Writing chora

The ideas that I present here take outset in my book "Making Place, Making Self", where the concept of place is rewritten in non-dualist and non-androcentric ways (Birkeland 2005). By working with biographical interviews with individual holiday makers to the Northern parts of Norway, and the North Cape, I have sought understandings of the meaning of place and how place is created in both external and internal worlds of individual human beings. Such understandings can work as a foundation for developing sustainable concepts of subjectivity and self, and for forming sustainable relationships to place and to nature for humans.

When I use the word sustainable here, I am treating it in a very loose sense. I am not using it in an instrumental sense of the word but evoking a flow of maternal thinking – thinking about things and people in a way where everything is related to everything and that everything affects everything. Re-inscribing place with new meaning needs place-writing. This is what geographers do, place-writing - chorography. But instead of relating to – and writing - place and nature through treating place and nature as object, I suggest we relate to – and write – place and nature as subject, treating place and nature as a she, as fore-mother, and affirm the dependency to her as the seat for our becoming. This project is not chorography, but choragraphy, writing chora.