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[ 3 ] This is a story about a place—Black Rock, New Mexico—a small community in the west-central part of the state, forty miles south of Gallup and four miles east of the Pueblo of Zuni.1 It is a story about landforms, ancestral settlements, culturally significant Zuni sites, a town created by the federal government and its eventual transition into a modern housing suburb of the Pueblo. It is a story not only about a particular sense of place, but as the tale unfolds, it illuminates the multiple meanings of place given to this landscape. They are meanings created by Zunis and non-Zunis alike. TH E ID EA OF PLACE Place. It is such a common word. People use it every day to describe where they are, where they were, or where they are going. We are always in a place or going to another place. Most of the time we experience places unselfconsciously; they are a part of our everyday world and we pay little attention to their physical properties or their meanings to our self or cultural identity. At certain times, however, we become very conscious of place. We may arrive somewhere that feels very comfortable and secure. Once there, or on the way there, we literally “sense” our place through a variety of emotions, memories, sights, smells, and sounds; we become, as Edward Casey says,“implaced.”2 On the other hand, we may find ourselves in a locale that seems forbidding, where we feel unwelcome, maybe even fearful. We may feel uncomfortable because we are out of place, disoriented because we lose our sense of place. These feelings, what Casey calls “displacement,” are often only fleeting sensations, but it is at these moments that we grasp the importance of place in our daily lives.3 What is it about place that causes these feelings? Although a place is certainly a corporeal object— physically located in both time and space—it is so much more than that. Introduction to Place-Making, Identity, and Cultural Landscapes CHAPTER 1 [ 4 ] INTRODUCTION TO PLACE-MAKING, IDENTITY, CULTURAL LAND S C A PE S As defined by Michele Dominy, a place is “invested with cultural meaning , a site of intense cultural activity and imagination—of memory, of affectivity, of work, of sociality, of identity.”4 Places can be real, or they can be imagined. All of these are true because, in the simplest of terms, a place is a focus of our awareness. It is something that all of us experience and to which we ascribe meaning. According to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, it is something with which we have a “lived relationship.” Place. It is a seemingly simple word, yet when we focus in on what a place means to us we discover that everyone has his or her own concept, image, or meaning for a particular place. How can this be? What forces— experiential, cultural, and historical—work on us to create places? This common word suddenly becomes a complex concept when we explore the multiple meanings that people have for a place and as these particular sites become a part of a personal or group identity. This complexity is compounded when we consider what happens when changes overtake a place. What happens then to a person’s “sense of place?” The study of place has been the focus of several different disciplinary approaches, most notably, cultural geography, anthropology, and phenomenology . How do these disciplines look at the concept of place and its expression as a cultural landscape, and how do they explore the connection between place and cultural identity? By delineating the parameters for the concept of place and its affiliation with cultural identity, we will thus be able to explore the meaning of place at Black Rock. TH E CO NCEPT OF PLACE Cultural geography has the led the way in the study of place; however, as James Duncan and David Ley note, the discipline has gone down several methodological pathways.6 Until the 190s, the most common form of scholarly “place-making” was through descriptive fieldwork in which geographers described and classified the world’s landscapes and peoples. This was followed by an interest in spatial theory whereby geographers were striving to produce “abstract, reductionist descriptions of the world,” which take little account of differences resulting from cultural variation.7 Later, postmodernist scholars attempted to deconstruct and de-center the meta-narratives that they felt hampered the academy’s ability to understand the...

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