Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe, by Thomas Gieryn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2018. ISBN: 9780226561950; 208 pp. $32.50 cloth.

《Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe, by Thomas Gieryn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2018. ISBN: 9780226561950; 208 pp. $32.50 cloth.》

打印

作者: Mike Owen Benediktsson

来源: CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue1,P.414-416

语言: 英文

关键字

作者单位: Hunter College

摘要: Truth Spots is a compelling book on an entirely original topic in sociology. Beautifully written, it is fashioned after a travelogue, where each stop is a “truth spot,” or a place that “makes people believe.” It offers a fascinating tour, albeit one that ends perhaps a bit too soon. Upon arriving at the book's final epigraph, “Veritas Filia Loci” (Truth is the Daughter of Place), you may find that you would have liked to visit even more truth spots. The book's author, Thomas Gieryn, is one of sociology's most perceptive observers when it comes to the material and cultural dimensions of place. If he has led us to recognize the truth spots around us, Gieryn suggests in closing, then his job here is done. The book clearly succeeds by this criterion. Truth Spots is an eye‐opening contribution, and is full of consequence for how urban sociologists perceive and interpret the places we study. Gieryn's agenda is to explore a series of locations that confer validity or authenticity to the claims of social actors, but that do so in very different ways. In the first chapter, which doubles as an introduction, we abruptly find ourselves at the ancient oracle in Delphi, Greece. Gieryn peels back layers of history and artifice to show how archeologists and historians have “manufactured” the truth through Delphi's ruins, defining the location as a place where ancient Greeks came to communicate with the Gods. Believe it (or not), his next “truth spot” is Walden Pond (Chapter 2), followed by a series of case studies that include the Potemkin Villages created by Henry Ford (Chapter 4), a courthouse in St. Louis (Chapter 6), and a scientific laboratory at the University of Indiana where ancient nickel deposits are analyzed (Chapter 8). To move through such a wildly varying itinerary of places without losing the reader requires a great degree of writerly skill, and Gieryn is up to the task. Like the book's topic, Gieryn is one‐of‐a‐kind, a sociologist whose lyrical, descriptive prose is laced with sharp analytical clarity. In short, he's a stimulating tour guide — a combination of curiosity and novel insight propels this book forward on its whirlwind voyage across centuries and around the globe. The diversity of case studies in the book provides a payoff for Gieryn, giving him a great degree of analytical leverage, but he wields it with an abundance of caution and nuance. (Arguably too much of the former — more on that later.) The descriptions of the places profiled in the book are deeply sociological, and invite the reader to indulge in some deep theorizing along the way. Gieryn, however, declines to extrapolate from his cases till the end of the book where, in a theoretical “coda,” he finally provides some general answers to the question framed by the running title. Places make people believe by manipulating time; by gathering or separating people; by ordering things, or (as in the case of Walden Pond), leaving things wild and “messy”; by exposing some truths, while hiding others; and by deriving power from their uniqueness or, in some cases, their standardization. This list might sound equivocal — a bunch of either/ors — but Gieryn hasn't taken the easy way. Rather than a typology of truth spots, or a neat formula for inspiring belief, he instead outlines a set of powerful psychological and cultural capacities that certain places have, but that rarely come together in precisely the same way. Although I suspect he would not favor the term himself, make no mistake: These capacities are mechanisms that allow specific places to play a crucial, agentic role within broader cultural and political projects. Scientists use their laboratories to underscore their authority, and, by extension, the veracity of the knowledge they produce. Historians and archeologists use historic sites in somewhat similar fashion, deriving legitimacy from places and narratives that they themselves legitimate. Barack Obama used Seneca Falls, Selma, and the Stonewall Inn to conjure a sweeping, multigenerational fight for social justice and civil rights, while metonymically anchoring this campaign in sacred places and moments in time. In short, places have the power to lend authority and credibility, and thus become indispensible cultural resources. In constructing this argument, Gieryn builds on a solid analytical foundation — a working definition of place that he first espoused almost thirty years ago in the Annual Review of Sociology. A place, according to Gieryn, has three essential ingredients: a unique geographic location, materiality, and a cultural identity. In truth spots, these factors come together in ways that are irreducible and crucial. Belief in the “predictive accuracy” of prophecies received at Delphi relied on its awe‐inspiring location, high on a ridge beneath snowcapped mount Parnassus, a near ideal place to communicate with the gods. Similarly, scientific knowledge of the extent of human lead pollution depended on the unparalleled cleanliness of a room built in the 1950s at Caltech in Pasadena. Specific places are crucial to the construction of controversial or high‐stakes forms of knowledge. This insight is a common thread that runs throughout the book, and it hints at a much broader set of implications that emanates from Gieryn's analysis, bearing upon a wide variety of subfields — cultural, political, and urban sociology, as well as the study of social movements, just to name a few. Not only should we look for truth spots in the physical world around us — perhaps we should look for them anywhere truth is asserted or contested. This is my claim, not Gieryn's — he stops short of this degree of generalization — and it hints at the one substantial criticism I have of this book. Gieryn's light touch with theory is admirable — up to a point. But, like any tour guide, occasionally he seems to walk briskly past something interesting, perhaps in the interest of getting us back to the bus on time. For example, Gieryn suggests that truth spots are not uncommon. But for lack of the kind of litigious, term‐defining exercise that we might find in a less enjoyable book, I was left wondering what isn't a truth spot? Don't all places make us believe something? The local branch of Chase Bank employs architecture and interior design to inspire faith. It is commonplace for old restaurants (or those who want to seem old) to signal the authenticity of their food, displaying framed photos of the owners’ grandparents, or a yellowing Polaroid of the original facade. Do these places count? I suspect Gieryn would say that they do count, within a genre of watered‐down, possibly franchised truth spots, but I am not entirely sure. One of the most fascinating chapters in the book looks at how courthouses are designed to discourage any impression of prejudicial justice — this was as close as Gieryn came to exploring the truth spots that might exist in society's more mundane and profane settings. I wish we had ducked down this dingy alley for a closer look. Another path untaken was the “un‐truth spot” — an idea that Gieryn briefly gestures at on page 146, and that is clearly implicit in the notion of truth spots. What is an un‐truth spot? It seems important. Is it a place that makes us disbelieve in something, or a place that make us believe un‐truths? A chapter titled “Obama's Three Birthplaces,” it turns out, concerns the president's rhetorical use of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. But before I got this far, I assumed that the chapter was about Honolulu, Nigeria, and some third location I had not even considered. I was briefly disappointed when I realized the chapter was not devoted to tracing the role of place in “birther” conspiracy theories. It would be fascinating, I thought, to explore how politically expedient un‐truths are manufactured through and within specific locations.… And then I continued reading, and was transported again by Gieryn, this time to a blindingly white laboratory in Bloomington, Indiana… Truth Spots will be a useful text for graduate level courses in cultural sociology, urban sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. The book will also be right at home on the syllabi of upper level undergraduate courses. Instructors looking to introduce difficult concepts such as the social construction of knowledge or collective history might find the book's case studies helpful, given its clear, accessible prose. This is an enjoyable book, well worth reading (or assigning) simply for the fun of it. But (and here's the truth), it is also an important book for urban sociologists to consider, absolutely vital for those who have an interest in the cultural and political implications of place.