ABSTRACT
Early approaches to understanding ‘place’ tended to focus on describing its characteristics. Geographer Fred Lukermann, for example, in the 1960s – as highlighted by Relph – characterized ‘place’ as being where (1) location is fundamental, (2) nature and culture are involved, (3) spaces are unique but interconnected and part of a framework of circulation, (4) spaces are localized, and (5) spaces are emerging or becoming, and have a historical component (Relph, 1976, p. 3). While this framework is useful for an elementary understanding of place, it adds the complex, related notion of ‘space’ and does not address the myriad ways in which one may interpret ‘place’, such as a physical place (a lakeshore), an activity (e.g., place of worship) and a figure of speech (‘she was put in her place’). ‘Place’ can also be explored in a cultural sense, as was the focus of Feld and Basso’s Senses of Place (1996), which contains ethnographies of what ‘place’ means to such populations as the Apache of Arizona and the Kaluli people of New Guinea in terms of expressing and knowing. Lippard in Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997) similarly discusses ‘place’ by blending history, geography, cultural/ social studies, and contemporary art.
