My advisor in graduate school once said that cultural geographers generally come from one of two kinds of upbringing, either a peripatetic childhood with many different "homes" over the years, or a childhood rooted in a particular place, often a rural area undergoing some sort of urban or industrial change. I am of the former type, having lived in Washington, DC, Tennessee, Georgia, (far upstate) New York, Illinois, and Montana during childhood and adolescence. But in both cases, the experience of place is especially salient. As for me, I was a perennial outsider trying to understand the locale and its inhabitants; I was the "new kid" from another place. In childhood my family vacationed at my grandfather's rustic cabin in western Tennesse--I became lost in the deep southern woods -- and later we moved to a rather remote section of land in the forest-primeval north of the Adirondaks where I spent hours clambering over deadfall, trapsing around muskeg, exploring the hidden places. And then the rural West captured my attention. What was it like to live in such remote locales? What was life like in far northern Canada, or eastern Montana, or northern Idaho? I vividly remember the class in which my advisor instructed us that these questions were part of cultural geography -- so I was hooked, and became a cultural geographer.
I started the process of becoming a professional geographer as an Anthropology/English double-major in college, and over time the degrees, research, and (thankfully) jobs required more relocation: from Illinois to Lawrence, Kansas, then a year and several summers living in an Aboriginal community in northern British Columbia, then back (briefly) to Illinois where my first son was born, a move to my first job at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, and finally now, for the past six years, in Columbia, Missouri where I teach in the University's Department of Geography. Having moved so much, and traveling besides--and perhaps getting older plays a factor, too--I have increasingly felt the need to settle somewhere, get to know the region and develop ties in the landscape, and in so doing become part of the place. And besides, what a great way to teach a class: have the students learn Geography by doing it, tracking down and interpreting the myriad cultural landscapes in Boone County and beyond.
These thoughts and nascent motivations were percolating when I met Bob in a Departmental seminar. I learned about his ideas for Habitation, The Next 100 Years, and immediately intellectual and other connections began forming. During the course of my academic career, I have been especially interested in the ethical possibilities intrinsic to a strong (yet tolerant, or "open") sense of place. Isn't place the context for all our experiences, encounters, and knowledge? If so, could this existential perspective on place reveal some groundlines for ethical relationships and action? A number of philosophers (Emmanuel Levinas, Jeff Malpas, Ed Casey) and bioregionalists have answered in the affirmative to this question. So if we could use a digital medium to stimulate interest in (and care for) the local environment, perhaps it would contribute to more ethical outcomes here, in this place. Bob was probably thinking along these lines when he designed the project for a minimum of 100 years, which I believe was intended to diffuse the power structure inherent to the division between designers/managers and others (contributers, actual and prospective; community members). The New Media make such open access and participatory exploration possible within a networked multiplicity of actors all contributing to common purposes and communication, but without power concentrated an overarching director/manager, a structural center, or a logical rubric. In this sense, cultivating a collective sense of place could become a kind of anarchist bioregional politics...
By way of conclusion - my approach to this project comes first out of a childhood of hiking the woods and vacationing in rustic cabins; my ethnographic research with Aboriginal peoples in North America (and the related literature; especially powerful for me were Hugh Body's Maps and Dreams and Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits In Places); later, from my study of existential phenomenology (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Sartre); and most recently, my reading of the literature on place-based education and critical pedagogy (Freire, Cajete, Linda Tuhawaii Smith, Sobel, Orr, Louv).
Interesting, that my growing up is quite the opposite of Soren's mobility. I was rooted/buried in the Bootheel (Southeast Missouri) for 18 years, did 4 years in Rolla, and then the rest here in Boone County, though at 6 or so different residences. While it would have better career-wise for me to be mobile, I need a sense of place, deep intense connection with place, to feel at all whole.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the Bootheel became claustrophobic in its own way--so limited in education, jobs, culture--with all the small town meanness thrown in with the familiarity.
Columbia, to me, opens out into a wider world (which we can never convince St. Louis people of). Yet, I wonder if fast-growing Columbia with its transient core of some 30,000 plus students, allows most people to develop a sense of place. Or maybe I should ask, what sense of place can develop here? What place knowledge do residents absorb? What communities bind us here? Or, what clusters of communities, many of which are now not-spatial?
bob