HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 363categories (e.g., size and scale, stone and glass, blue and green, light and airy). Even photographs,
maps, sketches or other forms of representation that are used to portray the spaces do not stand
alone: Analysis is mediated by a descriptive narrative that turns visual data into words, rendering
the artifact a particular form of “text analogue” (Taylor 1971; see also Casey 2002; Fyfe and Law
1988; Latour 1999; M. Lynch and Woolgar 1990a; and T. Mitchell 1991 on maps and other
representations).
Analysis, then, is already one step removed from immediate experience: The experience of
space and its meanings is initially one of bodily sensations evoked by visual and spatial elements;
initial firsthand, nonverbal sense making and interpretation are responses to these, rather than to
the words that come later. Analytic trustworthiness relies on descriptions of a sufficient level of
detail to support inferences and enable the researcher to reproduce the reasoning process by which
she derived those inferences. What Scheflen writes with respect to another research context ob-
tains here:
It should be noted that I did not count these behaviors or measure them. For I am interested
in their meaning, and... the meaning of an event is in its relationship to the larger picture,
not in the qualities of the event itself.... I must know, to derive meaning, exactly how each
behavioral unit fits in relation to the others in the larger system. So I shall not present charts
and statistics, but only simple descriptions, and later abstractions not unlike those that every
[analyst] makes. The advantage is that I can retrace my steps and tell exactly how each is
derived. (1974 [1966], 184; emphasis added)The systematic character of space analysis lies in sustained inquiry over time, which produces
myriad “observations” (in the sense in which that term is used in large ‘n’ studies); in the careful
choice of sites to observe, individuals to talk to, and documents to read; and in the procedural
systematicity brought about through the various categories for accessing and analyzing data.
The extent to which analysis of spatial meaning draws on bodily experience should not be
underestimated. Casey captures this well when he writes:
My body continually takes me into place. It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and
witness of being-in-place.... Without the good graces and excellent services of our bodies,
not only would we be lost in place—acutely disoriented and confused—we would have no
coherent sense of place itself. Nor could there be any such thing as lived places, i.e., places
in which we live and move and have our being. Our living-moving bodies serve to structure
and to configurate entire scenarios of place. (1993, 48; emphasis in original)This only adds to the puzzle of academic analysis in such fields as organizational or political
studies (i.e., those that are not primarily space oriented) that lack an orientation to the play of
spatial elements in a “sheer herelessness” (Casey 1993, 52): How can researchers be so tuned out
of space, yet not experience themselves as “dis-oriented”?^25 As the philosopher Ernst Cassirer
noted, the human “body and its parts are the system of references to which all other spatial distinc-
tions are indirectly transferred” (quoted in Casey 1993, 82). And yet T. Mitchell provides a clue
that links experiential and methodological herelessness: in the mid-nineteenth-century develop-
ment of personhood conceived of “as something set apart from a physical world,” as one who by
nature controls “his own physical body and will” (1991, 19), body was subordinated to mind, and
this detached observational attention was deemed “objective.” To the extent that built spaces have
been seen as body analogues, they have been relegated to the same observational and analytic