Place, Region and Modernity

Examining innovation in the Alps at the local scale

“…This perspective corresponds well to the notion of betweenness proposed by Nicholas Entrikin (Entrikin, 1991). Little referred to by French geographers, the "entre-deux" concept indeed appears as a particularly creative means for exploring and translating the many socio-spatial and socio-territorial relational schemas which are characterised by dualities, ambiguities or hybridizations where differences are played out again and frontiers become blurred in a way that is characteristic of territorial post modernity: touristic -non-touristic place, town-mountain, resort -outside of resort, sport -heritage, holiday stay -residence, summer-winter, protection-development .…”

‘I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from’: the meaning of place in social work with children and families

“…Cultural geographers, amongst others, remind us that human experience is always rooted in place (e.g. Entrikin , p. 41). This is illustrated, for example, by Philip Hensher, winner of the 2013 Ondaatje Prize for Sense of Place with his novel Scenes from Early Life , who wrote that, when he thinks of a novel he loves, ‘often … it is not the plot that comes to mind, or even, sometimes, the characters, but the setting … when the novelist's eye falls on a particular stretch of earth, it can transform it for ever’ (Hensher ).…”

“…Part of the explanation for this apparently contradictory finding is provided by sociologists and social theorists who have noted that, in a world characterized by increasing uncertainty and risk, personal identities are in a constant process of construction , through day‐to‐day reflexive interactions between individuals and their environments, rather than being assigned to them by society according to largely immutable factors such as their gender, race, social class and educational background, as in the past (Giddens , ). So, even if the time individuals spend in any one place is shrinking (although this is not true for everyone), personal identities and feelings of security and belonging are likely to be more closely linked to the places where people were born and brought up or currently live than ever before (Entrikin ).…”

Special issue on sense of place in the history of English

“…This perspective thus informs the treatment of place in this collection which, taken as a whole, captures the idea that it is not perceived as static and fixed, but as a location for competing definitions and multiple interactions all of which produce differentiated views of what a ‘sense of place’ means. This orientation competes with the ‘objective space-time of modern science’ (Entrikin 1991: 63), which not only struggles with the idea of differential ‘senses’ of place, but has also eroded other traditional and religious world-views that dealt with ‘place’ in specific ways. Given that ‘[t]he earliest religious myths of humanity were concerned with the need to introduce orientation or a centre of reference into time and space’ (Charme 1984: 157), it is unsurprising that, even in the earliest English texts, places can be envisaged as more than their mere physical locations.…”

“…Trudgill 1999). 1 This issue reflects debates about the divergent ways in which place can be comprehended (see Entrikin 1991), and that the ‘meaning’ of places will naturally change over time. Furthermore, it underscores the possibility that lexical items may not necessarily have a stable relationship with particular locations over their history, and that there will always be competing definitions of ‘place’ which entail that indicating regional provenance or the location of current usage is fraught with problems engendered by different readers’, and indeed scholars’, varying perspectives.…”