Chapter 2 The Genealogy of Place Part 1

The second chapter of Place a Short Introduction by Tim Cresswell is titled The Genealogy of Place. This chapter is aimed at describing how geographers look at places. Geography is described as a result of people’s curiosity of different parts of earth’s surface. Before the 1960s, much of human’s geography focuses on regions. People spent time differentiating one region from another using culture, climate…etc. Chronology is the term used to describe place/region. The French tradition of la geographie humaine focuses on ways of life. Some environmental determinists insist that the environment determines the culture. Others such as Saucer said that culture is what shaped environment. Another point (unrelated to the previous two) that’s offered is that different regions are defined by different cultures. Geographers are also exploring other things, such as how regions are produced. One of the ideas is that politics shapes a region. Nick Entrikin even argues that the stability of democracy is the fruit of people’s attachment to place and local community. Humanistic Geography is a branch of geography that was developed most thoroughly by Yi-Fun Tuan and Edward Relph. Tuan agrued that through human’s perception and experience they get to know the world through place. Topophilia is a word developed by Tuan to mean affective bond between human and place. Tuan identifies space as freely moving and scientific while place as stopping, involvement, and a sense of belonging. Humanistic geography is different from the “scientific” geography in that it involves human’s experience in it. Tuan also moves so far as to discuss what people do in a place and how they are willing to defend the place against others. Relph, the other humanist geographer describes space as not yet experienced and place as experienced. For Relph, any “place” can be a place as long as a sense of essence (what it is) is given to the “place” by humans. Another word for Relph’s belief would be phenomenology, except Relph thinks of the consciousness discussed in phenomenology as something in its place. The humanists also argue home as the fundamental place (a sense of comfort, rosiness). Tun even said that any place has a certain sense of hominess. Feminists however argue that home instead of portraying a rosy feeling conveys a sense of oppression because of family violence. People such as David Harvey view place as a more political oriented thing. Harvey view place as being developed because of competitions from other places. Others see the development of place more of a cultural and ideology thing. These cultural geographers see culture signs not as symbols but instead as ideologies. The last part of this reading deals with place as being in the world versus place as social construct. While people such as Harvey brothers view place as socially constructed while others view it as naturally constructed or culturally constructed, Robert Sack and J.E. Malpas thinks most place as having most of the three qualities.
I do not quite agree that a place has to offer a sense of hominess or comfort. I still think of place as anywhere that’s not in terms of gas (solid or liquid). It doesn’t matter if I can see them or know that they exist; a land mass or a pool of liquid on a surface (maybe inside the planet) is always a “place”. I’ll admit that the word space does give me a more freedom like feeling over place, and that place suggests a sense of familiarity. While I may not agree with the author on the definition of a place, the growth of the places described in the book are very interesting. In terms of agreement of what constructs a place, I agree with Robert Sack and J.E. Malpas’ definition the most. It’s true that there must be a place to start with for the cultural and social growth to take place. While I can’t see how some places are mainly developed by social and cultural factors, I don’t really have enough info to say anything yet.

Chapter 1 Defining Place

Chapter 1 Defining Place in Place, a Short Introduction by Tim Cresswell started off by describing place as a simple and yet complicated term because of its commonly known and yet ill defined meaning. Place can be used in many different phrases, such as ‘she put me in my place’ and ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. The author than moves to describe different ways to describe a place, such as by its environment, using longitude and latitude to track down a place on the maps, events that have happened, changes, races of people who dwelled in the region, conflicts, and may more. This chapter also talks about how people shape a place for different purposes, and erecting monuments is one such example. Tim Cresswell even goes as far as saying that people the ones who make these places meaningful. According to John Agnew, a political geographer, location, locale (material setting for social relations), and sense of place are the three elements that make a place meaningful. Space and Place are somehow linked. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, space is considered as allowing movement while place as pause. Place also seemed to be a familiar space. It is also suggested that whether a space becomes a place depends on the importance of it in people’s lives, as suggested by the ignorance of the mountains by the Tlingit’s. Landscape and place also has a very close relationship since landscape is earth’s surface that can be viewed from one spot. Landscape however is present only through the viewer. Landscape is always where the viewer isn’t currently, which is the major difference between place and landscape. What people call place can become a landscape when the viewer is standing at a far enough distance. The author also suggests how people can view different places differently depends on situation. The rest of the chapter summarizes what the book is going to say in the future chapters, which I will not comment on yet.
While I agrees with most of what the author has to say, there are a few points that I don’t agree with. I don’t really think place as a very complicated term although it does give me some confusion (not yet, I might change my mind after reading the later chapters). Due to my language background, place is basically anywhere on the landmass of a planet, sun…etc. I’m not sure if we use place to describe the sea or the inside of the ocean. Space is anywhere on the entire universe, even including void. In terms of my own understanding, space and be any place but place can’t be any space. In Chinese, we don’t use place in any other way besides describing a location on the continents, so the definition such as ‘put someone in place’ is out of question.

Semiotics for Beginners Signs

Signs is an article written by Daniel Chandler. It's about philosophers talking about the function of signs and how it works. The reading is divided into two primary sections, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce’s explanation of what sign is. For Saussure there are two parts of sign: the signified and signifier. Sign exists in psychology form and not physical form for that the brain process things and physical stuff can’t be understood without being processed. Saussure also thinks that language is the primary sign because people look at the world through language and think in terms of language. Language is also pretty much arbitrary because words don’t look like the actual physical object. The one thing not completely arbitrary about a language according to Saussure is that some words consist of two put together words. I strongly disagree with the statement and numerous philosophers in the article don’t seem to believe in it as well. The Egyptian and Chinese for example based their words on actual objects and they slowly evolve into the modern form. As for Peirce’s model, the sign consists of three parts: the representamen (form of the sign), interpretant (sense made of the sign), and object (the thing refer by the sign). I have more trouble making sense of this article than the other one. One of the reason being that the article talks about how different parts of the sign relates to one another and which part of the sign comes before the other. I tried to make a meaning out of them but have a hard time understanding how these information can be used in real life. Based on my past experience, in art, basically all one has to do is to use symbolism, composition, or other effects to link the work with some other ideologies or create a network of ideologies. It is possible to establish a deeper meaning by relating to different signs with each other, but this depends on the artist as well, not by a fixed blue print of different parts of sign.

Denotation, Connotation and Myth Report

Denotation, Connotation and Myth is an article about denotation (the surface meaning), connotation (deeper meaning) and myth. It is argued in this paper by Barthes that denotation is just another connotation. It is also argued that connotations are not just personal interpretations but also what is given to the viewer, which is something that I agree with. People from the same culture will have no trouble understanding the denotation message is stressed in the reading. It is demonstrated very well by I’m having a trouble understanding what the Panzani advertisement means and can’t even figure out that it’s an image about shopping from the supermarket. Instead, I mistook the supermarket product random stored goods and the net bag as a decoration. At the middle of the paper Barthes declared that it’s hard to separate denotation from connotation because of the multiple meanings in a piece of work and how one signified may act as a signifier for other things. Other data that this paper offers include how signs were interoperated differently over time and how language, texture, and style can completely change the connotation meaning of a sign. While I really can’t make any comments on any of the things the author says due to their informational nature and how I already agrees with a lot of them, there’s one thing that made me a bit uncomfortable, and that being how Barthes stress is that myth basically simplifies a culture and makes the culture more accessible and that it can be treated as a metaphor and just like any other sign. I admit that I’m having trouble understanding this section. From what I know though, of course myth be treated like any other sign and metaphor and of course they are timeless. That’s what made them so popular and misleading.