#keith basso

[thebacklogreviews]

Today, on its second birthday, Norco remains one of the best written games ever, and one of my personal favourites!

Here’s my old video essay on the game, and the ways people turn space into place:

[intersection-2]

[pneumaticpresence]

"In this convulsive age of uprooted populations and extensive diasporas, holding onto places--and sensing fully the goodness contained therein--has become increasingly difficult, and in years to come, it may everywhere be regarded as a privilege and a gift."

--Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996)

[pneumaticpresence]

"[Sometimes] we are deprived of these attachments and find ourselves adrift, literally dislocated, in unfamiliar surroundings we do not comprehend and care for even less. On these unnerving occasions, sense of place may assert itself in pressing and powerful ways, and its often subtle components--as subtle, perhaps, as absent smells in the air or not enough visible sky--come surging into awareness. It is then we come to see that attachments to places may be nothing less than profound, and that when these attachments are threatened we may feel threatened as well."

--Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

[ariesanthropologist]

The Lows is a pseudonym for a neighborhood that thrives, in its own way, in a town that is one of eight towns that make up a tribal district in the northwest quadrant of Oklahoma. It is a multiethnic, multicultural, economically challenged neighborhood. This is an aging neighborhood where the women outnumber the men, the elderly outnumber the youth, and the poor outnumber the middle class. It is a complex landscape.

The biopsychosocial, geographical, architectural, and semiotic landscapes of this neighborhood are textually and texturally diverse and complex (Basso 1996). Language, the sharing of stories, the exchange of recipes and remedies, the facilitation, creation, and distribution of meals, and the use of space all serve as markers of identity within this neighborhood.

[arizonapoppy]

“It is better to write of things one believes one knows something about than to anguish in high despair over the manifold difficulties of knowing things at all. And better as well, having taken the plunge, to allow oneself to enjoy it.”

Isaiah Berlin, quoted in "Wisdom Sits in Places," by Keith Basso (p. 111)

[noraesther]

In short, anthropologists have paid scant attention to one of the most basic dimensions of human experience—that close companion of heart and mind, often subdued, yet potentially overwhelming, that is known as sense of place.

Good morning! Keith Basso is speaking to my heart, and oatmeal is good.