Sense of Place: A Framework for Exploring American
Culture(s)
Annotated Bibliography of Key Works
Sense of Place and Cultural Landscapes
Lewis, Peirce. "The Monument and the Bungalow: The Intellectual Legacy
of J.B. Jackson." In Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After
J.B. Jackson, edited by Chris Wilson and Paul
Groth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Just like the late J.B. Jackson, in whose honor this collection of pieces
was compiled, Peirce Lewis has been a central figure in cultural landscape
studies for several decades. His approaches to the field are widely
respected and widely viewed as entailing a foundational set of practices
that can be applied to most studies of cultural landscapes. In this piece
he describes his understanding of cultural landscape study as an act of
"reading" the landscape and bringing to life the voices of the ordinary
people who build and inhabit landscapes. He is especially emphatic in
emphasizing the importance of "the habit of attention" in exploring the
material characteristics of cultural landscapes, of "get[ting] down on
[one's] hands and kneeds to see what a piece of pavement is made
of." (94) Lewis organizes this piece as a sort of class tour of small-town
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, walking readers through his investigations of
both "the monument" (the Centre County War Memorial) and "the
bungalow" (the predominance of California bungalow-style housing in this
town), and his interpretations of both in terms of larger historical
conditions and movements. Lewis maintains a modernist approach to his
scholarship, but his work remains a significant contribution to cultural
landscape studies by virtue of its emphasis on the importance of material
and historical grounding.
Schein, Richard H. "The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework
for Interpreting an American Scene." Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 87, no. 4 (1997): 660-680.
This piece is a superb demonstration of the power of places, and of
"senses" of place, to both shape and reflect social relations and
identities. Author Richard Schein presents a theoretical and conceptual
framework for interpretation of a cultural landscape, also applying his
framework to a particular place. He embraces poststructuralist theories of
space, culture, and power, thus complicating more traditional, or
modernist, approaches to cultural landscape studies. He also makes use of
concepts of discourse and human agency, resting his framework on the
notion of landscape as "discourse materialized." (664) He sees agency as
expressed both materially and through human beings, contending that
landscapes "discipline" their human inhabitants, and that humans likewise
discipline the landscape. Schein makes use of Ashland Park, a residential
suburban neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, as a means of demonstrating
his framework. He explores several examples of discourse materialized,
emphasizing the reciprocal action and negotiation of both individual human
agents and the disciplinary discourses they have written into the
landscape. The greatest significance of Schein's piece lies in its merging
of the complexity of poststructuralism with an approach to landscape
interpretation that is still very grounded in human and material
realities.
Sense of Place and Ideology
Duncan, James S., and Nancy G. Duncan. The Landscapes of
Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
This book represents an attempt to connect the politicization of aesthetic
values with the social production of elites in American society. Authors
James and Nancy Duncan are particularly concerned with how ideas about
sense of place, identity, locality, and privilege are expressed through
the construction and control of landscapes. They center their study on the
exclusive New York City suburb of Bedford, New York, which is one of the
most exclusive suburbs in the country, inhabited by the likes of Glenn
Close and Ralph Lauren, in addition to other non-famous (but still
affluent) folk. The Duncans define three major discourses as being
prominently embedded in the Bedford landscape, and as being frequently
articulated by Bedford residents: the pastoral, the wilderness, and the
New England village. These discourses are central to the reproduction of
an aesthetics of beauty and landscape taste which is of great importance
to Bedford residents, so important, argue the Duncans, that it "become[s]
the basis for a sometimes virulent politics of exclusion." (57) They
detail the manner in which local zoning law, anti-development activism,
the giving of land to local nature preserves, and the aestheticization of
local history all help to "save Bedford," or rather, to keep the space of
Bedford "beautiful," rural, and elite. They conclude with a chapter on the
growing Latino population of a nearby town, emphasizing the irony of the
role these people serve as day laborers in Bedford, helping to maintain
elite Bedford even while being excluded (by lack of affordable
housing) from living there. This work contributes to scholarship on sense
of place and cultural landscape studies by emphasizing the extent to which
sense of place can be constructed and managed in order to create or
maintain certain social conditions.
Sense of Place and the Environment
Cronon, William. "Introduction: In Search of Nature." In Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.
In this introduction to a set of highly thoughtful meditations on the
meaning(s) of nature, culture, and environment, William Cronon argues that
nature and culture cannot be imagined as discrete, separable
concepts. Says Cronon, "What we mean when we use the word 'nature' says as
much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word." (25) He
is making, in other words, an argument for the importance of perspective,
context, particularity, locality. Cronon organizes this piece by
delineating several discourses that surround the word 'nature' and inform
various understandings of it: nature as naive reality, nature as moral
imperative, nature as cultural construction, nature as virtual reality,
nature as commodity, nature as demonic other, and nature as contested
terrain. The discourse that he finds most useful in promoting dialogue
about nature/culture is this last idea of nature as contested terrain. He
veiws this discourse as acknowledging that nature cannot be given a stable
or universal definition by human beings, and I view it additionally as
highlighting the complex interactions and overlappings between concepts of
human agency and construction, place, environment, and
community. "Nature," however we choose to define it, is indeed the place,
or "terrain" where we live, and that terrain is inevitably contested. How
we make sense and meaning of it is of central concern to scholars of
place.
Sense of Place and Consumerism
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
In this comprehensive historical study of the cultural, political, and
material landscape of postwar America, Lizabeth Cohen argues that
Americans in the postwar period created a "Consumers' Republic" founded on
the integration of "consumership" with citizenship. This Consumers'
Republic, she feels, led ultimately to a weakening of the concepts of
public and civic life which she sees as integral to American
democracy. Through an investigation of federal economic and consumer
policies, as well as more localized examinations of the cultural, legal,
and economic landscapes of particular cities and suburbs, she exposes the
unfulfilled promises and damaging consequences of the Consumers'
Republic. Her examinations of suburban residential areas and of shopping
malls are of particular interst in terms of place-based scholarship. Cohen
argues that suburbia represents an increasing commodification of housing
and privatization of home and community, and that postwar-era shopping
malls likewise represent an increasing commercialization and privatization
of public space. And both, she argues further, represent increased
divisions of space on the basis of racial and socioeconomic differences,
leading to significant disadvantages for those identified as "other" on
the basis of race, class, or gender. Cohen's work is particularly
significant in highlighting the importance within place-based studies of
civic and public "sense of place," and its relationship to concepts of
community and nation.
Geography and Beyond: Borders, Boundaries, and Identities
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
This work is one of great creativity and insight, and as the title
suggests, it crosses boundaries and enters into borderlands of all kinds,
from the geographical to the cultural to the disciplinary. Indeed,
Anzaldua's book is not explicitly about geographical space or landscape,
as are many of the works in this bibliography. Rather, this book is an
examination of both explicit and implicit space and landscapes, of
concrete geographical spaces as well as abstract mental and cultural
spaces. Anzaldua has a very pointed goal of demonstrating the struggle for
existence and for cultural empowerment among Chicanos, and in particular
Chicana women, living in the cultural borderlands at the edges of both the
United States and Mexico. She also has a more abstract goal, however, of
articulating a highly complex notion of borderlands, of many kinds, as
sites of marginality and ambiguity but also of powerful and transformative
creation and reconstitution. In this sense, she highlights the extent to
which all of us, though to highly varying degrees, exist within kinds of
borderlands and are both constrained and liberated by them (again to
varying degrees). Anzaldua also argues that dualistic splits of all kinds
(and she sees boundaries and borders as examples of these splits) are
destructive, and that they are the source of all disconnection,
marginalization, and violence. Her work is ultimately of significance for
scholarship on sense of place because it problematizes the concepts of
borders and boundaries, which are so central to the process of defining,
articulating, and maintaining place. Her work also demonstrates that place
and space are as much cultural and conceptual as they are geographical and
material.
The Death of the Local? Mobility, Hybridity, and Sense of
Place in a Globalized World
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Much scholarship on sense of place encourages us to conceive of place and
landscape as discrete, bounded, and static. These are useful ways of
conceiving of place and landscape, because boundaries do exist, as do
differences between places, and human beings have a tendency to
internalize and normalize those boundaries and differences as static (as
demonstrated by the Duncans in the case of Bedford), even when the places
and landscapes themselves tend not to remain static. Nevertheless, it is
useful as well to broaden the scope of place and landscape exploration,
and in this work Arjun Appadurai encourages us to do so at the global
level. In articulating a framework for the cultural exploration of
globalization, Appadurai argues for a perspective on culture and globality
that emphasizes flows--the movement entailed in mass migrations and mass
media, as well as in constantly shifting cultural and political
boundaries--as opposed to fixed notions of place and culture. He suggests
five "scapes" that can be used to characterize today's world of
movement: ethnoscapes (flows of people), technoscapes (flows of
technology), financescapes (flows of money), mediascapes (flows of
mediated information), and ideoscapes (flows of ideologies and
movements). He is also concerned with the nation-state as a source of
bounded and constructed identities, arguing ultimately for a postnational
world characterized by "the global production of locality." (188) This
work does not suggest any very practical ways of characterizing or
organizing the many deterritorialized flows in today's global world, but
it is of significance nonetheless because it opens the door to more
creative, more fluid, and more large-scale thinking on sense of place.