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.