Abstract
Gieryn has furnished the reader here with a collection of eight fairly disparate case studies knit together by their illumination of nodes linking place and knowledge. In these studies, he reminds us with exceptional clarity and playfulness that, even in a world increasingly comprised of virtual places, epistemological assertions of all kinds are inseparable from and even require emplacement for their successful establishment. He captures his observations in elegant but accessible prose (which makes up somewhat, though not entirely, for the book’s total lack of visual material) and drives them home by narrating his own ground-truthing journeys: site visits meant both to strengthen his conclusions and to model tacitly his central tenet.
Some cases focus on special places as proof-of-concept of one kind or another – Delphi (ch. 1), Walden Pond (ch. 2), the courthouse (ch. 6), and the ultra-clean lab (ch. 8) – each functioning with different nuances to ground-truth various claims about time, austerity, justice, and scientific reliability. Other studies are about the drawing together of diverse loci – sometimes literally, as in Henry Ford’s ironic collection at Greenfield, MI of cottages important to industry (ch. 4), and sometimes literarily, as in President Obama’s allerative allocation of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall as birthplaces of women’s-, racial-, and LGBTQ-rights movements (ch. 7). In both cases Gieryn deftly attends to the opportunity costs and occlusions these acts of place-gathering entail. Paths can be places too, where the journey is more important than the arrival for epistemological and existential claims – including in Gieryn’s description of the Camino de Santiago as a kind of eclectic theater that leaves each character transformed (ch. 5), or in the peregrinations of biologist Carl Linneaus into the wilds of Lapland to gather specimens, to the scientific hub of Leiden to establish his reputation, and to the university ‘pulpit’ of Uppsala to promulgate and promote his binomial taxonomic system (ch. 3). In his ‘Coda’, Gieryn distills the previous studies through the notion that places ‘exert themselves on bodies and minds, sometimes convincing us that assertions from there are true’ (p. 171).
While Gieryn’s focus is on specific cases that illustrate the variety of ways in which place and knowing are related, there emerge also some thematic clusters: racial justice (Dredd Scott, Ferguson, Selma), science (Linneaus, labs), tourism (Delphi, El Camino, Greenfield). Seen this way one also notes the greater attention he gives to specialized, elite, preeminent, and otherwise anomalous places, and less to some of central importance to critical geography, especially gendered and domestic spaces. This might not be coincidental, as critical geographers and cultural theorists have shown repeatedly the way the extraordinary and the elite naturally carry over values of (e.g.) gendered power that run so deep they are often difficult to perceive. And vice versa: ignoring quotidian and mundane spaces also bears implicit statements of value, especially when those spaces are as (if not more) important for knowledge and worldview construction than are the exceptional. Although Gieryn’s style and accessible orientation meant little explicit engagement with academic conversations, it felt a loss not to see him take up at least the subjects of classic works of (e.g.) feminist geography, whose attention to the way spaces are constructed as masculine and feminine, workplace and domestic, indelibly affect gendered epistemologies. Which places make people believe things about themselves? Even further, how might ‘places make people believe’ things against their own interests, or how might places become sites of oppressive, rather than liberating, truths? Reading this now in the context of life disrupted and forced into new places by a global pandemic, this lack seems all the more unfortunate, especially given Gieryn’s formidable talent for making the ideas accessible to the very audiences he might otherwise have spoken to more robustly. In the end, it is to Gieryn’s credit that he has left his readers an accessible framework and a heightened awareness of the relationships between location and understanding that can be extended to excavate similar kinds of questions in different kinds of places.
