Title: Critical and Cultural Approaches to Space: An Introduction (Ethnography of Cultural Space)
Abstract: ... when we write about daily life now, we should think very carefully about whose daily life we are talking about. When we write about space, we should likewise think about whose we mean (Merrifield 2000: 181). Throughout opening pages of his 1991 study of Calvert, Newfoundland, Gerald Pocius elaborates a distinctive argument about material culture and space. Although A Place Belong is based on several decades of research on Newfoundland material culture, Pocius makes it clear that he does not share in a tendency of material culture research isolate particular classes of and artifacts from spatial and activities that give them meaning. In order tackle of cultural space (1991: 11), he had to start with and discover relations that individual fostered within that space (8). What does such an ethnography of cultural achieve? Pocius is unequivocal: reversing analytic relation between material culture and offers an investigative model for production of vernacular landscape and spatial organization of consumption. The result gives reader a glimpse into an ongoing dialogue between tradition and modernity. Calvert is not portrayed as a traditional community moving down inevitable road modernity, nor does Pocius merely reveal quaint features of a geographic marginality. Pocius demonstrates how people appropriate present in ongoing articulation of their sense of spatial order. He also reveals consequences of losing a sense of and its demands. As ties of place generally weaken in any region, people increasingly create objectified signs of their culture, promoting item-oriented activities under rubrics like folklore and heritage (Pocius 1991: 23). This research model lets him move towards what some might have identified a decade ago as a postmodern in representation. In same year that A Place Belong was published, Rob Shields published Places on Margin, a linked collection of his essays that brought critical research traditions bear on a variety of spatial case studies. Looking at topographic locations like Canadian north or Brighton beach, Shields explores how such spaces acquire significations and circulate as representations. The Other of marginal and of low cultures is despised and reviled in official discourse of dominant culture and central power while at same time being constitutive of imaginary and emotional repertoires of that dominant culture (Shields 1991: 5). Shields uses phrase social spatialization describe this discursive complex of spatial representations. Unlike disciplinary emphasis that Pocius places on material culture and vernacular landscape, Shields sees his approach as contributing human geography, environmental psychology, and semiotics (11), as he seeks antecedents from sociology and anthropology for dealing with labeling of space. Yet he too feels that prior research has contributed being analyzed as context-less assemblages of objects (26). Shields does not move towards an ethnography of cultural space. Drawing on Lefebvre, he turns instead towards the culturally mediated reception of representations of environments, places, or regions which are `afloat in society' as `ideas in currency' (14). Why compare these books by way of introducing this collection of essays? I have stretched out comparison for several reasons. First and foremost, Pocius and Shields suggest something of range of spatial research encompassed by individual projects in this issue. Their concurrent publication a decade ago is indicative of creative ferment happening in a variety of fields reengaging concept of space. They demonstrate broad, interdisciplinary currency that cultural research on had and continues have. …
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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