Sense of Place

"Sense of place" has several meanings:

1. A set of personal, family, and community narratives that include features of place. Taken together, these narratives constitute an attachment to place. It is this meaning of "sense of place" that Donald Worster seems to have in mind in Dust Bowl; it is also Stegner's. This meaning may embed the other meanings of the phrase.

2. The attribution of non-material characteristics to a place. The "soul" of a place; its genius loci.

3. Tacit knowledge of a place. This would include the ability to describe a plant or an outcropping of rock without being able to put a name to either. It would entail the tendency to have embodied skills for route-finding, but neither the linguistic nor the visual memory needed to draw a map.

A sense of place, in this meaning, would include the notion of "being oriented." To lack a sense of place is to be "disoriented." In modern industrial societies, such a sense of place is relative to mode of transport. One may have a sense of place when walking, for instance, but become utterly disoriented when in an automobile.

4. A synthetic but unsystematized body of knowledge about a place. In this meaning, systematic knowledge of place is embedded in an unarticulated system of a higher order: knowledge about parts but a sense of the whole.