Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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All the World's A Coffee Shop: Reflections on Place, Community and Identity [1] / Anthony M. Orum

Abstract: This essay uses a personal experience, the routine of daily activity at my local coffee shop, to illustrate the importance of places to the nature of human experience.  Every day, I argue, the conversations and interactions that take place at the White Hen store nearby my house serve to reaffirm a number of important features of my life: (1) a sense of my own identity; (2) a sense of a larger community of people outside my family and close friends; (3) a sense of civility, of small kindnesses and courtesies among people who, on the face of it, seem very different from one another; and (4) an even deeper sense of stability and routine in the world, brought about simply because people reaffirm for me daily that, among other things, today is indeed another day, and that, in all likelihood, the sun will rise tomorrow as it has today.  Having established these basic parameters to the significance of this place to my life, I then argue further for the broad importance of place to our understanding of human experience, noting, for example, that significant changes in the character of places, such as their actual physical destruction, often leads to a significant and felt sense of disruption in people’s lives.

Introduction

<1> Every morning at about 7 a.m., depending on whether it is the cold dark of December or the bright warmth of June, I get up and drive five minutes to my nearby coffee shop, otherwise known as White Hen. I park in the adjacent lot, generally in a way not to offend or to disturb other clients of the store. As I enter the store, I often hold the door open for someone coming in or going out, a small formality that I have acquired over the course of getting my coffee here for at least ten years.

<2> I enter the store, a rather small crowded space, generally wave or say hello to the clerks behind the counter – Pauly, the brother of the owner and a young man with a noticeable limp, owing to an automobile accident several years ago; and Marco, a young Mexican immigrant who has worked at the store for years and who often will pull pranks on his customers, like offering them dollar bills in change but then taking them back, creating a kind of friendly tug of war designed to wake up the customer. I walk over to where the cups are placed, pick up my usual 16-ounce cup, and then pour my usual cup of Columbiano Supremo coffee. I turn around, pick out one stick of string cheese, and then bend over nearby and grab my all-seasons bagel. Then I head to check out.

<3> The usual crowd of friendly and preoccupied faces is here; the little gestures of friendship are exchanged. I stop and sometimes talk to Pauly, who is the local expert on the weather, asking what the weather will be like today. “Storm clouds this afternoon, but by the weekend it will be better.” Everyone relies on Pauly for his source of weather information. Sometimes we tap into other common projects. Two years ago Pauly and I started losing weight together, both of us having more than enough to get us through a tough winter but far too much for a humid summer. Everyday he and I would exchange the tip of the scale, not the tip of the hat: “How much today,” Pauly, “I would ask?” “Oh about a pound, but it sure is coming off slowly,” he might reply.

<4> Sometimes it is Marco and I who get involved in a small exchange. “How is life at the video store?” I ask, wondering more about the long hours he has to put in simply to survive rather than what life is really like at the video store. “It’s okay,” he replies, “but last night I did not close up until past midnight,” he says. In the next few weeks he and I will also become closer as I begin to practice my Spanish with him. I am taking a summer course in Spanish and, as I did two years ago, I will employ my Spanish on people I know, in my neighborhood. Marco is very kind to me that way, and when I speak Spanish he will speak back to me in Spanish. It makes me feel good, in part for the linguistic reasons, but in part because he and I now connect in other ways, having transcended our obvious differences; I am a white Jew, he a dark-skinned Mexican immigrant but both of us become something else – almost like friends, more like acquaintances – when we begin to talk in Spanish.

<5> This is my morning routine at my local coffee shop. These are not my friends, not in the usual sense of the word at least. Pauly and I rarely, if ever, carry on lengthy conversations. We connect on small matters, our weight, the weather, nothing more, but nothing less either. He is a very decent person (just recently he gave a job in his store to a local homeless man because, as Pauly put it, “the guy needed work and money”); and someone who is so much a part of my usual social routine that last year, when I went to China, I made it a point to bring him back a nice key chain as a small memento of my visit. And I did the same for Marco. Not only are they there for me in the morning, but they also will always buy my favorite string cheese; and when it runs out, they are always quick to order more.

<6> Here then are the elements of a very important part of my life. These are the people who, besides my wife, family and close friends, are there for me everyday. They reaffirm for me that the sun comes up and goes down [thus, not merely a fact of physics but clearly one also grounded in social relations], and that the weather can be miserable but that it, too, will pass. They reaffirm my sense of who I am; and they represent a vital part of my community because they are there, they respond to me, and they represent an important part of the way I am connected to the world.

<7> Or, to cast all of this in somewhat more abstract but still identifiable terms: it is at this place, my coffee shop, that habitually my sense of identity – of who I am – and my sense of community – of the people who are a part of my daily life – are reaffirmed. I am who I am, in part, because these people connect with me daily at a particular place; and they are who they are for the very same reasons. In the course of our exchanges, we re-affirm daily who we are, both individually and collectively. But, beyond this, we establish for ourselves a sense of civility: we treat one another with respect, opening doors, making friendly gestures, asking about work even if it is really asking about the other. This sense of civility emerges and re-appears, day in and day out.

<8> And all of this occurs among people who, on the face of it, should have no interest in or even sense of sympathy with one another. We are old and young; gentile and Jew; dark skin and pale; mainly men, but sometimes women. Sociologists would typically place us in different categories, e.g. white men, immigrants, rich, poor, well educated, no high school education, as they proceed to unravel our lives. But there we are, at my morning coffee shop, creating and recreating community from one day to the next. And we do so in the same place and in the same way almost every day of the year; and we have done so for the past five or six years, at least.

<9> Place, identity and community. These words sound complex, but, in fact I believe, if we all look around ourselves, in the morning, or in the evening, there are corners and shops, grocery stores and newsstands, bars and playgrounds, where the sense of our identity as well as that of our community are constantly replenished. We are emplaced not only, or merely, because of special sites; but those sites, those places, become special because, in fact, they are the locations where our sense of who we are is constantly reaffirmed. We feel safe and secure because it is usually the same community of people, of customers, of passersby, that, through their gestures and their language, however much it differs from day to day, recreate us daily as social creatures.

<10> In this paper, I want to address the matters of place, identity and community. As most readers probably know, places, and a place-based view of the world, have drawn increasing attention in recent years [2]. Why this is so generally remains a mystery to me; but why it is so for me, in particular, is very clear. I have studied cities over the past two decades. I have done so mainly as a social historian, sometimes as a critic. But as time has gone by, I have come to realize that I what I write and think about are not merely cities but they are places, and the attachments that people form to them. I am not a psychologist, and so, therefore, I do not deal in matters like place-attachment. But I am a sociologist, and in finding out about the intricacies of places, I have learned much about people and the communities they build around themselves.

<11> In some previous writings, alone and in collaboration, I have written about place in a general sense, and also in ways to explore some of its philosophical presuppositions and the consequences of those presuppositions [3]. Here I want to touch briefly on the following matters: the nature of places; the implications of a place-based philosophy; the nature of community in places; and the tensions between our sense of place and the imposition of meanings on places by powerful forces.

<12> I also need to make a couple of points very clear at the outset before delving into the details. My sense of place, as of identity and community, is not a historicist one even though I have done historical work. Lately we have been treated to various claims and arguments about the historical loss, or disappearance, of community from writers that range from Ray Oldenburg to Robert Putnam, among others [4].

<13> In contrast to their arguments, I can find community today in many places. And I do not sense that it has been lost, or, forgive me, even found: it has always been there. Why I have been able to locate it, and others have not, may be because of where we have looked. Perhaps, as the popular song has put it, some people have been “looking for love in all the wrong places.” In any case what I hope to do briefly here is to suggest some parameters for depicting place and, given those, where it can be found.

What Counts As A Place

<14> There exists some confusion about the nature of places and the nature of space. That happens, I believe, because the two are often conflated with one another. Space is a medium independent of our existence in which there exist objects that behave according to certain natural laws. Place, in contrast, is a special site in such space where we acquire a certain sense of identity, a sense of community, a sense of a past and a future, and a sense of being at home [5]. Place, in other words, is not simply a material form independent of us but it is a material form that has become a part of us, part of our daily routine, because it is where certain significant things happen to which we are connected as, for example, acquiring a reaffirmation of a sense of ourselves, our identities. There are both sacred places, such as cemeteries and public squares; and there are everyday places, those that will be of concern to me here [6].

<15> Place thus can be represented at many sites or locations in the world. It all depends on whose connections and identities we seek to explore. It can be a coffee shop, as in my case; or it can be a playground where children play and their parents converse with one another. In many instances, I have found, place is actually a person’s house, a site that is very much their home. I come across these matters almost daily, but let me give you just one illustration that appeared in a recent issue of The New York Times. It is an article about how some elderly residents are being forced to leave their homes because they can no longer afford the taxes. Here are quotations from a couple of older people that illustrate how they feel about these matters.

<16> “’I worked hard for this house,” said Mrs. Dextradeur….”Now I think I should be able to enjoy the house and stay here until the end.”…”My husband and I put on the wallpaper,” Mrs. St. John said, trying to hold back tears…”We designed the cupboards; he made the coffee table; we built the whole place” [7].

<17> People such as Mrs. Dextradeur and Mrs. St. John, as they grow older, become especially connected to their houses. For them, as for most of us, such sites are more than houses – they are homes. Such material locations hold memories, memories of families working together to build the place, memories that are especially poignant when those members are no longer present [8].

<18> But it need not be a house; and it appears not to be so especially among younger people [9]. It can be an anywhere: it only needs to satisfy the criteria that it is the site where people feel at home, where they connect with those whom they regard as members of their community, and where they constantly feel comfortable about themselves because that is where they can be most relaxed: they are among companions.

The Implications of A Place-Based Philosophy

<19> Taking a position on the world about the importance of place is not a simple matter. If one regards place, and places, as essential to our human nature and well being, as I do, then such a view commits one to a position on and about the world. The possibility of taking place seriously has only occurred, as the philosopher Edward Casey tells us, as the notion of body became seriously considered and then accepted by modern philosophers [10]. Until the twentieth century, it was the mind and consciousness that drew the attention of philosophers; somehow body slipped aside, partly the result of a Cartesian moment of the sort, I think, therefore, I am.

<20> But we human beings do more than simply think. We also act. And we act not simply in some phantom atmosphere but we act in and as part of our bodies. Our bodies put us in a world, in a certain position in space. And because of this, they make it possible for us to act, to move, to go forward and backward, even to go sideways. How could we possibly act if we did not act as part of our bodies? Indeed, as Hegel long ago reminded us, our bodies, being part of nature, limit what we can and cannot do. At every moment that we act, we take risks. We cross streets not as minds but as bodies. If I get hit crossing the street, my mind suffers only because it is supported by my body, not by sheer thought. I could, of course, simply imagine crossing the street. But, if I did, there would be no action at all. And as feminist philosophy also tells us, our bodies become as subject to the aggressions of outside forces as do our minds – perhaps even more so [11].

<21> Now if we accept the above fundamental assumptions, then several key implications follow. The first is that our ability to understand the social world around us depends on where our bodies are emplaced. We must, in effect, be on the ground, where the action is at, in order to understand what the action is – what the nature of a community is, or the identity of a person. I cannot simply construe the nature of meanings, of identity or community, simply by sitting at my desk and creating it. I must be there; I must be there as a body doing the observing of what is happening, of the action where it takes place. Thus, the sociological work of a sociologist is always emplaced – it always occurs at a somewhere and in a sometime. That being the case, then, scholarly work which occurs, let us say, in an ivory-tower is limited both in its appreciation of the everyday realities out there in the world and obviously in its implications for what it says about the world.

<22> There is an old rule in sociology, advanced most vigorously by the great sociologist and historian Max Weber. It says that in order to understand social action one must seek to understand it through verstehen, best translated as empathy. Anyone taking body seriously, however, must reject that as somewhat artificial, perhaps even mistaken. It is not empathy we employ. It is rather putting our bodies on the line, and observing the world that we are after. Bodies, containing the sensory apparatus that we can use to look and observe, must be placed at the site of action, itself.

<23> This is why, then, anthropologists who seek to understand the world out there must leave their ivory towers and get out in the field, or on the ground, to understand what people actually are doing. To make assertions and claims about the social world only on the basis of what dusty manuscripts might say, or the collected analyses of other sociologists might offer, is one step – a big step – removed from everyday social realities themselves. In order to know these realities, we must observe, feel, touch and smell them up close – we must sense them, in other words, with all our faculties for only in so doing can we appreciate social action. We must put our bodies, in effect, at the place, on the line.

<24> A second implication is that a place-based philosophy, such as the one I espouse here, is one that not only recommends what and how we study the world but it does so on the basis of the world, as we know it. The everyday worlds of other people that we wish to understand will not be like our world because the contents differ. Yet the forms – that appreciation for place, identity and community – will remain the same. And it is the forms that give body and sense to the contents – whether the routines of people in places involve local playgrounds; coffee shops; mosques; back stoops; or malls.

<25> A third implication of a place-based philosophy has to do with the connection between universal qualities and their particulars. Philosophers over the ages have spent much time and thought writing and thinking about these matters. The place-based philosophy I espouse here carries its own consequences for the connections between the universal and the particular. Unlike physicists who deal with broad uniform entities, like space, even unlike molecular biologists who deal with the forms and varieties of genes, social scientists that take a place-based point of view must deal with all the particularities of places. Even if we conclude that places become the way they are – that they attain meaning for people – because of the social action that happens there; or even if places become important to us because we, like the elderly cited above, invest ourselves in them; it remains the case that, however much we agree on the nature of these concepts, their reality can only be unearthed in the particulars in which they bear meaning. On the street corners; in the back alleys; in the halls of power; even in rural farm fields. There, thus, are an infinite number of ways in which places take on meaning for human beings, and in which our knowledge becomes emplaced. My sense of place may occur at my morning coffee shop, but I imagine across the world there are other people doing much the same kind of thing, though it may be in a bazaar, a marketplace, a lunch room, or even at a local fishing spot.

The Nature of Community and Identity in Places

<26> One of the questions that must be addressed by a place-based view of the world is the nature of the identities and communities that are implicated in the workings of places. What kinds of identities and communities are these, after all? Are they like the identities and communities traditionally studied by psychologists and sociologists? Or are they, as some writers, suggest merely place-based, that is, place-based identities, or even place-based communities?

<27> In my view, these identities and communities are an integral part of who we are as human beings. If we were to use a metric of time spent in significant places over the course of a day, week, or month, I suspect that it would amount to many hours. If a house is a home for us, then how many hours do we spend there? Or, on the local playground, shooting baskets and playing ball? Adding up the hours over the course of these days or weeks might indicate that, if particular places are of importance to us, we spend a great deal of time in them. And, that being the case, then, surely the identities and communities that are at work in them – the reaffirmation of myself in the White Hen, or the community of people whom I know at the local ball park – are a central part of our existence. They are, as the French social philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, might put it, a part of the natural social rhythms to our lives as human beings [12].

<28> As a sociologist, one of the more interesting challenges offered by this place-based view of the world is to uncover and assess the nature of the communities to which we return when we return to the significant places of our lives. As I think I have made clear, my companions at White Hen are not friends, in the usual sense. And they are certainly not members of my family. Pauly, Marco and I talk about the weather, and so we connect on some level. We even talk about changing our body images by losing weight. But I certainly do not unload the day’s problems with Pauly and Marco. Nor do they with me. But we know one another very well on some level.

<29> So these communities of people represent very specific kinds of relationships. There is a famous distinction made by the sociologist, Mark Granovetter, which draws attention to the difference between the strong social ties we have to friends and family, and the weak ties we have to acquaintances [13]. But Granovetter is not entirely clear, in general terms, what he means by a weak tie; in specific terms, he has meant social connections we have that can be used to acquire information, and even interviews, for jobs. But I cannot imagine that any time soon I would ask Pauly for a job at White Hen, or even ask about his friends who might know of jobs.

<30> The kinds of communities that emerge in the places to which we are attached are, as the sociologist Barry Wellman might put it, specialized relationships [14]. They are very specific. I might even call such relationships incidental ties, as opposed to being my principal social ties. Yet though they are incidental they are very much a part of the fabric of my life, of my comings-and-goings.

The Fundamental Tension Between Our Sense of Place and The Power of Others To Impose Meaning on Our Places

<31> The strength of our attachment to places, and to the communities of people with whom we associate in them, is often revealed in the emotions generated by the actual, or potential, loss of those places. The other day, for example, my wife was speaking with a woman whose daughter is disabled. The woman was speaking about the hopes she had for her daughter, small by contrast with the hopes many parents have for their children.

<32> The woman told my wife that her greatest hope was that someday her daughter could walk the several blocks from their home to a nearby pharmacy. That pharmacy, located in a central part of our town, represented to this woman the core place in the town. It was the site where people not only shopped for drugs, but where you could meet and greet your friends, as she had, for many years. With some fear, my wife then told the woman that the store had just gone out of business after having been there for many decades. The woman was dismayed. “What! Gsells is gone? How could that be?” From her reaction it was clear that the passing of this place, its termination, was felt as a serious and substantial loss.

<33> It is with the loss of places – or their threatened loss, as the case of the elderly citizens above makes clear – that we realize how deeply important places, and their associated personal and social qualities, are to us as human beings. A friend, in fact, has suggested to me that the notion of place has grown to be significant because so many powerful forces – local developers; terrorists; global enterprises – seem to threaten the life and stability of places we have known. It reminded him of the famous remark by Hegel, commenting on the ability of philosophy to guide our actions: “Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give (instruction)…When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wing only with the falling of the dusk” [15].

<34> There may be something to that. In any case it is clear that people both mourn the loss of place and deeply resent the efforts of other forces – social, political and economic – to impose their power over places. As the United States went to Iraq, for example, to help, as the government says, to rebuild that society, it was clear to me that the task would be enormous. Not only because of the difficulty of establishing an American-brand democracy there, but mainly because the United States would be imposing its will and meaning over the places to which Iraqi citizens had become attached, and in which they had developed their own communities, and secured their own identities. This sense of imposition of meanings from outside, or above, is a central issue for all people. And it is central because people, as part of their own human nature and life cycle, have developed their own communities and understandings in places.

<35> Ultimately, then, if a place-based view of the world is taken to one of its many logical conclusions, it means that there will always be a tension between the places to which people become attached and the efforts of outsiders to impose their will and power over those places. And, if we assume, as I do, that people ultimately create their own meaning and attachments to specific places, then it is only they who can effectively and successfully fashion and refashion those places. This is a fundamentally democratic view of the world, but one grounded in the very intimate and natural attachment between the places where people live, and the security and comfort they achieve there.

Conclusion

<36> In a world in which the global economy impinges on us almost daily, there are a few institutions and people to whom we can turn to find support and to feel safe and secure. Our family is surely one such institution. Another is religion, whether it is a church or a mosque, something large and public, or something small and private. Besides these institutions, I believe that we all find certain places in the world in which we feel comfortable and possess a safe haven. For me it is my morning coffee shop, but for other people I know it is the lunchroom at which they gather at work, or the walking trail they traverse everyday, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, but generally running into and greeting the same crowd of people. Just as we each possess certain routines to the nature of our day, and how we organize our work and leisure, so, too, we also possess those routines that take us back to the same places.

<37> The importance of such places is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, beyond the sphere of our family and our close friends, it is at those places where much of who we are is continually constituted and recreated. This sense of place, in other words, is a critical and vital part of our lives: we are as much a part of the place for others as it has become a part of us. I hope in this brief article I have helped to illuminate the some of the whys and wherefores of this deeply significant process.

Notes

[1] My thanks to Xiangming Chen for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. [^]

[2] See, for example, Irwin Altman and Setha Low, eds., Place Attachment (New York: Plenum Press, 1992); John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Anthony M. Orum and Xiangming Chen, The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2003) Chapter 1. [^]

[3] Anthony M. Orum, “The Urban Imagination of Sociologists: the Centrality of Place,” The Sociological Quarterly, 39, 1 (January): 1-10; and Orum and Chen, ibid. [^]

[4] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).[^]

[5] For a fuller elaboration, please see Orum and Chen, op. cit. [^]

[6] On the distinction between sacred and everyday places, see the discussion in Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated from the French by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Collier Books, 1961); and also Walter Firey, “Sentiment and Symbolism as Ecological Variables,” American Sociological Review, 10 (April 1945): 140-8. [^]

[7] Yilu Zhao, “Taxes Driving Some Elderly from Their Homes,” New York Times 12 April 12, 2003: A7. [^]

[8] See, for example, Sue Ann Perkins Taylor, “Place Identification and Positive Realities of Aging,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 16 (2001): 5-20; and Ray Hay, “Sense of Place in Developmental Context,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, 18 (1998): 5-29. [^]

[9] Lee Cuba and David M. Hummon, “Constructing a Sense of Home: Place Affiliation and Migration Across the Life Cycle,” Sociological Forum, 8, 4 (1993): 547-72. [^]

[10] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). [^]

[11] For a very interesting set of readings that illustrate and expand on this theme, see the entire issue of the journal, Development, 45, 1 (March 2002). The title of the issue is “Place, Politics and Justice: Women Negotiating Globalization.” [^]

[12] Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’espace. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991). [^]

[13] Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 78, 6 (May 1973): 1360-80. [^]

[14] Barry Wellman and Scot Worley, “Different Strokes from Different Folks: Community Ties and Social Support,” American Journal of Sociology, 96, 3 (November 1990): 558-88. [^]

[15] Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated with Notes by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952; 1967) 12-13. [^]

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