Place presents itself to us as a condition of human experience. As agents in the world we are always "in place," much as we are always "in culture."
For this reason our relations to place and culture become elements in the construction of our individual and collective identities. The modern scientific view and the associated technological advances in communication and transportation have transformed our sense of place. Associated with this transformation is our greater awareness of the fundamental polarity of human consciousness between a relatively subjective and a relatively objective point of view. [⇒ Viewpoint]
The former is a centered view in which we are a part of place and period, and the latter is a decentered view in which we seek to transcend the here and now. Our awareness of the gap between the two perspectives is a part of the perceived crisis of modernity. When we assume a decentered attitude toward a world that includes ourselves, our individual projects may seem meaningless and absurd.
Our ability to adopt such an attitude, however, does not diminish the role of place as a basic condition of experience.
J. Nicholas Entrikin's argument concerns the modern understanding of place and, at a larger scale, region. The interest in understanding places and their variation is not specific to the modern world, as demonstrated by the chorographic concerns of Classical Greek scholars.
> Such an interest no doubt predates written history. A history of the study of place would thus repeat much of the general outline of the history of ideas. In this book I shall emphasize twentieth-century arguments, but the basic form of these arguments was established during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the encounter between the Enlightenment conception of a human science and its critics.
This form was later refined by those engaged in the debates concerning the historical and naturalistic orientations to Social Science in the late nineteenth century.
Enlightenment scholars described the historical and geographical diversity of ways of life in terms of variations in a decentered, universalistic view of human nature. The critics of the Enlightenment characterized this variation in a centered, particularistic manner emphasizing the individuality of cultural communities. Aspects of both views were interwoven into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social thought. For example, German liberal theorists associated with the "return to Kant" sought, in part, to accommodate the provincialism of national culture groups to the cosmopolitanism of Kant. The German historian Friedrich Meinecke highlighted this tension in his 1907 study of nationalism: […]
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David Snowden's Cynefin definition struck me as important--the place of our belonging. He points out the English language has no word for this.
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ENTRIKIN, J. Nicholas, 1991. The Betweenness of Place. London: Macmillan Education UK. [Accessed 17 January 2023]. ISBN 978-0-333-29497-0.
The geographer's concept of specific place draws attention to the relation between particularizing and universalizing discourses and between subjective and objective perspectives. Specific place refers to the conceptual fusion of space and experience that gives areas of the earth's surface a "wholeness" or an "individuality." I shall introduce this concept by first offering a general overview of the idea of Place as Context, a view that incorporates both the existential qualities of our experience of place and also our sense of place as a natural "object" in the world. This dualistic quality of place has been at the center of the conception of geography as a chorological science that addresses the relationship of people to their environment.
I shall connect the conception of geography as a synthetic chorological science to its modern origins in the metaphysical holism of nineteenth-century geography, and suggest a model for twentiethcentury studies of place and region that involves the cognitive holism associated with narrative understanding. Narrative offers a means of mediating the particular-universal and the subjective-objective axes. Before discussing narrative, I shall critically examine recent attempts to mediate these axes through theory.