Naming of location is an old social process. It is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). Event may be natural or social. The naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. Local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. Embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. Idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people.

Located story-telling

Physical signage is the first step in externalizing the naming process. As social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more universal. (Exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a socially abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. Why do we struggle to associate events with those places? Are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates our social self from non-standardize be-ing? Is there a praxis that can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation promulgated by a forced deference to standardization?

When I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the local cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. Coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency)-based mapping and location activities — USGS topo orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) — the process of reading, comprehending, and making the leap from the ‘coordinated’ map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable intuitive process. Approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectors from paper to topography was practiced. Watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations was also standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location.

When I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. A typical description would be:

“You know the Hellisheidi road?”

“Já”

“Well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a low ridge for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about a kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi.”

This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of the country with native friends that I realized that I could simply say that I had gone to Grensdalur. That localized name precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. And indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location — creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name. The more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that ‘mapped’ the human occupation of and interaction with that location). The names came out of embedded human understanding of that exact place at that exact time (or over a period of time). And place, along with its human name, was a reductive product of cultural construction in a language-based culture as Iceland is. This is in certain opposition to an (Imperial) Amurikan approach which is more focused on territories (of acquisition and conquering and control and extraction).

The key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. The loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transference of the experience that ‘names’ it. It would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagation method that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory. Relating ‘where I’ve been’ places me in a deep cultural history.

Using one system will not allow a utopian ‘return’ to another system. They exist in parallel to some degree, but they are different paradigms and ultimately different living cultural practices.