Site-Seeing

'Site-Seeing: Places in Culture, Time and Space' is a collection of essays about people ascribing meaning to places, a phenomenon found in all cultures and throughout history. The essays are presented from both an interdisciplinary and a cross-cultural point of view. The case studies in this volume show how a tree in Sri Lanka, a fortress in the Netherlands, a cave in China, a market place in Papua New Guinea, a shopping mall in Jakarta and a burial place in Egypt, have been places of worship, wonder, love, respect and inspiration. People interact with these places, thereby transforming the location and giving it new meanings. It is because of the way that people use these places that the sites can come alive time and time again.

The authors in this volume are all experts in their field, and include an art historian, an anthropologist, an Egyptologist, as well as scholars of the language and culture studies of India and China . They found common ground by looking at the phenomenon of meaningful places from the perspective of users and usage. Pragmatics, a term borrowed from the field of linguistics, offered a useful model to approach the heterogeneity of the places discussed. Pragmatics is usually defined as the study of the way in which language is used in particular situations; it is therefore concerned with the function of words as opposed to their morphology. It is this approach that the various authors have applied to the concept of meaningful places.

This is the first time that scholars from such diverse, scholarly backgrounds have worked together on the topic of 'meaningful places' worldwide. The volume demonstrates the existence of both parallels and differences in what is in itself a pan-human phenomenon: people's intimate attachment to specific sites.

With essays by Karel R. van Kooij, Kitty Zijlmans, Oliver Moore, Pieter ter Keurs, René van Walsem and Wilfried van Damme.