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206 The accumulation of evidence in the preceding chapters leads to an unavoidable interim judgment: that the homogenization or rationalization of American territory and society has indeed been the dominant process in the historical geography of the nation since its inception. But we must also add some large qualifications to any account of this triumphal procession. As we have learned, accompanying such a grand convergence, this creation of a set of interlocking clusters bearing a strong family resemblance—along with the smoothing out of various cultural wrinkles—there has also been a lively eruption, ever greater in number and variety, of unpredictable places within the interstices of the grander system. Moreover, in at least three cultural realms—the linguistic, religious, and political—American place-to-place differences have shown little sign of vanishing. But there is still another major evolution we have yet to confront: a sea change developing over the past century in our sensibilities with regard to questions of space and place. More specifically, the notion of region has entered our general consciousness. Thus we may now pose such questions as: do genuine regions exist within the United States? If so, how many and where? How old or new are they? How meaningful are these regions? How great are the differences among them? Are these differences increasing or decreasing? In short, what bearing do regions have upon the central concerns of this study?1 But, before we can set about grappling with such questions, we must try to understand just what is meant by “region” and related terms and concepts.2 On the Meaning and Fortunes of Place and Region Perhaps the only unassailable claim concerning regions is that they are a certain kind of place. “We can begin by admitting that place and region are 6 The Regional Factor The Regional Factor | 207 inherently complex, that they are messy ideas that resist easy characterization . Region is perhaps the most untidy, for nearly any description includes nagging exceptions and obdurate contradictions. Nothing seems to stay neatly packaged or bounded” (Lang 2001, v). But, fortunately, we have recently had major developments among the community of scholars who deal with human affairs which enhance the value, indeed the urgency, of dealing with place, if not region. The subsequent discussion would be rather superficial if these are not kept in mind. First there is a “shibboleth among critical human geographers [and now almost everyone else!] that place and region are socially produced or socially constructed” (Entrikin 1996, 215), an understanding that has become universally accepted. Then, an even more fundamental reassessment of the role of place in the larger scheme of things has gained traction in recent years. “Mounting evidence of persistence and, in some instances, intensification of localist attachments and influences (even in highly industrialized societies) has prompted many to question the aspatial assumptions that have dominated the Western social literature in the twentieth century . . . With this development , the concepts of region, place, and locale have been accorded increasing attention in the social sciences and humanities” (A. B. Murphy 1992, 22).3 In a truly profound pair of volumes, the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1997) has trenchantly and lucidly explored the ongoing revolution, the emergent (postmodern?) paradigm that has begun to inform our current approach to social reality. It replaces an outmoded mind-set Casey has characterized as follows. In the past three centuries in the West—the period of “modernity”—place has come to be not only neglected but actively suppressed. Owing to the triumph of the natural and social sciences in this same period, any serious talk of place has been regarded as regressive or trivial. A discourse has emerged whose exclusive cosmological foci are Time and Space. When the two were combined by twentieth-century physicists into the amalgam “space-time,” the overlooking of place was only continued by other means. For an entire epoch, place has been regarded as an impoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal cosmic partners that tower over modernity . . . By late modern times, this world has become increasingly placeless, a matter of mere sites instead of lived places, of sudden displacement rather than of perduring implacements. (1993, xiv–xv) But ultimately a contradiction has ensued. As modernity seemingly flattens or diminishes place, our personal and scholarly concern with it has begun to rise sharply (Lutwack 1984, 182–83; Sack 1986, 218–19). In the preceding chapters, I have offered some indications of this recent transformation of sensibilities. Many more...

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