Keith Basso: A Place In Places

Keith Basso, in Wisdom Sits in Places, identified that “place-making” is the construction of a “place-world” as culture activity. He highlighted that “we are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine” (Basso 1996: 7). They can either have descriptive names or commemorative names. Just as specific places are meaningful to the Western Apache, such as “Big Cottonwood Trees Stand Here And There,” “Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above In A Compact Cluster,” and “Men Stand Above Here And There,” the Wardroom of NROTC at CU Boulder is a specific place that is meaningful to me and others (Basso 1996: 52-54). This specific place relates to personal and social identity for me and others because it represents what we have done in the past, what we are doing in the present, and what we will be doing in the future. Our Executive Officer and Associate Professor of Naval Science is Commander Charles Brown. In 1993, he graduated from the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Boulder as an Aerospace Engineering major and commissioned from NROTC at CU Boulder as an Aviation Warfare officer. In this case, I could attain “a common response to common curiosities” by “place-making” (Basso 1996: 5). Commander Charles Brown is a continuous reminder to me and others …show more content…
It affords meaning to the community as well. The Wardroom of NROTC at CU Boulder is located inside of Folsom Field and a few of its features are a couch, a television, a study table, a trophy case, a kitchen, and a foosball table. Anthropology is the study of humans and in this assignment my central approach was to assess human needs, compare and contrast places, uncover symbols, understand personal and social identity, envision stories about the past, and illuminate ideas about history. I did this by referring to Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz, and Keith