Metamorphosis and Place

If personal and national identity is often constructed in terms of place, how do our identities and values change as places themselves are transformed? What happens to the spaces in which we live as societal values and identities change? These questions can be asked of almost any discipline, whether one is taking a photograph or mapping a literary topography, tracing linguistic change in a geographic region or language’s importance to our conception of a political territory, building a house or place of worship on a physical plot of land, or constructing them from words on a page or computer software.Few places are ever uniquely our own. We share them, knowing that the geographic points stabilizing our own identities serve, on their reverse side, to support an entirely different set of meanings. We project our cultural (or disciplinary) markers onto landscapes which are already hardly blank, but full of others’ meanings. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, architecture, anthropology, photography and art history, communications, sociology, lexicography, linguistics, tourism management and theoretical psychoanalysis, each shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.