Introduction: Exploring Space, Excavating Place

Abstract

The Heraclitean aphorism that one can never step into the same river twice, because other waters are always flowing, dates back two and a half millennia and it is both a truism of Western philosophical commentary on humanity’s perception of the natural world and a commonplace of everyday experience. Returning to the scene of our childhood, we visit another place because of its metamorphosis through time. Buildings may have been demolished, arable land may now be used for grazing, neighbours may have moved away, but even when physical changes are minimal or indiscernible, the epistemological landscape has altered. On a macro-political level, seismic changes such as the French and Russian Revolutions, the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring effect major transformations in the identities of nations, but seemingly more settled societies are also subject to the dynamics of the ever-flowing river. Switzerland is a land of traffic jams and multicultural encounters as well as cuckoo clocks, alpenhorns and chocolate. The alpine snow remains, but climate change means that it falls differently from year to year, from minute to minute, and again the epistemological landscape alters along with the physical. Everything is in flux and the identity of places is constantly in motion. So it goes without saying that the Heraclitean aphorism holds true? Except that in post-Enlightenment Western thinking there is a contrary impulse which has tried to transfix place as static and unchanging, an impulse which gathered force and was prevalent during the centuries when Western European empires were expanding and flourishing. Despite the proliferation of cross-cultural encounters that occurred as a consequence of the hitherto unparalleled movements that occurred during this era of exploration, trade, conquest and missionary activity, imperialist practices and more recently neo-colonial forms of globalization have habitually promoted fixed conceptions of place, while redrawing borders, dispossessing peoples and despoiling landscapes for commercial gain.