Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography

Preface

xiii Still another plunge into terra incognita. Or is it a labyrinth this time? This book is the latest, possibly final, chapter in a lifelong quest to grasp the realities of American cultural and social geography. It has involved countless miles, days, and hours of observation, reading, discussion, daydreaming , and brooding. Not Yet a Placeless Land supersedes, and substantially corrects or modifies, The Cultural Geography of the United States, initially published in 1973 and reissued in revised form in 1992. Its most direct antecedent , however, is Nation into State (Zelinsky 1988a), while it feeds on all the articles assembled in Exploring in the Beloved Country (Zelinsky 1994b) and various subsequent publications of mine. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 1, this is the very first systematic inquiry into the validity of the widespread belief or assumption that our nation-state has become so thoroughly rationalized and homogenized by means of modern technology and by centralized governance and business enterprise that all but faint vestiges of genuine places have vanished. Be forewarned that the quest for a sensible assessment of the actual situation is long, complex, and beset with perplexities. Before we are done we shall have wandered deep within the realm of paradox. Along the way it has been necessary to touch on a multitude of topics, so many indeed that what follows is something of a preparatory sketch for the much more ambitious tome I can never hope to realize. Other authors have dealt with some of these issues in detail, sometimes definitively (and it has been necessary to exploit their findings much too briefly); but for all too many others we have only partial or superficial coverage, and for still others none at all. If this opus succeeds in nudging other investigators into filling some of the gaps, I shall be overjoyed. And, given the obvious fact that this is a fallible, pioneering effort, one of my fondest hopes is that eventually Preface xiv | Preface some intrepid scholar will do the job properly and render this volume obsolete. The question so single-mindedly pursued in the following pages is entwined with much vaster issues. I resist the temptation to veer off into them for a single compelling reason. It is my lack of competence to add much of value to the work of others who have expertly explored some of those grander questions. Perhaps the grandest of them all—and one I cannot avoid mentioning here—is the angst that afflicts so much of contemporary humanity, the sense of being adrift, homeless in a universe of doubtful meaning (literal placelessness is just one of the symptoms). It is a malaise effectively expressed in many recent works of fiction, verse, the visual arts, film, and theater but also falls within the purview of the social scientist. Thus we live today in a world in which many of us are fascinated by genealogy and antiques or are involved in resurrecting and celebrating the past—or seek variety and some sort of emotional redemption in distant places. Still more indicative of a profound rootlessness of human beings flailing about in the flood of time is the rather sudden latter-day craze for science fiction, a medium whereby we can find sanctuary in both other worlds and other eras. Once again, my presentation only brushes along the fringes of such overarching concerns. As the reader will soon realize, I do not confront the immensely fashionable theme of globalization head-on, thrusting it instead to the sidelines with only the occasional fleeting mention. But a deeper interpretation of what follows will recognize this inquiry as comprising, in large part, a case study of the recent operation of globalizing processes—in addition to several others—in making the United States a special or not-so-special place and also of how such processes enhance or crush the individuality of the nation’s component parts. I maintain that, if globalization has recently become such an increasingly unavoidable issue in the American story, it has been an active, steadily growing force in worldwide human behavior throughout the past five hundred years or so. Indeed it is an inseparable element of the overall modernization project. (In pre-modern times, there may have been intermittent, relatively feeble episodes of globalistic phenomena, but that is another topic and irrelevant to the matters at hand.) In any event, as time went on, globalization gathered strength and accelerated so that, finally, after the twentieth century was well under way...