is formed. He also expresses this in the dualism of “insideness” and “outsideness” where insideness is “knowing where you are,” and the converse is the way a traveller might look at a new town. However Relph cites Bachalard who says “outside and inside form a dialect of division…[and] are both intimate,”
An individual’s ‘Sense of Place’ is predominantly their place of belonging and acceptance in the world, may it be through a strong physical, emotional or spiritual connection. In Tim Winton’s novel ‘The Riders”, the concept of Sense of Place is explored through the desperate journey of its protagonist, Fred Scully. Scully’s elaborate search for identity throughout the novel is guided and influenced by the compulsive love he feels for his wife Jennifer and their family morals, the intensity of hope and the destruction it can cause and the nostalgic nature of Winton’s writing. Two quotes which reflect the ideals of a person’s Sense of Place are “Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.’(Aldous Huxley) and “It is not down in any map. True places never are.” (Herman Melville). Huxley and Melville’s statements closely resemble Fred Scully’s journey and rectify some of his motivations throughout the text.
Riegel, Christian A Sense of Place: Re-evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing Calgary : University of Alberta, 1997
Identity is 'how you view yourself and your life.'; (p. 12 Knots in a String.) Your identity helps you determine where you think you fit in, in your life. It is 'a rich complexity of images, ideas and associations.';(p. 12 Knots in a String.) It is given that as we go through our lives and encounter different experiences our identity of yourselves and where we belong may change. As this happens we may gain or relinquish new values and from this identity and image our influenced. 'A bad self-image and low self-esteem may form part of identity?but often the cause is not a loss of identity itself so much as a loss of belonging.'; Social psychologists suggest that identity is closely related to our culture. Native people today have been faced with this challenge against their identity as they are increasingly faced with a non-native society. I will prove that the play The Rez Sisters showed this loss of identity and loss of belonging. When a native person leaves the reservation to go and start a new life in a city they are forced to adapt to a lifestyle they are not accustomed to. They do not feel as though they fit in or belong to any particular culture. They are faced with extreme racism and stereotypes from other people in the nonreservational society.
...lves the confirmation of the boundaries of the social world through the sorting of things into good and bad categories. They enter the unconscious through the process of socialisation.’ Then, “the articulation of space and its conception is a reminder that time boundaries are inextricably connected to exclusionary practises which are defined in refusing to adhere to the separation of black experience.”
Place in art involves the human experience in a landscape. It grows from identifying oneself in relation to a particular piece of land on the surface of planet Earth. Identity is the concept one develops about oneself that evolves over the course of a life. Many artist use place in their work to express, explore and question ideas about identity. The two artist I will be discussing in this essay are John Olsen and Hossein Valamanesh because they both explore a sense of identity and place, although, through different medias, paintings and installations or sculptures.
The ways in which people are placed within “time space compression” as highly complicated and extremely varied. For instance, in the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara said, “ Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You do not need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high”(127). Barbara has a car so that she can drive to her workplace and save the time from waiting public transportation, and she also can go to different cities whenever she is free. Therefore, she has more control of her mobility. The social relations would change when she went to another city. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others, like Barbara; some initiate flows and movement, others do not; some are more more on the receiving-end of it than others. Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imaged as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are structed ona far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. We can see that from her different work experiences in different places. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates ina apositive way the global and the
This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.
In what ways does this text explore the development of belonging through connections to people, places, groups, communities or the larger world?
Adrienne Rich once wrote an open letter titled “Politics of Location” that profoundly opened my eyes to a relevantly obvious concept of self-identity. More often than not, one fails to see the truth that sits right before his or her own eyes. However, it is still the responsibility of the individual to be accountable for that truth. The concept of politics of location is simply that one’s life experiences affects one’s perspective. Unintentionally, individuals make themselves the center of reality. When, in actuality, one is only the center of his or her own reality. Rich also goes on to explain that people are different; yet, individuals have an uncanny since of imagined community. That being, the feeling that
In the article “A phenomenology of fear: Merleau-Ponty and agoraphobic life-worlds,” Davidson explored the Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical idea of space such as ‘lived’ space and ‘objective’ space on a single case who was agoraphobic. Lived space according to Merleau-Ponty is one’s own self-projection and the social relation to his/her environment. It is an abstract space that one perceives and produces through engaging in activities with the objective space or others. Objective space on the other hand is a physical and tangible space that people can see and measure.
An essay written by Paul Valéry is titled "Le Situation de Baudelaire," translated in the Collected English Works as "The Place of Baudelaire." Our translators may have taken liberties here, for if Valéry wanted to say "place" would he not have said "lieu" or "endroit"? "Place" comes via Middle English and Middle French alike from Latin "platea," a street or courtyard, whereas both the English and French "situation" are straight from Latin "situ," place. Why this detour through etymology, which seems either way to take us back to, or puts us back in, place? Because in talking about place(less Place) I want to think less about place as location and more about place as situation, placement, a manner or posture, a stand or a way of situating oneself in a place. In some ways it will be impossible for me to avoid place-as-location altogether, since I am ultimately concerned about the place of contemporary poetry, what takes place there and how I place myself in relation to it. But a place(less place) is for me less a place without place, or a place that is nowhere, a no-place or utopia; rather, a place less place, place with its placeness subtracted and leaving as the remainder: a situation, a situating. This then would be the place of contemporary poetry, its situation.
‘Through identifying places and organizing them, we make sense of the world we inhibit’ (Unwin,
The section talks about what makes a location useful. The two points are the culture of the people and nature of the place and they can also define what’s feasible in a place. This is called the cultural definition of resources. A feature is a resource only if people think it is. It discusses determinism which is the belief that conditions in specific places determine what people do there.
A place, for me, is somewhere that I am familiar with and I recognize it in some way as my own special geographic location. It is somewhere I am emotionally attached to and it is a place that I wish to remain at. I personally feel that it has taken me years to achieve this particular comprehension about where for certain that place is for me in my life, and to make out why I feel a certain way about being within the walls of my own home. I have now come to realize that my home is where my heart will always truly be, because I believe it is the only place where I will always be loved without
De, Blij Harm J., and Peter O. Muller. Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts. New York: J. Wiley, 1997. 340. Print.