Therapeutic Environments: Putting Human Health in Place

The following should give some indication of my interests in this new area of research.

A conference session prepared for the Session for the Society of Medical Anthropology Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

Panel Organizer/Chair: Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D., Research Fellow

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life

The theme of “Critical Intersections/Dangerous Issues” resonates with widespread sentiment that we stand together at a kind of crossroads. Liminal spaces in many societies, crossroads are recognized as sites of power, opportunity and danger.  Positioned where anthropology, geography and the sciences of human health come together, this session identifies and discusses important design, planning and lifestyle trends as responses to opportunities and challenges at a crossroads.

Through application of expanding theoretical and practical literature on place, papers on this panel examine intentional environments where a therapeutic ideal is at work. Social scientists studying place have been inspired by cultural critiques of neo-Marxism and postmodernism as well as humanistic approaches of cultural geography.  With the deconstruction of place as a given backdrop or container for social and cultural processes, place is now generally interpreted as continuously constructed and contested space.  Place is linked to global relations in world marked by “deterritorialization,” the loss of culturally meaningful landscapes and defeat of place-based conceptions of culture to globalization as a social, cultural and economic force.  Yet despite declarations of the world’s “placelessness,” the individual and collective experience of place continues to be important. In the face of widespread dislocation, sense of place – the meaning that places have for people and that they give to places – still matters in everyday lives.

This panel encourages conversation between divergent fields, innovatively applying the literature of place to examine and understand its role in human health and well-being.  Starting with the concept of therapeutic landscape, we combine a range of practice-oriented and humanistic interpretations.  Seen as a symbolic transformation of the natural world and form of cultural production, landscape is a holistic concept that takes account of humans and their anthropogenic environment and how this environment is conceptualized, experienced and symbolized in different locations and times.  A geographic metaphor intended to aid social scientists in understanding place-based healing processes, therapeutic landscape is meant to encompass those places that combine the physical, psychological and social environments associated with treatment or healing. This panel extends consideration to a variety of environments from informal shrines and memorials in the deserts of Nevada, the New Urbanist renovation of an historical asylum, to a Zen community, urban zoos, and an innovative hospital.

From landscapes to built forms, our conceptualization of “therapeutic” relates not only to planned treatment of individual disease/disorder or provision of something thought health-promoting but also the impulse or intent to offer remedies for the perceived ills of a collective through alternative social and spatial arrangements. We also appreciate the objectives of individuals for their own relationship with place which may be at odds with the therapeutic plans and intentions of others. The combined projects of this session look at the intent of certain configurations of landscape forms and the design of constructed environments for therapeutic purposes in different contexts. With an eye to the enduring importance of place to human physical and mental health, research presented here will consider different aspects of its therapeutic use.

Publication

2007     “Therapeutic Uses of Place in the Intentional Space of Purposive Community” in Therapeutic Landscapes: Advances and Applications, Allison Williams, ed. Hampshire, England: Ashgate [View PDF]

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References

Cosgrove, Dennis E. 1983. Towards a radical cultural geography. Antipode 15(1):1-11.

Cosgrove, Dennis E. and Stephen Daniels. 1988. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cronon, William. 1995. Uncommon Ground Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Escobar, Arturo. 2001. Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20(2):139-74.

Geertz, Clifford. 1996. Afterword. In Senses of Place. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds. Pp. 259-262. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Gesler, Wilbert M. 1992. Therapeutic Landscapes: Medical Issues in Light of the New Cultural Geography. Social Science & Medicine 34(7):735.

----- 1993. Therapeutic Landscapes: Theory and a Case Study of Epidauros, Greece. Environmental Planning Design: Social Space 11:171-189.

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James. 1992. Beyond "culture": space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):6-23.

Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. 1994. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Meinig, Donald W. 1979. Symbolic Landscapes. In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. Donald W. Meinig and John B. Jackson, eds. Pp. 164-194. New York: Oxford University Press.

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