Region, Reveries, and Reverence

Abstract

Region, Reveries, and Reverence P a u l F. S ta rrs University of Nevada What do people make of places? The question is as old as people and places themselves, as old as human attachments to portions of the earth. As old, perhaps, as the idea of home, of “our territory” as opposed to “their territory,” of entire regions and local landscapes where groups of men and women have invested themselves (their thoughts, their values, their collective sensibilities) and to which they feel they belong. The question is as old as a strong sense of place—and the answer, if there is one, is every bit as complex (Basso 1996, p. xiii). For it is still the case that no one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined and limited stretch of it— “the world around here”... The banalities and distractions of the way we live now lead us, often enough, to lose sight of how much it mattersjust where we are and what it is like to be there. The ethnography of place is, if anything, more critical for those who are apt to imagine that all places are alike than for those who, listening to forest or experiencing stones, know better (Geertz 1996, p. 262). T h e REGION. To see a place made up of stories, with every slice and segment a deliberate expression of the diverse people who live there, all tinged and tinctured with difference, yet collectively con­ stituting a kind of community, is to understand that our world, drawn at whatever scale, has unending building blocks of regional parts. Regions provide our problems and questions, tasking geographers with becoming place experts, and commanding us to make compari­ sons that illuminate the novel and the commonplace lifeways of a spot, big or little, on the earth. Now, some of a region’s parts are great, others small. It falls to geographers to bear witness and map and theorize, making larger sense of a region. That is what we do, though always with varying levels of skill and sensitivity. Historians analyze events, geographers 194 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 61 • 1999 places. And so a complex winnowing is simply the foremost of geography’s glittering gifts. Proof is not in the primary material of raw observation, but in making sense and forming pattern. Divagat­ ing elements can rust in the front yard, no better than naked parts. Or bits and pieces can be bound and secured by the rawhide of narra­ tive, wit, analysis, and grace—think, for instance, of the fabulous boxes of Joseph Cornell, who was a master of what is dubbed “as­ semblage” (Solman 1997). Geographers in their best work are akin to the bricoleurs of Claude Lévi-Strauss (the tinkers, or handymen, or native thinkers of The Savage Mind), and our art is a kind of bricolage, a supremely ac­ complished tinkering and telling (Turkle and Papert 1990). For regional geographers, knowledge is concrete and contextual— as bricoleurs it is up to us to marshal a “set of techniques from which they pick and choose the appropriate ‘tool’ to be used in the situation at hand” (Rathbun, Saito, and Goodrum 1997; Schneider 1999, p. 1). After all, the tinker was known as much for spreading information, drawing connections, and bridging communities with news and no­ tice as for trading in any single good or making any actual repair. Of course, that is where more than a few regional treatments fall woe­ fully apart: in their lineaments and ligaments; in the telling. It also happens to be where many nongeographers have proved themselves masterful regional essayists. They write convincingly about places and variations. “It is still the case,” Clifford Geertz reminds us— an anthropologist of the sense of place— “that no one lives in the world in general” (Geertz 1996, p. 262). We know that. Or do we? Commencements Of late I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Spain, and along those lines I have had to think a good deal about who does Spain well. Instantly there come to mind Jan (née James) Morris...