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| 1 |
ID:
139620
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores Sindh, today a province in Pakistan, in terms of its spatial relationship with the various overlapping ‘worlds’ to which it has belonged in the recent past. Sindh's reputation under the British was as a sleepy backwater, located at a distance from centres of colonial power. But this simplistically static picture belies its relationship, for instance, with new communication and transportation links that connected it in different ways to places outside its immediate provincial boundaries, whether Indian, imperial or international. By the time of British India's independence, Sindh (and its port city of Karachi in particular) constituted a major crossroads: and while in the second half of the twentieth century it became more of a hub than it had ever been in its history, equally never before had so many people made it their final destination and home. This article, thus, traces the interconnected processes that, both before and since 1947, have helped to position, and arguably redefine, Sindh's place in the world.
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| 2 |
ID:
193006
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In the early-twentieth century, Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the fellaheen (peasantry). In this article, the author examines how Canaan’s expansive collection of stories related to holy sites across Palestine in Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. In so doing, she contends that Canaan both contests orientalist constructions of the Holy Land as frozen in biblical time and, critically, unsettles the very spatiotemporal logic governing dominant colonial narrations of place. This epistemic shift, the author concludes, is the result of Canaan’s recentering of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries that have so far circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work.
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| 3 |
ID:
115816
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In recent years several historical publications have appeared in Kyrgyzstan which are far from homogeneous in terms of style, form and content. In this article, two very different local histories written by Kyrgyz authors from the same village are analysed and compared. The first author is a former kolkhoz president who produced two books that basically cover the time from the end of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. His work is strongly (auto)biographical and focuses on individual achievements and personal experiences. The second author is a mathematician who wrote two books about the history of his own descent category (uruu). His work combines oral history (sanjyra) with written sources. The two authors create very different images of 'esteemed people' (ardaktuu adamdar), yet they exhibit a common interest in producing a narrative that links the deeds of one's own people (family or descent group) with the history of particular places (pastures, villages or regions). Taking up these observations, the author argues that local histories relate to different types of memory and are far from uniform with regard to their composition, sources, methods and narrative strategies. Yet, despite their diversity, the newly developed genres of 'written collective memory' provide the idea of social continuity by stressing connections between past and present, and between people, land and morality. This may indeed be one reason why collective memories, which were suppressed for many decades, have become so popular in times of rapid social transformation.
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| 4 |
ID:
100034
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
It is well known that traditional communities relate to their settlements differently from modern ones, and that in the developing world contemporary settlements often constitute dualistic communities, holding contrasting perceptions of place. Sri Lanka's traditional communities have been fashioned by historically evolved conceptions of the world comprised of supernatural beings and their interrelationships; reverence for nature and spirits underpin everyday activities and life expectations. The monks and peasants who were the main occupants of such villages articulated their conceptions of place around the duality of the sacred and the profane, a mode of conceptualisation still embedded in everyday language and behaviour. The paper elucidates the structure and the conceptualisations of the significant places in traditional Sri Lankan villages. It discusses how they have become, with globalisation, diffused, yet remain at the core of local conceptualisations.
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| 5 |
ID:
120726
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Formal schooling was virtually non-existent before the Soviet power in nomadic Kyrgyzstan, as communal life and learning was organized informally at the household and clan level. During the Soviet period, however, educational success became an avenue to a new form of upward social and geographical mobility, and the school provided new and prestigious positions for local teachers and administrators. This paper explores how the externally imposed Soviet collectivization policies reshaped the understandings and meanings of place and community during the twentieth century, a reshaping that centrally involved redefining education and the importance of 'the school'. In the post-Soviet period, the utility of secondary and higher education in local and national labour markets has diminished, as has the power and prestige of educators. Yet the appeal of education lingers on. The authors seek to document these claims using oral histories, ethnographic interviews and participant observations in the Ylay Talaa Valley of the Kyrgyz Republic.
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| 6 |
ID:
175361
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| Summary/Abstract |
By adopting a spatial approach to analysis, this article examines the significance of death in Timor-Leste and its relationship to security and peace. The main argument is that a person’s security in Timor-Leste is very often made possible via the sustaining of what is referred to here as ‘cognate communities’ which comprise both the living and the spirits of the ancestral dead. Grave-making as a form of ‘emplaced security’ – an expression of agency which results in the creation or transformation of a place in order to mitigate threat – enables a particular kind of space whereby the living as part of cognate communities are able to venerate their dead. In turn, engagement with the ‘spatial turn’ demonstrates how this form of emplaced security is not static, but rather is dynamic and adaptive as communities formed through custom constantly interact with broader social changes and spatial transformations. Even as grave-making represents a micro-form of emplacement, such acts both produce and respond to different spatial orders, including more abstract forms bound up with nation formation. As such, the ‘spatial turn’ shows how burial represents both an intimate and petite act of place-making while also intersecting with different spatial orders and scales that interact with meta-narratives including religion, modernisation and nationalism.
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| 7 |
ID:
145855
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| Summary/Abstract |
The concept of indigeneity is highly problematic in Asia, where a heightened degree of spatial mobility and ethnic fluidity challenge conventional understandings of Indigenous peoples (IPs) as rooted, stable, and unchanging from time immemorial. As some scholars have argued, however, this conception of indigeneity ignores the fact that many IPs have had multiple experiences of displacement due to their colonization by outsiders. Here, the authors discuss one such group – the Akha minority residing throughout the Upper Mekong Region – that in spite of multiple historical experiences of displacement, marginalization, and, more recently, colonization has maintained an intimate connection with their ancestral homeland. Akha have maintained this connection by way of their ‘intimate place-making cosmographies’, whereby non-Akha space is reconfigured as a microcosmic totality of the larger Akha cosmos. These practices have allowed for Akha to sustain and vitalize their distinct identity as Akha in the face of various external pressures from non-Akha others.
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| 8 |
ID:
175362
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and perform practices, including why they sometimes identify and behave in counterproductive, and even damaging, ways. The final section considers why an analytical focus on place is valuable, noting that place-based experiences and place-identities are formative of ontological security. It argues that treating interveners as a referent object provides opportunities to rethink the tendency to focus on home as the key site of emplacement in the ontological security literature. Building on this, it argues that examining the emplaced security of interveners invites us to examine the political nature and consequences of interveners’ physical and ontological security-seeking narratives and practices, including their creation of the material and ideational structures of intervention spaces and places.
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| 9 |
ID:
101038
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The emergence in the United States of an increasing number of spaces across the socioeconomic spectrum with majority nonwhite populations merits close attention because of these spaces' potential in reconfiguring historical and contemporary claims to place. In an era in which the neoliberalization of urban development has spurred local governments toward more active involvement in defining relationships between race, ethnicity, consumption, and space, "majority-minority" suburbs are particularly important sites of study. In the late 2000s, two branding campaigns in majority-Asian American and Latina/o municipalities in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley-a densely populated region popularly known as a "suburban Chinatown"-put forth specific discourses of race, ethnicity, and culture in attempts to actualize specific visions and claims to place, identity, and history. In doing so, these campaigns illuminated and reinforced larger racial, geographic, and ideological divides. "Diversity" on Main Street embraced pluralist multicultural discourses of the nation, while the "Golden Mile" proposal sought to showcase the transformation of a central thoroughfare by ethnic Chinese capital and immigration. A close examination and comparison of these two campaigns shows how struggles over race, geography, and history are intertwined in the contemporary identities of places and integral to the shaping of civic landscapes.
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| 10 |
ID:
180678
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| Summary/Abstract |
This in-depth analysis of the aesthetics of place and person in ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a famous short story by Saadat Hassan Manto, and a masterpiece of South Asian literature in English, presents a re-reading in the light of ecotheoretical concepts of ‘place’. It theorises how material space as ‘place’ is represented in literature and brings to light the hegemony of sociocultural discourses in relation to space, belittling its connection to nature. Ecotheory raises concerns of human and non-human life within the natural ecosystem of specific indigenous places. The protagonist of the story, Bishan Singh, ultimately also the namesake of a place, Toba Tek Singh, dies a terrible death while desperately searching for his native place. The article presents the story as a powerful literary attempt to re-imagine the places and spaces where we live and our relations to them.
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| 11 |
ID:
143702
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| Summary/Abstract |
The authors give an updated definition of EW forces as an arm of the Land Forces, offer their view of EW targets, and also the very special style the EW forces use to fight their electronic and information war in an army operation
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| 12 |
ID:
166887
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. ‘Place’ encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; ‘body’ takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and ‘story’ refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.
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| 13 |
ID:
087481
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Starting from the premise that mobility is a fundamental social issue, this article addresses the impact of mobility and place on identity. Three major schools of thought addressing this issue are examined: the socio-historical approach of Giddens (1991) and Bauman (1997, 2001) that describes a shift over the last century from place-based (prescribed) identities to mobile (achieved) identities; recent theories in sociology that see identity as mobile, dynamic, hybrid, and relational; and recent theories in geography that consider the relationship between place and identity. With reference to my own research into the migration experiences of a group of young adults in Australia, I argue that both mobility and place are essential components of identity construction and discuss the complex inter-relationships between mobility, place, and identity.
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| 14 |
ID:
123930
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article considers the entanglements of race, culture and place in Puerto Rico. I analyse two distinct constructions of blackness that sustain racial hierarchies intrinsic to Puerto Rican 'racial democracy'. First, 'folkloric blackness' is a static, historicised version of blackness that represents Puerto Rico's African heritage without compromising the whitening bias of racial democracy discourse. A second construction of blackness that I term 'urban blackness' also circulates throughout the island, but instead serves as the counterpoint to the rest of the presumably 'whiter' Puerto Rico. Both have been emplaced within distinct, bounded locations, and affiliated with certain cultural practices. I argue that these 'emplacements' that arise from the associations between race, culture and place produce specific constructions of blackness that appear contradictory, yet ultimately work together to maintain the racial hierarchies intrinsic to racial democracy discourses.
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| 15 |
ID:
145043
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| Summary/Abstract |
Regent Park was built with great optimism in the 1950s as a public housing neighbourhood in Toronto. Over the years, however, it has come to be seen as a failure of this ideal and stigmatized as a poor, crime-ridden, violent neighbourhood with large numbers of visible minorities and immigrants. Recent urban revitalization efforts have aimed to transform the physical space as well as to re-brand the neighbourhood in more positive ways as part of a diverse, multicultural city. This paper critically considers the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a place, between the external representations of the city’s urban developers and the internal, “lived experiences” of its Muslim residents. It analyses the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a Muslim place within the representation of Toronto as a Canadian, multicultural city.
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| 16 |
ID:
158932
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| Summary/Abstract |
The subject of ‘leisure’, although extensively studied by scholars of multiple disciplines, has often lacked systematic theorization, so far as gendered spatialities are concerned. This paper attempts to address this gap by exploring how space and place relate to gendered leisure practices. Based on a primary survey in the city of Kolkata, India, this paper explores both the place-specific conditions and the person-specific experiences of leisure in the context of new consumption spaces (NCSs). The paper observes that, although these spaces have provided women with new ‘freedom’ to stroll around in public spaces by providing ‘safe’ and ‘civil’ environs, one should refrain from an unproblematic interpretation of this freedom. This is because the usual constraints on women’s leisure continue to apply, even as they ‘freely’ engage with NCSs to spend their leisure time. Local cultural specificities get invested within these ‘global’ spaces and continue to define the ‘appropriateness’ of place, time, and company for women to be enjoying their leisure in their own right. Thus, these spaces actively participate in the reproduction of existential gendered realities and lived experiences, albeit tacitly.
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| 17 |
ID:
166711
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| Summary/Abstract |
The notion of place is quite useful to account for local acceptance of energy transitions. Using semi-structured interviews and content analysis, this article explores how new places are imagined or formed in opposition to wind farms in South Korea, with a focus on the memory of place disruption and sensory interactions with wind turbines. First, residents opposed to the construction of wind farms imagine negative places in opposition to future energy transitions, such as places in which landslides and ecological disruptions have occurred, based on trauma from past place disruption. Second, residents' sensory experiences of the noise created by wind turbines and the turbines' aviation-obstruction lights form concepts of artificial, urban, or mechanical places in opposition to the natural or rural quality of the places prior to wind turbine construction. These negative places that are formed based on memory and sensory input drive opposition to wind turbines. Therefore, place-people relations should be adequately and carefully discussed in both site-planning and community engagement processes associated with wind farms.
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| 18 |
ID:
141469
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| Summary/Abstract |
While recent scholarship on migration has reflected growing attention to gender and to the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality, there has been little focus on women’s emotional and bodily responses to migration in the context of larger structures of sexism, racism and the legacies of colonialism. In this paper, I examine some literary portrayals of how migrant women’s relationships with specific places of origin and settlement, both steeped in structural relationships of unequal power and experienced on an immediate, psychological and bodily plane, are fundamental to migrant women’s changing sense of belonging and identity. Jamaica Kincaid in her novel Lucy, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions and Dionne Brand in the opening poems of her volume No Language is Neutral evoke some of the complex ways in which migration can affect women’s lives and identities, thus both complementing and critiquing some contemporary theorisations of migration and migrant identities.
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| 19 |
ID:
165738
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| Summary/Abstract |
The employment of diverse forms of security and control on territorial borders have led to the production of numerous events of border crossings, smuggling, banditry and death along with stories of separation, loss, mourning, pain, and yearning in the everyday life of border people. The Naqshbandi Khaznavi order has an expansive interpersonal social network across the political borders of Turkish and Syrian nation-states. This work analyzes the ways in which Sufis dealt with diverse aspects of the Turkish-Syrian border by unbinding shackles and orders of political system that were fabricated constantly from the 1920s to the early 1980s. The life stories and narratives of the Sufis document the existence of a religious-cultural landscape, diversifying the perception of place, time and fear which have transcended political borders for decades, contradicting official cartographic imagination and the modern-secular understanding of place and time. Besides, in addition to analyses of religious orders as social, economic and political entities, this work aims to elucidate emotional aspects of relations and faith that coexist between Sufis and their Sheikh in the context of spatial distance, political border and fear of death.
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| 20 |
ID:
113871
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Though there is a danger that 'place' may become subsumed or ignored in research as attention now shifts to questions of 'mobility,' discussion of place has burgeoned throughout academia. Many texts declare that place is important, or proclaim the power of place. While place has been shown to be a fundamental part of human existence, what does this then mean for those who are characterized as not being interested in places? Examining nomadic Gypsies and Travelers in Britain, who are often constructed as placeless, highlights that this is not simply a representational concern, but has a tangible empirical affect, impinging on their everyday practices as well as influencing policies and laws that actively deny them their right to place. By exploring various definitions of place and how this impacts the understanding of mobilities, I demonstrate that the meaning ascribed to nomads is dependent upon a spatialized definition of place which is underpinned by the space-place binary. It is this aspect of the discourse that allows for nomads to be constructed as out-of-place wherever they are, and by recognizing this we can avoid framing placelessness as a natural characteristic of nomadism. Reconceptualizing place allows for more nuanced understandings of nomadism, as our identities are constructed in relation to both place and mobility, not just one or the other.
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