Progress in Human Geography

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Place and region

J. Nicholas Entrikin
Prog Hum Geogr 1994 18: 227
DOI: 10.1177/030913259401800209

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 227

Place and region

J. Nicholas Entrikin
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024,
USA

The concepts of place and region have gained an intellectual currency that few in
geography would have anticipated a decade ago (e.g., Agnew and Duncan, 1989; Entrikin,
1991a; 1991b; Johnston, 1991; Paasi, 1991; Daniels, 1992; Massey, 1993; Sack, 1992).
Remarkably, this interest is not limited to geographers. For example, the sociologist Roger
Friedland’s (1992) discussion of ’the geographical moment’ is reinforced by arguments
that place ’is a problem in contemporary anthropological theory’, and that it is a ’useful
concept in social theory’ (Zukin, 1991: 12; Rodman, 1992: 640). It is especially note-
worthy that this interest is often expressed with reference to theoretical debate in the social
sciences.
With this renewed interest has come a diversity of meanings and emphases, but there are
some shared themes as well. Much is said in the contemporary literature about the

meaning of place from a cultural perspective and about the construction of place by social
forces (e.g., Anderson and Gale, 1992; Vaness, 1992; 1993). This recent work is
differentiated from the chorological tradition in geography by the shift away from
understanding places in themselves, and towards an appreciation of place as a social and a
cultural category. Thus, the ideas of both individual and collective subjects and of self play
important roles in these discussions (Sack, 1992; Thrift, 1992; see also Pile, 1993). Place
in this sense is viewed as significant in studies of race, ethnicity, gender and class, as well as
in those concerning modernity and postmodemity (Anderson and Gale, 1992; Pred and
Watts, 1992; Watts, 1992; McDowell, 1993).
In his comprehensive and well-balanced review of place studies, Stephen Daniels
(1992: 311) identifies a shift from a relatively narrow perspective on place to a ’broader,
interdisciplinary consideration of themes’. To those critics who see place as a less than
substantial theme, Daniels states that ’To emphasize place awareness or consciousness is
not to ascend into some ethereal realm, rather it is to reclaim geography’s imaginative
ground’ (Daniels, 1992: 311). Fundamental to Daniels’ claim is that place has a central
role in geographical research and pedagogy (see also Herbert, 1991; Burgess and Jackson,
1992).
As one would expect in these contentious times, not all geographers agree with this
assessment. For a sceptic such as David Harvey (1990), current interest in place studies
reflects one of the latest ideologies of modem capitalism:

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The claim that the place of geography in academia is to be secured by attaching the discipline to a core concept of
place (even understood as a unique configuration of elements) has strengthened in a phase of capitalist development
when the particular qualities of place have become of much greater concern to multinational capital and when there
has simultaneously been a renewed interest in the politics and image of place as an arena of supposed (even
fictional) stability under conditions of powerful time-space compression. The social search for identity and roots in
place has reentered geography as a leitmotif and is in turn increasingly used to provide the discipline with a more
powerful (and equally fictitious) sense of identity in a rapidly changing world (Harvey, 1990: 431).
As either fonts or figments of the geographical imagination, place and to a lesser extent
region are now more a part the lingua franca of social scientists than at any time in the
of
recent past.

I Place and social forces

.
Social construction (or production) arguments have been an inevitable consequence of the
recent encounter between human geography and social theory. These have taken many
forms, from the oft-repeated theme of the destruction of place by capitalism, to more
localistic studies that seek to consider the cultural mediation of economic and social forces.
This latter view is expressed clearly by Beynon and Hudson (1993: 182):
... for people with a local identity their town or village is not just (or, for many, even) a space in which to work for a
wage. It is a place where they have networks of friends, relatives and acquaintances, where they have learned about
life and acquired a cultural frame of reference through which to interpret the social world around them; their place
is where they are socialized as human beings rather than just reproduced as bearers of the commodity labour power.
As a result, people have often become profoundly attached to particular places, which come to have socially
endowed and shared meanings that touch on all aspects of their lives, helping shape who they are by virtue of where
they are.

Despite persuasive arguments concerning the importance of the local as a source of

meaning by geographers such as Massey (1993), locality studies have yet to pay significant
attention to the cultural or to actors as moral agents.
The issue of place and agency has been prominent in two important theoretical works.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) wishes to show how the late modem experience
of place effects our sense of agency and self. Giddens describes the process as ’disembed-
ding’, or the separation of social life from its local context and its relocation within a world
of institutions based on abstract systems. Our sense of spatial scale as experienced through
institutions such as the mass media or international markets indicates that events
seemingly far removed may often have immediate consequences (Meyrowitz and Maguire,
1993). Modem media creates a ’collage’ effect of juxtaposing events that may be
locationally quite separate, and leads to the ’intrusion of distant events into everyday
consciousness’ (Giddens, 1991: 26-27; see also Meyrowitz, 1985; Meyrowitz and
Maguire, 1993; Zelizer, 1993). The modem self-identity is constructed in relation to both
local and distant events (Giddens, 1990; Kirby, 1990).
The geographer Robert Sack (1992) looks at the construction of the self and place
through advertising and consumption. Unlike Giddens, however, Sack wishes to give a
greater role to the geographic beyond being the place where social forces intersect. Sack’s
geographical premise is
... that space and place are fundamental means through which we make sense of the world and through which we
act. I use this premise to show that places created by and for mass consumption are fundamental to our making
sense of the modem world (and of one of its facets, the postmodern) and to our power as agents in that world (Sack,
1992: 1).

For Sack, the realm of social relations represents one set of forces which, together with

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 229

nature and meaning, constitute the theoretical domain of modem social science. He
recognizes that all theories of society from sociobiology to culture theory fit within this
domain and represent attempts to give priority to one of these realms. The geographer’s
concepts of space and place may be addressed in relation to any one of these theoretical
realms, but cannot be contained within any one. In addition to these forces, Sack
emphasizes the perspectival quality of place and recognizes how place and space vary as
one moves between relatively objective and relatively subjective points of view.
Sack’s argument, similar to those found in his previous books on space and territory
(1980; 1986), is distinguished by the attempt to develop a theoretical perspective that
captures the richness and breadth of geographic concepts without neglecting their
connection to the larger realm of social thought. He offers an increasingly rare example of
geographic theorizing. While many other geographers concentrate on working out the
geographical consequences of social theories, Sack conducts a theoretical exploration that
has geography as its starting point.

IIl Place and identity

The concern with the construction of self in the modem world and its connectedness to
place and the environment is also reflected in the growing literature on place and identity.
The sociologists Cuba and Hummon define place identity
... as an interpretation of self that uses environmental meaning to symbolize or situate identity. Like other forms of

identity, place identity answers the question - Who am I? - by countering - Where am I? or Where do I belong?
From a social psychological perspective, place identities are thought to arise because places, as bounded locales
imbued with personal, social, and cultural meanings, provide a significant framework in which identity is
constructed, maintained, and transformed. Like people, things, and activities, places are an integral part of the
social world of everyday life; as such, they become important mechanisms through which identity is defined and
situated (Cuba and Hummon, 1993: 112).

geographers have used a similar concept in their studies of modem

Political and social
Europe. example, John Agnew (1992) examines local identity as a factor in Italian
For
politics, and in doing so seeks to mediate between two alternative theoretical positions.
The first, the residualist, explains local identity as a remnant of traditional societies, one
that gradually disappears with modernization. The second, the primordialist, sees local
culture as imprinted and fixed, and as continuously reproduced through local practices
and customs. Agnew wishes to consider the specificity of place as a site of changing
cultural practices and identities, which have influenced and will continue to influence
electoral outcomes in the foreseeable future. In politics, the local is the real and the
national average is the convenient fiction. Agnew does not deny the importance of global
and national issues on elections, but rather emphasizes the role of local culture as a set of
codes which inevitably shape the interpretations of these issues and events.
A similar emphasis on specificity and local interpretation at the regional scale is offered
by Alexander Murphy ( 1991 ) . His case study is the linguistic and cultural regionalism that
divides Belgium. Murphy shows the importance of understanding regions not simply as
handy containers that frame social interactions, but as sources of cultural identity and thus
as part of the real world of social actors. This goal of blending the relatively objective world
of social and economic relations and the sometimes more subjective world of cultural
identity has been a part of several attempts to describe the importance of regionalism, such
as Lagopoulos and Boklund-Lagopoulou’s (1992) study of Macedonia and Paasi’s

(forthcoming) work on Finland. It also appears to be a part of the stimulus behind R.J.

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Johnston’s (1991; Johnston et al., 1990) call for clear methodological protocols for a
renewed regional geography.
Susan Smith ( 1993) examines the practices and rituals that help construct and maintain
collective memory and cultural identity attached to place. Her rich ethnographic analysis
of the Peebles Beltane Festival in the rural towns of the Scottish borderlands provides
insight into the ambiguities surrounding traditional festivals in modem cultures. They
both unify and divide, and Smith is careful to capture the many competing meanings that
lead to the Beltane’s multiple interpretations. Smith’s is a deeply reflexive study that
captures well the meeting of place and culture through ritual.
It is this connection of place, region and identity that has received the greatest attention
outside of geography in works that range from popular, relatively superficial treatments
(e.g., Gallagher, 1993) to more substantial works by architects and environmental
psychologists (e.g., Altman and Low, 1992). Related to these are the psychoanalytic
studies of place and space produced by those claiming to practise ’psychogeography’ (e.g.,
Stein, 1987; Stein and Niederland, 1989). Behind this intriguing label, one finds a series of
studies reminiscent of the early work of Yi-Fu Tuan and other humanistic geographers.
Unfortunately, psychogeographers appear unaware of geographers’ contributions to this
topic, a fact that has led Kenneth Foote (1992) to describe psychogeography as ’The
emperor’s new globe’.

III Mental places

Geographers continue to explore the artist’s sense of place, in an attempt to help valorize
place and understand its connection to self and group identity. The modes of representa-
tion have varied, including media studies (Zonn, 1990), literature (Shortridge, 1991),
music (Gill, 1993), travel writing (Jakle, 1990) and art (Daniels, 1993). The specific
emphases vary from that of place as symbol or metaphor, to the more complex
construction of place and region through narrative (Cronon, 1990; Johnstone, 1990;
Entrikin, 1991a; 1991b; Daniels, 1992; Lich, 1992; Said, 1993).
This latter theme is central to Edward Said’s (1993: xiii) assertion that ’nations
themselves are narrations’. He explores the role of stories as sources of cultural imperialism
and claims that
... stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become
the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history. The main battle
in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work
on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future - these issues were reflected, contested, and
even for a time decided in narrative (Said, 1993: xii-xiii).

It is this contestation between indigenous oral traditions and colonial travel and explora-
tion narratives, as well as the persistence of colonial tropes in postcolonial accounts of
South Africa, that is examined by Jonathan Crush (1992 and forthcoming).
One of the most innovative attempts to draw together literature and place can be found
in the work of the Swiss geographer Bertrand Levy (1989; 1992), who has written
geographic biographies of the commonly misunderstood German author Hermann Hesse.
Rather than simply restating the geography presented in Hesse’s work, Levy seeks to
explore the interior and exterior ’spaces’ of the author. He examines Hesse’s own
connections to place and nature, and how these are embedded in his fiction. This work
contributes to the rapprochement that Levy seeks between humanistic geography and what

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has been referred to as ggopoitique (Levy, 1991).

What these and other explorations of place through literature demonstrate is the use of
the specific to understand the universal. As Gillian Tindall (1991) states in her wide-
ranging discussion of English and French literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries:
... the novels of Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Zola, Mauriac, Camus, Graham Greene and many
others are created ’out of’ the physical settings they depict. But, by the same token, these physical settings, these real
places, from railway-wracked London to a remote tropical trading post, are essentially put to use as metaphors,
emblems or examples for ideas that transcend that particular time and place. In them, a local habitation and a name
are given to perennial human preoccupations, and it is in the peculiar tension between the timeless and the specific
that much of the force of the novel lies (Tindall, 1991: 10).

It is in this realm framed by the polarity of the universal and the particular, in combination
with that of the objective and the subjective, that place and region function in the
construction of modem cultures.

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