Tita Berger
Dissertation First Draft:
Introduction
Welcome to Truth or Consequences: Place and
Place Making in Modern New Mexico
“What
do people make of places?” Keith Basso, Wisdom
Sits in Places (xiii).[i]
“How
do you find it here?” Local inquiry into what people make of places.
This work examines what people make
of places and how people go about making places. The central focus of this work
is a place study of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The wider lens of this work
explores contemporary and historical ideas about place and place making in the
wider region. These include ideas about modernity, critical regionalism, globalization,
historical narratives, tourism, preservation, revitalization, sustainability, place
memory and cultural landscapes. Place studies encourage connections to broader
histories while remaining grounded in specific sites. Questions of what people
make of places, and how people go about consciously or unthinkingly shaping
places are never very far from ideas about how places shape people. Despite
this power and presence, places have long been regulated to the backdrop of
history. The still-typical question about how people find a place illustrates this idea. The power of place as a tool to
locate bodies is evident in this question. While this is no longer the case in
a great deal of scholarship, viewing place as a static geographical locator is
still common practice.
How do we find a
place? Place is so widely and commonly used that it does not lend itself readily
to academic argument. This work takes as true the idea that place is a dynamic and constantly
shifting configuration of forces describing localities. A locality encompasses specific
sites as well as the quality of having a position in space. Unlike place, however,
locality has a much more narrow understanding. This is perhaps why studies
exploring places generally or places in particular rely heavily on specific
descriptors such as place memory, populated place, or sense of place. The constellation
of influences comprising place is fluid, and attempts to talk about a place or
place identity is therefore an attempt to temporarily fix these forces. Ranging
from geography to global capital markets, these forces are physical, political,
cultural and historical. They are also expressions of shared social
engagements, infrastructure and narrative. How do these forces temporarily
coalesce and create dominant place identities?
This study seeks to uncover these moments in order to consider how place
identities emerge. Through an exploration of what these place forces are, how
they emerge, are sustained, contested, reconfigured and reoccurring, we will
arrive, as T.S. Elliot is famously paraphrased as writing, where we started, to
know a place for the very first time.
Against emerging
arguments of placeless world, or a borderless world, is an increased awareness
of the power of place. This power is generally cast as a positive expression. Place
commemorations and celebrations are a mainstay 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 globalization of place and culture. The power of place is
often evoked as a tool to combat the supposed placelessness that is seen in
ubiquitous commercial strips and capital-driven touristscapes with authentic
cultural expressions. Yet it is often the desire to be in ‘authentic’ places
that drives commodification and entrenches borders. Places can be powerful indicators of poverty
and exclusion. Violent histories are obscured or occluded in many cultural
landscapes. Critical renderings of place entail greater considerations of these
forces. To this end, place studies are largely method-driven while attending carefully
to theoretical lenses that shape place understandings. The ways in which a
specific place is rendered meaningful entails consideration into the multiple
ways that we inscribe meaning to place.
This is a
method-driven place study that engages extensive theoretical discussions. I
begin with an overview of place ethnography. I follow with a discussion of various
theoretical understandings of place in tandem with an overview of the literature
and recent works on place. An overview of the content and organization of the
remaining chapters is provided. This introductory chapter concludes with a
synopsis of my research town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The
production of this study is an attempt to contribute to the understanding of
our shares social-life in place. It is an account of the cultural, social,
political, individual and communal sense of place in the contemporary moment
based on ethnographic methods of discovery. It is also an attempt to craft an
account of place based on historical and archival methods cast in contemporary
theoretical understandings. Most importantly, this study seeks to contribute to
the growing awareness of the power of place. Sense of place, as Keith Basso
reminds us, “rests its case on the premise that being from somewhere is always referable to being from nowhere.” (148). Attending to the many ways that the power of place
is understood, how somewhere is
created, is the ultimate goal of this work.
[i]
This is the opening query in Basso’s preface to Wisdom Sits in Places (1996). This
question, I various incarnations, is the driving force in my dissertation work.
Historical narratives of what people ‘made,’ of the southwest region remain
powerful contemporary dialogue shapers for example. All of my observations and
research can be understood as an iteration of this question. Basso argues that
the question of what people make of places “is as old as people and places
themselves, as old as human attachments to portions of the earth,” (xiii).
