Over the last two decades anthropologists have drawn on insights from ethnographic inquiry to challenge accepted definitions and ideas of space and place. Their efforts have led to an understanding that both the conceptual and material dimensions of space as well as of built forms and landscape characteristics are central to the production (and reproduction) of social life. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture is an unprecedented collection of key articles presented explicitly for students and researchers in anthropology, environmental psychology, sociology, architecture, geography, and urban planning. The volume includes an introduction that synthesizes existing literature, highlights core issues, and maps potential directions for future research.

Are reports of the death of conventional fieldwork in anthropology greatly exaggerated? This book takes a critical look at the latest developments and key issues in fieldwork. The nature of 'locality' itself is problematic for both research subjects and fieldworkers, on the grounds that it must now be maintained and represented in relation to widening (and fragmenting) social frames and networks. Such developments have raised questions concerning the nature of ethnographic presence and scales of comparison. From the social space of a cybercafe to cities in India, the UK and South Africa among others, this book features a wide range of ethnographic studies that provide new ways of looking at the concepts of 'locality' and 'site'. It shows that rather than taking key fieldwork processes such as globalization and mobility for granted, anthropologists are well-placed to examine and critique the totalizing assumptions behind these notions.

This truly multidisciplinary book explores how culture-founding terms like ‘space’ and ‘place’ have been reconsidered, re-elaborated and how they have acquired new meanings through academic research that crosses the traditional borderline between the humanities and social sciences. All chapters explore from different perspectives how the notions of space and place are still modelling our sense of reality by investigating social and cultural phenomena of various types that evolved between the 20th and 21st centuries. The essays collected here provide evidence of the growing necessity of building bridges across disciplines to allow knowledge, in general, and academic work, in particular, to work towards new forms of epistemology. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, discourse analysis, multimodality, communication and media, linguistics, literary and film studies, anthropology and ethnography.

The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, and to consider the active roles individuals, groups, and social structures play in creating the environments in which people live, work, and play. These readings highlight the ways in which space and place are produced through large- and small-scale social, political, and economic practices, and offer new ways to think about how people engage the environment in multiple and diverse ways. Providing an essential resource for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and many other areas, this book brings together important but, till now, widely dispersed writings across many inter-related disciplines. Introductions from the editors precede each section; introducing the texts, demonstrating their significance, and outlining the key issues surrounding the topic. A companion website, PeoplePlaceSpace.org, extends the work even further by providing an on-going series of additional reading lists that cover issues ranging from food security to foreclosure, psychiatric spaces to the environments of predator animals.

This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.

Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into 'view', and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volume follows from these interconnected ways of considering landscape: the conventional, Western notion of 'landscape' may be used as productive point of departure from which to explore analgous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively by used to interrogate the Western construct.The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural process: a process located between place and space, inside and outside, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify this approach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan "gaze" in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinea rainforests. The anthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape.

In a volume that brings together a wide range of disciplines—art history, sociology, architecture, cultural anthropology, and environmental psychology—Irene Cieraad presents a collection of articles that focuses on the practices and symbolism of domestic space in Western society. These essays go beyond the discussion of conventional issues such as aesthetics and social standing. At Home takes an in-depth anthropological look at how different cultures use their homes as a visual model of the culture's social structure.

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of "supermodernity" to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.