DiscussAncestralPlace

Discuss the current crop of posts on AncestralPlace here.

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Funny...here we are again. All place writers writing about other-than ancestral places.

Is this kind of distance from one's own roots a prerequisite for writing about place? Do we need to be "out of the fishbowl" to write about the fish? Can Tuscans write about "being Tuscan" or do they just write about "being me?"

-- Chris

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Not everyone in the world is a "pureblood". And not everyone in the world has lived exclusively in one place all their lives. Not everyone one in the world knows everything about their ancestors. Not everyone in the world can even define what "ancestral place" means. And not everyone in the world sees "place" as purely a physical location. The word "home" is not even a concrete noun... you can't always use an article like "the" or "a" with it, because it is not something you can touch. Yet to everyone it is a place.

--Miguel

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So many of the contributions seem to be from people who are themselves, or have descended from immigrants. I wonder how many generations have to pass before you can "adopt" the local ancestors.

--Geoff

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I guess that's my point Geoff...travelling gives us eyes to write about place...it gives us the distance between the seer and seen that is necessary for analysis of place and landscape. I think ancestral places are probably those places where we are so embedded that we cannot think of ourselves as seperate from the land. We are literally rooted there. Only with the human experiement of migrating to we learn to see other places in the context of where we have come from. That difference allows us to gaze outwardly upon something rather than dwelling entirely within. -- Chris