THE POWER OF PLACE

Shakespeare’s ‘blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ (Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1) and Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England’ (The Soldier) are artistic representations of the power of place.

Where does this power of place come from? What makes it, especially in the hands of poets, intellectuals and politicians, such an effective means of arousing collective sentiment and mobilising common action?

There is no better way of introducing this subject matter than by referring to Cecil Rhodes, and to his renowned love of Oxford. It is said that, when he was dying, at the southern tip of Africa in 1902, he asked for Matthew Arnold’s eulogy to Oxford, from the preface of Essays in Criticism, to be read out to him – a passage which begins ‘Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene’ (Dougill, 1998).

What about ‘the world we live in’ as it is often called, the industrial world of late modernity where the individual’s lifespan is becoming ‘separated’ from the ‘externalities of place’ (Giddens, 1991); where there consequently exists a ‘generalised sense of homelessness’ (Said, 1979)?

What we need, clearly, is a theory of place that will apply as much to the world of late modernity as to the pre-modern world. The mystique of anthropological fieldwork fits perfectly with the idea that cultures are spatially localised, which in turn fits perfectly with ‘nationalist thinking, in the West where anthropology developed’, about nations as ‘naturally rooted in the native soil of their people.

The divisions of local groups indicates in the sense that their members live in the same or nearby places, interact on a daily basis in social, economic, political and ceremonial affairs and utilise the same range of economic resources.

The construction of a general theory of ‘locality production’ and, in particular the
‘contextual’ nature of locality is defined as a ‘phenomenological quality’, or ‘dimension’ of social life, to be distinguished from ‘neighbourhood’, which is defined as an ‘actually existing’ social form in which locality is ‘realized’. The choice of ‘neighbourhood’ as an alternative to ‘place’, on the grounds that neighbourhood ‘suggests sociality, immediacy and reproducibility’ (Appadurai, 1996).

Looked at in this way, one can ask how the relationship between locality, as sense of place, and neighbourhood, as a ‘substantive social form’ is affected by what is called the ‘dynamism of modernity’. Appadurai is at pains to point out that, in both modern and pre-modern settings,

……locality is an inherently fragile social achievement. Even in the most intimate, spatially confined, geographically isolated situations, locality must be maintained carefully against various kinds of odds.

Despite the fact that most researchers who write about such situations take locality for granted, the ethnographic record is full of evidence that ‘hard and regular work’ is needed to produce and maintain a sense of place. This ‘work’ includes everything from the building of houses and settlements to rituals of all kinds. Rituals of naming and initiation are particularly relevant to place-making because, with their spatial and temporal symbolism, they are designed to produce ‘local subjects, actors who properly belong to a situated community of kin, neighbours, friends and enemies’. The work of locality production is, always and everywhere, a constant struggle to keep at bay ‘an endemic sense of anxiety and instability in social life’.

Neighbourhoods - the ‘substantive social forms’ in which locality is ‘realised’ - imply context in two senses. First, they are contexts: they provide the ‘frame or setting’ for the conduct of meaningful human action and for the production of ‘local subjects’ (Appadurai). Second they require and produce contexts: they have to be carved out from ‘some sort of hostile or recalcitrant environment’ which may include other neighbourhoods. In this sense, ‘The production of a neighbourhood involves the assertion of socially…organized power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic or rebellious’. Appadurai calls this the ‘context-generative’ quality which is a necessary aspect of all locality production.

In the modern world, the most powerful context-generative social formation that any neighbourhood is likely to encounter is the nation-state, in which ‘neighbourhoods exist…to produce compliant national citizens – and not for the production of local subjects’. The nation-state has produced ‘extreme examples of neighbourhoods which are context-produced rather than context-generative’, including urban slums, ghettos, prisons, concentration camps and refugee camps. These are ‘the starkest examples of the conditions of uncertainty, poverty, displacement and despair under which locality can be produced’ - but produced it nevertheless is.


Extracted from:
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.

Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Smith, A. D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Turton, D. (2004) Lip-plates and ‘the people who take photographs’: uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia. Anthropology Today.

Turton, D. (2004), The meaning of place in a world of movement; Queen Elizabeth House International Development Centre, University of Oxford.