What makes New York City different from Moscow? Are small towns
looking more and more alike? What criteria should we use to
distinguish onw place from another? Today, geographers and other
social scientists are debating not only the answers to these sorts
of questions but even whether or not to ask them at all. This
ongoing controversy about how (or whether) to study place and its
meaning in modern life forms the focus of J. Nicholas Entrikin's
pioneering work.
Those who point to a decline in the study of place in geography,
Entrikin explains, cite three main causes: the apparent
homogenization of world culture; the belief that studying
particular places is somehow "parochial"; and the tendency of the
scientific method to generalize. Entrikin treats each of these in
turn, addressing topics that include the Marxist view of a world
economy, the moral implications of place (in such notions as
community and provincialism), and the empiricist versus neo-Kantian
traditions in philosophy.
To geographers arguing the merits of hard, scientific data
versus subjective experience, Entrikin offers a compromise. "To
understand place," he suggests, "requires that we have access to
both an objective and a subjective reality. From the decentered
vantage point of the theoretical scientist, place becomes either
location or a set of generic relations and loses much of its
significance for human action. From the centered viewpoint of the
subjective self, place has meaning only in relation to one's own
goals and concerns. Place is best viewed from points
in-between."
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