Four Symbolic Boundaries of The American West

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4488928
AutoresJohn Wright (0000-0001-9572-7293), John B Wright (autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen104
Número2
Páginas229-241
Fecha de publicación2014-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1931-0846.2014.12019.x
OpenAlexW2154739193
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas40

What are boundaries of West? This seemingly mundane, even passe spatial concern maintains its relevance through our continuing theoretical interest in regions, borders, and boundaries (Ayers and others 1996; Linklater 2008; Diener and Hagen 2012; Shelly 2013). While most scholarship on West is rightly focused elsewhere, delineation of boundaries of region--spatially and thematically--should not be dismissed. location and meaning of West is far from being settled geography. Land-tenure collisions began during Ice Age migrations and grew louder as each actor entered stage. During this process, natural landscape was transformed into contested homelands, territories, states, countries, and empires. West became a birthplace, a destination, a crossroads, a geopolitical prize, and finally, property (Cronin, Miles, and Gitlin 1992; Wright 1993). As a result, it is not a place of sequent occupance but cumulative occupance, since nearly all groups who arrived here remain here in some iteration of themselves. were and are Native Americans, Mexicans, Chicanos, Hispanos, Tejanos, Latinos, Mormons, Asians, African-Americans, Anglos (Northern Europeans), and an array of other people negotiating nested identities. This diversity is cultural wealth, but it prevents Westerners from embracing of a single, unifying land-tenure story. Is West a place or a process? A myth or true terrain? Where are boundaries and whose place is it? In 1947, John Gunther distilled one of first structural definitions of West: Indian nations, prominence of government land, U.S.-Mexico border, transience, and abundant natural resources (Gunther 1947). Patricia Nelson Limerick insisted we remember West's unbroken history of conquest, racism, sexism, and rigged deals (Limerick 1987). For amenity migrants, West remains a pristine ideal forged by a mythology that has not cooled. Despite economic downturns, people still come to live in idea of an imaginaire written in disappearing ink. William Wyckoff and Lary Dilsaver called central attraction The Mountainous West; a spectacular subregion defined by barriers, islands of moisture, zones of concentrated resources, government control, and land's mystique as a restorative sanctuary (Wyckoff and Dilsaver 1995). Harried newcomers quickly learn that actual West is a place of intense land-tenure conflicts, argued history, economic struggle, and grave uncertainty about future (Westphall 1983; Deloria Jr. and Lytle 1984; Sutton 1985; Wilkinson 1992). Through it all, boom and bust cycles sicken landscape like a patient with malaria or manic depression. As we wrestle with these subjects, Donald Worster urges us to be clear-eyed, demythologized, and critical; to reject outdated Turnerian notions of the Frontier, and embrace continuity between historic processes and modern drivers of social and landscape change (Worster 1985). literature on West is leviathan and intensely discussed. So much has been written because so much is at stake. My objectives here are more modest and applied: 1) to offer a set of boundaries of American 2) more importantly, to assign a symbolic meaning to each of four cardinal directions; and 3) to explore how these descriptors may guide geographers in teaching about West, investigating its riddles, and grasping region's thematic connections to larger world. MAPS, BOUNDARIES, AND REGIONS Maps are iconography (Monmonier 1996). A useful map ably serves a clear purpose. A successful map inspires us to explore reality within its boundaries and compare this to world outside neat line. James Shortridge's book, Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, is a masterful example of how exploring origins, ethos, cultural landscapes, and meaning of mapped regions can be of enduring geographic utility (Shortridge 1989

Archaeology · Ethnology · Frontier · Geography · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Cross-Border Cooperation and Integration · History · Law