EOC Part B-Number 1

From The Rediscovery of North America

by Barry Lopez (1992)

In Spanish, la querencia refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn. It comes from the verb querer, to desire, but this verb also carries the sense of accepting a challenge, as in a game.

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In Spain, querencia is most often used to describe the spot in a bullring where a wounded bull goes to gather himself, the place he returns to after his painful encounters with the picadors and the banderilleros. It is unfortunate that the word is compromised in this way, for the idea itself is quite beautiful—a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs. Querencia conveys more than “hearth.” And it carries this sense of being challenged—in the case of a bullfight, by something lethal, which one may want no part of.

I would like to take this word querencia beyond its ordinary meaning and suggest that it applies to our challenge in the modern world, that our search for a querencia is both a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are. And the discovery of a querencia, I believe, hinges on the perfection of a sense of place.

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A sense of place must include, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship between a people and the place they occupy, and certainly, too, how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure to attend to it, wounds people. Living in North America and trying to develop a philosophy of place—a recognition of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of geography—inevitably brings us back to our beginnings here, to the Spanish incursion. The Spanish experience was to amass wealth and go home. Those of us who have stayed, who delight in the litanies of this landscape and who can imagine no deeper pleasure than the fullness of our residency here, look with horror on the survival of that imperial framework in North America—the physical destruction of a local landscape to increase the wealth of people who don’t live there, or to supply materials to buyers in distant places who will never know the destruction that process leaves behind.

If, in a philosophy of place, we examine our love of the land—I do not mean a romantic love, but . . . biophilia, love of what is alive, and the physical context in which it lives, which we call “the hollow” or “the canebrake” or “the woody draw” or “the canyon”—if, in measuring our love, we feel anger, I think we have a further obligation. It is to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a relatively few people can amass wealth.

From The Mountains of California

by John Muir (1894)

Most people like to look at mountain rivers, and bear them in mind; but few care to look at the winds, though far more beautiful and sublime, and though they become at times about as visible as flowing water. When the north winds in winter are making upward sweeps over the curving summits of the High Sierra, the fact is sometimes published with flying snow-banners a mile long. Those portions of the winds thus embodied can scarce be wholly invisible, even to the darkest imagination. And when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see something of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees. Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer, we see detached plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, or, escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like crests. Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topography of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain rivers conforming to the features of their channels.

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After tracing the Sierra streams from their fountains to the plains, marking where they bloom white in falls, glide in crystal plumes, surge gray and foam-filled in boulder-choked gorges, and slip through the woods in long, tranquil reaches—after thus learning their language and forms in detail, we may at length hear them chanting all together in one grand anthem, and comprehend them all in clear inner vision, covering the range like lace. But even this spectacle is far less sublime and not a whit more substantial than what we may behold of these storm-streams of air in the mountain woods.

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.

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When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away, and, turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, “My peace I give unto you.”

As I gazed on the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of the storm was forgotten, and never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.

From "Ethnic Place Identity Within a Parisian Neighborhood"

by David Kaplan and Charlotte Recoquillon (Geographical Review, April 7, 2014)

The Goutte d'Or has long been a place that captured the French imagination....

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Three distinct communities each "make" this neighborhood. The European French—many who have lived here for a long time but some who have moved recently to take advantage of the (slightly) lower rents—see this place as yet another quarter of Paris. They participate more broadly beyond the boundaries. The Maghrebi population, both first-generation immigrants from North Africa and their children, have established a strong religious and commercial presence here. The development of a new mosque, the establishment of the Islamic Center here, and continued business ownership, confirm the Goutte d'Or as an important cultural and religious anchor throughout the Île-de-France. The West African population is of relatively recent origin. Yet they have come to define much of the street life of the Goutte d"or and, while not thus far well represented among the business proprietors, they make up much of the customer base. What is more, many of the people shopping and socializing on the streets of the Goutte d'Or come from beyond the neighborhood, throughout the region, and even internationally.

Ethnic groups make places by modifying the landscape in the community and by altering the social milieu. Neighborhoods like the Goutte d"or are marked by the intensity of social activity that occurs here every hour of every day. But such locations do not really speak to the immigrant French. For them, is it neighborhoods like the Goutte d"or that embrace their Paris, one that attracts people from around the world. For those people who share in the live of the Goutte d'Or and who partake of its charm, this central destination is a key aspect of their own French immigrant identify.

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From Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977)

Rootedness in the soil and the growth of pious feeling toward it seem natural to sedentary agricultural peoples...The Lakota of the Northern Plains have the warmest feeling for their country, particularly the Black Hills....The old people, even more than young, love the soil; they sit or recline on the ground so as to be close to a nurturing power....

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As a member of the Ilbalintja tribe explained to [an] anthropologist..."Our fathers taught us to love our own country, and not to lust after the lands belonging to other men."...

Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible. The native's identity—his place in the total scheme of things—is not in doubt, because the myths that support it are as real as the rocks and waterholes he can see and touch. He finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres. The whole countryside is his family tree....

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A homeland has its landmarks, which may be features of high visibility and public significance, such as monuments, shrines, a hallowed battlefield or cemetery. These visible signs serve to enhance a people's sense of identify; they encourage awareness of and loyalty to place. But a strong attachment to the homeland can emerge quite apart from any explicit concept of sacredness; it can form without the memory of heroic battles won and lost, and without the bond of fear or of superiority vis-à-vis other people. Attachment of a deep though subconscious sort may come simply with familiarity and ease, with the assurance of nurture and security, with the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time. It is difficult to articulate quiet attachments of this type....

In China the ideal of the simple and sedentary life is stated in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching. One passage in it reads: "Let us have a small country with few inhabitants....Let the people return to the use of knotted cords [for keeping records]. Let their food be sweet, their clothing beautiful, their homes comfortable, their rustic tasks pleasurable. The neighboring state might be so near at hand that one could hear the cocks crowing and dogs barking in it. But the people would grow old and die without ever having been there."