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Reading is central to the project of BOOKS & CULTURE. And it is clear from even a casual perusal of its pages that reading applies no less to the "culture" half of the title than to the "books" component. It is, I think, in large measure to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz that we owe the idea that human culture is a text that can be read, a kind of document in need of interpretation. To think this way, Geertz once noted, "shifts the analysis of cultural forms from an endeavor in general parallel to dissecting an organism, diagnosing a symptom, deciphering a code to one in general parallel with penetrating a literary text." We are, by now, familiar with this line of thinking and with the diverse range of ways in which we routinely apply the notion of reading: we read books, maps, musical scores, mathematical formulas, movies, political situations, religious rituals.
Places can also be read. Cultural geographers have long been speaking of landscapes as texts that can be translated. Indeed it has become commonplace to use the fundamentally religious language of "iconography" to interrogate the cultural meanings that are inscribed in landscapes. The spaces humans occupy are thus to be seen as symbolic formations. Space, we have come to realize, is not an empty container within which human action takes place, or a mere stage on which the human drama unfolds. Rather it is constitutive of social interaction.
Getting a handle on some of the ways in which space is produced has done a good deal to open up fresh lines of inquiry at every scale from the routine spaces of daily life, to global geopolitical relations. For the spaces through which we transact the affairs of social life are both the medium and the outcome of human interaction. Consider the different venues that act as the arenas in which we encounter other people—the factory floor, the sports field, the dinner party, the church building, the lecture hall, the home—to name but a very few. In each case, these sites provide us with repertoires of meaning that facilitate communication.
How people behave and relate to one other in each of these sites is radically different, but in each case it is clear that the signs and symbols meant to give meaning to human actions are spatially linked. For this reason, making sense of even the simplest of gestures and behaviors requires an understanding of what has been called the "imaginative universe" in which the occupants of any particular locality participate. Without a familiarity with what we could call the "local customs" of the boardroom or the library or the building site or the church sanctuary, it is extraordinarily difficult to sort out the coded messages in which communication is embedded.
All of this suggests that the meaning of space is of fundamental importance in social life. But this does not imply that places have only one meaning. To the contrary. Places are polysemic; their meanings are unstable, contested, equivocal. And it is for this reason that "the geography of the mind" is so important. For the meaning of landscape is shaped by mindscape. Places are perceived in different ways by different people. And this indicates that spaces and sites assume different meanings for different cultures at different times.
Thus while the early New England Puritans, for example, found the wilderness a place of moral jeopardy and spiritual peril, the Romantics spoke of it as a surrogate civilization bursting with innate vitality. And while early visitors to the English Lake District thought it barren and threatening, a later generation of Wordsworthians found grandeur and glory there. Again, while early explorers found the world of the tropics exotic and paradisial, their later heirs typecast it as pestilential and morbid; the tropics were as much, if not more, an imagined realm as a regional reality.
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