Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe

by Thomas F. Gieryn

We may not realize it, but truth and place are inextricably linked. For ancient Greeks, temples and statues clustered on the side of Mount Parnassus affirmed their belief that predictions from the oracle at Delphi were accurate. The trust we have in Thoreau’s wisdom depends in part on how skillfully he made Walden Pond into a perfect place for discerning timeless truths about the universe. Courthouses and laboratories are designed and built to exacting specifications so that their architectural conditions legitimate the rendering of justice and discovery of natural fact. The on-site commemoration of the struggle for civil rights—Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall—reminds people of slow but significant political progress and of unfinished business. What do all these places have in common? Thomas F. Gieryn calls these locations “truth-spots,” places that lend credibility to beliefs and claims about natural and social reality, about the past and future, and about identity and the transcendent.

In Truth-Spots, Gieryn gives readers an elegant, rigorous rendering of the provenance of ideas, uncovering the geographic location where they are found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. These kinds of places—including botanical gardens, naturalists’ field-sites, Henry Ford’s open-air historical museum, and churches and chapels along the pilgrimage way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain—would seem at first to have little in common. But each is a truth-spot, a place that makes people believe. Truth may well be the daughter of time, Gieryn argues, but it is also the son of place.

208 pages, Hardcover

Published May 22, 2018

Reviews

[Jonte Samuelsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable read by a master author. Laid out as a kind of travel diary rather than a work of academic scholarship, Truth Spots is highly accessible to readers of all stripes, not just academics or students. There is a flip side to that coin though. References and debts to previous scholarship are not absent in the book, they’re just obscured and non-explicit. Somewhat paradoxically, this makes Truth Spots a rather hard read for someone looking to make scholarly use of it. Rather than explicitly positioning himself among existing scholarship on, say, labs or courtrooms, Gieryn writes more or less as if he had gotten his ideas from thin air and then happened to find some interesting writing on similar topics. This has the effect that, in order to assess Gieryn’s position in the scholarly conversations he engages in, the reader has to be extraordinarily well-versed in them, much more so than if the book had been written as a standard academic monograph.

[Renan Malafaia · Rating 2 out of 5]

“If, by now, you have begun to think about places that make people believe-the truth-spots not already considered in this book-then my work here is finished.”