Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Space and Place

Anthropological studies of space and place recognize that landscape, space and the body represent important sites for cultural meaning, social and political memory, and public discourse. Space can be used to carry social meanings that are culturally and historically constructed as well as contested. The hermeneutic study of space explores space as a symbolic medium and recognizes that space and space language convey a culture’s meanings about the immediate world, while place carries with it sentiments of attachment and identity that emerge out of lived experience. At the macro or cosmic level, geo-symbolic systems can order the world cosmologically and serves as one element of political organization.

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History and the Uses of Space

The Spaces of Science and Sciences of Space: Geography and Astronomy in the Paris Academy of Sciences

Space and Place. A Morphological Perspective

Notes

Geertz’s claim neglected several important and insightful studies of place that had been carried out before this time; for example, Cunningham 1964; Kuper 1972; Bourdieu 1973; Ardener 1993; Johnson 1989; and Munn 1986.

See Rodman [Critchlow] (1992), Hirsch (1997), Low and Zúñiga (2003), and Kokot (2006) for overviews of the main themes of space and place studies that have been addressed from an anthropological perspective.

Tomforde (2006) documents the enduring significance of landscape and memory to identity for diaspora cultures.

Kämpf (2013) provides an overview of the positivist/interpretive debate with a discussion of the importance of meaning to both philosophy and anthropology.

Sherry Ortner discusses critiques of interpretive anthropology in relation to feminist, post-colonial, reflexive, and post-modern theories that have called for recognition of the situatedness of hermeneutic understandings. Armin Geertz (2003) advocates ethnohermeneutics as an approach to studying non Western cultures and religions that will draw on interpretations and theories developed by Indigenous scholars as a response to post-colonial critiques of hegemonic Western discourse.

See Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) for an anthropological exploration of space and culture in the context of popular television in Egypt, both in terms of new spaces created for consuming this media, and the depiction of national, memorialized, gendered and domestic spaces through its programs.

Insights from hermeneutic interpretation and whole/part relations that can be applied toward research design are detailed by Michael Agar (1980).

The critique of Habermas’s fusion of horizons as (p. 183, n. 85) as holding to a false consensualism is discussed in Euben (1999).

Werbner’s (1996 S55) semiotic analysis of the novel The Satanic Verses explores hermeneutic and conflicting understandings of this work, where interpretations “have piled upon interpretations in an infinite hermeneutical spiral.”

E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study The Nuer (1940), for example, records in detail the culture-environment relations among Nuer pastoralists in East Africa, providing a rich account of physical setting, resource base, and seasonal climatic changes. With this account, an appreciation can be gained of the acuity of Nuer decisions regarding resource availability and mobility as they manoeuvered herds of cattle across a vast territory of which they have an extensive and intimate knowledge; however, little was conveyed of the cultural meaning of this Nuer landscape.

For an interpretive analysis of the symbolism of space and time and religious ritual, see Gossen 1979.

Feuchtwang’s (2014) analysis of cosmology, space, ritual and traditional medicine in China illustrates the articulation of various meaning systems, including space.

Brettell (2015) and Spain (1992) provide ethnographic examples as well as reviews of theories of gender, space and power.

Robert Hertz (1973 [1909]) provides us with one of the earliest and most insightful reflections on spatial distinction and meaning.

In English, for example, moods are given the orientational expression up/down, and social classes are separated as lower/middle/upper.

Cunningham analyses in great detail spatial divisions as they relate to status and kin relationships as well. See also Waterson (2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Pauline McKenzie Aucoin

1. Pauline McKenzie Aucoin