Key Principle
Three interlocking phenomenological frameworks define what displacement destroys. Yi-Fu Tuan's topophilia names "all of the human being's affective ties with the material environment" (Ch. 6, p. 315). Edward Relph's rootedness describes the unconscious, pre-reflective belonging of long habitation -- "existential insideness" -- while sense of place is its conscious, deliberate counterpart -- "empathetic insideness," the recognition of genius loci (Ch. 6, pp. 314-315). Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology of the home completes the triad: "The house has power to integrate our thoughts, dreams, and memories....Without it man would be a dispersed being" (Ch. 6, p. 321). Together these frameworks reframe forced displacement from an administrative relocation into an existential assault -- not the loss of property but the destruction of a mode of being-in-the-world.
Why This Matters
Place-identity theory explains behaviors that purely economic analysis cannot. The Mullis family of Salt Creek Valley bought back their home from the government and had it physically moved uphill, out of the lake's reach (Ch. 6, p. 321). Tenant farmers had far fewer regrets than landowners, both at Norris Basin and in Salt Creek Valley (Ch. 6, p. 320), because ownership deepens the integrative bond. Some displaced residents committed suicide; others "simply refused to leave and died in their homes before being evicted, seemingly of broken hearts" (Ch. 6, p. 318). These responses become intelligible only when land is understood as extension of self: "such ravaging of the land becomes, symbolically, a ravaging of the individual's being" (Ch. 6, p. 319).
Good Examples
Trees as symbolic vehicles. Trees are "literally and figuratively, rooted to the land" (Ch. 6, p. 318). Aunt Nannie Meador gathered ashes of an oak destroyed by TVA. Buelah Sipes described Clarence's maple: "he'd pinch off the tips...it was so pretty, and, it's still standing" (Ch. 6, p. 318). A Land Between the Lakes resident said, "I'd be like the Indians on the Trail of Tears if somebody took this away from me -- I'd probably go out and hug the trees and cry" (Ch. 6, pp. 317-318).
The farewell to Deckard's Delight. A 92-year-old former resident's 1975 oral history records a return visit in fall 1964 before submersion. The landscape is stripped: "the old familiar scenes were now entirely strange; no timber and no houses," Salt Creek banks "as nude as could be" (Ch. 6, pp. 323-324). The narrator inventories lost landmarks -- swimming hole, cucumber patch, schoolhouse, soapstone cliff, the big barn with "Deckard's Delight" painted in bold letters -- composing a folk memory map of a submerged world. "We stood there with tears in our eyes remembering, just remembering....soon the farm will sink into oblivion under the Monroe reservoir" (Ch. 6, p. 324).
Sensory rootedness and self-sufficiency. Grace Heinzman, age 86: "Home raised and home grown, home cooked and home canned, home baked. And we didn't waste anything" (Ch. 6, p. 323). Attachment is fostered by "the memory of sounds and smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over time" (Ch. 6, pp. 322-323).
Counterpoints
Rootedness does not require antiquity. Tuan specifies that rootedness requires only "the recall of the past reaches back to only two or three generations" and that life feels "pleasantly humdrum and timeless" (Ch. 6, p. 322). Relatively recent American settlements produced the same depth of place-attachment as ancient communities.
The peasant land-love debate. Some scholars argue farmer attachment is purely rational and economic. Mordoh counters with cross-cultural evidence: American family farmers are "often unwilling to sell land even when in economic need" (Ch. 6, p. 316); Scottish crofters had "an attachment to the land that transcended the calculations of profit and loss" (Ch. 6, p. 316); Irish immigrants avoided farming in America because famine made land a site of trauma, demonstrating that "even negative reaction to the land...suggests an important emotive content" (Ch. 6, p. 316).
Unarticulated attachment. Tuan observes: "little is known about the farmer's attitude to nature. What we have is a vast, largely sentimental literature on the farming life written by people with uncallused hands" (Ch. 6, p. 320). Oral history must read between the lines, attending to what farmers allude to rather than what they state directly.
Displacement versus modernization. The 1960s simultaneously brought school consolidation, church consolidation, decline of family farms, and mass culture penetration -- all independently eroding rural communities (Ch. 6, pp. 312-313). Any displacement study must distinguish forced removal from broader structural change.
Key Quotes
"Place is currently understood less as a physical location than a characterization from an individual's emotions, experience, and cultural background." (Ch. 6, p. 315)
"As one's home and, for a farmer, especially, one's land becomes an extension of self, such ravaging of the land becomes, symbolically, a ravaging of the individual's being." (Ch. 6, p. 319)
"These inauthentic attitudes to place are themselves specific forms of an inauthentic mode of existence in which both individuals and societies fail to recognize the realities and responsibilities of existence." (Relph, Ch. 6, p. 329)
The author equates forced removal with "the ancient, dreaded, worse-than-death community punishment of banishment." (Ch. 6, p. 319)
Rules of Thumb
- Rootedness is unconscious; sense of place is what remains after rootedness is destroyed. Cochrane's Isle Royale fishermen produced "highly reflective, appreciative and nostalgic" narratives -- conscious sense of place replacing the unconscious rootedness they formerly possessed (Ch. 6, p. 325). You cannot know what rootedness felt like until you have lost it.
- Placelessness is the antithesis of rootedness. Relph defines it as the replacement of diverse, organically grown landscapes with "stereotyped, artificial, dishonest" environments "planned by others" (Ch. 6, p. 327). Paynetown, Indiana, became a trailer camp where a community once stood (Ch. 6, p. 328).
- Museumisation is not preservation. Reconstructing replicas after destroying authentic places -- as at Land Between the Lakes -- produces simulacra that erase rather than preserve meaning (Ch. 6, pp. 314, 327). Disneyfication follows the same logic: a fake bank barn housing a candy store built one-quarter mile from a real bank barn slated for demolition (Ch. 6, p. 328).
- Grief is stratified by tenure. Landowners grieve more deeply than tenants. Tuan: "The farmer's topophilia is compounded of this physical intimacy of material dependence and the fact that the land is a repository of memory and sustains hope" (Ch. 6, p. 320).
- Eradication exceeds removal. Residents grieved not only physical removal but "the razing of their homes and landmarks (trees, waterholes, fences), the total eradication of any sign of their presence on the land" (Ch. 6, p. 319). The destruction of the spatial architecture of memory is the deepest wound.
Related References
- Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia (1974) -- foundational concept of affective ties to environment.
- Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness (1976) -- phenomenological geography, existential/empathetic insideness, placelessness taxonomy.
- Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1958/1964) -- the home as integrator of thought, memory, and dream.
- Cochrane, Timothy. Study of Isle Royale fishermen displaced by national park creation (c. 1980) -- rootedness-to-sense-of-place transformation.
- Baskin. New Burlington -- unanalyzed oral recording model.
- McDonald and Muldowny. Norris Dam study -- statistical social history with limited oral history.
- Waverly Plantation, Mississippi -- comprehensive ethnoarchaeological model (24 investigators, two months).