Chapter 1: Inventing
the Reality of the World
In
his poem “January First,” Octavio Paz deftly captures how place narratives and
place making are approached and theorized in this study. The poem is an
exchange between two people at the start of the New Year. Paz writes, “The
year’s doors open like those of language.” The next day the pair will have to
“think up signs” and “sketch a landscape,” in order, writes Paz, “to invent
once more the reality of this world” (Paz and Bishop 1975, 15). In just a few
verses, Paz speaks to the idea that place is a fluid phenomenon, shifting daily
and constantly being remade by its inhabitants. He does this without
theoretical bulk or the dense discourse about language that mark place’s
critical scholarship. I am not so fortunate in my choice of medium. This
chapter is an exploration of the theories and concepts of that populated the
landscape of this research project. I discuss these ideas in many different
ways. In some cases I tie these theories directly to my research site, or
particular histories I explore in this project. I will also discuss ideas and defer
their grounding to a later chapter. I bring in certain ideas in order to develop
my own concepts. There are instances where I will briefly I touch particular works
because they illuminate important ideas about place. Place is the most powerful
way we create the reality of the world, and this idea is where I begin.
I take my working definition of place from
geographer Edward Relph (1976), who writes that places “are fusions of human
and natural order and are the significant centers of our immediate experiences
of the world” (141). Relph draws from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) and
his elaboration on ethnography as thick description. “What the ethnographer is
in fact faced with —except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the
more automatized routines of data collection— is a multiplicity of complex
conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one
another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he
must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render” (10). Thick
description is observation made clear with interpretation. Geertz argues that
“that culture consists of webs of significance woven by human beings, in which
we are all suspended,” (5). Extending this claim, Relph writes that “places
occur where these webs touch the earth and connect people to the world” (Relph
1996, 24). This elaboration captures the fluid complexity I claim throughout this
project. I am interested in the dynamic and constantly shifting configuration
of forces that describes the location where our webs of significance touch the
ground. Place is both an external as well as an internal experience, contingent
on experience, not just in the physical realm, but in the cognitive world as
well. Geographer Peter Jackson (1989, 1993) argues that place is in where we
chose to look and where those images are processed and thus is ultimately a
mental construct, albeit one realized on the ground.
American geographer Carl Sauer first
popularized the idea that geographical place combines both topographical
elements and human action in his work on cultural landscapes. Sauer pens the
classical definition of cultural landscapes in The Morphology of Landscape (1925) as being “fashioned out of a
natural landscape by a cultural group,” where “culture is the agent, the
natural area is the medium, and the cultural landscape is the result” (298).
Beginning in the early 1970s, a body of scholarship emerged that established
and refined understandings about relationships between place, culture, and
perception, including works by scholars such as J. B. Jackson (1970, 1980, 1986),
Edward Relph (1976, 1985), Anne Buttimer (1976), Buttimer & Seamon (1980), Yi-Fu
Tuan (1974, 1977, 1980,), David Lowenthal (1976), Edward Soja (1989) and David
Harvey (1969, 1972, 1985, 1989). American geographer Donald W. Meinig argued,
capturing the spirit of this first wave of place scholarship, that “landscape is composed not only by what
lies before our eyes, but also what lies in our heads” (1986, 2:34).
The second wave of place-centered
scholarship emerged in the 1990s. Irwin Altman and Setha Low’s Place Attachment (1992) is a seminal
work on the role of place in anthropological and geological study. Postmodern,
poststructuralist, and critical theory scholarship on place emerged as well,
especially in the work of anthropologist and geographer David Harvey (1996,
2000, 2006), “urbanist” Edward Soja (1996, 2000), political geographer John
Agnew (1997, 2002, 1987), and geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 2005).
Definitions of place that emerge in these works are as varied and nuanced as
those that first emerge, which has always been a hallmark in the study of place.
Massey defines place as “layers of articulation” (1994, 188). “Addressed by all
of the social and cultural academic fields,” says Phillip B. Gonzales in his
introduction to Expressing New Mexico:
Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual and Memory (2007), “the concept of place has
come to signify the special qualities of any bounded and identifiable human habitat,
including imagined ones” (27). Philosopher Edward Casey (1992, 1996, 1997,
2000) canonical philosophical texts on the subject hold place as paramount in
understanding society, history, and human experience. Common usages of place are
varied, ranging, and contestable (Agnew 1987, 1993; Creswell 2000, 2004; Seaman
2000).
Relph’s (1976) early and influential
work on the phenomenological experience of place identifies three basic place
components: physical setting, activities, and meanings. Meaning, Relph claims,
is the most difficult to grasp. John Agnew (1987) describes place as having
three dominant characteristics. The first is locale, the formal or informal
settings in which social relations are constituted. The second is location, the
physical setting where social interaction, encompassing economic, cultural, and
political processes, takes place. The third is sense of place, the local
“structure of feeling” (28). Environmental psychologist Fritz Steele argues in Sense of Place (1981) that people’s
relations to places arise in a dialectic involving place qualities and the
characteristics of people when they are in place. Relph (2008) claims place is
“not a bit of space, nor another word for landscape or environment, it is not a
figment of individual experience, nor a social construct,” but is, “instead,
the foundation of being both human and non-human; experience, actions, and life
itself begin and end with place” (36). Edward Casey (2002) stresses the primacy
of place to “accord to [itself] a position of renewed respect by specifying its
power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us
who we are and what we are” (xv). This is only possible, he claims, through an
awareness of “where we are (as well as where we are not),” and so “to be in the
world is to be in place.” Casey writes that the phenomenal particularization
and abstractness of Heidegger’s formal and abstract “being-in-the-word,” can only
be mitigated by the “concreteness of being-in-place, i.e., being in the
place-world itself” (xv). Phenomenological study holds place to be neither
fully objective nor fully subjective, but rather a lived experience. Geographer
Yi Fu Tuan (1979) claims that “place incarnates the experiences and aspirations
of a people,” and as such, “place is not only a fact to be explained in the
broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood
from the perspective of the people who have given it meaning” (388). Nicholas
Entrikin in The Betweenness of Place:
Towards a Geography of Modernity (1991) claims that to ignore this fluid duality
of self and nature, of perception and reality, and the tension between the
subjective and objective nature of knowing, “is to misunderstand the modern
experience of place” (134). Feminist art critic Lucy Lippard begins The Lure of the Local (1997) by claiming
that for her, place “is the locus of desire” (4).
Place identity is the the focus of this
research project. Relph (1976) writes that place identity is the “persistent
sameness and unity,” which allows place to be “differentiated from others,”
(45). He develops these ideas in concert with dwelling and identity, and
especially the idea of home. Place identity, however, is most often defined as
an individual sense of identification with places. Place identity is used to
describe the ways that place and identities are linked, especially in terms of
attachment. This is most often cast as an emotional connection, a bond of
kinship, interest, experience or affinity (Relph 1976; Seamon 1979; Rowles
1983). The question of when place attachment attains the strength to become
part of personal identity has been explored mostly through survey and
quantitative analysis, but there is a strong body of theoretical work as well
(Altman & Low, 1992; Gifford, 2002, Giuliani 2003). Geographer Anssi Paais
(2003) begins his considerations on regions and identity by noting that “identity,
a term that was not yet included in Williams’ important Keywords: a vocabulary of
culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s”
(475). Seamon (2012) claims “place identity refers to how people living in a
place take up that place, their world; how they unself-consciously and
self-consciously accept and recognize that place as part of their personal and
communal identity” (13). Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1993) states that, “identity
is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity
meet the narratives of history, of a culture” (135).
The difference between individual
identity and collective identity remains theoretically and conceptually
underdeveloped. In later works, Relph (2009) distinguishes between genius loci, what he calls the spirit of
place, and the sense of place. He defines the spirit of place as the singular
qualities of a particular landscape or environment that give it a unique
ambience and character. Sense of place, the much more common term, is the
individual perceptions of a particular landscape. This is the experience and
perception of a spirit of place. “Some people are not much interested in the
world around them, and place” he writes, “is mostly a lived background” But
others “always attend closely to the character of the places they encounter” (25).
I use place identity in Relph’s sense of spirit of place. Place identity is the
collective identity of a place, the idea of it, and the sense of a place. It is
what people think of when they think of a place. It is the character and image
of a place. This is the source of much debate but less theoretical development.
There are generally a few very strong identities markers that characterize a
place. Melded to perception, these characterizations found place identity.
I use the concept of place imaginary throughout
this project. It is a concept I devised to bridge the fluid and shifting but
still-grounded concept of place, and the ephemeral but persistent ideas and
experiences that shape place perceptions. I draw from semiotician Walter
Mignolo (2000). Mignolo sketches a history of modernity that precedes the
Enlightenment but also creates the conditions for the seemingly global triumph
of Enlightenment ideas. This begins, he argues, with the onset of Spanish
colonialism and the “building of the Atlantic imaginary.” An “imaginary” he
writes, is “all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the
world” (Mignolo, 2000, 23). Mignolo argues that the modern/colonial
world-system can be described in conjunction with the emergence of the Atlantic
commercial circuit and the conquest of the Americas. This is the “imaginary of
the modern/colonial world.” I also use literary theoretician Edward Said’s work
on imaginative geographies Orientalism (1978)
and Culture and Imperialism (1994). Said
argues that Western society has imagined the world through a range of disparate
and encompassing practices and process in order to justify and advance its
colonial ambitions and practices. Said claims
“that none us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely
free from struggle over geography, that struggle is complex and interesting
because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about
forms, about images and imaginary” (1994, 7). Said’s imaginative geography is a
concept that describes the ways colonial discourses reinvent landscape by
imbuing them with meanings that justify territorial control and subjection. David
Harvey (1970) uses the term geographical imagination as part of a “spatial
consciousness,” of the work of culture and capital (Harvey, 48). These form, in
the language of this research project, the place imaginaries of a town or city
or state, a nation, or even a globe. Geographer
Denis Cosgrove (1984, 2001) contends that landscapes are texts that are also
deeply influenced by perception in their interpretation. They are
unquestionably material, Cosgrove claims, yet emerge into being as readable
text with cultural forces at work, only in the gaze of an observer. Like
Cosgrove, Said argues that landscapes are a material realities but our
perception of them is fundamentally invented and imagined.
The concept of narrative is also used
extensively in this project. Narrative encompasses both the telling and the
tale. What we say about place not only creates the conditions for tangible
features of place, but how we imagine places. Place narratives are defined as
the ways places are described, documented, and understood. Geographical place
narratives, for example, include the political, scientific or intellectual work
of recording, surveying, and mapping patterns in the landscape such as geological
features, terrain, resources, settlement, infrastructure, the built
environment, and other physical and material characteristics. Geographer Yi-Fu
Tuan, in an elegant and cogent article titled Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach (1991)
asserts that questions of how places are made are at the core of geography, yet
scant attention has been paid to the role of language in the making of place.
The habit to see place as the result of the material transformation of nature
is deeply ingrained. Words, however, have the power to render objects and
places visible and to give them character, says Tuan. This trait is readily
apparent in the fashioning of the American Southwest. Tuan outlines three
approaches to speech and place. The first begins with the nature of language
itself, and the second requires a focus on the use and effectiveness of speech
and social contexts. Tuan adopts a third approach. It is what he terms a
“narrative-descriptive” approach to the study of place (686). Drawing from and
absorbing the first two approaches, Tuan claims he does not pause for
theoretical overviews or excessive analytical detail. Theory, he explains, by
its clarity and weight, drives away countering viewpoints and understandings.
“Indeed,” he claims, “in social science, a theory can be so highly structured
that it seems to exist in its own right, to be almost ‘solid’ and thus able to
cast (paradoxically) a shadow over the phenomena it is intended to illuminate”
(685). In a narrative-descriptive approach, however, theories hover
“supportively” in the background, while the object of study occupies center
stage. It is an approach Tuan believes is appreciated by scholars predisposed
by discipline or disposition “to appreciate the range and color of life and
world . . . whose best works tend to make a reader feel the intellectual
pleasure of being exposed to a broad and variegated range of related facts and of
understanding them a little better (though still hazily), rather than, as in
specialized theoretical works, the intellectual assurance of being offered a
rigorous explanation of a necessarily narrow and highly abstracted segment of
reality” (688).
Tuan, echoing Mignolo and Said,
describes how the modern imaginary of place begins the Spaniards arrival in the
New World, an imaginary that precedes, preconfigures and casts aspirations on
future geographical claims. Tuan writes that place, in the standard literature,
is a product of the physical transformation of nature in this New World,
occurring with the first European ax. This understanding misses a critical
component of how place was imagined, he argues. The “the ordering of nature-the
conversion of undifferentiated space into place-occurred much earlier…with the
first ritual act of possession,” by the Spanish he writes. The newly discovered
country was “recreated” by the cross, he continues, “reinstated into God's
cosmos-as though it had no prior existence, or that its prior state was one of
unredeemed wildness” (687). The ritual creation of place was the first step,
Tuan claims, followed by other others as explorers pushed inland.
Tuan’s arguments, despite their
elegance, do not encourage me to leave theory hovering supportively in the
background as I seek to understand the object of my study. I struggle with
these questions actively in the field and in my public research blog. The
considerable theoretical debate and development on these ideas gives me a way
to think about how they emerge into the landscape I study. In an essay titled The Question of Narrative in Contemporary
Historical Theory (1984), Hayden White, a historian in the tradition of
literary criticism, laid out some of the foundations he developed richly in Content of the Form (1987). White
suggests that “value attached to narrative in the representation of real events
arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity,
fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary”
(White 1987, 25). While this research project seeks to challenge idea about
histories through contemplation on place and a study of a particular place, it
is not a project devoted to questions of history. Yet I do devote considerable
time to these questions. An introduction to these ideas provides this project’s
theoretical groundwork in the approach to considerations of history. At issue
are scholars who would see hsitory striving to be a science, and in this
desire, discounting narrative. “Within professional historical studies,” White
writes, “the narrative has been viewed for the most part neither as a product
of a theory nor as the basis for a method, but rather as a form of discourse
which may or may not be used for the representation of historical events,” (White
1984, 1). What what “distinguishes ‘historical’ from ‘fictional’ stories is
first and foremost their contents, rather than their form.” The content of
historical stories was real events, “events that really happened,” rather than
imaginary events, events that were “invented by the narrator” (2). White
explores four broad discussions of narrative and the role of narrative in
historical theory that defined academic debates in the latter half of twentieth
century in the West. How are narrative representations of reality, especially
those represented as the past, arbitrated against these debates? Subtly,
densely, with great theoretical nuance and at great length, judging by White’s
careful consideration in this mere 33 page article. Even as I struggle to extricate
my own writing from this structure of inscrutable incomprehensibility to all
but the most well-versed, I am drawn to it the explanatory power of critical
theory across disciplines. I defer to Whites’ question in his concluding
remarks: “How else can any ‘past,’ which is by definition comprised of events, processes, structures, and so forth that are
considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness
or discourse except in an “imaginary” way?” To which his concludes, “Is it not
possible that the question of narrative in any discussion of historical theory
is always finally about the function of imagination in the production of a
specifically human truth?” (33).
This idea can be extended to the study
of place. Place is narrated into being, in other words, but the conditions are
given, even as the conditions are themselves narrated into being. Edward Said
(1993) contends that “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists
say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized
people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history”
(Said, xii). This is not a project of merely projecting a meaning onto a
landscape, but it is an active colonial subject creation, even at the present
moment. Said argues that imaginative geographies play a role in identity
formation and sense of place through these material and cultural markers of
belonging. White’s arguments illuminate these ideas as well, that “our desire
for the imaginary, the possible, must contest with the imperatives of the real,
the actual,” and in these “conflicting claims where the imaginary and the real
are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse,” that “we begin to
comprehend both the appeal of narrative and the grounds for refusing it” (White
1984, 4). White’s critics defend the work of historians and
the histories they build as seeking rigor through collectively developed
framework which are dependent on hard archival research. Historian seeks to
establish and assembles convincing evidence.
The place identity of Truth or
Consequences is typified by a phenomenon that I call a historical vacancy, a
condition that is constantly at work in any assessment of place meaning and place
making narrative about the town and the region. The term historical vacancy
describes a place characterized by the perception of an unoccupied past or
emptiness in the historical narrative of a place, as well as the ways history
is created and projected onto places. It is a concept, like place imaginaries,
I create in order to consider the particular ways history, narrative and place
come together in my research project. I use the term historical vacancy because
it suits the patterns and narrative characteristics of the histories that
emerge into places that are perceived as unsettled. There is no place in the
American empire where history does not crowd the landscape. This particular
part of the New Mexico landscape, however, does not carry the same evidence of
empire as other parts of the state. Histories narrated without apparent regard
to veracity are a defining feature of the town. Many of the stories I record in
this work lean heavily on the side of conjecture or, just as often,
indifference to veracity if the story or history is interesting. Historical
vacancies are also a useful way of understanding where patterns of place
imaginaries shift, where histories are elided, displaced, buried, or ignored.
Similar to the interdisciplinary nature
of place scholarship in recent decades, the stitching together different threads
of theory and method, as evidenced in this project, is the revival of
place-based movements. Architect and historian Delores Hayden (1997) talks
about the power of place in her book of the same name. The power of place is
generally cast as a positive expression that melds sense of place, place
making, politics, preservation, public history and a host of other
place-specific activities. Place commemorations and celebrations are mainstays
of global tourism and place revitalization. Preserving cultural landscapes or
sites considered integral to dominant understandings of important history and
cultural expression is a popular cure to the supposed flattening effects of
globalization. The power of place is often evoked as a tool to combat the
steady domination of ubiquitous commercial strips and capital-driven tourists’
capes with supposedly authentic cultural expressions. Other histories—of
settlement, violence, empire, kinship, and community— recede in many of these
efforts obscured or occluded in many cultural landscapes. It is often the
desire to be in authentic places that drives commodification and entrenches
borders, from nations to hotel compounds. Where a body is placed is a powerful
indicator of poverty, violence, and exclusion. Hayden claims these
considerations are integral to the creation of inclusive, honest and meaningful
places.
Anthropologist Keith Basso’s call to
make haste in the study of places in Wisdom
Sits in Places (1996) fueled some of my initial desire to locate and
explore the connections between people and places. Basso claimed that place
attachments were profound and critical to our individual and community well-being
and identity. This resonated with my research interests. Basso’s final chapter
of Wisdom Sits in Places began with a
relentlessly haunting list of the anguish confronting places and communities,
efforts to protect places, stay on ancestral lands or to preserve sacred
places, issues of environmental destruction, poverty, despair and massive inequality.
He followed this litany with remarks on people’s adeptness at creating richly
lived and sensed places. Basso claimed that many of these deep attachments to
places were represented, enacted, and embodied in physical landscapes. The
question, “What do people make of places?” was the opening query in Basso’s
preface. Historical narratives of what people “made” of the Southwest remain
powerful contemporary dialogue shapers. Basso argued that the question of what people
make of places was “as old as people and places themselves, as old as human
attachments to portions of the earth” (xiii). According to Basso the task of
ethnographers is to fashion a written account that adequately conveys his or
her understanding of other people’s understandings. It is a discomforting
business abounding with loose ends, he claims. He argues that with patience,
good humor as well as perseverance, it is possible to achieve the
ethnographer’s task of determining what expressive acts might mean, and
relating them to larger ideas. Fashioning accounts that convey the
ethnographer’s understanding of others' understandings is a daunting task, but
a worthy one, says Basso. He writes that to “argue otherwise (and there is a
bit of that around these days) is to dismiss ethnography as a valid source of
cultural knowledge and turn it into a solipsistic sideshow, an ominous prospect
only slightly less appealing than the self-engrossed meanderings of those who
seek to promote it” (1976, 34). Basso contends that ethnography, although often
painful and wrenching, is also a great deal of fun. Occasionally, he remarks,
ethnographers “stumble onto culturally given ideas” (35) that are worthy of
wider attention, attention that places, and the ways they are understood, deserve.
In Senses of Place (1997), Basso’s and
anthropologist Steven Feld claim that place ethnographies seek to “locate the
intricate strengths and fragilities that connect places to social imagination
and practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and movement” (8).
I mirror parts of this research project
against the experimental ethnographic essays of Michael Trujillo in Land of Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities
and Transformations in Northern New Mexico (2009). In addition to Basso,
Trujillo’s work in the Northern New Mexico city of Española is another intellectual
pillar of this project’s theoretical and methodological approach. Uncomfortably
opposed at many junctures, these two texts taken together nonetheless create a
framework for my own research. Basso’s work is hailed as “a classic creative
ethnographic representation” on the book’s back cover. Trujillo, on the other
hand, claimed his goal in Land of
Disenchantment was “to challenge ethnography” (209). He employed what he
described as the once-radical style of the modernist ethnography.
Representations of supposedly cohesive cultural groups have long been a
mainstay of ethnography. This is decidedly true in New Mexico. Not merely
portrayed as cohesive, but outside of the modern, First Nation and Nuevo
Mexicana/o communities have a long history with the ethnographic gaze according
to Trujillo. Trujillo engaged the modernist ethnography through a series of
essays, “a form designed to address such complex and often-indefinable subjects”
(23). This form, he claimed, captured the dynamic intertextuality between the
ethnographic gaze and the ethnographic archive. It is a method “aware of the
historical and contemporary connections that link the objects of its gaze” 924).
Trujillo explored the juxtaposition between the positive and negative, a
cascading “dialectical where “a thing is affirmed as what it is through a
denial of what that thing is not” (21).To “evoke negativity is a political
intervention and performs a political act and destabilizes illusions of
perfection, presence and permanence,” in “such places, the positive and
negative, form and excess, reasons and its other are imbricated” (20).
The identity that emerges is a “complex
and dynamic unity, a differentiated, meditated phenomenon contingent on
negativity” (21). Trujillo used his framework to interrogate his own ethnographic
accounts. Trujillo, like Basso, spoke to finding something sublime and
fulfilling in ethnography.
Trujillo noted that modernist
ethnography was well-suited to a time when “paradigms are in disarray, problems
intractable and phenomena are only partly understood” (24). Trujillo maintained
that through this method the ethnographer admitted the challenge of
bewilderment and incomprehension that accompanied observation as well as the constant
presence of past representations of cultural groups that loom in any present
ethnographic account. Unlike Basso, Trujillo eschewed the “desire to unmask or
defrock some larger or deeper truth,” an approach common to many ethnographic
representations. Yet Trujillo conceded that even as he strives to recognize the
complex, partial, and subjective representations his ethnographic accounts, he
still sought “to paint a picture that is somehow more whole than previous
ethnographies” (26).
I too engage an experimental
ethnographic method to explore this dynamic intertextuality and tension in a
particular place. This has resulted in a mixed-method work: part ethnographic
study of the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, part historical inquiry
into what people make of places in the larger Southwest United States,
beginning at roughly the turn of the 19th century, part
philosophical musing on place and identity. I call this method place
ethnography, and describe it at length in my next chapter. I am both an
outsider and and insider in the town, belonging in measure but still distant.
My focus on place and place identity as well as my professional focus on
historic preservation created an uncanny urge to boosterism and a hesitation to
delve into the realities of poverty, drug abuse, alcohol use and exclusion that
marked the town. Familiarity is tricky, as is the tension between local, state,
regional, national and global frames. The modern is especially tricky in all of
its incarnations, especially the tendency in the modern to cast the world into
binaries. I borrow the work tricky from David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000), who “looks at the tricky question of the
relation between ‘particularity’ and ‘universality’ in the construction of
knowledge” (15). Harvey follows his
remarks on the “tricky question,” with a robust denial of the choice between
the particular and the universal. “Within a relational dialectics,” he claims,
“one is always internalized and implicated in the other” (16). This is one
tenant of his approach to a “historical-geographical materialism,” that takes
as central in its study of place a sustained tension between the geographical
global forces of capitalism, the bodies embedded in these global networks, and
the practices of contest and conciliation in expressions of culture, activism
and creativity that marks place.
A similar method is adopted by James
Clifford in The Predicament of Culture (1988),
in his claim that his research “migrates between the local and the global
perspectives, constantly re-contextualizing its topic.” Broadly conceived as a critical ethnography
of the West, Clifford seeks to rupture the hegemonic discourses of that have
shaped the study of culture. Clifford claims that nostalgia for some unbroken
and authentic past, in the face of the dislocations of modernity, are themes
that have shaped the way Western trained scholars see, study and evaluate the
world. The questions Clifford asks are familiar in critical theory, including
ideas on who has the authority to speak for cultural identities, ideas on how
essential elements and boundaries of culture established, and considerations of
the role of ethnographers as they are implicated in their own account of
culture. “What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for
the present range of local oppositional movements?” he asks (8). Clifford does not deny the idea that the
forces of modernity are disconcerting. “People and things,” says Clifford, “are
increasingly out of place” (6). By the turn of the twentieth century, Clifford
writes that a “truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions has
become imaginable,” and so the “ethnographic modernist searches for the
universal in the local, the whole in the part” (4). Ethnographer Kathleen
Stewart captures this tension with a sharp clarity in A Space on the Side of the Road (1996). In places named Red Jacket,
Viper, Odd, Amigo, Twilight, and Decoy, Stewart uncovers paradoxes in American
narratives of modernization and progress. There is an uncanny similarity
between place names that refuse to adhere to conventional standards of naming
in this account. The power of naming is a central consideration in this
study. A vivid cultural poetics of place
emerges in Stewart’s text. Her stories are part of larger patterns of
narratives that embody the contradictions in rural modernity. Modernity and
progress are as ruinous in their presence as they are in their supposed absence
in these places. They are evidenced in linear time but unrecognizable on the
ground. They are always coming but never arrive.
My purpose in this project was not to
look at the whole of place writ small in the landscape of Truth or
Consequences, but rather to explore how a particular place could illuminate the
sweeping ideas about place that proliferate in the wide-ranging literature I
engage. While I ascribe to the contingent and particular, the universal
resonates. I find in the particular and universal a similar cascade of
implication. I do not claim truth in the universal, any more that the
particular. Truth or Consequences has qualities I am drawn to, including
gestures to larger place patterns that have developed during the last 100 years
in New Mexico and the nation. There is a shifting, elusive and yet strong sense
of place and a very curious place identity that is tied to various place
imaginaries of the town and region. There is a commitment to historic
preservation and revitalization in the past two decades. I am fascinated by the
ways that this small place reflects larger patterns that emerged during the
last century. I am often surprised by how often people’s attachment to places
creates opportunities to critically engage a range of ideas, from historical
veracity, to ideas about what makes good places. This project is not a
historical account of the town of Truth or Consequences, but rather an
exploration into the place identity of the town that explores and recounts a
great deal of history. I explore the historical claims embedded in the
narratives and seek to understand how these shape the place imaginaries that
emerge, and how these narratives persist. I blend these historical
considerations with ethnographic fieldwork in order to consider the persistent
narratives and practices of regional place imaginaries. While I agree with
Basso that place studies are critical for a variety of reasons, I see in the
study of place an opportunity to fully engage in the kind of interdisciplinary
study that draws me to the field of American studies. The study of place, and
the concept of place, lies at a juncture where the particular and the universal
come together.
As places like Truth or Consequences
seek to create and market place identities, the fluidity and malleability of
place can invite the kind of haphazard or fictitious historical accounts that
persist for decades—the focus of my third chapter. As a historic
preservationist in training and a critical scholar with many years of training,
however, I am often confounded by the lack of critical perspectives in the
preservation and revitalization of places. These conversations are dominated by
contemporary ideas about branding and economic revitalization, but are also
opportunities for starting a conversation about how to bring in a critical
perspective. In the majority of interviews I conducted for this project a
willingness by people to bring critical lenses to their own observations was
abundant. People were keen to point out that their perceptions were just that,
their own. Yet our own place narratives are created in the same ways that the
places we describe are—through a full contingency of forces that come to bear on
individuals and communities.
