[Scpg] new book on relationship to place

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

Making  Place, Making Self  (2005) is a remarkable book exploring our 
relationship to place. Inger  Birkeland is a human geographer from Norway. She 
becomes fascinated by what  draws people to make a journey to the most 
northerly point of mainland Europe,  the North Cape in Norway. While on the surface 
it would seem to be yet another  tourist destination, Birkeland takes a 
look at the deeper layers of what  motivates people to go to the compass point “
North”.  
She is first  inspired by a Spanish woman, Sofia, who makes the newspaper 
headlines by walking  the 2,100 km from Oslo to the North Cape. Sophia is 
propelled by the feeling  that she is missing something in life and, despite 
everyone around her believing  she is crazy, she gives up everything in her 30’
s and sets off. Her mother  thinks she has ‘lost her North’, a Spanish 
saying to describe someone who has  lost direction in life and who has decided 
to do something out of the  ordinary. 
After this,  Birkeland interviews a series of people and devotes nine 
chapters of her book to  exploring their very different stories and reasons for 
making their journeys.  She  draws on post-lacanian and feminist 
psychoanalytic thinking, as well  as phenomenology and existentialism to develop themes 
related to place and  space, home and home-coming, sexual difference and 
subjectivity, travel as rite  of passage, chora and the metaphysics of place. 
Birkeland’s  capacity to weave together personal accounts with well argued 
academic theory  makes for a compelling read, and a major contribution to 
the developing  theoretical base of ecopsychology. 
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