Abstract
The concept of community has been used in many ways in modern social thought, but one of its relatively constant attributes is its localization in place. The most common illustration of this meaning is the concept of Gemeinschaft, a term used to refer to a pre-modern, locality-based, folk community. It is not surprising, therefore, that the concern for place in the social sciences has been closely linked to the interest in the study of Gemeinschaft. The apparent inappropriateness of this ideal type of traditional community for describing modern social relations has been generalized to suggest the modern irrelevance of place-based social relations. At the same time, place is important for those who would like to “reconstruct” such communities, for example through the development of modern, urban villages.
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Notes
John Agnew, “The Devaluation of Place in Social Science,” in John Agnew and James Duncan (eds) The Power of Place: Integrating Sociological and Geographical Imaginations (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 9–29.
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 3–50.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vols. 2 and 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).
Edward Shils, “Center and Periphery,” in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 3–16.
This phrase is borrowed from Thomas Nagel’s discussion of the religious impulse in individuals: The wish to live so far as possible in full recognition that one’s position in the universe is not central has an element of the religious impulse about it, or at least an acknowledgment of the question to which religion purports to supply an answer. A religious solution gives us a borrowed centrality through the concern of a supreme being. Perhaps the religious question without a religious answer amounts to antihumanism, since we cannot compensate for the lack of cosmic meaning with a meaning derived from our own perspective. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 210.
Melvin M. Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” in Lowdon Wingo Jr. (ed.) Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), pp. 23–54
Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 44, 1938, pp. 1–24
Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 154.
Wilbur Zelinsky, “North America’s Vernacular Regions,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 70, 1980, pp. 1–16
In their study of the use of localism by business elites, Cox and Mair have noted how such ideologies address the feelings of alienation and loss of meaning in modern life, “by propagating a redemptive sense of identity in which locals as a group are beleaguered and oppressed by the outside world, but can, on the other hand, legitimately demand redress due to their local community’s status as worthy and as a paragon of national ideals.” Kevin R. Cox and Andrew Mair, “Locality and Community in the Politics of Local Economic Development,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 78, 1988, pp. 307–25
Robert D. Sack, “The Consumer’s World: Place as Context,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 78, 1988, pp. 642–64.
Tuan argues that a sense of place is distinguishable from rootedness in that the former is a conscious understanding of place and the latter is a more unconscious or subconscious relation. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Rootedness versus Sense of Place,” Landscape, vol. 24, 1980, pp. 3–8.
Richard Maxwell Brown, “The New Regionalism in America, 1970–1981,” in William G. Robbins et al. (eds) Regionalism and the Pacific Northwest (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983), pp. 37–96
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Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
Thomas McCarthy has summed up this dilemma in the following manner: The retreat of “dogmatism” and “superstition” has been accompanied by fragmentation, discontinuity and loss of meaning. Critical distance from tradition has gone hand in hand with anomie and alienation, unstable identities and existential insecurities. Technical progress has by no means been an unmixed blessing; and the rationalization of administration has all too often meant the end of freedom and self-determination. Thomas McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), pp. v–xxxvii
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T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
Maclntyre argues that: I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives. Moreover this asking for and giving of accounts itself plays an important part in constituting narratives. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 218.
“Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.” A. Maclntyre, After Virtue, p. 222. See Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Yi-Fu Tuan, The Good Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
David Carr argues: At whatever level of size or degree of complexity, a community exists wherever a narrative account exists of a we which has continuous existence through its experiences and activities... where such a community exists it is constantly in the process, as an individual is, of composing and recomposing its own autobiography. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), p. 163.
Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 175–253
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Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)
Bryan G. Norton, Why Preserve Natural Variety? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 198–9.
Vincent Berdoulay, La formation de l’école française de géographie (1870–1914) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981).
Anne Buttimer, Society and Milieu in the French Geographic Tradition (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company for the Association of American Geographers, 1971), p. 16.
John L. Thomas, Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 365.
Michael Steiner has argued that regionalism “implies both the systematic study of areal variations and the sense of identity that persons have with a portion of the earth which they inhabit.” Michael C. Steiner, “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” The Geographical Review, vol. 73, 1983, pp. 430–46
David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 89.
Werner Sollors, “Region, Ethnic Group, and American Writers: From “Non-Southern” and “Non-Ethnic” to Ludwig Lewisohn; or the Ethics of Wholesome Provincialism,” in Jack Salzman (ed.) Prospects, the Annual of American Culture Studies, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 441–62
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of Sections in American History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961)
Michael Steiner, “The Significance of Turner’s Sectional Thesis,” in The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 10, 1979, pp. 437–66.
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931)
Fred A. Shannon, An Appraisal of Walter Prescott Webb’s “The Great Plains: A Study in Institution and Environment” (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1940)
Gregory M. Tobin, The Making of a History: Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976)
James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to its History (Lawrence, Kan.: James C. Malin, 1947).
Robert P. Swierenga (ed.) History and Ecology: Studies of the Grassland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
D. N. Livingstone and J. A. Campbell, “Neo-Lamarckism and the Development of Geography in the United States and Great Britain,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series, vol. 8, 1983, pp. 267–94.
William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 576.
Friedrich Ratzel, Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika, vol. 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1880), p. 21
Ellen Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-geography (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), p. 115.
See, for example, W. P. Webb, The Great Plains; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938)
Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938).
George W. Stocking, Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 211.
Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846–1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), p. 99.
Carter A. Woods, “A Criticism of Wissler’s North American Culture Areas,” American Anthropologist, vol. 36, 1934, pp. 517–23.
Clark Wissler, The American Indian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1922), pp. xvii–xxi.
The logical dilemma posed by the concept of culture area has been described by Marvin Harris: if too much emphasis is given to the natural geographical substratum, the mapper falls victim to a naive form of geographical determinism; if simple contiguity is emphasized, the “cause” of each assemblage appears to be wholly capricious and the question of boundaries becomes insuperable. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968), p. 375.
Carl Ortwin Sauer, “Regional Reality in Economy,” Sauer Papers, Bancroft Library Archives, Berkeley, California, p. 7. Reprinted with corrections and commentary by Martin S. Kenzer in Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, vol. 46, 1984, pp. 35–49.
Carl Ortwin Sauer, “Foreword to Historical Geography,” in John Leighly (ed.) Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 351–79
Carl Sauer, “Minutes” of the Summer Institute on Southern Regional Development and the Social Sciences, 19 June 1936, Odum Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ratzel has discussed the mutual interaction of the geographical and the psychological methods in ethnographic studies, and has emphasized the importance of each. He described the geographic method of the study of the origin and distribution of culture traits as being logically precedent to and distinct from the psychological study of the individual and group psyche. He also viewed the geographer’s task as being much less complex than that of the psychologist. See Friedrich Ratzel, “Die Geographische Methode in der Ethnographie,” Geographische Zeitschrift, vol. 3, 1897, pp. 268–78.
Odum’s colleague, Rupert Vance distinguishes regionalism from ecology in terms of the former’s interest in community and the latter’s concern with homogeneous culture areas. Associated with this difference is the fact that “Homogeneous regions are usually agricultural and rurally oriented; the communities studied by ecologists are invariably great metropolises.” Rupert Vance and Charles M. Grigg, “Regionalism and Ecology: A Synthesis,” Research Reports in Social Science, vol. 3, 1960, pp. 1–11
John Shelton Reed and Daniel Joseph Singal (eds) Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 185–96
Howard W. Odum, “Folk Sociology as a Subject Field for the Historical Study of the Total Human Society and the Empirical Study of Group Behavior,” Social Forces, vol. 31, 1953, pp. 193–222.
Howard W. Odum, “The Promise of Regionalism,” in Merrill Jensen (ed.) Regionalism in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), pp. 395–425
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930).
Odum’s social science was of several parts. One was a quite outdated organicism of the earlier generation of American sociologists such as Charles Cooley. This social theory was a derivative of a Lamarckian perspective on human affairs. According to Singal, [Odum] was able to contend that the folk culture that conditioned southern life had originally been heterogeneous in its essence, “of such variety and mixture that later biological and cultural homogeneity reflects remarkable power of physical and cultural environment quickly to develop social patterns and regions.” Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), ref. on p. 148.
John Friedman and Clyde Weaver, Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
Donald Davidson, “Provincialism,” Nashville Tennessean, 22 April 1928. Cited in Virginia J. Rock, “They Took Their Stand: The Emergence of the Southern Agrarians,” in Jack Salzman (ed.) Prospects, The Annual of American Cultural Studies, vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975), pp. 205–95
Allen Tate, “The New Provincialism,” in Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1968), p. 538n
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand; O’Brien suggests that “If there was a central idea in agrarianism, it was an abhorrence of industrialism and a repudiation of the Victorian faith in progress and science.” Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 14.
In his autobiography, Mumford writes that one of his early interests was described in a note of 1919: My present interest in life is the exploration and documentation of cities. I am as much interested in the mechanism of man’s cultural ascent as Darwin was in the mechanism of his biological descent. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), p. 335.
Pierre Clavel, “Introduction,” in Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (New York: Torchbooks, 1968), pp. vi–xxii.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 314.
Frank G. Novak, Jr, “Lewis Mumford and the Reclamation of Human History,” Clio, vol. 16, 1987, pp. 159–81
Isard cited the work of Odum and Vance in his 1956 paper on regional science and again in his historical overview of the field in 1979. Walter Isard, “Regional Science, The Concept of Region, and Regional Structure,” Papers and Proceedings, The Regional Science Association, vol. 2, 1956, pp. 13–26
See also Daniel O. Price, “Discussion: The Nature and Scope of Regional Science,” Papers and Proceedings, The Regional Science Association, vol. 2, 1956, pp. 44–5.
W. Isard, “Regional Science,” p. 20. Gale and Atkinson refer to regions as classificatory concepts in spatial analysis and regional science, and hence not as objects. They do, however, notice somewhat differing functions between regions as “units of data collection and analysis,” and as “mechanisms for monitoring and controlling social affairs.” Stephen Gale and Michael Atkinson, “Toward an Institutionalist Perspective on Regional Science: An Approach via the Regionalization Question,” Papers, The Regional Science Association, vol. 43, 1979, pp. 59–82
Allan Pred, “Presidential Address: Interpenetrating Processes: Human Agency and the Becoming of Regional Spatial and Social Structures,” Papers of the Regional Science Association, vol. 57, 1985, pp. 7–17
Torsten Hägerstrand, “What about People in Regional Science?”, in Papers, Regional Science Association, vol. 24, 1970, pp. 7–21.
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© 1991 J. Nicholas Entrikin
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Entrikin, J.N. (1991). Normative Significance. In: The Betweenness of Place. Critical Human Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21086-2_5
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