In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
By Tim Cresswell (1996)

Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).

Interesting Specifics:

"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).

Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.

"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.

"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).

"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.

"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).