Place meaning
Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too
‘Place meaning’ is one of the most loosely defined terms for the A-Level geographer to come to terms with. My textbook doesn’t even try to define it, just telling us what it relates to:
“Meaning relates to individual or collective perceptions of place”1
Meaning has something to do with how we take in sensory experience (sight, sound, touch…etc), the memories we have of a place and the way we process those experiences and memories to make sense of a place.
Sometimes though we can understand a term better not be studying its definitions but by looking at an example. Here is Martin Amis, in London Fields on the place meaning of the USA:
Countries go insane like people go insane; and all over the world countries reclined on couches or sat in darkened rooms chewing dihydrocodeine and Temazepam or lay in boiling baths or twisted in straitjackets or stood there banging their heads against the padded walls. Some had been insane all their lives, and some had gone insane and then gotten better again and then gone insane again. America: America had had her neuroses before, like when she tried giving up drink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when she thought she could rule the world; but she had always gotten better again. But now she was going insane, and that was the necessary condition.
In a way she was never like anywhere else. Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability – to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny. And finally it looked as though the riveting struggle with illusion was over, and America had lost2.
Malcolm Skinner et al. Geography (p.349). Hodder.
Martin Amis. London Fields (p. 366). Random House. Kindle Edition.