What is place? At the very least, a place possesses these several features: it locates and orients human beings (and other animals); it is the ground for a continuing and constantly revised history; it is a crucial source of meaning and thus a basis for the interpretation of cultural practices; and even when not thematized as such, it serves as an indispensable background for ongoing experiences. Given these minimal criteria of what counts as a place, it is hardly surprising that place was long neglected in the social sciences and other fields in the modern Western world. Since the early decades of the last century, the focus of these sciences (taking their clue from the paradigm of behaviourism in psychology) was on the specifics of human behaviour taken in isolation from surrounding environments.
The emphasis on the precise determination of the parameters of such behaviour meant that place, which resists being quantified, was not considered a valid subject of study: it was literally off-limits and thus was rarely considered as such. The effect was both to constrict the range of research and to objectify what was considered a legitimate object of investigation. Undergirding all this was an often unstated belief that time is the only pertinent dimension of human experience. This was presumed to be infinite (or at least unending) in extent and homogeneous in constitution, whereas place is neither: particular places are always markedly delimited and they are composed of quite diverse contents (things, peoples, practices, histories).
It is not surprising, then, that place failed to be recognized as having intrinsic importance in the theory and practice of the social sciences throughout most of the twentieth century. It was not until the role of ‘natural contexts’, in Ulrich Neisser’s term, was singled out in the last decades of this century that place came to be regarded as a constituent of all significant human experience and knowledge (Neisser 1982; Gibson 1986). For the life-worlds of humans are ineluctably place-worlds: in their restless agililty, these beings move continually from one place to another. When they are not lingering in one place, they are on their way to another place, so that a placeless world is unimaginable for them — and yet such a world was assumed to be the case in much prior theorizing. Moreover, place is not only part of local culture, a merely provincial matter; it provides the indispensable setting of all culture. The same is true of behavior: there is no such thing as unplaced human conduct.
Matters changed dramatically when Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place appeared in the mid-1970s. The work of these bold cultural geographers, and of others who soon followed in their wake — such as Anne Buttimer and David Seamon, Nicholas Entrikin, and Robert Sack — opened up an expansive vision of how place figures ineluctably and yet differentially in human experience, especially in its cultural reaches. Building on this base, place has received widespread attention among anthropologists, landscape archaeologists, cultural cartographers, cognitive psychologists,sociologists, and social historians in the last three decades.
In fact, there is now a systematic recognition of the centrality of place in all of the leading (and several recently emerging) social sciences, and it is now widely held to be a major variable in these various forms of inquiry, which have pursued its detailed description in different idioms. Further, the social and political bearing of places have come under intense scrutiny (Agnew 1987; Agnew and Duncan 1990). The same holds for gendered aspects of place and the implications of place itself for gender (Massey 1994; Irigaray 1993). Places are selected for description from far-flung cultures, especially in the work of anthropologists of place. Basso and Feld co-edited Senses of Place (1996), in which the role of place in a striking variety of cultural settings is set out in detail. In an Afterword to this volume, "Clifford Geertz argues for place as an inalienable aspect of all human cultural praxis.
Philosophers have discussed place in ways that have proven of special interest to social scientists. Edward Casey has emphasized the role of the active body in the constitution of place: on his conception, there is no place without the intervention of the lived body and no such body without a surrounding place in which to be situated (Casey 1997). Jeffrey Malpas explores the ingredience of place in the subjectivity of human beings and shows how being-in-the-world (in "Heidegger’s term) is wholly bound up with place (Malpas 1999). The work of Casey and Malpas carries on, in a phenomenological key, the earlier research of "Foucault, who dissected the spatiality of human institutions such as the prison, the hospital, and the school as these were constructed in eighteenth-century Europe (Fou-cault 1977) as well as that of "Deleuze and Guattari, who detail the dense dialectic of terri-torialization, deterritorialization, and reterritor-ialization in human history (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The same work also rejoins the ‘topoanalysis’ of Gaston Bachelard, who decades ago investigated the subtle placial dimensions of domestic spaces, as well as the emphasis on dwelling on earth as this has been described by Heidegger (Bachelard 1964; Heidegger 1971).
What has been called the ‘spatial revolution’ in many fields is in effect a turning to place. What is at stake is in fact the fate of place and not of space — much less of time (Casey 1997). Place is now acknowledged as a feature of lived experience that cannot be overlooked in any thorough consideration of how human beings and other animals inhabit the earth. They do so by establishing places on it — places in which they dwell and between which they move. In light of this pervasive dimension of life on earth, the social sciences, in tandem with cultural geography and other allied fields, are called upon to take more complete account of the radical pla-cialization of experience as it is studied in their respective domains of inquiry.
