“We late moderns are said to struggle to maintain meaningful place attachments and places themselves struggle to be distinctive” (1).
“What is clear is that a diverse set of social actors in late modern America are making place vital to their cultural existence. Place is being positioned as central to the construction of selves and communities. Emotionally felt and morally loaded meaning is being attributed to place. Place is being used as a symbol of, a resource in, and a starting point for resistance to expansive and powerful macrosystems. Place is consistently treated as a contested social space: as redeemable, as the locus of power, as something to rally around, but something endangered and under threat. In short, there are high stakes involved with place, in which political, social, personal, ecological, economic, and ethical gains are up for grabs” (3).
“To conclude, I will not suggest but say: this essay is a promise. Through ethnographies of place, anthropologists of late modern America will uncover Low’s “systems of exclusion,” see Feld and Basso’s fusions of “locality to life-world” at work, and come to terms with the political, economic, and ethical possibilities that people invest in their places” (10).
