two comments
OK, I don't really have anything that insightful to say, so I'm just gonna recombine things.
First, I really liked Michael Curry's descriptions of chorographic and topographic ways of knowing things. Yes, I know this is from last week, but it came out to me again in the Nancy Munn reading (and thinking backwards it seems an important component of the Basso reading too). In those particular ways of relating to the territory, choros and topos seem deeply intertwined, because the power of the place to inform you how to act is really tied up with narratives of what happened there and how you relate to those events. I take choros to be very much about action, and topos to be very much about narrative representation, and these examples show how very important one is for the other. We've talked a lot about the mapping instinct of ubicomp, and how technology has lent a lot of power to the geographic way of knowing things. So I wonder, we've also already talked about how computational technology is capable of both representation and action; if situated (rather than objective/omniscient) how can it interact with topographic and chorographic ways of knowing? Do we have any good examples of this?
Second, I've read the LeMarcis a couple times before and every time I reread it, it upsets me all over again, not least because big pharma has pulled the same sort of sketchy drug-trial bullshit in Thailand as well. The Cresswell article leaves me (to a lesser extent) irritated with The Man as well. Soooo... I think the body as object-subject is a really valuable contribution, not just for dealing with women's bodies, but sick bodies (in which the body becomes an uncooperative object even to the person inside of it?), minority bodies, etc. And the extent to which your body is going to be objectified depends a lot on the situation its in (hence women-only gyms). This was a really interesting thing to consider as I start diving into my pile of fieldnotes about Thai transnationals, because some of them are moving between a situation in which their bodies area going to be very marked as other (being SE Asian in the midwest is pret-ty "other") and one in which they will blend in perfectly.