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PROLOGUE
The last several years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in surfaces, in my own discipline of social anthropology to be sure, but also in human geography, architecture and design, and in studies of literary, visual, and material culture.1 What has unlocked this interest is also a certain unlocking of both the body and the earth-an ontological inversion, or a turning inside out-that has undone the modernist assumption that the true essence of things and persons is to be found deep inside them, in an inner core that can be reached only by breaking open the external appearance behind which it hides. It is this assumption that so often leads us to equate the surface with what is "superficial."2 It is why we distrust surfaces and the meanings they convey: why we think we have to break through them or peel them aside, if ever we are to arrive at real significance. Psychologists aim to penetrate behind the machinations of the body to discover the inner sanctum of mind; archaeologists dig deep into the earth in the hope of finding treasure-filled chambers; literary scholars plumb the depths of their texts to recover historically repressed meanings. But what if there is nothing underneath? What if surfaces are the real sites for the generation of meaning? Then by mining them, excavating them, or clearing them away, we may in fact be destroying precisely what we seek to find, and that lies under our very noses, convinced as we are that the truth can never be on the surface but somewhere deeper down.
In this essay I am concerned with two kinds of surface with which we deal at every moment of our everyday lives. They are the page and the ground. We encounter the page most often as the leaf of a book, or perhaps of an unbound manuscript or document, which is either blank or more or less covered in writing. We encounter the ground as a surface of support for our activities, a terrain either cleared for cultivation or building or inscribed with the traces of our passing such as footprints, paths, and tracks. My purpose is to compare the two. Is a blank page like cleared ground? Is there an analogy, even...