Pictures in the Mind, and Where to Place Them
In a modern world, where everything seems both intimately interconnected and dreadfully distant, what use remains for place names? Certainly, in a small community with a shared mythos -- an understanding of common stories and where they occurred -- evoking the name of some certain place would hold distinct associations. But today? I struggle to see the value -- or at least I did. Funnily enough, I found another perspective in the wisdom of the Apache, right here in my home state of Arizona. They, far more than most of us today, retain an intimate awareness of the importance of place in telling a good story. So crucial is the place and its name in their stories, that , as cultural anthropologist and linguistic researcher Keith Basso puts it, "placeless stories simply do not get told." That idea, that of the placeless story, got me thinking about the stories I hear most often today, stories my friends in different states relay to me and laugh uproariously, while I sit on my phone, desperately trying to keep up. I think that nowadays, we have largely lost an awareness of how important place is to a story, because we can no longer rely on our audience having the same shared understanding of context and place. That is not to say the practice is lost in the modern world, though. As I said, the value of place names helps inform our storytelling today more than we realize, only in a form adapted to our modern context. Instead of specific locales like one hilltop or tree, such that the Apache might evoke, we instead situate stories with different levels of specificity depending on our audience. If I am talking to a friend who lives down the street, I might refer to local landmarks by name, which evokes a very specific, targeted feeling (a "vibe," if you will). This sense of vibe can be extended to a far broader context if I discuss recent events with friends out of state, where I might refer to my context as simply, "y'know, Arizona," which evokes a less specific, but still very useful foundation. So while placenames might not be as useful to us today as they were and still are to the Apache, "the landscape in which people dwell can be said to dwell in them." And if Mr. Basso's verbiage is a little over-the-top, let's keep it simple (if a little Shakespearean): vibes maketh man.
