This week’s reading by J.E Malpas seeks to remedy “sense of place” by advancing an account of the nature and significance of place as a complex but unitary structure that encompasses self and other, space and time, subjectivity and objectivity.He argues that the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the grounding of experience in place, and that this binding to place is not a contingent feature of human existence, but derives from the very nature of human thought, experience and identity as established in and through place.
Malpas prefers to call place “opaque” or “obscure” . The writer himself is leery of regarding “place” as a social or political construct even though neither of Malpas or anyone else denies cultural of and historical dimensions of place.The intimate bonding between place and culture does not mean that place is a simple product of cultural configurations anymore than it is of social structure or political power. He shows us that we can effect changes of place as well as be affected by the place we are in.