ABSTRACT
Not long ago, places were treated as locations of a space-time considered to be universal but accommodated in culturally specific representations and social experiences. Recently, a re-conceptualisation led some anthropologists to reverse this relationship. Contrary to the conception of local communities shaped as arenas of protest against expanding nations and the globe, the word ‘place’ was redefined and redeciphered as itself a forceful sensual and conceptual construction of attachment. The attachment is universally pervasive, not the premise either of universal or of globalised space and time (Feld and Basso (eds) 1996). To ‘bring places back in’ anthropologists have worked closely with cultural geographers and philosophers to give new qualities to place in which the universality of experience and structure of feeling in the body-place matrix weighs more than the materiality of local space-times (Casey 1996). While such studies of place can be compelling, they make me think of the different vision that sinological anthropologist Maurice Freedman a few decades ago tried to convey to us, in which a more historically informed sense of place is entailed.
