Abstract
Place, this chapter argues, is not just a setting or backdrop for the life course and personhood: it can also be constitutive of them. Via a range of ethnographic examples, this chapter explores how personhood can be made through social interactions and the transmission of substance, grounded and embodied in place. The chapter outlines key theoretical principles on place and its significance as discussed by anthropologists and human geographers. This assists in contextualising the ethnographic material on personhood and place that follows, all animated by a shared inquisitiveness into the question of how it is that place and personhood can be mutually constitutive.
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Notes
- 1.
Note too that a number of anthropologists have explored the significance of place for creating a sense of belonging and of collective identity. This extensive body of work includes Basso (1984, 1996) in the Southwest United States amongst Western Apache who I explore in close detail in the next section of this chapter; Myers (1986) working with Pintupi people in the Western Desert of Australia, Cohen’s work (1987) in Whalsay, in the Shetland Islands, Weiner (1991) amongst the Foi people of Papua New Guinea, and Stewart in West Virginia (1996). In addition to these monographs, a number of influential edited volumes have included Bender (1993), Hirsch and O’Hanlon (1995), Feld and Basso (1996), and Árnason, Ellison et al. (2012). Some of my own work has sought to develop this field, by exploring the ways in which absence and time figure in the interstices of belonging and place (Degnen 2013), the work of social memory in regards to place (Degnen 2005), and the embodied and relational aspects of place attachment (Degnen 2015). There is thus a healthy and now long-standing body of work in the discipline that engages critically with the connections of people and place.
- 2.
ANV is the abbreviation for Āru Nāṭṭu Veḷḷāḷa, a jāti whose members are thought to be astute business people, an ability “which is strengthened when they reside in the ancestral villages of their jāti” (Daniel 1984, 62, fn 2).
- 3.
Daniel, like Cresswell, is heavily influenced by Heidegger and so the parallels between their accounts are not accidental. See Daniel’s website at Columbia where he writes that “My consuming interest is in the relevance of the writings of Charles S. Peirce and Martin Heidegger for anthropological theory and practice. European modernity begins and is sustained, I hold, by the - unwarranted? - questions raised by Descartes and the - inadequate? - answers provided by him and most major thinkers in the western intellectual tradition who followed him. And anthropology is a capricious child of such a modernity because of its encounter with systems of thought and action that interrogate this modernity on the one hand and its filial loyalty to its own disciplinary heritage on the other. Peirce and Heidegger, as two of the most powerful critics of Cartesianism, show us ways of connecting non-western (ethnographic) critiques to western modernism’s (philosophical) critiques deriving from these two thinkers. Against this broad problematique, I do research and write on semeiotic, violence, refugees and plantation labor. My geographic areas of research are South India and Sri Lanka.” http://anthropology.columbia.edu/people/profile/350, viewed 14 June 2016.
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Degnen, C. (2018). Place and Personhood. In: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56642-3_4
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