ABSTRACT
Writing cannot be anything but a personal experience. Yet in much academic writing the author usually keeps well out of the text. Paradoxically, however, ‘personal experience’ always takes place in conditions over which, at some level, we have little control: we have free will yet are always subject to larger determinations. As Marx famously said (though I cite him here as interpreted by Stuart Hall) men – and these days we would include women – make their own histories, ‘but under conditions which are not of their own choosing’ (S. Hall 1991b: 43). In this chapter I want to explore and also illustrate these and other propositions: how personal histories are embedded in larger histories, personal geographies in larger geographies. What may, at the time, seem to be the ‘smaller’ histories, geographies and sociologies of, for example, individual families, households or communities, are also part of ‘larger’ histories of regions, nation states, and empires. We are products of our circumstances.
