Epistemologies of Place-Making in a Time of Globalization

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Epistemologies of Place-Making in a Time of Globalization Putting knowledge in its place: epistemologies of place-making in a time of globalization Devon G. Peña, Ph.D. Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Anthropology University of Washington Plenary Address prepared for the Place Matters Conference, Diversity Research Institute, University of Washington. Urban Horticulture Center, October 27, 2006. Current draft prepared October 26-27, 2006. Putting knowledge in its place: epistemologies of place-making in a time of globalization Devon G. Peña, Ph.D. Abstract. The study of place, and especially sense of place, has long been limited by the vagaries and niceties of anecdotal evidence, autobiographical narratives, or ethno-poetics. Anthropologists and other social scientists only recently developed sets of more rigorous methods for the interdisciplinary scientific study of place. This paper examines a variety of anthropological approaches to the study of place and place-making that engage the perspectives of local cultures and local knowledge. Of particular significance to such projects are contributions from environmental anthropology and ethnoecology. This paper examines recent approaches to the ethnoecological study of place-based knowledge and draws from the author’s own experiences in the historic acequia communities of the Upper Rio Grande bioregion and among Mesoamerican farmers in urban Los Angeles. The author argues that the study and protection of place and place-making are particularly urgent given the challenges of globalization and de-territorialization. The advocates of de-territorialization posit the “end of the local” and the rise of globalized spaces and places. This address presents a critique of these approaches and presents an alter/native view based on collaborative and participative studies of “transnational place-making” and the persistence of place-based communities. The paper concludes with some reflections on the future of place in the context of globalization and the modest recommendation that we re-value the subversive epistemologies of place-based communities as privileged holders and transmitters of the knowledge, belief, and practices required for a just and sustainable society. Keywords. ethnoecology, anthropology of place, place-based culture, globalization, de- territorialization and re-inhabitation INTRODUCTION Theorizing place is as old as the human imagination and the typical Eurocentric narrative usually starts with a celebration of the Greek concept of genus loci and the idea that space becomes place through the interplay of shapes, meanings, and power. Aristotle’s notion of the “power of place” was not about politics and instead signified the intense emotions associated with deeply-held local knowledge and place-bound cultural memory. The narrative then moves into contemporary discourses that include stops with Yi-Fu Tuan (1990) and his principle of topophilia or “love of place,” and E. V. Walter (1988), the sociologist who coined the term “topistics” to refer to the social scientific study of place-making. In many ways not much has changed in our approaches to the study of place and postmodern critics might be on to something. Indeed, much of the social scientific 2 discourse on place remains fixated on narratives that follow some variation of the old Greek story of shape, meaning, and power: Recently, some very capable folklorists studying the New Jersey Pinelands, sounding very Greek, announced that: “Sense of place is the totality of perceptions and knowledge of a place gained by residents through their long experience in it, and intensified by their feelings for it.” (Moonsammy, Cohen, and Williams 1987: 1) Left unsaid in the conventional narrative are stories recounting what happens to a people’s sense of place when they cannot claim a “long experience” in place. What happens to diaspora peoples? Immigrants? Refugees? Those displaced by mountain-top removal, deforestation, freeway construction, or enclosure? Does sense of place survive the globalized diasporas of displaced peoples, cultural hybrids, and transnational commodity chains? What happens to sense of place in the aftermath of the social disaster that followed in the wake of Katrina and left 75,000 displaced residents unable to go home? Indeed, what happens to sense of place when most Americans by one estimate (www.remotecontrolmail.com) move elsewhere an average of 20 to 30 times over the course of a single life span? I believe I can speak to this since I have lived in seven different places in my own life time. What happens? Sometimes we simply bring place or, at the least, inherited place-making proclivities with us. Anthropologists have long held a fascination for place even if much of the past century was spent writing “distanced and normalizing” narratives organized under the rubric of temporal shifts and historical trajectories. Space, Tom Thornton (2006) and others rightly claim, was subordinated to time in anthropological narratives and place was reduced to a mere background setting, the inert stage, for the real drama of time-bound narratives. Anthropologists seem to have forgotten how Durkheim proposed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that regions developed their own unique spatial signatures which represent the infinite possibilities for sensuous, embodied, activity to render landscapes in differentiated form (1915:23). By the end of the Twentieth Century, anthropologists had moved toward a litany of postmodern critiques proclaiming the end of history, 3 the end of master narratives and universal truths, and the end of the subject and her transcendent agency. Place and sense of place were also dismissed as quaint relics of the European Enlightenment, an odd assertion given the silencing of space and the privileging of time as the dominant social scientific trope (or frame) in fashion since the 17th Century and the birth of global maps and navigation, ship-building, exploration, expansion, and eventually colonial conquest and the incessant exploitation of natives and their lands.1 Jameson (1984) was among the first of the skeptical postmodernists to propose that the “radical indeterminancy” of space means that the “individual human body” can no longer “map its position in a mappable external world.” This means the “subject” has no place to locate herself other than that wrought of power and political struggle (see Rosenau 1992:68-9). One could add, in the fashion of a critique of rationality and the ideology of disconnection (Taylor 2006), that the skeptical postmodernists mistakenly repudiate the very possibility of inter-subjective community because they have introduced as a static condition the incommensurability of language games, themselves subject to endlessly-shifting positions of deconstruction. An alter/native but no less critical attitude toward the allegedly archaic obsession of restoring the place of place in epistemology is perhaps most poignantly captured by James Clifford’s de Certeauian notion that “space is never ontologically given” (1997:54). In this sense, place is always space in a process of becoming humanized or “cultured.” The new anthropology has produced eloquent ethnographies of displacement, diaspora movements, and travelogues of ever- shifting identities in globalized border lands. These approaches constitute what can be characterized as the “anthropology of placelessness” and pivot around the concept of the globalization of cultures 1 The ‘temporalist framing’ of intellectual work is all the more ironic given Foucault’s observation that the birth of the prison, and the tyranny over space envisioned by the total institution, indicates that the rise of modern government is very much concerned with spatializing command and control imperatives. 4 that produces endlessly-shifting hybrid ethnoscapes (cf. Appadurai 1996): This begets the McDonaldization of Bangalore and the Pujabization of the Los Angeles basin. We hear an increasing number of anthropologists proclaim not just the end of history but the end of the local in a globalized world. We are also said to have entered a new phase of global organization driven by the corporate “de-territorialization” of space. This begets the end of the local in a world ruled by the logic of an ever-expanding “generalized elsewhere” (Meyrowitz 1985). Localities everywhere are reinscribed with the same Starbucks, McDonalds, and Wal-Marts, the avatars of capital that presumably control the planetary landscape so it looks more and more like every other next-door strip mall-freeway- failed surburbia. We live in a world presumably ruled by the neoliberal imposition of the commodity- form as the defining property of all space and of all objects in that enclosed panoptical space. It is my contention today that too much of the work by the theorists of de-territorialization is focused on the displacing, homogenizing, and hybridizing effects of globalization. Too much of the theory of de-territorialization is actually constructed on a weak edifice of transient anecdotal evidence, autobiographical narratives, and literary ethno-poetics. Postmodern anthropological narratives of place have been cumbersomely subjected to exercises in reflexivity or critical “navel gazing.” These narrative strategies may say more about the anthropologist as a global traveler with a disruptive agenda than about the nuanced multiplex and materially-grounded processes of local- global dynamics in the interrelations of space and place. I am interested in the interweaving of the experiences of displacement and re-emplacement
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