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Senses of Place. Edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. (Santa Fe: New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 293, introduction by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, afterword by Clifford Geertz, illustrations, references, index. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper)
One of the extraordinary shifts in value in the United States, since the 1960s, is from space to place. Space once meant something glamorous. It evoked images of the open range, the beckoning horizon, the big sky-freedom and endless opportunity. Place, by contrast, suggested limitation-social and geographical constraint. Now, in both popular and academic esteem, the reverse is true. Space is somehow bad: it evokes the abstract and the impersonal, and is even tainted by the odor of imperialism. Place, by contrast, is embodied virtue-modest, in touch with one's roots, deeply personal, communal, and human. Space is elitist, for not everyone is equipped for the stress and strain (and exhilaration) of mobility and conquest. Place, by contrast, is populist, for we all-no matter how humble-can make a home for ourselves. Space is history-the old political history of change and movement; place is folklore. History now strives to be more static, more like ethnography and folklore. Folklore? It is the king of the heap!
Senses of Place is an example of the present love affair with place-the triumph of folklore. It is made up of papers delivered at a seminar held in 1993 in Santa Fe. All contributors are anthropologists, except Edward S. Casey, who is a philosopher. Folklore and its cousin ethnography eschew abstraction. Their story-telling and descriptive methods are eminently suited to their subjectplace. The most rewarding...