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OF BOUNDARIES, PLACES, AND SITUATIONS
Author(s) -
ETHINGTON PHILIP J.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
history and theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.169
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1468-2303
pISSN - 0018-2656
DOI - 10.1111/hith.12148
Subject(s) - epistemology , credibility , agency (philosophy) , pragmatism , sociology , meaning (existential) , pace , power (physics) , philosophy , geography , physics , geodesy , quantum mechanics
Thomas F. Gieryn's Truth‐Spots: How Places Make Us Believe presents eight case studies to support his historical‐sociological thesis that “Places … have agency and exert a force of their own on the direction and pace of knowledge and belief” (18). Gieryn adds a new angle to a century‐old discourse on the social construction of truth: the emplacement of credibility in narrated material locations. Throughout his career, Gieryn has contributed extensively to the spatial and placeful analysis of knowledge and social power: from advancing the concept of discursive “boundary‐work” in the 1980s, to a refined method of “cultural cartography” in the 1990s, and in the twenty‐first century, toward investigations of places: defined as meaning‐enriched material locations. He has now advanced “truth‐spots” as a type of place that credibilizes truth‐claims. This essay reviews the key concepts in the career of this historical sociologist of scientific knowledge, through a mapping of Gieryn's own trajectory within the arc of a long pragmatist tradition in US social science. I shall use Gieryn's own case studies to test two key claims in his account of how place operates in the social‐cultural construction of belief: (1) The model of “place” that Gieryn proposed in 2000, and has used consistently ever since (termed here a “Gieryn‐place”), and (2) Gieryn's claim that features of “truth‐spots” exhibit an observably independent (“agentic”) effect on the credibility of claims made there. I argue that both Gieryn‐places and truth‐spots suffer from incomplete specification of the ways in which people attach meanings to locations; of the boundaries of places; and of the sites of conscious encounter with places. They suffer also from his own boundary‐work to exclude imaginary, cultural, and virtual spaces from his conception of place. This essay argues that a credible account of how place operates in/as history will require a focus on situation and situatedness, drawing on the pragmatist tradition of the Thomas Theorem. The concept of situation completes the circuit between meaning‐production and the attachment of meaning to places and opens a gate for historical investigation, across the boundary between imagined, virtual, and conceptual spaces , and lived, material embodied places .