The Power of Place (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)

Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations

John Agnew, James Duncan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317907398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Reflecting the revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously, this book focuses on geographical place in the practice of social science and history. There is significant interest among scholars from a range of disciplines in bringing together the geographical and sociological 'imaginations'. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of places, and classifying them and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to explanation of human activities in terms of abstract social processes. The chapters in this book focus on both the intellectual histories of the concept of place and on its empirical uses. They show that place is as important for understanding contemporary America as it is for 18th-century Sri Lanka. They also show how the concept can provide insight into 'old' problems such as the nature of social life in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The editors are leading exponents of the view of place as a concept that can 'mediate' the geographical and sociological imaginations.

1

Introduction

JOHN A. AGNEW & JAMES S. DUNCAN

This book is an attempt to make the case for the intellectual importance of geographical place in the practice of social science and history. It reflects the recent revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously. Foucault (1980, p. 149) captures what is most at stake when he writes:

Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic….The use of spatial terms seems to have the air of anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant that one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one “denied history”…. They didn't understand that [these spatial terms]…meant the throwing into relief of processes – historical ones, needless to say – of power.

Place is a difficult word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives over three and one-half pages to it. It can mean “a portion of space in which people dwell together”, but it can also mean “rank” in a list (“in the first place”), temporal ordering (“took place”), or “position” in a social order (“knowing your place”). In modern social science the geographical meaning has been largely eclipsed by the others. In particular, the social categories of state censuses have pre-empted geographical places as the major operational units of social theory; classes and status groups have displaced places and geographical settings. In sum, sociology has transcended human geography.

The last few years have seen a surge of interest in the possibility and importance of bringing together what can be called the geographical and sociological “imaginations”. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of and classifying places and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to the explanation of human behavior and activities in terms of social process abstractly and, often, nationally construed. Since the early part of this century these imaginations have been separated by institutionalized methodological and conceptual differences and competing objectives. Recent work in social theory, however, represents a movement towards a meeting, if not a marriage, between these imaginations (see e.g., Giddens 1979, 1981, Foucault 1980).

To date, these developments in social theory have not really filtered down into the practice of history, social science, or geography. One purpose of this book is to suggest some ways in which the two imaginations can be simultaneously engaged by means of a focus on the concept of place. Another is to explore why and how the concept of place has been marginalized within the discourses of modern social science and history.

Approaches to defining a geographical concept of place have tended to stress one or another of three elements rather than their complementarity. Firstly, economists and economic geographers have emphasized location, or space sui generis, the spatial distribution of social and economic activities resulting from between-place factor cost and market price differentials. Secondly, microsociologists and humanistic geographers have concerned themselves with locale, the settings for everyday routine social interaction provided in a place. Thirdly, anthropologists and cultural geographers have shown interest in the sense of place or identification with a place engendered by living in it. Rarely have the three aspects been seen as complementary dimensions of place. Rather they have been viewed as mutually incompatible or competing definitions of place. But they are related. If locale is the most central element of place sociologically, it must be grounded geographically. Local social worlds (locale) cannot be completely understood apart from the macro-order of location and the territorial identity of sense of place (see Agnew 1987).

The fragmentation of the meaning of place has occurred in a particular historical-intellectual setting. The modernization theories that have dominated recent social science and history have focused heavily on the national scale. This has led to a neglect of scales other than the national in the analysis of social process. Concepts of place have survived but only in various marginalized and subordinate discourses that have selected the element most appropriate to their needs (Sack 1980).

The recent revival of interest in place does not involve rescuing, restating, or elaborating the various partial perspectives that have prevailed previously. Although the ways in which the elements of place are brought together will differ, as is apparent from the essays in this volume, the focus now is upon engaging them all rather than championing one over the others.

A critical question concerns: why now? Why is it that there is only now an energetic attempt to bring together the geographical and sociological imaginations by means of a focus on a multi-dimensional concept of place? A complete answer to this is probably impossible. We can only suggest some parts of an explanation here. One part of an explanation lies in the crisis that has afflicted national-oriented history and social science over the past 20 years. Modernization theories have come in for heavy criticism from a number of directions. Their functionalism, positivism, and evolutionism have been decried on both broadly philosophical and more specific empirical grounds. However, alternatives have been hard to come by. In a real sense there has not been a complete alternative to, only a critique of, the prevailing sociological imagination.

But this intellectual crisis is only part of a wider political and social crisis: the crisis of the modern territorial state and its legitimating myths. This has a number of sources. One is the fact that the power of the state has been fatally compromised by the emergence of a global economy that is no longer under the control of individual governments, either singly or collectively. Another is that the power of the state itself was never created only by coercion from the top down. Rather, the power of the state rested on thousands of “bits” of minute or local consensus. Increasingly, national consensus has been challenged by pressure groups (trade unions, political terrorists, etc.) which have revealed through their actions the fragility of state power and its basis in the local rules of social cohabitation.

Parenthetically, it is well worth noting that nation-building itself rested upon the privileging of certain places as capitals, as seats of festivals, or what have been called “les lieux de memoire” (places of memory). Even nationalization, therefore, epistemologically so antithetical to place (it is no coincidence that “lieux” means “pot à pisser” as well as “places” in French) gave to place an ontological variety of new meanings (Nora 1984).

Similarly paradoxical, the growth of mass communications has also reduced the social basis to state power. The emergence of mass communications would seem to lead inexorably to mass culture. However, the effect has often been the opposite. The reception of messages depends on interpretation, and interpretation depends on the nature of the sociological situations in which different frames of reference operate. The same stimulus need not generate the same responses. One way of putting this in a political context is as follows:

to the extent that the salient political cleavages in a society follow, rather than cut across geographical divisions, a national political environment and national media focusing attention on the same issues everywhere may serve to accomplish the opposite of nationalization, that is to stimulate dissimilar behavior on the part of geographical units (Claggett et al. 1984, p. 90).

One particularly important feature of the present period that correlates with the crisis of the state and its social science is the collapse of what can be called the Pax Americana. The self-confidence of the modernization theories rested initially and finally upon the perceived achievements of modern America. Insecurity is the new key word, in America and elsewhere. Umberto Eco (1986, p. 79) finds in present-day anxieties a parallel with the Middle Ages. A “clan spirit” has returned:

But insecurity is not only “historical” it is psychological, it is one with the man-landscape/man-society relationship. In the Middle Ages a wanderer in the woods at night saw them peopled with maleficent presences; one did not lightly venture beyond the town; men went armed. This condition is close to that of the white middle-class inhabitant of New York, who doesn't set foot in Central Park after five in the afternoon or who makes sure not to get off the subway in Harlem by mistake, nor does he take the subway alone after midnight (or even before, in the case of women).

Taken together the varied sources of a “denationalization” of history and social science provide an opening for consideration of a multidimensional concept of place as a means of integrating the sociological and geographical imaginations. In the face of the dissolution of the “national” it is no longer possible for the sociological imagination to ignore the geographical. Or as Eco put it, with an appropriate double-entendre, “let's give back to the spatial and the visual the place they deserve in the history of political and social relations” (1986, p. 215).

The chapters in this collection work around and upon the two major themes identified earlier: the intellectual history of concepts of place and the interpellation of power and place. They do so in different ways. Yet these themes must not be seen, as some detractors of the concept of place might argue, as fundamentally different; the first, abstract, general, sociological, and placeless; the second concrete, specific, geographical, and place-laden. For the intellectual histories, as much as the studies of specific places, are place-laden. They are not abstract intellectual histories, but histories of how, for example, American social scientists have thought about places, how French geographers and historians have thought about places, or how European and American historians have thought about Renaissance Italian cities. The organization of the chapters of this book is broadly geographical. The first four studies deal with the power of place (intellectually and empirically) in North America, the second three with Europe, the next two with Latin America, and the final two with Asia. This organization emphasizes the point that the study of place remains relevant everywhere around the globe. It is not simply a concept which pertains in the “Third World” or in Europe and America in the distant past. But we are not engaged in the contemplation of the idiographic. It would be mistaken to read the book this way. We are concerned with the role of place in social organization and social thought, not as an end in itself.

Although all of the authors are keen to stress the salience of place, they approach it in different ways. Some of the authors (Agnew, Entrikin, Berdoulay) provide us with broad overviews of how the social sciences in particular socio-political contexts have treated not only the concept of place but also actual empirical places. Other authors (Muir & Weissman, Richardson) discuss the disciplinary history of the treatment of place while focusing upon one or two empirical case studies. Still others (Ley, Hugill, Cosgrove, Robinson, the Samuels, Duncan) devote their attention to empirical case studies of the relationship between power and place. We feel that these different approaches are equally valid ways of engaging the power of place and understanding its meaning and significance.

The first section of the book deals with place in North America. Of the four chapters in this section, the first two focus upon intellectual history while the latter two provide case studies of the explanatory power of place. In the first chapter political geographer John Agnew examines the devaluation of place in social science. This devaluation is traced in conventional social science to the association of place with “community”. With the presumed eclipse of community, place has been eclipsed too. In Marxist social science there has been a tendency to absolutize the power of commodification. The universalization of capitalism thus undermines the social significance of place. However, rather than disappearing in the face of the eclipse of community or the logic of liberal capitalism the nature of place has changed. Indeed, commodification and resistance to it generate new pressures for place. Capitalism, therefore, while transforming society, has created a new structuring role for place.

J. Nicholas Entrikin, historian of geographic thought and urban geographer, concerns himself with the bases for judgment about the significance of place and regional studies and how these have changed as beliefs about modernity and rationality have changed. The question of significance, which has a dual sense of both importance and meaning, is divided into three distinct but related parts: empirical-theoretical significance, normative significance, and scientific significance. The first addresses the question of the areal variation of economy, society, and culture; the second addresses the cultural value associated with this areal variation; and the third more specifically addresses the “scientific” status of place and regional studies. All these bases for judgment about significance are related to ideas about modernity in American culture and social thought.

Cultural geographer David Ley traces the relations of space and place to the discourse of modernity through an examination of the “struggle” over the definition and meaning of the built environment. The suppression of local context and culture and the imposition of uniformity as a means to universality are seen as common to both modernist architecture and modernist geography. The post-modern struggle for place is viewed as part of a wider struggle over the definition of culture and attempts to “rehumanize” urban space.

Cultural geographer Peter Hugill examines home and class among an American landed elite in the 19th century. An American elite in upstate New York before the Civil War was a true landed elite on the English model with domestic roots deep in country life and a commitment to the local and the “natural”. It was based in class differentiation but one sensitive to its links with other groups and the overall ecology of place. After the Civil War these roots were torn up and replaced by the pursuit of pleasure in picturesque artifacts and the importation of behaviors conceived elsewhere with little concordance to the local. It marked the triumph of social differentiation at the price of lost sensitivity to class differences and ecological complexity. Sturdy farmers were transformed into peasants and robber barons were elevated to nobility. Place was transformed in train.

The next three chapters deal with the power of place in Europe. Social historians Edward Muir & Ronald Weissman explore the social and symbolic places of Renaissance Venice and Florence. They pose the question: what sense have historians made of urban geography in the Italian Renaissance? Their answer is that whereas an older historiography shared many of the assumptions of modernization theories, the recent historiography of Renaissance Venice and Florence has given special emphasis to the sociology of space and geographically-based social ties. A sensitivity to place, they argue, offers historians a rich context for the analysis of Renaissance society, and one which challenges many common assumptions about the Renaissance social order.

The historical geographer Denis Cosgrove demonstrates just such a sensitivity to place in his study of power and place in the Venetian territories. Cosgrove uses the landscape frescoes of the Villa Godi at Lonedo di Lugo to construct an account of power and place in the 16th-century Venetian landscape. He shows how the flux and uncertainty of everyday life are transformed in the frescoes into an immutable image of harmony. The frescoes, the villa, and the landscape in which it was set are equal participants in the cultural process of creating human meaning and articulating power within the social and environmental context of the Venetian terra firma in the mid-16th century.

In the final chapter of this section cultural geographer Vincent Berdoulay a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The devaluation of place in social science
• 3 Place, region, and modernity
• 4 Modernism, post-modernism and the struggle for place
• 5 Home and class among an American landed elite
• 6 Social and symbolic places in Renaissance Venice and Florence
• 7 Power and place in the Venetian territories
• 8 Place, meaning, and discourse in French language geography
• 9 Place and culture: two disciplines, two concepts, two images of Christ, and a single goal
• 10 The language and significance of place in Latin America
• 11 The power of place in Kandy, Sri Lanka: 1780–1980
• 12 Beijing and the power of place in modern China
• Index