Sense of Place: My Heart's Original Home is Not My Daughter's

Earlier this week I talked about my first book signing. Today I thought I'd share one of the book passages that I read from "The Unofficial Family Archivist." "A sense of place" is a topic I return to again and again. I even consider Robert Archibald's "A Place to Remember" as one of my professional bibles with its focus on place as a center point for our memories and community. Capturing a sense of place should be a vital part of the work of professional archivists and non-professional "citizen" archivists. Thinking about our environment feeds our identity, helps us understand human differences, and helps give personal stories context and meaning.

Figure 36. I asked my mother to send me photos of her and Dad from their childhoods that demonstrate a sense of place. Their city upbringings are evident in these images. Mom stands with her little brother in a carriage. Dad is the little boy on the lower left in the other image.

Sense of Place [p. 179-180 "The Unofficial Family Archivist]

"The backdrop to your personal story provides a valuable bit of information toward the understanding of your personal history, but it is one of those intangible elements that you will likely need to consciously convey and incorporate into your documentation efforts. A setting can influence us and the events around us in poignant ways. “Who am I?” has been influenced by the places I have lived.

"For example, I grew up in a suburban environment, in a town about 45 minutes outside of New York City. I could walk to school and to the grocery store. Wildlife consisted of birds, bugs, and an occasional raccoon in the garbage. Sidewalks were the norm, and my cul-de-sac enabled me to learn to ride my bike without fear of being hit by a car. I now live in a more rural suburban environment. I need a vehicle to get almost anywhere. The hills are too big for easily learning to ride a bike. I have had deer, fox, and fisher cats in my yard. Frogs keep me up at night instead of traffic, and friends have told me that there is a bear in the neighborhood. My formative years were certainly different from my daughter’s early years, and her sense of self has a distinctly New Hampshire tinge to it. When we visit a city, she is struck by all the people and buildings, noting them as distinctly different from her norm.

"The place from which we come gives us shared memories with other community members.[1] The place may also deeply impact us so that our “otherness” is obvious to others. Transmitting remembrances about our spaces is vital toward helping others understand us. One who lives in the inner city will have a very different perspective than one who lives in the country. A person of a particular nationality will also have alternate views from someone from another place. Explaining these differences is vital toward promoting harmony among diverse groups and can help us better understand ourselves and each other.

"Try to capture your environment in your documentation work. Use visual tools to relay your setting to others. Describe what makes the place or places you have lived unique. Try to convey how your sense of place has impacted you. Use sense of place as a thread through your other documentation work, or focus exclusively on it by describing the setting directly. To convey your sense of place, think about the location itself. Consider the buildings, natural elements, and infrastructure that you recognize as your own. Also mull over the cultural environment that your residence has that makes it unique. What characteristics of the community reflect its uniqueness? What language, ideas, history, and recurring events are distinctive elements of this place?

The Sense of Place passage is part of a U.S. registered Copyright. "The Unofficial Family Archivist," Melissa Mannon. ArchivesInfo Press, 2011. No part of this passage may be reproduced without the written consent of the author.

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[1] For more on “sense of place,” please see Robert Archibald’s A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 1999).

Communities

In an article I am working on for a history journal I write, "A community is a formal or informal group with a common history. The community can be based around a geographic area or topic of interest. Communities can be represented by civic organizations, governments, informal social groups, educational institutions, causes, and the like. Cultural institutions support the collective memories of communities by retaining materials that reflect individual group member’s ideas and remembrances, documenting special events as well as day-to-day activities."

This role of community support is one of the most important jobs of a museum or Archives. Cultural institutions help transfer the knowledge, beliefs, customs, artistic essence, memories, shared experiences and history of communities. By doing so, they aid the transference of human wisdom from one generation to the next.

Members of any given community will belong to many other communities, producing overlapping social circles. Cultural heritage institutions help pronounce the overlap between groups, citing our similarities and promoting understanding and empathy. [Please pardon my not-so-perfect, rough drawing of overlapping communities. Members of one community may belong to some similar communities, but may differ in other memberships. All of the communities here can be broken down further. For example, "Beliefs" can include religion, political affiliation, etc.]

For those interested in how cultural heritage institutions feed communities, Robert R. Archibald's A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community explains how the individual connects with his world through his own memories and experiences, while also learning from the knowledge of others passed through time. It is a book that I return to again and again in my personal library.

Much recent writing in the field of archives in particular has focused on documenting various communities. An article in the latest issue (Spring / Summer 2010) of the American Archivist titled "Documenting the Immigrant and Ethnic Experience in American Archives" discusses the need for and challenge of documenting "ethnic" communities. It is a thought provoking look at the idea of "activist archivists" who approach their work with the idea that collections should reflect diversity. The article discusses how those collecting records must work with those in the communities creating them.

If we accept that a significant role of the cultural heritage institution is to document diverse communities and we are open to the challenge of the "activist archivist" (for lack of a better term) or the "activist curator," our challenge becomes identifying the communities one should document. There is presumably an unlimited number of communities that exist. Beginning with my outline of humanity's cultural groups, cultural heritage professionals can seek to recognize the communities that their institution should embody and consider how these groups are represented by their collections and programs.