“The premise of my book,” writes Thomas F. Gieryn, “is that place matters mightily for what people believe to be true. We can better understand why some assertions or propositions or ideas become for some people credible and believable by locating them somewhere on the skin of the earth—and by asking what things are to be experienced at that spot and how this place is culturally understood.”

Gieryn, the Rudy Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington writes that in the introduction of his new book Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe. It is a scholarly, provocative, and accessible book, as well as a sort of grand tour of places that help us believe things. He begins in the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where once the prophetess spoke cryptic words to seekers of the future. From there he goes to other places, perhaps less obvious. Among others, there are Thoreau's retreat on the banks of Walden Pond; Henry Ford's ersatz village of Greenfield; the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts; the road to Santiago de Compostela; and the pristine clean rooms in which leaded gasoline was determined to be environmentally harmful. All of these, Gieryn argues, are places which help those who visit them–or even so much as know of their existence–believe something. "Truth may well be the daughter of time, Gieryn argues, but it is also the son of place."

For Further Investigation

Delphi

Walden Pond State Park

The Henry Ford: Greenfield Village

Detroit Institute of Arts

Walking the Camino de Santiago