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63 (Lefevbre 1991, 294)
(Lefevbre 1991, 294)
It is beyond dispute that relations of inclusion and exclusion, and of implication and explication, obtain in practical space as in spatial practice. ‘Human beings’ do not stand before, or amidst, social space; they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they are in this space. They do not merely enjoy a vision, a contemplation, a spectacle—for they act and situate themselves in space as active participants. They are accordingly situated in a series of enveloping levels each of which implies the others, and the sequence of which accounts for social practice. For anthropology, as it examines a so-called archaic or peasant society, there is the body (’proxemics’); the dwelling with its ’rooms’; and the vicinity or community (hamlet or village) along with its dependent lands (fields under cultivation or fallow, pasture, wood and forest, game preserves, etc.). Beyond these spheres lies the strange, the foreign, the hostile. Short of them, the organs of the body and of the senses. Like (supposedly) primitive peoples, the child, who, doubtless on account of its unproductive and subservient role, is mistakenly viewed as a simple being, must make the transition from the space of its body to its body in space. And, once that operation is complete, it must proceed to the perception and conceptualization of space. According to our present analysis, these successive achievements start and end with objective ’properties’—with material symmetries and duplications upon which inclusions/exclusions are superimposed. For such inclusions embody exclusions: there are places that are prohibited (holy or damned heterotopias) for various reasons, and others that are open of access, or to which access is encouraged; in this way parts or subdivisions of space are dramatically defined in terms of the opposition between beneficent and maleficent, both of which are also clearly distinguished from neutral space. [Lefevbre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd. [originally as La production de l’espace. Paris: Editions Anthropos. 1974.]]
