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Spatializing CultureAn Engaged Anthropological Approach toSpace and Place (2014)

Setha Low

INTRODUCTION

Through long-term research and collaborativeprojects I have found that spatializing culturei.e., studying culture and political economythrough the lens of space and placeprovides apowerful tool for uncovering material andrepresentational injustice and forms of socialexclusion. At the same time, it facilitates animportant form of engagement, because suchspatial analyses offer people and theircommunities a way to understand the everydayplaces where they live, work, shop, and socialize.I dene engaged anthropology as those activitiesthat grow out of a commitment to the

participants and communities anthropologistswork with and a values-based stance thatanthropological research respect the dignityand rights of all people and have a benecenteffect on the promotion of social justice (Lowand Merry 2010). It also provides them with abasis for ghting proposed changes that oftendestroy the centers of social life, erase culturalmeanings, and restrict local participatorypractices.

In this chapter I draw upon both mycommitment to engaged anthropology and myexperience with the effectiveness of spatializingculture for addressing inequality to frame this

discussion. These domains are integratedthrough my contention that theories andmethodologies of space and place can uncoversystems of exclusion that are hidden ornaturalized and thus rendered invisible to otherapproaches. The systems of sociospatialexclusion I am particularly interested inencompass a range of processes including

physical enclosure that limits who can enter orexit, such as fenced and gated spaces;

surveillance strategies such as policing, privatesecurity and city ambassadors, and webcamand video cameras that discourage people ofcolor from entering the space because of racialproling; privatization of property, especiallyareas that surround public spaces and denypublic access; legal and governance instrumentsthat restrict entrance and use such as thosefound in Business Improvement Districts andcondominiums and cooperative housing; andother related issues. All these systems ofexclusion reference the underlying structuralracism, sexism and classism that permeate

contemporary neoliberal society.In the same way that history sheds light on acultural change that is incorrectly seen astimeless and therefore not an important objectof study, the study of space, too, can directattention to social and spatial arrangementsthat are presumed to be given and xed, andtherefore considered natural and simply theway things should be. Space and its arrangementand allocation are assumed to be transparent,but as Henri Lefebvre (1991) asserts, they neverare. Instead when critically examined, spaceand spatial relations yield insights intounacknowledged biases, prejudices and in-

equalities that frequently go unexamined.After reviewing the concept of spatializing

culture as it has been developed withinanthropology, I draw upon a eldwork exampleto illustrate the value of the approachMooreStreet Market, an enclosed Latino food marketin Brooklyn, New Yorkand claim this urbancommercial space for a translocal and networked

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set of social relations rather than a gentriedredevelopment project.

SPATIALIZING CULTURE

Henri Lefebvres foundational work on thesocial production of space adds that space isnever empty: it always embodies a meaning(1991: 154). His well-known argument thatspace is never transparent, but must be queriedthrough an analysis of spatial representations,spatial practices and spaces of representation isthe basis of many anthropological analyses.Nancy Munn (1996) and Stuart Rockerfeller(2010) draw upon Lefebvre to link conceptualspace to the tangible by arguing that socialspace is both a eld of action and a basis foraction. Margaret Rodman (2001) and Miles

Richardson (1982), on the other hand, rely onphenomenology and theories of lived space tofocus attention on how different actorsconstruct, contest and ground their personalexperience.

In my own ethnographic work, I initiallyproposed a dialogical process made up of thesocial production of space and the socialconstruction of space to explain how culture isspatialized (Low 1996, 2000). In this analysis,the social production of space includes all thosefactorssocial, economic, ideological, andtechnologicalthat result, or seek to result, inthe physical creation of the material setting.Social construction, on the other hand, refers tospatial transformations through peoples socialinteractions, conversations, memories, feelings,imaginings and useor absencesinto places,scenes and actions that convey particularmeanings. Both processes are social in the sensethat both the production and the constructionof space are mediated by social processes,especially being contested and fought overfor economic and ideological reasons. Under-standing them can help us see how localconicts over space can be used to uncover andilluminate larger issues.

Unfortunately this co-production model waslimited by its two-dimensional structure.Adding embodied space to the social constructionand social production of space solves much ofthis problem. The person as a mobile spatialelda spatiotemporal unit with feelings,thoughts, preferences, and intentions as well asout-of-awareness cultural beliefs and practices

who creates space as a potentiality for socialrelations, giving it meaning, form, andultimately through the patterning of everydaymovements, produces place and landscape (Low2009; Munn 1996; Rockerfeller 2010). Thesocial construction of space is accorded materialexpression as a person/spatiotemporal unit,while social production is understood as boththe practices of the person/spatiotemporal unitand global and collective forces. Further, theaddition of language and discourse theoriesexpand the conceptualization of spatializingculture by examining how talk and media aredeployed to transform the meaning of practicesand spaces (Duranti 1992). For example, gatedcommunity residents discourse of fear plays acritical role in sustaining the spatial preferencefor and cultural acceptance of walled andguarded developments. The concept of spatializ-

ing culture employed in this discussion, thus,encompasses these multiple processessocialproduction, social construction, embodiment,and discursive practicesto develop ananthropological analysis of space and place.

MOORE STREET MARKET,

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

At lunchtime, Moore Street market is bustling,housed in a squat, white cement building thatlooks more like a bunker than an enclosed food

market with its barred windows and paintedmetal doors. The deserted street in the shadowof the looming housing projects seems oddlyquiet for a busy Monday morning. Uponentering, however, carefully stacked displays offresh fruit, yucca and coriander, passagewayslined with cases of water and soda, and highceilings with vestiges of the original 1940sarchitecture of wooden stalls, bright panels, andceiling fans reveal another world. Puerto Ricansalsa music emanating from the video storecompetes with Dominican cumbia blaring froma radio inside the glass-enclosed counter of anarrow restaurant stall where rice, beans,

empanadas, and arroz con polloglistening with oiland rubbed red spice are arrayed (see Figure 1).The smell of fried plantains lls the airconditioned space as Puerto Rican pensionersgather at the round red metal tables with redand white striped umbrellas open to offerintimate places to sit and talk. A young boy in aYankees t-shirt orders lunch for his Columbian



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mother who is hesitant to pass the securityguard perched at the entrance who she thinksmight ask for her immigration papers. Sheremains outside in the already-blazing Brooklynsun searching for a spot to sell avored ices onthe crowded sidewalk near the subway entrance.

Moore Street Market vendors are made up ofLatinos from Puerto Rico, the DominicanRepublic, Ecuador, Mexico and Nicaragua. ThePuerto Ricans immigrated to New York in the1940s, while Dominicans, Mexicans, andNicaraguans immigrated mostly in the 1980s.Their national and cultural identities arespatially inscribed with Puerto Rican vendorslocated at the markets social and economicheart, a central area near the caf that sellsCaribbean food and plays salsamusic, while therelatively new Nicaraguans and Mexicanvendors are located in stalls along the periphery.

These rst generation immigrants keep ties totheir homeland alive through music, food,family relationships and visits home. Manytravel back and forth from their native countriesbringing goods for sale and carrying gifts andmerchandise to families living in Latin America.

One of the vendors, Doa Alba, shuts hermetal screened stall, locking away her SevenSaints oil, plastic owers, and white rstcommunion dresses. She tells me about hermost recent trip to Latin America and success atobtaining the special orders and medicinalpotions for her regular customers. As a young

girl from Mexico she worked her way up fromcleaning for white middle-class families who atthat time still lived in the neighborhood andselling fruit at a street stand to leasing her ownretail space. The recent threat of eviction by theNew York City Economic DevelopmentCorporation (EDC), however, has slowed whatlittle business there has been during theeconomic recession, and she worries about herfuture and the enterprise that she is so proud ofand has so painstakingly built.

Moore Street Market, built in 1941 andlocated in East Williamsburg/Bushwick,Brooklyn, is one of nine enclosed markets

constructed to relocate the pushcart vendorsand open air markets and supply modernizingNew York City with safe and affordable food.During the 1940s and 1950s, it was a thrivingIrish, Jewish and Italian immigrant market.Although the neighborhood had a signicantPuerto Rican population by 1960, as late as theearly 1970s some of the original residents and

market vendors remained. But the market andthe neighborhood physically deteriorated withurban disinvestment during the 1970s and1980s. Despite an architectural renovation in1995, its tenuous commercial viability due to adecreasing number of vendors and shoppers wasexacerbated in March 2007 when the New YorkCity Economic Development Corporation(EDC) announced it would be closed to makeway for affordable housing.

With the threat of closure, the Public SpaceResearch Group (PSRG), a team of CUNYfaculty and graduate students, joined theremaining vendors and the Project for PublicSpaces to help formulate a community-basedresponse to EDCs closure. The New York Timesreporters also supported the Moore Streetmarket vendors, stating that the 70-year oldMoore Street market was always more than just

a place to do business [but] part of the fabricof Williamsburg life, with periodic culturalevents and tiny shops and stalls that hearkenback to the days before glitzy shopping mallsand sterile big-box stores (Gonzalez 2007).New York City ofcials and private developerswho would benet from building affordablehousing argued instead that the market was notsupporting itself and was tired and rundown.The media coverage and heated communitymeetings drew political attention from USRepresentative Nydia Velazquez and StateAssemblyman Vito Lopez who ultimately

secured $3.2 million in federal funding to keepMoore Street Market open.The ethnographic descriptions and vendor

life histories collected are being used to reinstatethe market as a Latino social center and to offeran alternative to the gentrication project thatsaved Essex Street Market, a boutique foodmarket in Manhattans Lower East Side. Whilethe revitalization of the market is still in process,one of the members of the PSRG, BabetteAudant, continues to attend communitymeetings and collaborate with stakeholders.This advocacy effort, though, requires a moreembodied spatial analysis focused not only on

the social production of this historic market,but also on the everyday practices and agency ofthe vendors, shoppers and neighbors who valueit. By embodied spatial analysis I mean thetheoretical premise that individuals as mobilespatiotemporal elds realize space, and theimportance of bodily movement and mobility inthe creation of locality and translocality. While



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Moore Street Market began as a collaborativeadvocacy project, it also generated scholarlyinsights into a translocal and community-basedpublic space through the mobilities, emotionsand meanings of the people who work, shop andhang out there.

Analytically the ethnography of MooreStreet Market reveals how urban public spacelinks the body in space, the global/local powerrelations embedded in space, the role oflanguage and discursive transformations ofspace, and the material and metaphoricalimportance of architecture and urban design. Itis through this embodied space that the global isintegrated into the spaces of everyday urban lifeand becomes a site of translocal, transnational,as well as personal experience. Moore StreetMarket can be understood as a place wherepeople spend the day listening to music from

their homeland, eating lunch and working atstalls where they make their livelihoods.Simultaneously they are enmeshed in networksof relationships, transnational circuits and waysof being that extend from the built environmentof the market to the towns from which theymigrated, and where, in many cases, theproducts that they sell as well as other familymembers remain, supported from the prots oftheir commercial endeavors.

It is the movement of these vendors,shoppers, pensioners, and visitorsdifferen-tiated by gender, age, class, ethnicity, and

national identityand their everyday activities:conversations, purchases, listening to music,eating homemade food, that makes the marketspace what it is. And it is through the embodiedspaces of their social relationships that themarket is simultaneously a local and translocalplace.

That is not to say that the market as sociallyproduced by the political machinations of NewYork City institutions and ofcials does notcontinue to play a role in its physical conditionand architectural form, and pose a challenge tothe markets continued existence. Nor that themeanings of the market are not socially

constructed differently by the African Americanresidents who live nearby, the tourists who visit,the ofcials who want to close it, the newspeoplewho want a story, and the regulars who see it astheir place. Even the language and metaphors ofstate ofcials and the media, as well as the talkof visitors and neighbors contribute to a series ofcharacterizations of the space as the center of

the Latino community to a place that isforlorn, decaying and deteriorating. But thesecontradictory discourses come into dialoguewithin one another through the space of themarket and the people who use it. In this sense,the market is a form of spatialized culture thatencompasses multiple publics and conictingmeanings, contestations, and negotiations. Inthis case, the engaged practice of communitycollaboration and activism to preserve themarket from gentrication also generated abetter understanding of translocality and its rolein creating and maintaining a culturally diverseurban public space.

CONCLUSION

Moore Street Market illustrates how engagement

and spatialization enhanced the breadth andscope of the research and advocacy project. Themarket ethnography project was engaged fromits inception, incorporating a collaborativeplace ethnography to assist the local communityand vendors in retaining the market for localuse. The spatial analysis helped residents to seethe social centrality of the market in theneighborhood. It also produced a better way tothink about translocality as embodied by usersand residents circuits of exchange and socialnetworks. Thus, spatial analysis led to engagedpractice, and advocacy and applicationgenerated spatial and theoretical insights. Ibelieve that one of the strengths of anthropologylies in this close relationship, its theoreticalgrounding in practice.

My second point is derived from this view ofengagement and suggests that anthropologistshave an advantage with regard to theorizingspace because we begin our conceptualizationsin the eld. Regardless of whether it is anethnographic multi-sited study, a survey ofhuman bone locations, or an archeological dig,there is an encounter with the inherentmateriality and human subjectivity of eldworkthat situates the anthropologist at their

interface. Theories of space that emerge fromthe sediment of anthropological research drawon the strengths of studying people in situ,producing rich and nuanced sociospatialunderstandings. Further, when spatial analysesare employed, they offer the engagedanthropologist a powerful tool for uncoveringsocial injustice because so much of contemporary



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inequality is imposed through the spatialrelations of the environment and the discoursethat mysties its material effects. Therefore,anthropological approaches to the study ofspace, such as the social production andconstruction of space embodied translocalspatiality, and discursive elements of MooreStreet Market suggest ways to improve the livesof those who live, work, or hang out there. Inthis sense, spatializing culture can be a rst orlast step toward engagement, and one thatanthropologists can uniquely employ.

REFERENCES

Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. Language andBodies in Social Space: SamoanCeremonial Greetings. American Anthro-

pologist, 94(3): 657691.Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and

Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:Vintage, Random House.

Gonzalez, Juan. 2007. Brooklyns LaMarqueta Buys Time. New York DailyNews.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production ofSpace. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Low, Setha. 1996. Spatializing Culture: TheSocial Construction and Social Productionof Public Space in Costa Rica. AmericanEthnologist, 23(4): 861879.

Low, Setha. 2000. On the Plaza: The Politicsof Public Space and Culture. Austin:University of Texas Press.

Low, Setha. 2009. Toward an AnthropologicalTheory of Space and Place. Special Issueon Signification and Space. Semiotica,175(14): 2137.

Low, Setha, and Sally Merry. 2010. EngagedAnthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas.Current Anthropology, 51(2): 203226.

Munn, Nancy. 1996. Excluded Spaces: TheFigure in the Australian AboriginalLandscape. Critical Inquiry, 22(3): 446465.

Richardson, Miles. 1982. Being-in-the-Plazaversus Being-in-the-Market: Material Culture

and the Construction of Social Reality.American Ethnologist, 9(2): 421436.

Rockerfeller, Stuart Alexander. 2010. Startingfrom Quirpini: The Travels and Places of aBolivian People. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.

Rodman, Margaret. 2001. Houses Far FromHome. Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress.


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