Space and Place as Cultural Phenomena, as Sites Where Meaning and Identities are Produced or Maintained - Essay Example

SPACE AND PLACE AS CULTURAL PHENOMENA, AS SITES WHERE MEANING AND IDENTITIES ARE PRODUCED OR MAINTAINED By Location Date Introduction Culture is both dynamic and hybrid. It is a product of the human hand and includes both intangible and tangible aspects of human creation. It changes according to time, place and even generations. The changing dynamics are due to mobility. Mobility can be described through three relational moments. Mobility as a brute fact describes mobility as the direct movement, which is physically observable. Mobility is also captured through representations or representational strategies like law, film or photography (Cresswell, 2006). Final mobility is experienced, practiced and embodied. People experience different cultures through the course of mobility (Cresswell, 2004). Cosmopolitan identity is formed through mobility and the reduction on the significance of one’s indigenous place. Place and mobility always go hand in hand, and they tend to be hybrid in the long run. In the 21st century, the identity is based on communication, mobility and allegiance to more than one place; the trend may be due to technological advances that have opened up the world and made every place accessible. According to Malpas, places are relational, in that that they can be related with each other. He further clarifies that places are bound yet still open, surface oriented, temporarily dynamic and relational (Cresswell, 2004). The term place can be described in three approaches; descriptive, socially constructive and phenomenological. The descriptive approach resembles the common sense idea of the world as a set of places, with each set having its own unique entity. The social constructionist approach is particularly concerned with specific instances of the general situation or place and involves explaining the individual unique characteristics of place. The phenomenological approach attempts to define the necessity of human existence as that which is necessary. Place is essential in understanding human character, and more specifically his culture. The cultural aspect of human life is geographically constructed. The society is unconceivable without place (Cresswell, 2004). Place is threatened by the hypermobility of a flexible transportation, mass communication and capital. Political struggles over a place give rise opportunities for resistance to capitalism forces. The Macmillan dictionary describes space as the time period in which something occurs (Space definition, 2015). Several connections between place, power and their meaning have been shown over years. Forever, the gay population managed to successfully mobilize symbols of gay identity through creative and progressive politics in 1984, as observed by Benjamin Forest. Forest argues that the gay community managed to have a broader identity, rather than just simple sexual acts by politically constituting place as a geographical emphasis on the gay identity. In this occasion, place played a role in normalizing and naturalizing the identity of the gay (Cresswell, 2004). Another clear example is the existence of Chinatown in almost every major city in the world. Its existence can be attributed to the fact that the belief by most people that a presence of such as street is a direct naturalized connection with the Chinese culture (Cresswell, 2004). The Chinese have a habit of constructing their own cultural identity in every place that they inhabit, which leads to the establishment of Chinese restaurants, pagodas and grocery stores. Kay Anderson traces the Chinese immigration to Vancouver, Canada to the discovery of gold and building of rail roads. Initially, the Chinese people were viewed as suspiciously and looked down under by the indigenous white population. The Chinese gathered at DuPont Street, which did not have the best habitable conditions. Eventually, Chinatown was built as a result of negotiation with the government to define the place (Cresswell, 2004). A recent event that points to use of events as sources of names is the protest in Egypt. The words “Tahrir” and “square” became associated with revolutions ideology or movements. This was after thousands of protesters gathered at the Tahrir square in Egypt to protest against the leadership of both President Mubarak and later Mohammed Morsi. The square, a movie on protestors, was released covering the same. The above scenario is also replicated at the Zuccotti Park in New York and the St. Paul’s Cathedral in London where several protests were held, just like the one in Egypt (Cresswell, 2004). At the southern tip of Manhattan, lies the Lower East Side. In the last century, the place had been long associated with several immigrant groups including the Jewish, Irish, Italian the Chinese. Due to the cramming of houses, the area had been associated with unlawfulness and the movie, The Gang of New York, was created using the place as its settings. The Tompkins Park that lies at its center has long been associated with demonstrations, political riots and protests by unions and police riots (Cresswell, 2004). John Agnew, a political geographer, outlines location, locale and as sense of place as the fundamental aspects in the definition of a location. The most basic definition a location is the geographical coordinates of the place. The sense means the emotional and subjective attachment one has to a place, usually evoked by movies and novels. Different fields try to explore some connection between places and identity. Usually, artists and urban planners try to paint an image of the sense of place in their work. Green activists and ecologist have bio-regions which they tend to explore the connections between them and their identity (Cresswell, 2004). Early American cultural geographers pointed out that the characteristic of human culture was largely due to their response to their environment Ellsworth Huntihdom and Ellen Semple say that the culture is mainly determined by the environment of that place. However, other scholars argue that it is the culture that determines the environment of the place, which is in contrast to Semple and Huntingdon’s idea. According to Wagner and Mikesell, the culture of a group of people have several themes – cultural area, cultural history, cultural landscape- which rests on a specific geographical basis and which tends to occur among people who occupy the same area (Wagner and Mikesell, 1962). Before linking a place and some identity, there are basic “conditions” that have to be met before the link is created. Malpas J.E, a philosopher, describes it as interdisciplinary. Malpas acknowledges that place research requires its own independent topography, which he refers to as the interdisciplinary engagement that a place benefits by having its own disciplines (Cresswell, 2004). In the past, Greek scholars such as Herodotus and Eratosthenes, anthropologists and philosophers explored the earth by travelling, exploring and defining different areas of the earth with respect to themselves. The differences in culture and how people interacted formed e various specified and varied places, according to the early travellers. Such reports were used to gazette places. Among the earliest cases of the philosophy of space was by Plato and Aristotle. They came up with the terms chora and topos. Chora is Greek for the study of regions while topos is the study of topology. According to Plato, for one to exist, it has to be differentiated from others (Cresswell, 2004). Plato introduced the term chora to refer to the limited extent of space that is receptacle. Aristotle equated the term to a large region or country. The philosopher, Albert Magnus, insisted that the particularity of a place had a huge rule in the type of life that developed at that place. He claimed that a place had a unique combination of environmental and cosmological influences. He further claimed that environmental factors like climate directly affected human character, a concept referred to as environmental determinism (Cresswell, 2004). Martin Heidegger related the relation between place and people, which he refers to as the relationship of dwelling. There is continuity between place and people through as whole manner of things. According to Heidegger, place invoked a sense of care and nearness. Buildings tend to raise a feeling of care and preservation which may usually results to authenticity in that world when carefully preserved. Places that are not carefully taken care of tend to lack authenticity. He thus proposed that to harmonize the different facets of existence, proper dwelling should be exercised (Cresswell, 2004). In an attempt to give the relation between place and practice, Edwin Soja came up with the concept of trialectics of spatiality. The base of his concept is the critique of binary concepts of spatiality that are at the center of geographical discourse. He then described the lived pace as third-space, which is an interruption of first-space and second-space. First-space described the measurable phoneme, like the spatial outcome of the social process. Second-space referred to some perceived space, which is imaginative (Cresswell, 2004). Kennecott is an imaginary town that is developed by author William Cronon in his book Nature metropolis. In the book, we see how the town grows from desertion and ruins to being a major port of business just because of its location. The growth is attributed to the need of the inhabitants to find food for themselves, hence the growth of trade (Cresswell, 2004). The name of the town, Kennecott, is even derived from the nature of the business itself- it was an area that linked the resources of one town to the need of the people thus the term connection. Even though the existence of the town is just theoretical, it serves as a good example on the role of place and space on the name/ identity of a place. Kennecott became successful due to its connection with her neighbors (Cresswell, 2004). Mobility, however, is a drawback to the identity of a place based on its cultures. Albertus insisted that everyone and everything belonged to a certain specific place and moving away weakens that identity. This can be attributed to the fact that the individuals may pick up some other characters and social activities. He gives the example of different rocks with their different point of origin; a rock moved away from its place of origin gets weaker compared to the rock at the original place (Cresswell, 2006). The rocks weaken since the environment that created them, which form the optimal conditions, lack and the rocks thus disintegrate slowly. Being out of place is both week and disruptive. Place is threatened by the hypermobility of a flexible transportation, mass communication and capital. Political struggles over a place give rise opportunities for resistance to capitalism forces (Cresswell, 2006). Among the causes of disruptively in the authenticity of a place is mobility. The mobility of many homeowners in the USA reduces the importance of homes and has a major direct role in the growing rise of placeless in the USA (Cresswell, 2006). By constantly moving from one place to another, the attachment to a certain culture is lost and the previous culture easily gets mixed up with other practices. For example, a businessman who is currently travelling across the world tends to lose their special character due to the exposure to other new cultures. Such factors to affect the authenticity of a culture, and may end up having no huge symbolic meaning (Cresswell, 2004). Conclusion Understanding the landscape is an important part in the celebrating the cultural diversity. The elements of space and time are essential in identifying or naming a certain aspect of an individual. The connection with any familiar landscapes constitutes part of the cultural and political identity, as people usually feel a sense of belonging to a place, country or region. The cultural arrangement is more than the physical sum of the locations. Rather, it is a composition of the minute details which when preserved and remain authentic, form an identity of the people or place. References Cresswell, T. (2004). Place an Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Cresswell, T. (2006). On the move. New York: Routledge. Space definition, m. (2015). space definition, meaning - what is space in the British English Dictionary & Thesaurus - Cambridge Dictionaries Online. [online] Dictionary.cambridge.org. Available at: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/space [Accessed 27 Apr. 2015]. Wagner P.L & Mikesell M. W,(1962), Readings in Cultural Geography, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Read More