On 'Space and Place — The Perspective of Experience'

The place which has most profoundly influenced my understanding of space in the context of vestigial conceptions with respect to particular aspects, is Arizona, my home. Roughly thirty miles southeast of Phoenix proper, there is a city named Chandler. It is one of only two places I have permanently lived, Chicago notwithstanding. I have spent most of my life there, and am rather fond of it. Chandler, Arizona is not a small city by any means. With a population of just over 250,000 the area is an excellent example of a manicured new-millennium suburb. It wasn’t always this way. Before the city became a Silicon Valley satellite region for several large tech companies including Intel, Motorola, PayPal, and Orbital, Chandler – like many parts of the southwest at the time – based its local economy in agriculture and livestock. As late as the early '90s, Chandler was not much more than level fields and cattle. Nonetheless, there are residual aspects of the town’s past which remain. The outskirts of the city still retain many of their original acres of corn and cotton serviced by long canals which cooperate like a massive capillary network, quenching the baked desert. A mile south of the house where I grew up, there is a small two-lane road. Across the shallow road is Indian reservation. Miles of desert touch the horizon and extend unobstructed, apart from abrupt mountains which rise prominently from the dirt. At dusk and dawn, the formations display their imposing contrast against the rising Sun. The mountains are a primary concentration. My time in Arizona was marked by many experiences but the mountains defined the space where I lived. The colossal rocks’ commanding yet gentle presence was as I perceived them, constant and immovable. The mountains defined my sense of direction and were at times a comfort. Like beasts, the great jagged stones kept a firm gaze over the wide valley below. Like that of certain cultures attaching meaning to specific geometric arrangements, I found solace in the still walls of the Phoenix valley.

First, in the case of the Hopi Indians, this particular culture had accepted that was known to them was, as it were, the truth, the ultimate, the way things are and ought to be. The Hopi divided their universe into several semi and quarter-spheres which represented plains of known and unknown. Concepts which were readily explained resided in the objective or x-axis. More abstract ideas existed in the subjective realm items such as the future and cognitive or “mental” (120) aspects developed meaning on this plain. Ultimately, the Hopi would have perceived the Earth differently than Europeans for instance. “To an agricultural people like the Hopi, it is important to mark the positions of sunrise and sunset, shifting in the course of the year, on the circumambient horizon.” (120) Regarding the question of why certain cultures choose to perceive the shared experience of time is one relating primarily to technological status. That is has such a society developed to the point that it requires a different concept of space and time? Rather, does said civilization require such an understanding for economic purposes? Possibly for trading or food cultivation. The motivation for understanding such things is typically practical.