ABSTRACT

To speak of practices as situated is not merely to speak of their 'broader situation', (Topalov, 2003) their local and wider context, or of their historical setting; but of their enactment and procedure at particular sites. It is, in a word, to speak of their site-uatedness. And of the inter-actions and inter-relations through which the site is perpetually (re)constiruted. And all that consequently follows. No site of human activity may be reduced ontologically to its locational co-ordinates, to the precise space it occupies, and nothing more. No such site may be divorced from its situation, from its actual relations to its (near and distant) surroundings, from all the more or less transitory circumstances that come into nexus there. Being always situated, practices are always contingent upon what does or does not come into conjuncture at their specific sites, upon the variously scaled interconnections, the variously scaled processes, the multiplicity of shifting networks, that do or do not come into nexus there. Or upon what is or is not there. But what is or is not there at any site - however areally delimited - is never solely a matter of the palpable and the measurable, the concretely apparent, the materially present. It is never solely a matter of visible macro-and micro-geographies - of the built landscape, land-use patterns and a physically extensive infrastructure; of the instruments, furniture and miscellaneous artifacts to be found in the interior spaces of a building. Nor is what comes into nexus at a site limited to the optically evident, to the movements of goods and people originating or terminating there. Situatedness is also a matter of the nexus of invisible geographies that are every bit as real as their visible counterparts - and every bit as much an intended or unintended consequence of previous situated practices.