These are two different ways that we “ascribe meaning to places, imbuing them with emotion and feeling, making them much more than the bundles of matter that they are, The individual attributes of a space emerge into something much more culturally meaningful: a neighborhood becomes the self-identity of a people a national park becomes for some visitors a lasting source of positive emotional attachment; a farm becomes more than fields and crops but the site of family ritual passed down to future generations.” (239)
The first is place attachment, which he explains as “members’ connection to the biophysical attributes” of a place, (Farrell, Battle, 239). Place attachment in his definition involves connection to the land. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social relationships, but concerns a deep attachment to the environment. People become attached to a landscape in various ways, through work, story, recreational experiences, etc. There is a significant body of literature on place attachment theory that is worth exploring.
The second is community attachment, which I am defining as "members’ connection to the social-relational community of a place." In this sense, attachment comes primarily through one's relationship to people, to a community of people who may also reside in a certain geographical locality--thus there is some conflation with place attachment. It is about social bonding.
Community attachment involves two factors. Group identity is about feeling connected to a group's purpose or character. An example might be identifying as a Corbin Redhound (our local high school mascot) - a strong sense of connection to this local school-based identity because one feels connected to the football team, or the band and their purpose. The other factor is interpersonal relational bonds between community members--real, lived relationships between members of this community. While group identity can be somewhat abstract, interpersonal bonds are very concrete and involve friendships, kinship, and other intimate personal connections between specific people.
I am trying to think about this in relation to Appalachia and other parts of Kentucky. I think you often have community attachment without a strong place attachment. This may be what Harry Caudill is pointing to when he writes about the woods, "The hill people probably know as little about their native heath as any folk on earth . . . . Today, a typical eastern Kentuckian cannot tell a black oak from a black gum or a hickory from a hornbeam. Though the people of China will pay more than sixty dollars for a pound of dried ginseng root most Kentuckians can walk past it without recognition" (Caudill, Darkness at Dawn, 38, 41). I see this exemplified in my wife's life – she has a strong attachment to the relationships and the relational network of extended family and friends that she grew up with in her small town. These are social bonds that have been forged for generations of living together. But she doesn’t have a strong connection to the land and its features, the environment and ecology of her local area. She doesn’t know the land or the geography, nor spend any time in it.
Now some of her family also has place attachment, which was formed through years of hunting, fishing, and farming the land.
Another issue of place attachment is that it might be super-local – families might be very attached to their holler or their mountain, but not so attached to the other side of the mountain. Families forge these sorts of super-local place bonds by generations of living in one certain place, the family holler or farm. Thus a very powerful place attachment might coincide with a negligent attitude toward environmental destruction someplace else. This sort of super-local place attachment for one’s own property but not the property of another fails to appreciate the interconnection between these “properties” defined by deeds rather than an interconnected landscape. It makes it more difficult to build joint or communal action to protect a landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment