Tuesday, June 17, 2014

place ethnography

Draft:Place Ethnography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Symbol opinion vote.svg Comment: While ethnography already has an entry on Wikipedia, I could not find a single academic journal article mentioning or discussing "Place ethnography" and as such this article submission can't be accepted. It's also written like an essay, and is quite mediocre at that, rather reading like a random collection of terms and thoughts without a coherent encyclopaedic thread. If this term really existed, you'd have to present it in its context, using clear and concise language and appropriate references. That's likely not going to be possible. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 23:03, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Definition[edit]

Place ethnography is a method that blends traditional ethnographic research with a range of disciplinary techniques in order to study place. In addition to field-based observation, documentation and analysis, place ethnographic research design can include phenomenological study, archaeological interpretation, the inclusion of critical race, gender, class and social theory, architectural surveying, cultural landscape studies approaches, spatial theory, mapping, visual analysis, quantitative, survey or statistical analysis as well as historical and other archival methods. This emergent interdisciplinary methodological framework allows individual field-based place exploration in specific localities as well as in conjunction with other place-specific scholarship and research. Place ethnography has roots in anthropology, geography, cultural resource and preservation planning, architecture, archaeology and the humanities.

Etymology[edit]

Place (n.) c.1200, "space, dimensional extent, room, area," from Old French place "place, spot" (12c.) and directly from Medieval Latin placea "place, spot," from Latin platea "courtyard, open space; broad way, avenue," from Greek plateia (hodos) "broad (way)," fem. of platys "broad" (see plaice). Replaced Old English stow and stede. From mid-13c. as "particular part of space, extent, definite location, spot, site;" from early 14c. as "position or place occupied by custom, etc.; position on some social scale;" from late 14c. as "inhabited place, town, country," also "place on the surface of something, portion of something, part," also, "office, post." Meaning "group of houses in a town" is from 1580s. Also from the same Latin source are Italian piazza, Catalan plassa, Spanish plaza, Middle Dutch plaetse, Dutch plaats, German Platz, Danish plads, Norwegian plass. Wide application in English covers meanings that in French require three words: place, lieu, and endroit. Cognate Italian piazza and Spanish plaza retain more of the etymological sense. To take place "happen" is from mid-15c. To know (one's) place is from c.1600; hence figurative expression put (someone) in his or her place (1855). Place of worship attested from 1689, originally in official papers and in reference to assemblies of dissenters from the Church of England. All over the place "in disorder" is attested from 1923. (v.) mid-15c., "to determine the position of;" also "to put (something somewhere)," from place (n.). In the horse racing sense of "to achieve a certain position" (usually in the top three finishers; in U.S., specifically second place) it is first attested 1924, from earlier meaning "to state the position of" (among the first three finishers), 1826. Related: Placed; placing. To take place "to happen, be accomplished" (mid-15c., earlier have place, late 14c.), translates French avoir lieu.[1]
Ethnography (n.) 1834, perhaps from German Ethnographie; see ethno- + -graphy "the study of." Related: Ethnographer; ethnographic. Eth•nog•ra•phy is defined as the the study and systematic recording of human cultures as well as descriptive work produced from such research. The Merriam Webster origins of ethnography are French ethnographie, from ethno- + -graphie –graphy, with a first known use in 1834. [2] . Also commonly identified as from the Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write"
As a method, place ethnography is still being defined from practice as well as theory. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology describes ethnography as having a double meaning in anthropology. Ethnography is both a product that includes ethnographic writings and narratives, and as a method that describes participant observation or fieldwork. Ethnography is described in this text similarly as both the building block and testing ground of anthropological theory, a process which in turn shapes ethnography and the ethnographic process. This mutual constitution of theory and method creates a dynamic engagement between theory and practice.[3]
As a written account, an ethnographic narrative focuses on a particular population, place and time with the deliberate goal of describing it to others primarily through narration, although digital techniques have greatly expanded the idea of what constitutes narrative.[4] Ethnography is considered a qualitative approach but can also include quantitative approaches, allowing for testing and prediction in addition to description and explanation. [5] Ethnographic techniques have been adopted across a wide variety of disciplines despite divergences in approach and design and academic contests over meaning and worth.

Scholarship[edit]

Emerging from the ethnographic method, place ethnography moves place to the center of consideration in research rather than treating place as stage, backdrop, or static location where events unfold. This multidisciplinary method reflects a growing body of research and scholarship on place. While place ethnography as a general research framework has developed independently in several fields, it is most closely associated with space and place studies in geography[6] and anthropology. [7]
Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga note in their opening remarks the “renewed interest in issues of place and space across disciplines” that scholars demonstrated in the 1990s, evidenced by the collection of work on the volume. [8] In an expansive review of the scholarship in the field n a journal publication from the beginning of that decade, Low and Lawrence make the claim that anthropological inquiry into the role of the built environment emerged with the first formalization of theories of cultural evolution during the 19th century and that “the built environment in anthropological research can be traced to the earliest endeavors in social and cultural theory, and in ethnography.” [9] Looking to the work of scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Franz Boas, Amos Rapoport and others, Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga explore the development of ethnographic and other approaches to the study of the built environment.
Phillip B. Gonzales also remarks on the growing research and scholarship on place generated in the humanities.[10] The growing interest in the study of place and place-making has been “addressed by all of the social and cultural academic fields,” argues Gonzales, and “the concept of place has come to signify the special qualities of any bounded and identifiable human habitat, including imagined ones.[11] Sylvia Rodriguez, for example, explores northern New Mexico’s acequia system in her chapter Honor, Aridity and Place. Rodriguez writes a place ethnography that explores the cultural landscape of the acequia system, the built system for water delivery first established by Spanish colonist starting in the late 1600s in New Mexico and still used today, as a critical site where cultures and the environments have felt the onslaught of commodity exploitation.
Edward T. Hall is often credited for laying the groundwork for anthropological place and space studies. Hall coined the term proxemics. Proxemics is defined as the study of human use of space within cultural contexts.[12] In The Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall argued that human perceptions of space are shaped by culture, as opposed to a shared or universally equivalent empirical sensory experience. Hall argued that these unique if overlapping cultural frameworks for delimiting and organizing space were learned and internalized, and as such largely unrecognized. Hall explored and analyzed person space in order to theorize the ways that these frameworks were evident in the organization of shared space.[13] Hilda Kuper’s ethnographic arguments focused on how specific locations, sites and places reflect symbolic dimensions of Swazi sociopolitical structure and serve as an early example of how place ethnography can be structured.[14]
Geographer Yi Fu Tuan has numerous contributions to space and place studies including several seminal works.[15] Tuan's publications demonstrate the breadth of his scholarship in the field of space and place studies.[16] Tuan 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”. [17] Tuan argues for a phenomenological turn in the study of place in order to bring a systematic analysis to the question of "how mere location becomes place."[18] Historian Dolores Hayden's award-winning books explore place, place making, community building, public history and memory in America. Her books, as well as courses on Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale, explore the multidisciplinary approaches to both study and create places. The Power of Place, (1996), for example, is both a review of place making practices in the field, as well as a call for critical and collaborative engagement in place making and scholarship.[19]
Scholar, historian and writer and cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson greatly influenced the development and trajectory of contemporary cultural landscape studies.[20]According to Paul Groth, Jackson's experiences during WWII assessing and planning troop movements meant included the interpretation of maps and aerial photographs, supplemented by intelligence gathered from deeds, aerial and land surveillance, postcards, guidebooks, captured prisoners and other sources. Groth notes that West Point cadets would later read Jackson's reports as model documents of military intelligence and reconnaissance. Groth asserts this experience allowed Jackson to see and interpret the everyday American landscape in new ways. Jackson essays on the American landscape and the Southwest and his work on Southwest, magazine Landscape celebrated the vernacular and promoted close attention to detail and setting. Jackson courses at University of New Mexico, Yale and Harvard reflected theses interests, as did his self-published magazine Landscape, which included essays from scholars such as then-fellow UNM faculty member Yi Fu Tuan.[21] This approach sharply diverged from the focus on monumental buildings and landscapes that dominated the study of the built environment claims editors Chris Wilson and Paul Groth in the introduction to Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson (2003). In addition to the growing importance of the built environment in research and scholarship across disciplines “was the discovery of everyday built spaces as significant evidence of social groups, power relations and culture by historians, American studies scholars, literary critics, and a growing number of anthropologists, sociologists and social theorists.” [22]
Edward Soja’s Potmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1986) noted this trend to foregrounding locality in critical theory research and scholarship and argued for a more critical assessment of how space and place. The recent work of Lucy Lippard, art critic, essayist and scholar, looks to photographic, narrative and other representations of place.[23] Geographer David Harvey argues that the study of place is 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.[24] Harvey's work on the theoretical development of the concept of place as well as his use of historical-geographical materialism to study place has shaped the methodological approach to place study and ethnography.[25]
Philosopher Edward S. Casey notes the burgeoning interest in place in his preface to The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (1997). He looks specifically at the fields of architecture, anthropology and ecology, while commenting on the absence of scholarship in other disciplines. By the time he wrote the introduction to the second edition in 2009 ofGetting Back to Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World (1993) this had dramatically changed. Spatial studies, he claimed, were “a whole industry in the humanities and social sciences.”[26] Casey argues that in a world where “sameness-of place” and a “monoculture based on Western economic and paradigms,” the “revitalized sensitivity to place” makes sense.[27] Examples of critical encounters with place include Chris Wilson's work on Santa Fe, New Mexico, which moves between architecture, history and culture to explore the complex interactions of identity, tourism, preservation, image and the built environment in the Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition(1997). Michael Trujillo's ethnographic work in northern New Mexico illustrate how place ethnography and critical theory can be engaged to challenge dominate place narratives and explore deeply-rooted cultural identities.[28]
Geographer and place scholar Tim Creswell, in Place: A Short Introduction (2004) sees the “popularity of place” both within in geography and across disciplines as both an opportunity and a problem. [29] Creswell defines place as space people are attached to, “the most straightforward and common definition of place—a meaningful location.”[30]Creswell cites John Agnew’s three-part place definition. The first part is location, or the geographical where of places. The second is locale, or the material setting for social relations’. The third is a sense of place. Creswell also identifies three broader currents in the history of place study that illuminate these layers. The first is descriptive, concerned with the “distinctiveness and particularity of places.” [31] This current has several strands, most notably in geographical and ecological traditions. The second is a social constructionist approach to place, or place as a process. This is demonstrated by David Harvey, who writes that place, “in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct…the only interesting question that can be asked is: by what social processes is place constructed?”[32] Third is a phenomenological approach to place. Place ethnography as a research framework draws from these traditions.
Anthropologist Keith H. Basso's place ethnography Wisdom Sits in Places calls for increased ethnographic place research.[33] "Places, to be sure, are frequently mentioned in anthropological texts ("the people of X...," "The hamlet of Y...," "The marketplace at Z...")," Basso writes, "but largely in passing, typically early on, and chiefly as a means of locating the texts themselves, grounding them, as it were, in settings around the world."[34] Basso’s approach to place ethnography is shaped by Martin Heidegger’s ideas on dwelling. Basso contends that place ethnography is a critical endeavor in the contemporary moment of dislocation, environmental devastation, mass migration and other global crisis. “For surely as place is an elemental existential fact, sense of place is a universal genre of experience,” writes Basso, musing that transcultural qualities might be uncovered through place ethnographic research.[35] “Everything, or almost everything, hinges on the particulars,” says Basso, “and because it does, ethnography is essential.” [36] The rich body of place scholarship in the past decades erodes Basso’s claim that “ethnographic inquiry into cultural constructions of geographical realities is at best weakly developed”[37]. Basso’s own work with Steven Feld is one example.[38] Their edited collection of research, many works which were first presented of a conference at the Santa Fe School for Advanced Research, reflects the range of place study across the globe. Basso and Feld claim that cultural geographers have adopted interpretive frameworks similar to those in anthropology. Seeking to "locate the intricate strengths and frailties that connect places to social imagination and practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and movement,” the body of research and ethnography that focuses specifically on place continues to grow.[39]
Setha Low's research and scholarship has been pivotal to the development of place ethnography as a method. In addition to published work and other scholarship, Low’s 2011 CUNY course, Ethnography of Place and Space, offered a systematic exploration into the methodological and theoretical implications of ethnographic research into space and place.[40] Low’s work with Irwin Altman on place attachment was one of the early texts in the field to look specifically at place using ethnographic methods.[41] In the text On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture, (2000) Low asserts that ethnography is typically filled with descriptions of place attachment and the relationships between people and place without the necessary work of examining these critical concepts and relationships. Low's decades-long ethnographic inquiry of two plazas in San José, Costa Rica seeks to uncover and illuminate the complex cultural, political and economic relationships between people and places. Low’s sustained ethnographic engagement with place and place attachment is evident in the extensive body of her published research.[42] In Ethnographies of Place: a New Urban Research Agenda, Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence explore how to explore vanished communities after local knowledge has been lost, and the places themselves have been redeveloped, removed or otherwise erased from the landscape as well as from immediate memory. Using archaeology and history, the research employs an ethnographic re-reading of place.[43]
The interest in the study of space and place reflects a trend evidenced by scholarly publications from the last decades and is evidenced as well by the expansion of online resources dedicated to the study of place and space. Although somewhat dated, the Research on Place and Space website remains a comprehensive online guide and introduction to place and space studies, resources and research.[44] The Arizona Institute for the Humanities Research together with the Iowa Project for Place Studies at the University of Iowa define place studies as an interdisciplinary area recognizing the centrality of natural, built, social, and cultural environments in the formation of individual, group, and communal identity, as well as the ways in which human beings interact with the world. Although “place” is grounded in local geography, they argue, it is the ground from which humans connect with virtually everything else. This site makes a call for understanding global ecosystems and economics in addition to local landscapes, community histories, and regional arts.[45] The digital humanities as a reflection of the interdisciplinary study of place includes an ever-growing bibliography of books, articles, blogs and websites.[46]Ethnography of the Street: When is a Place not a Place? illustrates the ways the place ethnography has been utilized on a small scale. [47] . The New York Times has also contributed to this growing body of research and practice withThe Power of Place: Doing Ethnographic Studies of Local Sites.[48]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up^ Etymology Online
  2. Jump up^ Merriam Webster Online
  3. Jump up^ The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Barnard and Spencer, Eds. Routledge, 2009, p. 243.
  4. Jump up^ Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media, Natalie M. Underberg and Elayne Zorn, UT Press, 2013
  5. Jump up^ Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction To Ethnography, 2nd Edition. M. Agar, Ed. Academic Press, 1996.
  6. Jump up^ Key Contemporary Thinkers on Space and Place, Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine, Eds. Sage, 2004
  7. Jump up^ Anthropology of Place and Space: Locating Culture, Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, Eds. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003
  8. Jump up^ Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003, p.1
  9. Jump up^ The Built Environment and Spatial Form. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 453-505. 1990. P. 459
  10. Jump up^ Expressing New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual and Memory, Phillip Gonzales, Ed. University of Arizona Press, 2007
  11. Jump up^ Gozales, 2007, p.27
  12. Jump up^ Center for Spacially Integrated Social Science
  13. Jump up^ [(http://www.edwardthall.com/ Life and Biography of Edward T. Hall]
  14. Jump up^ The language of sites in the politics of space, Kuper. Am. Anthropol.74:411-25, 1972
  15. Jump up^ See, for example, Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience, Tuan. University of Minnesota Press, 1977, and Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, Tuan. Prentice-Hall, 1974
  16. Jump up^ Yi Fu Tuan CV
  17. Jump up^ Philosophy in Geography, Tuan. Theory and Decision Library Volume 20, 1979, p. 387
  18. Jump up^ Philosophy in Geography, Tuan. Theory and Decision Library Volume 20, 1979, p. 387.
  19. Jump up^ [See http://www.doloreshayden.com/ for a complete list of works and reviews]
  20. Jump up^ American National Biography, John Brinckernoff Jackson
  21. Jump up^ A current story on the fate of the magazine is available online at [1]
  22. Jump up^ Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson, Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, Eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 2
  23. Jump up^ Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard. The New Press, 1997
  24. Jump up^ Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey. Blackwell, 1996.
  25. Jump up^ Spaces of Hope, David Harvey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 15
  26. Jump up^ Getting Back to Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place World, Edward S. Casey.Indiana University Press, 1993/2009, quotes are from the 2009 edition, p. xxi
  27. Jump up^ Ibid, p. xxii
  28. Jump up^ Land of Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico, Michael Trujillo. University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
  29. Jump up^ Place: A Short Introduction, Tim Creswell. Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 1
  30. Jump up^ Place: A Short Introduction, Tim Creswell. Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 7
  31. Jump up^ Ibid, 51
  32. Jump up^ Harvey 1996, p. 261
  33. Jump up^ Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache, Keith Basso. University of New Mexico Press, 1996
  34. Jump up^ Basso, p.xiv
  35. Jump up^ Ibid, ii.
  36. Jump up^ Ibid, p. 145.
  37. Jump up^ Ibid, p. 105
  38. Jump up^ Senses of Place, Feld and Basso, Eds. Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 1996
  39. Jump up^ Feld and Basso, p. 8
  40. Jump up^ Ethnography of Space and Place Course Syllabus
  41. Jump up^ Place Attachment, Irwin and Low, Eds. Plenum Press, 1992
  42. Jump up^ See, for example, Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space, American Ethnologist 23(4): 861-879, 1996. Behind the Gates: The New American Dream. Routledge, 2004. Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader. Rutgers University Press, 1999
  43. Jump up^ [dx.doi.orgEthnographies of place: a new urban research agenda, Mayne and Lawrence. Urban History, 26, pp 325-348, 1999]
  44. Jump up^ Research on Place and Space
  45. Jump up^ [ http://www.uiowa.edu/~ipops/index.html, Iowa Project for Place Studies]
  46. Jump up^ See, for example, [http://placeandspaceresearch.wordpress.com Place and Space Research
  47. Jump up^ When a Place is not a Place, by Martha Radice published in the March 2011 Anthropology News,
  48. Jump up^ http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/the-power-of-place-doing-ethnographic-studies-of-local-sites New York Times Learning Blogs]
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