Place and New Town

First, an announcement of sorts: If you had become emotionally invested in the idea of daily blog posts from me (I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who fills this category), I apologize for the reticence. The year might be almost over by the time I formulate a schedule that works, but I’ll keep trying.

Second, some of the readings I’ve done this week have turned my thoughts to the theoretical framework of my research, that is, the sorts of signs and occurrences and whatnot that I can admit as “data,” as well as the inferential oomph to turn the data into some meaningful statement. The texts in question–Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction and an article by anthropologist Margaret Rodman on emplacement in Vanuatu,  suggest that the cultural processes I identify as instrumental to spacemaking in New Town must accompany an identification of standpoint. Indeed, social actors make sense of their everyday realities from vantages which conduct or inhibit the reception of certain meanings and bits of knowledge. The resultant account, then, if taken as a monolithic proposition, will not say “New Towners understand space and spatiality as p,” but something like, “Town Management enacts q, the Commercial Association imagines z, and this one family comes to believe y.” Then I would describe the dynamics of the emergent process: how it becomes contested, propagated, etc.

Bourdieu does this by tracing socially positioned actors’ “trajectories” through a matrix of social and economic capital. I’m not quite done with him, so that post will come later. Here, though, is a quote from Rodman:

“We must acknowledge and try to understand the complex reality of the places in which we do fieldwork. But in empowering place conceptually, it must not be exoticized or misconstrued as the essence or totality of other cultures. Place must not become, for example, a metonym for Melanesia. The socially contested, dynamic construction of places represent the temporary grounding of ideas. These are often overlapping narratives of place […]. They can be competing narratives […]. We need to consider how different actors construct, contest, and ground experience in place.” [652]

Earlier in the article, Rodman refers to examples of these overlapping narratives and polyvocal constructions of place as she tours Vanuatu in turn with an old man, a young boy, and an old woman. You can find this article on JSTOR in .pdf.

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Rodman, Margaret C. 1992. Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality. American Anthropologist. 94 (3):640-656.

…and got potential cites for my thesis! Serendipity is wonderful.

One of the presenters at the conference, Esther Sternberg, mentioned her work on place and space, which will appear in a book this coming spring. Briefly, the panel discussion shifted to the human subject in her environment, and the relation this has to agency. Prof. Sternberg recounted the spatial manipulation at play in Disney World, in which (this is my memory speaking, so the specific details have probably suffered between then and now) “imagineers” consciously design channels through which people move, stop, behold scenery, gravitate somewhere, and so on. They release the smell of fudge at strategic junctions to create a salient (and salivary) convergence point, and position the Magic Kingdom castle so, approached from a certain direction, a series of shops will come into view rather suddenly, prompting abrupt consumer anxiety.

Research into the psychological effects of spatial production forms a sizable literature whose penetration might benefit this thesis research: as cultural processes render space intelligible, perhaps concurrently, space influences its participants unconsciously, impacting the form or course of social encounters in that space, or conditioning the emotional experience it affords. I may even find out how these psychological processes influence meaning. Get excited.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across this video on YouTube and did not get around to posting the link online. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed it within W&M’s Wordpress blog. The video comes from a realtor in New Town, and provides an overview of New Town from his perspective. He recorded it during the winter of last year, and you can see the decorative holly on the fence approaching the community on New Town Ave. Other signs of its age: Foundation Square hides behind scaffolding, Ironbound Gym has yet to obtain its jutting sign, and New Town banners had yet to achieve ubiquity.

Aside from these surface-level observations, the video evinces another quality of New Town: the social texture that conditions the space in New Town, as well as any research into it. Here’s a brief outline of preliminary observations that I may turn into fully fledged analytic points as I later trudge through my field notes.

1. New Town is layered with social networks and flows, ways of seeing the world, scopes of knowledge, and so on. This video demonstrates one such layer, that of the realtor’s interaction with potential buyers, developers, and whomever else, and the social spaces (or the appropriations of social spaces) that emerge from this. A video made by a shop owner or resident would, I would venture, proceed quite differently, as these groups seem to operate at least somewhat independently of one another. Hopefully I’ll have a better picture of the ways these layers form, and to what extent they are layers, stratified planes rather than supermposed and palimpsestic.
2. New Town is porous. It rests at the intersection of many overlapping circuits. The maker of this video, who sells homes all over Williamsburg, exemplifies this. An examination of social space in New Town, then, must acknowledge the systems that pass through it: governmental-administrative, environmental, cultural, and other sorts of divisions.

Time to head towards bed. Until later.

The title of this post is doubly significant. First, I have vowed to my Remember the Milk to-do list that I will try to blog something every day, no matter how trivial the topic (although not so trivial that it loses worth, if all goes well). This practice should keep my nose to my thesis work, since a pitching, yawing non-schedule has kept me well away from reading these past few weeks. Today marks a new era in self-discipline.

Second, the library phase of this project has taken a turn into the realm of consumerism and all it attends culturally. Social life in New Town, it seems from my rather limited time living over there, just doesn’t make sense unless foregrounded against an understanding of some broad, deeply formative trends. Specific examples from the fieldnotes will come later, once I’ve hashed them into discrete data points, but much of the things New Towners say, much of the forms which sociality takes there, even, occurs along what seems at first to be a capitalist/consumerist idiom.

To make sense of emplacement in New Town, then, I will have to answer some auxiliary questions: To what extent do the patterns of shared and negotiated meaning which nourish a society of “producers” and “consumers” (Are these terms even tenable in the milieu I consider? Another sub-question to consider!) creep into aspects of daily life that do not involve some immediate exchange of goods and services? Deeper still, how do consumption and production enter cultural processes in general? Put another way, How are subjects and subjectivities enmeshed in such scheme?

The literature on consumer society is humongous, but Prof. McGovern in the American Studies department offered me a reading list that should at least penetrate it. In the meantime (and this is where the blog format becomes particularly useful), do any of you fellow thesisniks know of some exemplary book or article or whatnot which addresses something along the lines of the above questions? I would much appreciate it.

Until tomorrow,

Paul

…in that I’m posting to this blog less frequently than I had imagined. The reason: I’ve willingly ceded all of my daily thesis time to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, which seeks to span the hitherto disjointed realms of mental and physical space with a heftily Marxian plank. He takes “production” quite literally, in fact. He also writes like a lava flow: dense, methodical, seeping into every available intellectual crevice with an omnidirectionally fumbling sort of curiosity, and with this infectious (when I read in the morning, as opposed to when I’d rather be sleeping) sort of vitality which lends its self to spirited if desultory pursuits of everything, like the best bar conversation you’ve ever had (except that he’d be a lousy barmate nowadays, having died and whatnot).

I’ll post something of substance on Lefebvre when I’ve finished with him. I’ll post something of what could pass as substance on New Town in general tomorrow, if all goes as planned.

[Edit: Swem’s site appears to be down, so no Worldcat citation wizardry. Instead, I give you the Amazon link to the book I’m reading now, right here.]

Welcome to the blogospheric face of my thesis project! I’ve been examining through anthropological goggles the sorts of things people do in and about New Town, and how “New Town”—the public and private roads, the houses and shops, not only in their physicality, but as represented in the consciousness of the folks who apprehend it and invoke it as a signifier—emerges from cultural processes.

The project extended pretty naturally from my developing interest in spaces as things anthropologists can study, especially the idea of a non-place (Augé 1995), which as Marc Augé frames it is that singular outgrowth of hypermodernity which, rather than mediate people’s relationships to each other, to history, and to some spatialized identity (the quality of being “from” somewhere), wipes away history, isolates its inhabitants, and actually confers identity and, you might say, subjectivity: on the freeway, person becomes driver, experiencing the present landscape as text and compressed images, articulating her agency through a technologically mediated universe. Of course, as Merriman (2004) notes, even the most insipid sorts of places have histories, and people still form relationships on the road, albeit through honks and bird-flips. Curiouser and curiouser!

Keep reading →