Putting knowledge in its place: epistemologies of place-making in a time of globalization
Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.
Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Anthropology
University of Washington
Plenary Address prepared for the Place Matters Conference, Diversity Research Institute, University
of Washington. Urban Horticulture Center, October 27, 2006. Current draft prepared October 26-27,
2006.
Putting knowledge in its place: epistemologies of place-making in a time of globalization
Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.
Abstract. The study of place, and especially sense of place, has long been limited by the vagaries and
niceties of anecdotal evidence, autobiographical narratives, or ethno-poetics. Anthropologists and
other social scientists only recently developed sets of more rigorous methods for the interdisciplinary
scientific study of place. This paper examines a variety of anthropological approaches to the study of
place and place-making that engage the perspectives of local cultures and local knowledge. Of
particular significance to such projects are contributions from environmental anthropology and
ethnoecology. This paper examines recent approaches to the ethnoecological study of place-based
knowledge and draws from the author’s own experiences in the historic acequia communities of the
Upper Rio Grande bioregion and among Mesoamerican farmers in urban Los Angeles. The author
argues that the study and protection of place and place-making are particularly urgent given the
challenges of globalization and de-territorialization. The advocates of de-territorialization posit the
“end of the local” and the rise of globalized spaces and places. This address presents a critique of
these approaches and presents an alter/native view based on collaborative and participative studies
of “transnational place-making” and the persistence of place-based communities. The paper
concludes with some reflections on the future of place in the context of globalization and the modest
recommendation that we re-value the subversive epistemologies of place-based communities as
privileged holders and transmitters of the knowledge, belief, and practices required for a just and
sustainable society.
Keywords. ethnoecology, anthropology
territorialization and re-inhabitation
of
place,
place-based
culture,
globalization,
de-
INTRODUCTION
Theorizing place is as old as the human imagination and the typical Eurocentric narrative usually
starts with a celebration of the Greek concept of genus loci and the idea that space becomes place
through the interplay of shapes, meanings, and power. Aristotle’s notion of the “power of place” was
not about politics and instead signified the intense emotions associated with deeply-held local
knowledge and place-bound cultural memory. The narrative then moves into contemporary
discourses that include stops with Yi-Fu Tuan (1990) and his principle of topophilia or “love of
place,” and E. V. Walter (1988), the sociologist who coined the term “topistics” to refer to the social
scientific study of place-making. In many ways not much has changed in our approaches to the
study of place and postmodern critics might be on to something. Indeed, much of the social scientific
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discourse on place remains fixated on narratives that follow some variation of the old Greek story of
shape, meaning, and power:
Recently, some very capable folklorists studying the New Jersey
Pinelands, sounding very Greek, announced that: “Sense of place is the totality of perceptions and
knowledge of a place gained by residents through their long experience in it, and intensified by their
feelings for it.” (Moonsammy, Cohen, and Williams 1987: 1)
Left unsaid in the conventional narrative are stories recounting what happens to a people’s
sense of place when they cannot claim a “long experience” in place. What happens to diaspora
peoples? Immigrants? Refugees? Those displaced by mountain-top removal, deforestation, freeway
construction, or enclosure? Does sense of place survive the globalized diasporas of displaced
peoples, cultural hybrids, and transnational commodity chains? What happens to sense of place in
the aftermath of the social disaster that followed in the wake of Katrina and left 75,000 displaced
residents unable to go home? Indeed, what happens to sense of place when most Americans by one
estimate (www.remotecontrolmail.com) move elsewhere an average of 20 to 30 times over the
course of a single life span? I believe I can speak to this since I have lived in seven different places
in my own life time. What happens? Sometimes we simply bring place or, at the least, inherited
place-making proclivities with us.
Anthropologists have long held a fascination for place even if much of the past century was
spent writing “distanced and normalizing” narratives organized under the rubric of temporal shifts
and historical trajectories. Space, Tom Thornton (2006) and others rightly claim, was subordinated to
time in anthropological narratives and place was reduced to a mere background setting, the inert
stage, for the real drama of time-bound narratives. Anthropologists seem to have forgotten how
Durkheim proposed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that regions developed their own
unique spatial signatures which represent the infinite possibilities for sensuous, embodied, activity
to render landscapes in differentiated form (1915:23). By the end of the Twentieth Century,
anthropologists had moved toward a litany of postmodern critiques proclaiming the end of history,
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the end of master narratives and universal truths, and the end of the subject and her transcendent
agency. Place and sense of place were also dismissed as quaint relics of the European
Enlightenment, an odd assertion given the silencing of space and the privileging of time as the
dominant social scientific trope (or frame) in fashion since the 17th Century and the birth of global
maps and navigation, ship-building, exploration, expansion, and eventually colonial conquest and the
incessant exploitation of natives and their lands.1
Jameson (1984) was among the first of the skeptical postmodernists to propose that the
“radical indeterminancy” of space means that the “individual human body” can no longer “map its
position in a mappable external world.” This means the “subject” has no place to locate herself other
than that wrought of power and political struggle (see Rosenau 1992:68-9). One could add, in the
fashion of a critique of rationality and the ideology of disconnection (Taylor 2006), that the skeptical
postmodernists mistakenly repudiate the very possibility of inter-subjective community because they
have introduced as a static condition the incommensurability of language games, themselves
subject to endlessly-shifting positions of deconstruction.
An alter/native but no less critical attitude toward the allegedly archaic obsession of
restoring the place of place in epistemology is perhaps most poignantly captured by James Clifford’s
de Certeauian notion that “space is never ontologically given” (1997:54). In this sense, place is
always space in a process of becoming humanized or “cultured.” The new anthropology has
produced eloquent ethnographies of displacement, diaspora movements, and travelogues of evershifting identities in globalized border lands. These approaches constitute what can be characterized
as the “anthropology of placelessness” and pivot around the concept of the globalization of cultures
The ‘temporalist framing’ of intellectual work is all the more ironic given Foucault’s observation that the birth of the prison, and
the tyranny over space envisioned by the total institution, indicates that the rise of modern government is very much concerned
with spatializing command and control imperatives.
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that produces endlessly-shifting hybrid ethnoscapes (cf. Appadurai 1996): This begets the
McDonaldization of Bangalore and the Pujabization of the Los Angeles basin. We hear an increasing
number of anthropologists proclaim not just the end of history but the end of the local in a globalized
world. We are also said to have entered a new phase of global organization driven by the corporate
“de-territorialization” of space. This begets the end of the local in a world ruled by the logic of an
ever-expanding “generalized elsewhere” (Meyrowitz 1985). Localities everywhere are reinscribed
with the same Starbucks, McDonalds, and Wal-Marts, the avatars of capital that presumably control
the planetary landscape so it looks more and more like every other next-door strip mall-freewayfailed surburbia. We live in a world presumably ruled by the neoliberal imposition of the commodityform as the defining property of all space and of all objects in that enclosed panoptical space.
It is my contention today that too much of the work by the theorists of de-territorialization is
focused on the displacing, homogenizing, and hybridizing effects of globalization. Too much of the
theory of de-territorialization is actually constructed on a weak edifice of transient anecdotal
evidence, autobiographical narratives, and literary ethno-poetics. Postmodern anthropological
narratives of place have been cumbersomely subjected to exercises in reflexivity or critical “navel
gazing.” These narrative strategies may say more about the anthropologist as a global traveler with a
disruptive agenda than about the nuanced multiplex and materially-grounded processes of localglobal dynamics in the interrelations of space and place. I am interested in the interweaving of the
experiences of displacement and re-emplacement or re-inhabitation, seeing these as qualities of
place-making wherever instabilities, ambiguities, and conflicts hold sway, and wherever place (the
encultured locale) is contested as space (the conflictive social, political economic re-inscription of
locale).
One of the stories I will share today involves the re-emplacement of diaspora peoples who
have managed to transnationalize local place-making by importing the cultural landscape, vernacular
architecture, biotic baggage, and cognitive mapping traditions of their point-of-origin communities.
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They have crossed borders but brought their epistemologies of place. They have used these
knowledge systems to re-inhabit a transnational location by means of mimicry, the re-enactment of
the diversity of species and forms and of the open spaces of conviviality that define their home
places. This process of self-telling through place-making is what I have termed autotopography (Peña
2006).
Anthropologists and other social scientists have recently developed innovative natural and
social science interdisciplinary syntheses in approaching the study of place. These tend to involve
combinations of various forms of environmentally-focused analysis. For example, conservation
biology, environmental history, political ecology, and non-equilibrium geography are often fused in
the leading edge work by environmental anthropologists seeking to meld studies of ecology,
economics, and culture (see for e.g., Mulder and Coppolollo 2004). These are not just novel
interdisciplinary experiments. They also involve participatory or collaborative research projects to
document and legitimize the place-based, often ecological, knowledge that comes from long-term
inhabitation of a given locale. The focus on knowledge produced by these “cultures of habitat”
(Nabhan 1998) is one facet of the search for material evidence of sustainable and just traditions of
place-making.
Moreover, as Carol B. Brandt (2004) has noted, the search for place-based
epistemologies involves not discovering (for “things” are already known) but re-qualifying the
knowledge, practice, and belief systems of place-based local cultures and communities in ways that
challenge top-down and expert-defined academic disciplinary models. Such work may take the
anthropologist beyond the self-obsessed and essentializing narrative forms and discourses that too
often romanticize the local and the place-based. There is a fetish for an ethno-poetics of the shifting
and ambiguous shapes, meanings, and powers of place. We need to extend James Clifford’s
argument that
All communities, even the most locally rooted, maintain structured travel circuits, linking
members “at home” and “away.” Under changing conditions of mass communication,
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globalization, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism, these circuits are selectively restructured
and rerouted according to internal and eternal dynamics….new tribal forms bypass opposition
between rootedness and displacement…Tribal groups have, of course, never been simply
“local”: they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes, regional and
interregional networks. What may be distinctively modern, however, is the relentless assault
on indigenous sovereignty by colonial powers, transnational capital, and emerging nationstates…(1997:254)
To move in this direction, and get past total reliance on anecdotal and ethno-poetic reverie, students
of place might take heed and consider that the “power of place” is a matter constructed as much
from ecological and economic qualities. This means we can recognize and analyze how
anthropogenesis is part of our species being as Marx would have it. However, it also implies a critical
spirit willing to challenge how capital re-inscribes place as space by “abstracting” land and reducing
it to private property, a mere object in space subject to the rule of the commodity form. This also
means we can study how people re-inhabit places, sometimes by resisting the imposition of the rigid
square-grid topography of the commodity form. Place-based communities craft alter/native cultural
landscapes through material practices that include irrigation and agriculture, the construction of
vernacular architecture, the propagation of biotic heritage in plants and animals, use of cognitive
mapping traditions (toponyms, etc.), and the forms of local self-governance derived from a deeprooted civic and environmental commons (see Hicks and Peña 2003). A focus on evidence embodied
in the documentation of material conditions and practices allows us to approach the study of placemaking in a more critical manner and takes us toward a fusing of knowledge at the intersections of
non-equilibrium ecology, critical political economy, ethnohistory, and alter/native anthropology.
I also propose moving past the binary constructs of displacement/re-emplacement.
I
propose that indigenous, third-world, native, or place-based cultures have long experienced the
interwoven dynamics of displacement and re-inhabitation. Colonial conquests certainly marked the
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beginning of the disruptive and displacing assault on indigenous sovereignty but the pursuit of
autonomy remains a salient feature of local cultures and their place politics (Peña 2005). In this
address, I will explore the interwoven experiences of displacement and re-inhabitation by focusing on
the production and uses of place-based ecological knowledge in two contemporary Latina/o
communities, one multigenerational, locally-rooted, and rural and the other one diasporic and urban.
Acequia Communities of the Rio Arriba
The physical and social landscape of the Culebra watershed is a product of the acequia water
institution introduced by Hispano settlers in the years immediately following the Mexican War. The
persistence of the Culebra acequias is an instance of successful engagement by local community
water institutions in creating and managing a natural and working heritage landscape, the resourcerich Culebra watershed. The environmental and civic commons created by the acequias resulted in
the capacity to be governed under local customary law. The acequias are an indigenous water
democracy.
The Culebra acequia communities are rich in land, water, native seed stock, livestock, and
other agroecological and culturally-produced natural assets. There are close to 300 acequia farms in
the Culebra watershed. These farms are overwhelmingly owned by smallholders and the average
farm is well under 100 acres. The acequia farmers in the watershed irrigate approximately 24,000
acres of privately-owned farmlands organized in the vernacular tradition of the riparian long-lot.
There are an additional 10,000 acres of anthropogenic wetlands and riparian corridors that were
created by subirrigation from acequias and these serve as critical habitat and movement corridors
for wildlife. Most of the three hundred acequia farms are still occupied by multigenerational farming
families that hold property deeds dating back to the 1851-68 period of initial settlement. Most of
these irrigated lands are cultivated for alfalfa and hay grasslands. Other cultivated areas include
row-crop fields of traditional land race varieties such as maize (Zea mays), bolita bean (Phaseolus
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vulgaris spp.), calabacita (Cucurbita spp.), and numerous other cultivars including oat, winter wheat,
and legumes. There are multigenerational and replacement orchards across much of the landscape.
The in situ heirloom seed saving tradition of the Culebra acequia farmers is a significant aspect of
the local cultural heritage. The heirloom seed banks support the production of a significant quantity
of high-end specialty crops like white roasting corn (chicos) and landrace beans (bolitas). These
heirloom crops are exchanged through local barter and reciprocity networks or marketed to regional
organic foods retailers and farmers’ markets across a geographic area spanning from Pueblo,
Colorado to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Many acequia farmers are also livestock ranchers. Historically
this involved sheep, but after the enclosure of the common lands in 1960, the locals turned
increasingly to cattle which remain the mainstay of the local livestock raising economy. Herds are
small by intermountain West standards, and cattle herds larger than fifty cow-calf pairs are unusual.
In 1960, the direct descendant of President Zachary Taylor, a North Carolina timber man by
the name of Jack Taylor, enclosed the common lands of the acequia farmers of the Culebra
watershed. Thus began a forty two year-long legal and direct action struggle by the local people to
regain their traditional use rights to a sacred homeland commons. In 2002, the Colorado Supreme
Court awarded the heirs and successors access to the enclosed common lands of the Sangre de
Cristo Land Grant. However, as the local people struggle to reassert their rights, it is clear that the
younger generations are still feeling the effects of having lived in a space that was disrupted; the
youth experienced displacement from the commons. But this did not mean people no longer went to
La Sierra; it merely meant that now one had to sneak on, one was required, as Joe Gallegos once
told me, to “tip-toe across the [Taylor Ranch] headquarters road.” The decades of informal
resistance to the enclosure, the so-called “forest crimes,” resulted in the completely unprecedented
restoration of common property use rights. The displacement of the acequia farmers of the Culebra
from their homeland common is now shifting to an era of local self-governance of the common lands
and the restoration of the customary rules of management and the ecological damage to the
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watershed by decades of abusive logging, mining, and road building for mostly subdivisions. The
people of the Culebra watershed have re-inscribed their sense of place, and renewed access to the
material and spiritual source of their right livelihoods. They have come home to a heritage landscape
that spans from the snow-capped peaks to the thriving hay fields, row crops, orchards, woodlands,
and wetlands maintained in the riparian bottom lands of the acequia farms.
The Mesoamerican Diaspora in Los Angeles
The South Central Farm is very likely the largest urban farm in the U.S. For thirteen years, the
community – including native peoples of Mixtec, Tojolobal, Triqui, Tzeltal, Yaqui, and Zapotec
descent – relied on a rare piece of urban open space to grow food while becoming self-reliant and
building a sense of community. South Central Farmers Feeding Families is a grassroots organization
of 360 families. The farmers created this collective organization in September 2003 in response to
City land use politics and the development interests that drive these, and an elite-dominated
regional food bank that is at its heart anti-democratic and considers the self-organization of the
farmers to be a threat. In a collective fashion, the farmers democratically managed a landscape filled
with native row crops, fruit-bearing trees and vines, and medicinal herbs. They created a vibrant
space filled with social life and buzzing with the moral density that accompanies their ethic of
conviviality. In June of this year (2006), the bulldozers destroyed this urban oasis.
The events at South Central are ultimately about the relationship between people and the
plants they cultivate understood as a pathway to their own wholesome identity as a people and
community in place. The transnational diaspora people that created the South Central Farm
transposed their kitchen garden tradition to recreate their vernacular mosaic of plants. El jardín is a
source of plants for medicine and traditional recipes; it is a diverse polycultural agroecological space
that biophysically and symbolically connects the migrant to her origin community. This allows for a
transnationalization of a sense of place. El jardín is the canvas for the telling of personal stories in a
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strategy to maintain cultural identity through the preservation of cultivars that resonate with one’s
foodways and in no small measure is the result of the presence of recognized culturally meaningful
plants.
The South Central Farm replicated the huerto familiar or hometown kitchen garden from
Mexico. A quick comparison of the classic Maya kitchen garden and the typical modern family plot at
South Central reveals that the Mesoamerican gardeners are still growing the familiar sacred trinity of
Maize (Zea mays L.), Beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), and Squash (Cucurbita pepo L.). They are also
growing Avocado (Persea americana), Banana (Musa sapientum L.), and the traditional aromatic and
medicinal herbs that are mainstays of the classic Mexican hortaliza or herb patch (see Peña 2006).
Places like South Central Farm are important as sources of fresh organic vegetables, fruits,
and medicinal herbs to supplement a family’s food security. But these jardinitos are also iconic
spiritual and political symbols of a process involving nothing less than the re-territorialization of place
as home by transnational communities (which is a biophysical and discursive process). In this
manner, Chicana/o Mexicana/os are linking Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and
other states south of the border with communities in transnational flows that crisscross El Norte
from Laredo to Chicago, Albuquerque to Atlanta, Tijuana to LA and Seattle, and San Diego to New
York City or Boston. The displaced peoples of Mesoamerica re-emplaced themselves in LA by reinhabiting space as a form of transnational home-making. It is one of the great tragedies of the
environmental justice movement that Los Angeles elected officials allowed for the destruction of the
farm and the displacement of a diaspora people who continue to struggle to remake place in
southern California.
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The Future of Local Places in a Globalizing World
The study of place and sense of place has been limited by the ‘destabilizing niceties’ of
incommensurable and largely anecdotal evidence based on multi-sited ethnographic or
autobiographical narrative sources. Students of place have romanticized the local or declared an
end to local places. The driving force in many of these postmodern narratives is marked by the
displacing and homogenizing effects of globalization. This address presented an alter/native variety
of anthropological study of place and place-making. We propose a synthesis of ecology, economics,
and culture based on the perspectives of local cultures and seek to highlight agroecological
knowledge, belief, and practice. Of particular significance to such a project are contributions from
the fields of environmental anthropology and ethnoecology. The study and protection of place and
place-making are particularly urgent given the challenges of globalization and de-territorialization.
The advocates of de-territorialization argue for the “end of the local” and the rise of globalized
spaces and places. We have criticized these approaches and presented an alter/native view based
on the persistence of multi-generational acequia farming communities and the “transnational placemaking” of the Mesoamerican diaspora peoples of the Los Angeles basin. In both examples, the
processes of displacement and re-inhabitation are evident as diaspora and place-based
communities interweave direct experiences in the autotopographical zones they have come to
inhabit through their struggles rooted in cultural memory and identity and especially in the
persistence of place-based ecological heritage.
Diaspora peoples in South Central LA have managed to transnationalize local place-making
by importing the cultural landscape, vernacular architecture, biotic baggage, cognitive mapping
traditions, and social networking practices of their point-of-origin communities. The multigenerational
acequia farming communities have managed to re-inhabit their watershed by restoring historic use
rights to an enclosed common land; they have re-asserted a direct relationship and stewardship role
in an esteemed, but ecologically devastated, heritage landscape. In both of these cases, however,
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the evidence I have sketched goes beyond the usual complement of anecdotal material, case
studies, or ethnographic, autobiographical, and ethno-poetic narratives. The Hispano farmers of the
acequias in southern Colorado and the Mesoamerican farmers at South Central Farm in urban LA
are certainly adept at discourse politics and genuinely ‘parhessiastic,’ speaking truth to power in a
direct and confrontational, and hence ‘rude’, language game (Foucault 2001). But their material
relationships to the land and water run much deeper than the politics of the spoken word and
encompass sets of practices (irrigating, seed-saving, cultivating, constructing landscapes as it were)
that sustain a sense of place while emphasizing the protection of the material conditions of
existence. I believe these “subversive epistemologies of place” behoove us to re-value both
persistent and diaspora place-makers. They are the sources and transmitters of the knowledge,
belief, and practices required for the organization of a just and sustainable society.
I will end my address by re-centering this discourse in the voices of local, place-based
knowledge; three epigrams then:
Roberta Black Goat, a Dine elder at Big Mountain: “Our language does not have a word for relocation. To relocate is to disappear, is to die.”
Joseph C. Gallegos, Culebra River acequia farmer: “Taylor clear-cut my soul…but we will return to
make this place our home again.”
Marisela, a Zapotec South Central Farmer: “I planted this garden because it is a little space like
home. I grow the same plants that I had back in my garden in Oaxaca. We can eat like we ate at
home and this makes us feel like ourselves. It allows us to keep a part of who we are after coming to
the United States.”
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