1.1sheHuman Identity and the Particularity of Place

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Human Identity and the Particularity of Place

Sheldrake, Philip.

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring

2001, pp. 43-64 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/scs.2001.0018

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historically, the Christian tradition has been ambivalent about the subject. This inpart reflects a tension between place and placelessness that dates back to the

biblical origins of Christian faith. The unfortunate result, however, is that in current

debates about the future of place, the Christian theological voice contributes

very little apart from occasional references to specific environmental issues.

I want to suggest ways in which we may think about place as a spiritual

issue. These are not intended to be comprehensive but, rather, are pointers to

stimulate further questions. Place has become a significant theme in a wide range

of writing, including philosophy, cultural history, anthropology, human geography,

architectural theory, and contemporary literature. Attempts by spirituality to

reflect comprehensively on place must therefore be interdisciplinary, while

making solid connections with theological themes. This essay begins by offering aphenomenological analysis of place in contemporary culture. It concludes with

an attempt at a theological reconstruction of a sense of place that is capable

both of expressing the particularity of incarnational spirituality and of making

room for marginalized groups.

CULTURE AND WORLD VIEWS

The preoccupation with place reflects in part what a number of commentators

refer to as a cultural crisis in Western societiesa sense of rootlessness, dislocation,

or displacement. Part of this crisis lies in a decline of traditional systems of reli-

gious, ethical, and social values and symbols. The resulting fragmentation (often

labeledpostmodernity) tends, among other things, to inhibit coherent world-views.

We not only live in the world; we also have an image of the world. People in

any society exist within a system of signs through which they identify themselves

and understand their world. This process is conditioned in part by fundamental

beliefs about God or about the nature of the human condition. The world that

surrounds them is not simply raw data but something they experience as bearing

meaning. Indeed, the very notion of the world is a human construct. We do not

dwell in pure nature but in the realm of mediated meaning.2 This system of

meaning is what many anthropologists and philosophers nowadays understand by

the term culture. Culture denotes an historically transmitted pattern of mean-

ings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic

forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their

knowledge about and attitudes toward life.3 This semiotic approach emphasizes

that culture is a text, with many layers of meaning. It demands sophisticated

reading rather than relatively straightforward classification and explanation.

[A]s interworked systems of construable signs . . . culture is not a power, some-

thing to which social events, behaviours, institutions or processes can be causally

attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligiblythat is,

thicklydescribed.4


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The symbols, rituals, attitudes, and perspectives about life that constitute cultureenable human societies to cohere and function. Culture regulates how people

assign meaning and allocate value in terms of the key elements of human life. It

defines peoples social, economic, political, and religious behavior.

Human society is in permanent motion, change and development. At different

times and in different cultures men perceive and interpret the world in their own

fashion, and in their own fashion they organise their impressions and their

knowledge, and construct their own historically conditioned worldview.5

Without becoming embroiled in technical discussions about cultural theory,

some recent shifts of understanding are relevant. Essentially, the older assumption

that the world is simply a mosaic of separate cultures is now questionable. On theone hand, technology, rapid travel, and contemporary economic processes have

produced a rapid increase in regional and global connections. Place is no longer

simply local. On the other hand, when we turn our attention to the cultures

associated with particular peoples and places, culture is no longer seen as an

ordered phenomenon. Cultures previously viewed as homogeneous are now

revealed as plural, often fragmented, and inextricably associated with issues of

dominance and exclusionin other words, with power. All this has a significant

impact on our perceptions of place and any spiritual reflections on it, precisely

because place has emerged as a contested reality.6

PLACE IS A CULTURAL CATEGORY

Because place has a determining influence on the way people behave, think, or

organize their lives and relationships, few other cultural categories express its

world picture so clearly.7 Physical places are vital sources of metaphors for social

constructions of reality. Metaphors are not mere options or embellishments to our

normal ways of thinking and speaking. Metaphors define our perceptions of

reality.8

Places form landscapes and landscapes may be defined as sets of relational places

each embodying (literally and metaphorically) emotions, memories and associa-

tions derived from personal and interpersonal shared experience.9

The most prolific contributions to contemporary understandings of place come

from the work of cultural geographers and anthropologists who often rely on the

phenomenology of Martin Heidegger (the concept of dwelling) or on

postmodern thinkers such as Michel de Certeau (the question of belonging). In

recent years, writers on place have turned their attention to the issue of social

identity in relation to roots and rootlessness, and, provoked by the various forms

of displacement, to the politics of place, especially to what is referred to as geog-

raphies of struggle and resistance.


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PLACE AND SPACE

Philosophical reflections on place have turned away from the notion that empty

space is the natural reality and that place is a secondary, albeit necessary, social

construction that gives meaning to what is otherwise a tabula rasa. Older scientific

views of reality suggested that space was absolute, infinite, empty, and a priori.

Place (or more accurately, places) was a mere division or compartmentaliza-

tion of natural space. This view is problematic in several ways. First, it suggests

that there really is such an objective reality as nature apart from how we

interpret it, a view associated with an intellectual preference for the universal or

general over the local or particular, and for abstract definitions and objective

knowledge over lived experience. Second, such a view renders nature into a

morally neutral object on which we can impose whatever we choose. Such intellec-tual preferences tend to marginalize individual stories in favor of a single

overarching narrative. The issue is, therefore, not merely philosophical but also

political, ethical, and, indeed, spiritual.

Third, the notion of space as three-dimensional, geometrical, evenly extended,

and divisible into commensurate sections has been complicated by the theory of

relativity and developments in particle physics, and even by the psychology of

perception. Space does not exist as a simple given; it is subjectively perceived and

experienced differently depending on perspective. For example, space can now be

compressed. New methods of communication and travel enable us to span greater

distances in both time and space than we could achieve even twenty-five years ago. In

that sense, the world may be described as smaller. Contemporary theorists are inclined

to say that it may be more appropriate to speak of a sense of place preceding and

creating a sense of space. Space is now conceived as an abstract, analytical

concept whereas place is always tangible, physical, specific, and relational.

Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, and Edward Casey

have re-embraced a conviction that place is prior to space. We come to know in

terms of our knowledge of specific places before we come to know space as a

whole or in the abstract.10 According to Heidegger, Spaces receive their being

from places and not from space.11 In his essay, An Ontological Consideration

of Place, Heidegger insisted that place is the house of being.12 Elsewhere, he

stated that, To say that mortals are is to say that in dwellingthey persist through

spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations.13 To be a person, for

Heidegger, was Dasein, or being-therein other words, to be thereas a person

in a particular place.

Walter Brueggemann has underscored the important distinction between

space and place: It is within the spatial connections of human life that we

most deeply encounter the meaning of existence.

Place is space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened

which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across


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generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have

established identity, defined vocation and envisioned destiny. Place is space in

which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have

been issued. Place is indeed a protest against an unpromising pursuit of space. It isa declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence

of commitment, and undefined freedom . . . whereas pursuit of space may be a

flight from history, a yearning for a place is a decision to enter history with an

identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage.14

Place depends on relationships and memories as much as on physical features. It is

a complex network of relationships, connections and continuities . . . of physical,

social and cultural conditions that describe my actions, my responses, my awareness

and that give shape and content to the very life that is me.15

PLACE AND SOCIAL CRISIS

Another dimension of the contemporary crisis of place is social. People in the West

are increasingly an uprooted people, living out of place. Social geographers

suggest that while it is essential to have place identity, we have since the Second

World War de-emphasized place for the sake of values such as mobility, central-

ization, or economic rationalization. The global relativity of space dissolves a

human sense of place. The skyscrapers, airports, freeways, and other stereotypical

components of modern landscapesare they not the sacred symbols of a

Barn Interior. Photograph by Michael Johnson.


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civilisation that has deified reach and derided home?16

Indeed, mobility is nowunderstood to be a freedom bought by money and education. Remaining in the

same place symbolizes a lack of choice that is the lot of the poor, the elderly, and

people with disabilities. In an increasingly placeless culture we become standardised,

removable, replaceable, easily transported and transferred from one location to

another.17

The French anthropologist Marc Aug describes what he terms non-place. He

distinguishes between place, filled with historical monuments and creative of social

life, and non-place, where no organic social life is possible. By non-place Aug

means the contexts where we spend increasingly more timesupermarkets,

airports, hotels, motorways, in front of the television, sitting at a computer, and so

onbringing about a fragmentation of awareness that leads to incoherence inrelation to the world. Aug describes non-place as curious places which are

both everywhere and nowhere. By contrast, place is simultaneously a concrete

and symbolic construction of space that serves as a reference point. Place is also

a principle of meaning for those who live in it and a principle of intelligibility for

those who observe it. Unlike non-place, place has three essential characteristics:

it engages with our identity, with our relationships, and with our history.18 In a

dramatically delocalized world, what is locality? It seems to have lost its

ontological moorings.19

PLACE AND BELONGING

It is this sense of placelessness that makes the contemporary Western quest for

meaning so concerned with roots. According to Brueggemann, There are no

meanings apart from roots.20 Our longing for place is more than biological or

aesthetic. Simone Weil suggests that the hunger for roots is fundamental to our

deepest identity:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the

human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of

his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves

in living shape certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a

natural one, the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of

birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to havemultiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral

intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a

natural part.21

We also seek authentic place in other ways. A sense of home seems vital if

human identities are not to be fragmented. Is it simply the native placeliterally

the place of birth? The Poetics of Space,by the French philosopher Gaston

Bachelard, is one of the most influential books on home. For our house is our


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corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos inevery sense of the word. But home is more than simply where we originate. All

really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home.22 Bachelards

emphasis on home undoubtedly reflects a tendency in the West since the nineteenth

century to idealize domesticity as the shaping symbol of a satisfactory life. Even if

we agree that specific twentieth-century cultural and historical factors shape the

emphasis on home, dwelling, and roots in the writings of, for example,

Heidegger, Bachelard, and Weil, these concepts nevertheless represent critical truths

about our spatial experience. First, home represents our need for a location

where we can pass through the stages of life and develop our fullest self. Second,

we need a place where we belong to a community. Third, we need a place that

offers a fruitful relationship with the natural elements and with the rhythms of theseasons. Finally, we need a place that offers access to the sacred (however we

understand that term), and perhaps, crucially, relates us to life itself as sacred.23

Belonging involves both our connection to specific places and also our

existence within networks of stable relationships. In Europe until recently, the

parish was the boundary of many peoples worlds. This was both a geographical

and social reality, with inextricable links between where you came from and who

you were now. The parish tended to dominate human associations. People be-

longed to it from birth to death and beyondtheir ancestors were already in the

churchyard and they would doubtless be buried there in turn. This sense of place,

shaped by social and religious ties as well as landscape, was intense. Even the next

valley was other, strange and foreign. People felt spiritually and humanlydislocated when they moved, voluntarily or not, beyond familiar boundaries. The

parish determined not only the behavior of people who belonged to it but also how

they thought and feltor did not feelas the case may be. A recorded medieval

anecdote states that one man remained completely unmoved when a whole church

full of people wept over a particular sermon. When asked why he alone had not

cried, he looked surprised and replied, But Im from another parish.24

The fact that identity has traditionally been so strongly placed explains in

part why the concept of travel is so ambiguous. Well-traveled is often used as

a metaphor for wisdom and moral authority, yet at the same time, the people

called travelers (the gypsies,gens de voyage), are amongst the most feared and

disliked people in Europe. Our suspicion of professional travelers also explains inpart why being in trade as opposed to holding land has historically been viewed

as socially inferiortraders cross boundaries and are therefore aliens and strangers

wherever they go.

Recent studies of the history of European anti-Semitism, particularly during

the Middle Ages, reinforce this understanding, revealing that one element in the

widespread antipathy to Jews was their prominence as merchants and traders. As a

result, Jews came to symbolize the strangers who intrude into stable, fixed

locations to disturb their inhabitants. Jews had no fixed place in the social environ-


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ment. They might, individually, be people of wit and charm but they had noorganic connections with established social frameworks through ties of kinship,

place, or role.25

PLACE AND COMMITMENT

Place thus has a great deal to do with commitment to human contexts and being

accepted within them. Some recent writing on the psychology of place speaks of

participation as a key element in being effectively placed. A place, as opposed to

a location (i.e., a mere object over there) invites participation in an environ-

ment. Environment, in the fullest sense, implies different sets of relationships

both between people and between the natural habitat and human beings. The

psychologist David Canter suggests a threefold model of place:

A place is the result of relationships between actions, conceptions and physical

attributes. It follows that we have not fully identified the place until we know a)

what behaviour is associated with, or it is anticipated will be housed in, a given

locus; b) what the physical parameters of that setting are; and c) the descriptions,

or conceptions, which people hold of that behaviour in that physical environ-

ment.26

Commitment is the corollary of participation. In Penelope Livelys recent

novel, Spiderweb, Stella Brentwood is a cultural anthropologist who retires to

settle in an English village after years of wandering the world with no fixed abode.

Coming to terms with home and making sense of place are central themes of

the book. 27

I hope the new home is up to expectations, Richard had said just now, and for

an instant she hadnt understood what on earth he was on about. Whose home?

Ahher home, of course. This was what she now had, apparently. And must set to

and play the part. Nest. Embellish. Fix rogue radiators, fit washers to taps. (p. 13)

Really beingsomewhere means to be committed to a place rather than simply an

observer. But this not what Stella is used to. For her, The world is out there, richly

stocked and inviting observation (p. 15). She has no difficulty in appreciating the

theory that place is complex and is far more than landscape.

And thus Stella learned. There came beams of light. The place took shape. It ceased

to be a landscape, a backdrop, and became an organism. Stella perceived the

intricate system of checks and balances by which things worked. She saw that there

was a continuous state of negotiation, of dealing, of to-and-fro arrangements.

Everyone stood in a particular relationship to everyone else, often literally so in

terms of marriage connections or distant ties of blood. People employed one

another, or sold things to each other, or exchanged services, or simply rubbed

shoulders here, there and everywhere. Each casual encounter in a lane or at a shop


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entrance reinforced this subtle and elaborate system, as hard to penetrate as anyshe had met. (pp. 7172)

One day, while visiting the village shop, Stella listens to an interesting little

homily on commitment from Molly the shopkeeper who is still unsure about Stella:

You used to know how a person stood, without having to take soundings, know

what I mean? You knew if they were farming or trade, church or chapel, you knew

who their father was and which way theyd jump if it came to the push. Nowadays

people can walk into the shop and its anyones guess, frankly . . .

Stella then thinks to herself,

. . . I am part of the landscape like everyone else. And some of us are more

tenuously placed within that landscape than others. Some are entrenched; others

merely perch. (p. 175).

The difficult challenge for Stella is to move from observer to participant. She never

quite makes that transition, never quite fits in, and eventually leaves.

PLACE AND LANDSCAPES

Place involves a specific landscape, a set of social activities, and webs of meaning

and rituals, all inseparably intertwined.28 Places are inherently associated with the

events that happen in landscapes. Human memories, whether individual or

collective, are often localized in landscapes even when people cannot remember

precisely when events happened or how long they lasted.29 Landscape, then, is the

first partner in the dialectical nature of place. Yet the very word landscape

implies an active human shaping rather than pure habitat. Historically, the land

has been actively shaped for as long as humans have existedby agriculture,

forestation, enclosure, and in Europe, by aesthetic landscaping by the wealthy since

the late seventeenth century.

Simon Schama, in his monumental work Landscape and Memory,explains

that Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination

projected onto wood and water and rock.30 Our contemporary tendency to

objectify, reify, or even romanticize nature, then, is born of anxiety. It reflects a

human sense of distance from the natural world, a guilty recollection of abuse

through our unreflective use of industrial and technological power, and our

subsequent concern to repair the damage through an appropriate ecological

consciousness.

Apart from its human embodiment, the most common experience of place, or

being placed, involves familiar landscapes. Any analysis of place inevitably has a

subjective element. People learn to be who they are by relating to the foundational

landscapes of childhood or to adopted landscapes that become significant because


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of later events and associations. Familiar landscapes are the geography of humanimagination. Their power is greater than mere beauty, for landscapes are not

necessarily romantic or awe-inspiring. People are culturally conditioned by the

kinds of landscapes that exercise power over them.31

It is interesting to ask what is particular about the English landscape. In such a

small country, relatively densely populated, one feature stands outthere is very

little true wilderness. In a groundbreaking book, The Making of the English

Landscape, W. G. Hoskins noted that

. . . there are not many places where one can feel with such complete assurance

that this is exactly as the first inhabitants saw it in the freshness of the early

world. Not much of England, even in its more withdrawn, inhuman places, has

escaped being altered by man in some subtle way or other, however untouched we

may fancy it is at first sight.32

Although Hoskins himself admitted that everything is older than we think, he

persisted in his view that a natural landscape of primeval woodland had remained

substantially unaltered until early medieval times. Today, we know that forest

clearance began as early as 8000 BC and that what existed by the time of the

eleventh-century land survey, the Doomsday Book, was the result of successive

phases of clearance and regeneration. To put matters simply, English landscape is

archetypically a historical landscape.

Although place is a human construct, we must not lose sight of the fact that

natural features are part of the interrelationships comprising place. The physicallandscape is a partner, active rather than passive, in the conversation that creates

the nature of a place. Paradoxically, radical contemporary writing on the politics of

place often fails to mention the non-human element, simply substituting a new

anthropocentrism for old. Writers like Schama, however, do not suggest that there

is no realnature, merely that there is nopurenature. Instead, what we have is an

interplay between physical geographies and geographies of the mind and spirit.

PLACE AND MEMORY

Schama is correct to remind us that human memory about landscapes has a more

powerful effect on us than the physical contours. To put matters theologically, God

is not revealed in the immediacy of raw nature but in incarnation, mediated through

the cultural and contextual overlays that we inevitably bring to nature and to our

understandings of the sacred. Belden Lane, in a review of Schama, states it thus:

Every habitat is approached by means of a particular habitus, a way of reading

the natural world that has accumulated over time.33

If place is landscape first of all, it is also memory: Places of memory. Places

into which I had poured myself and all the longings of my life and which reflected

back to me the shape and texture of my life there.34 Memory embedded in place,


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however, involves more than any single personal story; there are deeper narrative

currents that gather together all those who have ever lived there. Even as I reshape

a place by making my story a thread in that places meaning, I have to come to

terms with the many layers of story that already exist there.

My own childhood in the English county of Dorset was shaped by the fact that

we were visibly surrounded by Bronze Age hill settlements, Celtic burial mounds,

Roman military installations, medieval field systems, and myriad medieval

churches and monastic remains. Even the familiar copses of ancient trees on local

hilltops turned out to be related to sacred groves. There were mythic places too.

Badbury Rings was the reputed site of Mons Badonicus, one of the greatest

Child on a Forest Road, 1958. Photograph by Wynn Bullock.


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victories of the legendary King Arthur. Badbury is an eerie and silent place. It wassaid in my childhood that no birds nested in the trees because of the great slaughter

that took place there all those centuries ago. Collective memory was materialized

in landscape. It is difficult for a childs identity not to be unconsciously marked by

that sense of historical placement.

Landscape is also named. Names give landscape a particular meaning in

relation to human memories. No name is arbitrary. Every place-name is a code

that, once understood, unlocks a world of associations and stories. The ancient

town of Salisbury where I currently work is an excellent example. The name is a

Norman variant (substituting the l for an r) of the Saxon name Searobyrg

(derived from Searaburg) meaning, armor fort. But this in turn hints at the older

Roman name, Sorviodunum. The Saxons simply treated the first element of theRoman name as a sound to be transposed into their word for armor and

translated the second element into the Saxon equivalent for fort. However, the

Roman name itself has even older echoesits second element, dunum,derives

from the Celtic word dunon.35

It is therefore appropriate to think of places as texts, layered with meaning. A

hermeneutics of place progressively reveals new meanings in a conversation

between topography, memory, and the presence of particular people at each

moment. All human experience is narrative in the way we imaginatively recon-

struct it . . . and every encounter of the sacred is rooted in a place, a socio-spatial

context that is rich in myth and symbol.36 Thus, there can be no sense of place

without narrative.

PLACE AND NARRATIVE

If place lends structure, context, and vividness to narratives, it is stories, whether

fictional or biographical, that give shape to place. The French Christian philoso-

pher Paul Ricoeur has been greatly preoccupied with the importance of narrative to

human identity and with reconstructing a viable historical consciousness. This,

he argues, is vital to our individual and collective identitiesand, implicitly, to our

spiritual well being. [T]ime becomes human time to the extent that it is organised

after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that

it portrays the features of temporal existence.37

At first glance, Ricoeur is something of a paradox. On the one hand, he shares

a postmodern suspicion of giving in to the temptation of the completed total-

ity.38 Ricoeur concurs that we must renounce any attempt by history to decipher

the supreme plot. However, he also rejects a tendency to equate this renunciation

with the rejection of history as a form of narrative. In fact, he argues that the

former search for a supreme plot actually undermined true narrative because it

sought to transcend context and the particularity of all stories. As a result, it

reduced history to the totalisation of time in the eternal present.39


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Yet Christians cannot ignore the fact that they do speak a narrative of meaning,albeit constrained by an internal tension between kataphatic affirmation and

apophatic denial. Riceour recognizes that humans cannot live without such

narratives. If we reject the possibility of mediating narratives altogether, this is not

the liberating experience it may seemon the contrary, it is profoundly oppressive.

The reason is that without narrative we risk two things. First, we undermine a key

element of human solidarity (we bond together by sharing stories) and second, we are

trapped in the immediacy of the present. We reduce or remove a key incentive for

changing the status quo, as well as an important means of bringing this about. We

tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated.

The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.40

Narrative is key to our identity. We need stories to live by to make sense ofotherwise unrelated life events and also to find a sense of dignity. It is only by

enabling alternative stories to be heard that an elitist history is prised open,

offering access to the oppressed, to the people normally excluded from the history

of public places. Without a narrative, a persons life is merely a random sequence

of unrelated events: birth and death are inscrutable, temporality is a terror and a

burden, and suffering and loss remain mute and unintelligible.41 Rather than

abolish narrative, we need to ask, Whose narrative has been told? Who is in

the story of this place?

Ricoeur rightly rejects the positivist myth of history that has prevailed since

the nineteenth century (that is, history as scientifically verifiable fact) in favor of a

history that allows for the presence of fiction. In this way, history is restored as aform of literatureit does not simply recount events in a disconnected or disinter-

ested way, it also organizesthem into a form that seeks coherence. Ricoeur revives

history as more than a disconnected set of cold, objectified events emptied of

human warmth. Instead, it becomes an act of interpretation and, as such, implies

commitment, continuity, and, ultimately, responsibility.The added facets of

commitment and responsibility are a powerful reminder that history is not merely

about the past but also about the present and future. A historical consciousness

opens us to possible action rather than to passive acceptance of the way things

are. History, once again, becomes a critical spiritual and ethical issue. Once again,

it has to do with humanitys vision.

PLACE AND CONFLICT

Ricoeurs concern to recover what we might call a narrative of the oppressed

returns us to my earlier observation concerning contemporary treatments of place

by social scientists and anthropologiststhey increasingly affirm that, because place

is always a contested rather than a simple reality, our human engagement with

place is apoliticalissue. Place is also political because it can be constructed to be

occupied by some peoples stories but not by others. Schama offers as an example


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the fate of the Lithuanian forest, Bialowieza, and its primitive bison. After the Germaninvasion of 1941, the forest and its bison were subject to conservation by

Reichsmarshal Gring, whose visionary pursuit of Teutonic symbolism demanded

that all traces of the forests Jewish and Polish peasant population be eradicated.

Thus, to create his mythic forest, his total landscape plan as it was called, the first

task was to eradicate unwanted people.42

In deconstructing modernitys belief in objective, absolute place,

postmodern critiques assert that definitionis power. The French Marxist philoso-

pher Henri Lefebvres analysis of place also reminds us that systems of

spatialization are historically conditioned.43 Spatializations are not merely physical

arrangements of things; they are also patterns of social action and routine, as well

as historical conceptions of the world. These add up to what Lefebvre calls asocio-spatial outlook that manifests itself in our every intuition. At any given

time, the meta-narratives of the people who hold secular or religious power take

over public places; and thus history becomes stories of dominance and repression.

In the case of Christian theology and spirituality, as the Peruvian theologian

Gustavo Gutierrez reminds us, the Christian narrative became synonymous with

European culture and, for people of other cultures, with the values of colonizers

from elsewhere.44

We need to become aware of what might be called a longer narrative, one in

which all the others who have been made absent by those who control public or

institutional histories are now restored as people who are fully present, no longer a

presumed and distant them removed from a vague and tacit us.45 The notionthat place relates to issues of empowerment and disempowerment forces us to

think of multi-localities (that locations are different places simultaneously) and

multi-vocalities (that different voices are heard in each of them).

To be a person is not merely to be embodied but also to inhabit apublic place.

Our social selves are created for us, not just symbolically but also physically,

within roles determined by social, cultural, and religious hierarchies and by gender

stereotypes. So, for example, we put on our masculinity or femininity along with

our clothes and manners so as to change the very shape our bodies occupy in place.

Human places can also be read as landscapes of exclusion, thus people describe

particular places as central or peripheral in accord with whether they are associ-

ated with high culture or low. Power is expressed in the monopolization of centralplaces by socially strong groups and by the relegation of weaker groups to less

desirable environments.

Theological reflections on place can no longer ignore that the world of

concrete places is filled with exiles, displaced peoples, diaspora communities,

increasingly inflamed border disputes, and with violent struggles by indigenous

peoples and cultural minorities to achieve liberation. While narrative is important,

we have to reconstruct what might be called a narrative beyond easy narrative if


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space is to be made for those whose stories have not been heard. British feministtheologian Elaine Graham squarely faces the tension between reclaiming public

place from a patriarchy that has made women placeless, and leaving such place

behind in order to create alternative territories. Like Ricoeur, Graham suggests that

all any of us have is spatial locationa historical context and material experience

that are inherently contested. In other words, there is no ideal place to withdraw to

that is not political. A strategy of resistance demands, not withdrawal, but a

critical engagement with contexts and the political will to transform the narrative

and redeem the place.46

PLACE AND PARTICULARITY

All this suggests that a theological attempt to reconstruct an effective narrative of

place, with room for the unheard or marginalized, must begin with serious atten-

tion to the vocabulary of the particular. The problem with Western modernity,

which has dominated our thinking over the last couple of hundred years, is that its

impulse is to stress the universal rather than the particular or vernacular, the

anonymous or disengaged rather than the personal. The connection with tenden-

cies in theology is obvious, although there are differing views as to the degree to

which secular modernity influenced theology, or if tendencies in Christian

theology gave birth to its secularized counterpart. One might assume that a religion

based on the doctrine of the Incarnation would have been consistent in according a

fundamental importance to human history and to material existence. However, if

the stories of Christianitys origin suggest an affirmation of history, there has

always also been a siren voice suggesting that what is important exists in a spiritual

and eternal realm on the far side of time and place.

In seeking a theological vocabulary that enables engagement with particularity,

it may be helpful to look again at one of the great figures of medieval philosophy

and theology, the Scottish Franciscan Duns Scotus. Scotus flourished towards the

end of the thirteenth century at Oxford and Paris, and perhaps at Cambridge as

well. Interpretations of Scotus, the doctor subtilis, have tended to be inconclusive

and uncertain. This explains in part why he has received less attention than

Thomas Aquinas. However, it is now generally agreed that Scotuss thought was

expressed most originally in a theology of particularity and individuality. At the

heart of Scotuss view of the particular lies his distinctive understanding of the

doctrine of Incarnation. Although Scotus is rarely quoted in books on spirituality,

his philosophical and theological writings had an immense impact for centuries on

the Franciscan tradition of spirituality, and through this albeit implicitly, on much

else besides. For Scotus, the incarnation is Gods greatest work, and cannot be

explained by anything outside Gods own reality and eternal intention, such as by

chance or by human sin. Incarnation is the highest good in the whole of creation

and was immediately foreseen from all eternity by God as a good proximate to the


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end.47

By end Scotus means Gods purpose for creation. This purpose, for Scotus,is deification or a sharing in Gods own life, which is so fruitful that it constantly

and inherently seeks expression in the particularities of the created order.

Duns Scotus offers a theologically positive view of the specific and individual,

even to the smallest of details. His theology of incarnation leaves us with the

thought that God not only creates all things for Christ but also in Christ. Scotus

taught that everything, without exception, is rooted in the cause of creation. This

cause is the humanity of Jesus. By implication, all things exist not only to be

themselves, and to do themselves. They also do Christ. Thus, each individual

or particular thing is more than a symbol of something greater. That would make it

dispensable, usable then disposable. One thing might be substituted for another if

it proved to be a better symbol; thus, there would be no unique value in anyindividual or particular thing. Here, Scotus departs from the better known scholas-

tic theory of analogy, whereby true being exists only in God and everything else is

derivative, pointing only indirectly toward true being. Scotus, in contrast, suggests

that all things, in their veryparticularity,participate directly in the life of the

Creator. Because everything participates directly in God, each thing is a uniquely

important expression of Gods beauty as a whole.

In Scotus, for example, to the category place is added an individualizing

form, or final perfection, making this place this rather than that. Scotus gave it the

name haecceitas(thisness) in the belief that an individual thing is immediately

knowable by the intellect in union with the senses. The first act of knowledge is

therefore a recognition, albeit vague, of the individual, the concrete, the particularglimpse of thisness. Only by knowledge of the particular and concrete are our

minds able to arrive, by abstracting and comparing what is like this, while not

this, at the knowledge of the universal: leaf, place, person. As Scotus

suggests in the course of his treatise De Anima, we first need to know the singu-

lar before we can abstract universals. Scotus raised the particular from being

merely an instance of something of a certain type; in other words, an exemplifica-

tion of a category. For Scotus, what is individual is simply itself, even if it is related

to similar but other realities; thus, what is particular and specific is more perfect

because unique. Indeed, nature is predetermined to singularity.48 Haecceitasis

utterly specific and is to be found only in this and that particular. This concept of

absolute particularity, as opposed to the greater perfection of what transcendsparticularity or achieves a certain abstract universality, accords somewhat with one

aspect of contemporary postmodern sensibilities.49

While Scotuss principle of individuation, and his epistemology, attached great

importance to individuality, this is not of course in the later, post-Enlightenment,

isolatedsense. Each particular has a unique contribution to make to commonality

or common nature. Each particularity is not isolated, but instead should be

understood as standing within a unique set of relationships. Gods love for the


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created order may be thought of as truly universal precisely because it is alsoparticular; it excludes nothing as dispensable or irrelevant.

It is interesting that Franciscan scholars today emphasize that Duns Scotuss

concept of the perfection of the particular was influenced above all by the

Canticle of Creation of St. Francis of Assisi.50 If so, it is important to understand

what the Canticle means. It is possible to reduce it to a bland, romantic love of the

natural world. However, the underlying meaning of the Canticle is more complex.

The key is that all our fellow creatures (whether animate or inanimate), as brothers

and sisters, reflect to us the face of Christ. Francis experienced each particular

element of creation, not merely Creation as an abstract whole, as coming from the

same sourcethe good God of the Trinity revealed in the Incarnate Son. The

corollary is that each created particularity is an element of revelation. People maycome to know God through each element. The foundation of Franciscan respect

for all created things is the fact that the One through whom everything was created

has come among us to be a creature.

The majority of verses in the Canticle speak of the cosmic fraternity of all

elements of creation. Thus,

Let everything you have made

Be a song of praise to you,

Above all, His Excellency the Sun (our brother);

Through him you flood our days with light.

He is so beautiful, so radiant, so splendid,

O Most High, he reminds us of you.

This uplifting doctrine of cosmic fraternity, however, conceals a much sharper and

prophetic edge. Francis does not simply celebrate Gods goodness expressed in the

world as Gods gift. Verses 1011 celebrate the peace that comes from mutual

pardon or reconciliation. It is generally thought that the verses were written as part

of a campaign to settle a dispute between the mayor and bishop of Assisi.

Be praised, my Lord,

Through those who forgive for your love,

Through those who are weak,

In pain, in struggle,

Who endure with peace,For you will make them Kings and Queens,

O Lord Most High.51

Thus the created world is a reconciled space because of the fraternity of all

things in Christ. There is no room for violence, contention, or rejection of the

other. The Canticle suggests that Christian faith is based not on the singular I as

isolated subject but on the I in its initial intersubjective aspect, in its fundamen-

tal condition as brother or sister to what is other than itself. But there is also


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the question of what Francis understood by the other. The other for Francishad a very particular meaning. Behind the text of the Canticle, and underlying his

whole theology of creation and incarnation, is another text: the transformation of

consciousness brought about by his early encounter with a leper. In the first three

verses of The Testament, dictated shortly before his death in 1226, Francis actually

identified the first moment of his spiritual life with his encounter with the leper.

1. The Lord granted me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance in this way: While

I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. 2. And the Lord Himself led

me among them and I had mercy upon them. 3. And when I left them that which

seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body; and afterwards I

lingered a little and left the world.52

The meeting with the leper was not merely an encounter with human suffering

but also, in medieval terms, a call to Francis to embrace the excluded other.

Lepers were not merely infected with a fearful disease; they also symbolized the

dark side of existence onto which medieval people projected a variety of fears,

suspicions, and guilt. Lepers were outcasts banished from society. They joined the

criminals, the mad, the excommunicated, and Jews. In many respects, lepers were

not only perceived as wretched and dangerous but also, because symbolic of

corrupt flesh in general, as scandalous. Interestingly, their corrupted flesh was

often associated in the popular imagination with the practice of illicit sexuality.

There was more than a hint that the sickness was a divine punishment.53

Through the encounter with the leper, Francis came to see that participation inhuman experiences of suffering as well as exclusion were at the heart of Gods

incarnation as revealed in the face of the Crucified Christ. If Duns Scotuss theol-

ogy of the particularity of creation is a kind of exposition of the spirituality of the

Canticle of St. Francis, then haecceitas, thisness, necessarily involves a sense of

Gods place among the rejected and the garbage of this world. Thisness ex-

presses the absolute inclusivity of a God that draws all things together within

difference.

The image of a leper becomes for St. Francis, and implicitly for Duns Scotus, a

paradigm for our understanding of creation, incarnation, and thus discipleship. By

entering the world of the concrete, specific, and particular, and by taking on our

flesh, God in Jesus becomes committed to, and thus redeems, allthat humanity is,including what is unacceptable and other, and all the places where humans

dwell. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1: 14). The

Christian doctrine of incarnation offers an image of Gods irrevocable commitment

as somethingremaining.Similarly, it seems, Duns Scotuss very Franciscan concept

of haecceitas demands that believers become similarly engaged with particularity,

with contingent reality, with specific places. By remaining hereor there, Scotus

proclaims, we encounter the face of God.


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DEPARTING FROM THE PARTICULAR

In the context of Scotuss medieval world, this approach to particularity is not the

basis for an isolated sense of the self or for the impossibility of conceiving anything

beyond each particular. In Christian terms, a theology of place must maintain a

balance between Gods revelation in the particular and a sense that Gods place

ultimately escapes the boundaries of the local and embraces universality. There is a

persistent tension in Christianity between what is sometimes referred to as place

and placelessness or, as I prefer, between the local and universal dimensions of

place. All place is both this, here and now,and at the same time a pointer to

elsewhere.

In the light of incarnation, spirituality is undoubtedly concerned with how to

live within the complex world of events. Our place is specified by Gods commit-ment to the particularities of the world and of human history. The event of Jesus

Christ is set in a particular time and place. Yet there is a tension, which is ex-

pressed somewhat elusively by Michel de Certeau.

Christianity implies a relationship to the event which inaugurated it: Jesus Christ.

It has had a series of intellectual and historical social forms which have had two

apparently contradictory characteristics: the will to be faithfulto the inaugural

event: the necessity of being differentfrom these beginnings.54

In de Certeaus terms, the particularity of the event of Jesus Christ permits

the placed nature, the particularities of all subsequent discipleship. There, too, God

may eternally say yes to us without condition. However, the place of Jesus is

now symbolized by an empty tomb. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he

said . . . indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee. (Matthew 28: 67). God in

Jesus cannot be simply pinned to a here and there, a this and that. The place of

Jesus is now mobile and perpetually elusive. He is always the one who has gone

before. To be in the place of Jesus is, therefore, literally to be disciples, those who

follow after in the direction of Jesuss perpetual departure.

It may be true that an emphasis solely on particularity conceals issues regard-

ing fragmentation, incoherence, or the refusal of narrative movement. However, it

is equally important not to see any movement to transcend particular and local

place as a denial of the world of places. Rather, it points, first of all, to the

catholic sense that the divine presence cannot be imprisoned in any isolated

place or series of places. The divine is to be sought throughout the oikumene, the

entire inhabited world. Again, to adopt the words of de Certeau, discipleship

simultaneously demands a place and an elsewhere, a further, or a more.

De Certeaus perspective reflects his Jesuit roots and life-long preoccupation with

the Ignatian mysticism of practice. This offered de Certeau, among other things,

the language of the magis, the semper maiorthe always greater, always more,

always beyondtogether with the value of movement or the transgression of

boundaries, always exceeding limits in search of oikumene.


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Within the Christian experience, the boundary or limit is a place for the actionwhich ensures the step from a particular situation to a progress (opening a future

and creating a new past), from a being there to a being elsewhere, from one

stage to another . . . A particular placeour present placeis required if there is to

be a departure. Both elements, the place and the departure, are interrelated,

because it is the withdrawal from a place that allows one to recognise the enclosure

implicit in the initial position, and as a result it is this limited field which makes

possible a further investigation. Boundaries are the place of the Christian work,

and their displacements are the result of this work.55

A catholicity of place is, for Christians, symbolized most powerfully in the

koinonia of believers filled with the Spirit of Jesus and shaped by Eucharistic

space, which has a particular potency in terms of the tension between local and

universal. On the one hand, every Eucharist exists in a particular time and place.

On the other hand, each Eucharist is a practice of transgression and a transitus,a

transit point, a passageway between worlds that prefigures the conclusive passing

over brought about in death. Eucharistic space enables the particularity of local

place to intersect in the risen and ascended Jesus with all times and all places.

NOTES

1. Donlyn Lyndon and Charles W. Moore, Chambers for a Memory Palace(Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1994), xii.

2. Clifford Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 45.

3. Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures,89.

4. Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures,14.5. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G.L. Campbell(London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 45.

6. A good summary of these issues can be found in the editors introductory essay

Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era, in Culture, Power, Place:

Explorations in Critical Anthropology, eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 229.

7. Gurevich, Categories, 94.

8. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1981), especially chap. 4, Orientational Metaphors.

9. Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 177.

10. See Edward S. Casey, How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of

Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena, in Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith

H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 1352. Also see Gaston

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).11. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:

Harper & Row, 1975), 154.

12. An Ontological Consideration of Place, in Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being,

trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958), 26.

13. Heidegger,Poetry, Language, Thought, 157.

14. Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith

(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 5.

15. Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1992), 4. On the humanly constructed meaning of place see also Simon Schama,

Landscape and Memory(London: HarperCollins, 1995), for example 67, 61, 81.


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16. See Anne Buttimer, Home, Reach and the Sense of Place, in The Human Experienceof Space and Place, eds. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (London: Croam Helm,

1980), 174.

17. Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment, 8687.

18. Marc Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans.

John Howe (London/New York: Verso, 1997), especially 5152, 77.

19. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation(Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 29, 178.

20. Brueggemann, The Land,4.

21. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Willis (London/New York: Routledge,

1997), 41.

22. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space,45.

23. See the comments by architect Robert Mugerauer in his Interpretations on Behalf of

Place: Environmental Displacements and Alternative Responses(New York: State

University of New York Press, 1994), especially chap. 10.24. A.J. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans.

Janos B. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1990), 79.

25. Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1994), 7880.

26. David Canter, The Psychology of Place(London: The Architectural Press, 1977), 910,

15859.

27. Penelope Lively, Spiderweb (London/New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

28. Cited in Julian Thomas, Time, Culture & Identity(London: Routledge, 1999), 87.

29. See Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 7.

30. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 61.

31. On the spirituality implied by landscape art, not least the contrast between English

landscape painting and the art of Australia and North America, see for example Peter

Fuller, Theoria: Art and The Absence of Grace(London: Chatto & Windus, 1988),especially chaps. 14 (An Earthly Paradise?), 19 (The Art of England), and 21 (The

Glare of the Antipodes).

32. W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, rev. ed.(London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1992), 18.

33. Belden Lane, review of Simon Schamas Landscape and Memory, in Christian Spiritual-

ity Bulletin4, no. 1(Summer 1996), 31.

34. Douglas Burton-Christie, Living Between Two Worlds: Home, Journey and the Quest

for Sacred Place, Anglican Theological ReviewLXXIX (Summer 1997), 414.

35. Martyn Whittock, Wiltshire Place-Names: Their Origins and Meanings(Newbury, UK:

Countryside Books, 1997), 122; and Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of

English Place-names(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 402.

36. Belden Lane, Galesville and Sinai: The Researcher as Participant in the Study of

Spirituality and Sacred Space. In Christian Spirituality Bulletin2 (Spring 1994), 19.

37. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and DavidPellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3.

38. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative(TN) 3, 103.

39. Ricoeur, TN3, 202.

40. Ricoeur, TN1, 75.

41. Mark Wallace, Introduction in Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religions, Narra-

tive and Imagination, trans. Mark Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 11.

42. Schama, Landscape and Memory,6771.

43. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1991).


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44. See, for example, the comments of Gustavo Gutierrez in We Drink From Our OwnWells, trans. Matthew OConnell (London: SCM Press and New York: Orbis Books,

1984), part 1, especially 2629.

45. For a summary of the impact of the new history on studies of spirituality see Philip

Sheldrake, Spirituality and History: Questions of Interpretation and Method,2nd ed.

(London: SPCK, 1995 and New York: Orbis Books, 1999), especially chaps. 3 and 4.

46. See Elaine Graham, From Space to Woman-Space, Feminist Theology9 (May 1995),

1134.

47. Cited by Allan Wolter in Franciscan Christology, ed. D. McElrath.(New York:

Franciscan Institute, 1980), 141, 153.

48. Opus Oxoniense, II, 3, 6, 2.

49. See Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages(New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1986), 8588.

50. For example, see Michael Blastic, Franciscan Spirituality, in The New Dictionary of

Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael Downey (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press,1993), 416.

51. New translation by the contemporary English Poor Clare, Sister Frances Teresa. See her

Living the Incarnation: Praying with Francis and Clare of Assisi (London: Darton,

Longman & Todd, 1993), 129.

53. Translation in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, eds. Regis Armstrong and

Ignatius Brady(New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 154.

54. See for example, Bronislaw Geremek, The Marginal Man, in The Medieval World,

trans. Lydia. G. Cochrane, ed. Jacques Le Goff (London: Collins & Brown, 1990),

especially 3679; and R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society(Oxford:

Blackwell, 1994), 4563.

55. Michel de Certeau, How Is Christianity Thinkable Today?, in The Postmodern God,

ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 142.

56. Ibid., 151.

Documents

1.1sheHuman Identity and the Particularity of Place