Space, Place, Emergence

Abstract

The idea for this special issue emerged during a conversation at a meeting of the Western States Folklore Society. Space and had taken such a central position in general social theory, we wondered, was there anything left to say about it? Could folklorists contribute to that conversation? Were folklorists even interested in anymore, or had they moved on to other place-less topics? To judge from over thirty-five responses to our call for papers on the broad subject of unbounding place, including a number from outside the US, the topic is alive and well. We sincerely regret having to decline many interesting proposals in the interest of space (no pun intended), but are impressed that the subject remains of active interest to our colleagues in folklore and related fields. In the end, we accepted these six papers. Our goal is modest: to present an array of papers on the subject, each of which contributes something to the overall idea of space and as being more than simply location. From this range, we extracted a few tropes or themes that focus on space and in an unbounded world. We hope that others might find them a useful starting point for conversation. Anyone interested in space and soon discovers a vast body of scholarship so broad in scope it easily becomes unmoored. If we have learned anything, it is that spaces and places essentially are conflicted: they are sites of struggle, not the least among academics over proper theoretical and methodological models for studying such subjects. For example, so many websites, and websites of websites are devoted to the study of space and that one could spend days merely looking at online materials before cracking a single book.1 The subject interests much of the humanities and social sciences-folklore as well as such disciplines as history, creative non-fiction, literary studies, American Studies, anthropology, architecture, geography, philosophy, and sociology. The fact that the words space and are useful metaphors (Smith and Katz 1993) compounds the problem. We can talk of actual locations, but spatial metaphors expand these basic concepts in apparently unlimited as well as useful ways, making them seem applicable to everything and tempting us to mistake metaphor for reality. Literature reviews are impossible, therefore; the following provides only a sketch of some basic issues as they pertain to the history of folklore studies. In folklore, our academic home, studies of space and are grounded in regional studies that were the focus of the early- and mid-twentieth century. These regional studies typically focused on defining particular geographic regions, on collecting within already-loosely-defined-or-subjectively-felt regions, or on relationships between culture and landscape, perspectives that were critiqued at the same time they were developed (e.g., Halpert 1947), a fact not always acknowledged (see also Green 1978; Nicolaisen 1976). Well-known early figures include such notables as Benjamin Botkin, Vance Randolph, and Richard Dorson. Many were influenced by, or trained in, classical scholarship in humanist and cultural geography, as revealed particularly in the early work of Henry Classic ([1968]197l),Joan Miller (1968) and others. Useful overviews of this scholarship can be found in Alien 1990 and Ryden 1993; see also Hufford 2002 for new takes on regionalism. Later approaches emphasized regional consciousness as collective identity (Jones 1976; Dorson 1964; Clements 1979; Stewart, Siporin, Sullivan and Jones 2000, Lightfoot 1983, Hufford 1986) as well as experiential and locallyconstructed meanings of drawn from the early work of Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, 1977), loosely organized under labels such as place-attachment studies, topophilia, phenomenological approaches, and sense of place studies2 (Classic 1982; Alien and Schlereth 1990; Ryden 1993; Feld and Basso 1996; Altman and Low 1992, Sanders 1993, Lopez 2000, Hiss 1990, Wilson 2000). …