Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

Children’s Geographies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 7–23, 2003

‘To Go Back up the Side Hill’:Memories, Imaginations andReveries of Childhood

CHRIS PHILOChris Philo, Department of Geography and Topographic Science, University ofGlasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT This paper offers theoretical reflections on how adult researchers access,process and represent the ‘worlds’ of children and childhood. Recognising previousclaims and warnings issued by geographers, it is argued that researchers can and shouldtake advantage of the fact that all adult researchers have once been children, meaningthat there are always fragments of connection allowing ‘us’ at least some intimation ofchildren’s geographies as experiencede and imagined from within. Gaston Bachelard’s(1969a) ‘poetics of reverie’ is partially built upon just such a sense of connection, layingout the basis for a phenomenology of childhood wherein adults seek an imaginativerevisiting of the reveries—the absent-minded daydreaming—of ‘bored’ and ‘idle’ chil-dren. This paper provides a critical exegesis of Bachelard’s work in this respect,emphasising the importance to his thinking of geography, landscape and environment asboth elements within and embodied spurs to childhood reverie. Questions about theadmixture of adult imagination and memory in the recovery of childhood reverie areconsidered, and conclusions are reached about what can usefully be taken fromBachelard’s ‘poetics of childhood’, notably in terms of a methodology of ‘not doing toomuch’ as an adult researcher in this field. Claims are also made about needing to takemore seriously than hitherto the mundane reveries of childhood, those contained inchildren’s own undirected jottings, drawings and play, as a possible source for futureinquiries into children’s geographies.

Childhood flows from so many springs (sources) that it would be as futile toconstruct its geography as to write its history. (Bachelard, 1969a, p. 112)

Introduction: Adults, Children and Connections

‘Adult researchers are not children’, writes David Sibley (1991, p. 270) in his thoughtfulcomments on Sarah James’s 1990 Area paper that restated the case for mountinggeographical studies of children.1 Responding to her call for geographers to attempt‘viewing reality through the eyes of both children and adults’ (James, 1990, p. 283, myemphasis), Sibley’s simple observation that geographers as adult researchers are no

ISSN 1473-3285 print; ISSN 1473-3277 online/03/010007-17 ! 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1473328022000041634

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longer children announces a problematic that has hovered in the margins of thisemerging new field of inquiry ever since. In some respects, it is a difficulty standing asone instance of a more general conundrum for geographers studying all manner ofhuman groupings, in that there is often a gulf—sometimes massive, sometimes morenuanced—in terms of attributes, identities and backgrounds between the person of theresearcher and the persons of the researched. Peter Jackson (1993) referred to this as ‘ageography of position’, and much ink has been expended, both in the geographicalliterature and beyond, on the problems entailed when a researcher remains an ‘outsider’to the everyday worlds of the people being studied. Up for debate is the credibility ofthe researcher’s findings and conclusions, as linked to the representational problemsarising as the academic seeks to portray these ‘other worlds’, all as framed by the fraughtethics of the research process from the moment of entering ‘the field’ to when researchwrite-ups circulate and become available for external use.

For adults researching children, such questions perhaps have a special charge, not leastbecause of the perceived (and often very real) vulnerability of this particular cohort ofresearch subjects, as linked to the great nervousness felt by many other adults—parents,schoolteachers, social workers, politicians—about allowing ‘strangers’ access to childrenand their spaces. In consequence, we are immediately forced to assess exactly why andhow we are proposing to conduct research with children, and to wonder whether thereare methodological and ethical issues arising in this context that are fundamentallydifferent to those arising in research with (most) adult cohorts. Various such issuesintegral to researching children have already been inspected in the geographical literatureby the likes of Aitken (1994, especially pp. 31–38), Matthews et al. (1998) and Valentine(1999), and doubtless this new Children’s Geographies journal will be doing more tosatisfy Sibley’s (1991, p. 270) injunction that ‘[a]ppropriate research strategies, in bothmethodological and ethical senses, need to be thought through very carefully’.2 While Ido not see the present paper as a direct input to this debate, it may still have a relevancethrough the speculation that we could usefully envisage being less interventionist thanis presently the case in most of our qualitative research endeavours as geographersinterested in children and childhood. Indeed, I will be arguing for a research practice thatallocates a role to the inactive daydreaming of the adult researcher, as well asrecommending that greater emphasis be placed upon such simple activities as theresearcher responding imaginatively to things produced—written, drawn, danced, sung,acted, whatever—by children outside of the research encounter and independent of theresearcher’s prompting. The final section of my paper is designed to clarify such claims,strange as they may first appear, and the hope is that it will be easy to detect how suchclaims emerge from the main arguments elsewhere about adults (re)kindling their sensesof childhood.

Some attention has been paid by geographers to the question of whether or not adultresearchers can adopt strategies allowing them ‘to stand in the place of the child’. Auseful early statement from Stuart Aitken (1994, p. 30) runs as follows:

It is one of the great ironies of human development that by the time we are oldenough to reflect on what is it like to be a young child, we are so far removed fromthe experience that it is difficult to empathise. Schactel (1959, p. 285) articulatedthis principle as ‘childhood amnesia’ wherein adults can no longer cognitivelyprocess early childhood experiences. Our mental structures have changed to theextent that we have great difficulty in imagining the world of the child. Certainlywe see ourselves in … children, but we no longer appreciate the nuances thatcomprise the child’s world.

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The issue may not be so pressing with respect to older children and teenagers, and manyof the essays in a collection such as Skelton and Valentine (1997), tackling thegeographies of youth cultures, evidently depend in part on authors’ well-rememberedexperiences of adolescent years.3 The pertinence of the question with respect to youngerchildren cannot be denied, though, and it is here that the ‘study of children as otherechoes most glaringly the current crisis of representation in the social sciences’ (Aitken,1994, p. 30).4 A key paper explicitly considering this apparent ‘unbridgeability’ of thegap between adult and child is that by Owain Jones (2001, p. 177), who offers thisobservation:

We have all been ‘children’, or at least biologically young, so perhaps uniquely inthis concern for a form of otherness, we have all been that other once, and may stillcontain some form or traces of it. This raises the question of whether it, or elementsof it, are retrievable through memory, or whether the illusion that it is in fact makesthe other/other[5] even more inaccessible and invisible. Once childhood is super-seded by adult stocks of knowledge,[6] those adult filters can never be removed toget back to earlier states. Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to bea child are inevitably processed through adultness.

Jones is not suggesting that researchers should forsake all efforts to reconstructchildren’s geographies as ‘felt’ from within by children themselves, and he himself(Jones, 1997, 2000) has contributed greatly to a corpus of work now embracing a rangeof possibilities from the analysing of children’s ‘mental maps’ (e.g. Matthews, 1992) tothe interpretation of children’s most intimate feelings about place and landscape (theclassic geographical work in this latter respect being Hart (1979)). What Jones issuggesting, however, is that researchers should beware a too ready insistence that theycan (re)visit this particular other. He is warning us to guard against an approach thateffectively ‘clos[es] in on the otherness of childhood’ (Jones, 2001, pp. 177–178) to thepoint where the dimensions of this otherness—‘those very characteristics which might beat the centre of understanding children’s geographies’ (Jones, 2001, p. 177)—arereconfigured into shapes, sizes and meanings comprehensible to adults but no longerrecognisable to children. I agree entirely with this warning, and in many ways my paperhere is moving in the same direction of asking about how to preserve ‘the otherness ofchildhood’ in our studies.

Where I differ from Jones (2001) is in the extent to which I accept the ‘unbridgeabil-ity’ of adult’s and children’s worlds. Whereas he rightly worries about the difficultmaterials with which a bridge might be built between these two worlds, my stance is thatwe should avoid portraying the situation as one of totally unbridgeable ‘distance’.Indeed, while being alert to the problem of ‘childhood amensia’, I think it worthrepeating the banal but important fact that chronologically all adults have at an earliertime of their lives been children. We have all ‘been there’ in one way or another,creating the potential for some small measure of empathy—some sense of recognition,sharing and mutual understanding, even if slight—with the children whom we encounterin our adult lives. This is not to deny the enormous variability in the childhoods onceexperienced by adults, as shaped by the contingencies of time, space, gender, class,ethnicity and countless more factors, and in no way is it to reject the crucial gains ofscholars who ‘have challenged essentialist understandings of “the child” by arguing thatchildhood is constructed in different ways in different times and places’ (Holloway andValentine, 2000a, p. 9). Nonetheless, I am speculating that in geographical studies ofchildren, perhaps more so than in many social–cultural projects where ‘we’ do remainfundamentally ‘other’ to the peoples being researched, there is still a fragment of

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connection between researcher and researched because we have all at some stage beenyounger, bodily smaller, experientially deficient and largely dependent upon, providedfor and regulated by adults. One writer talks about ‘what we once felt all too vividly,the otherness of grownups and the unavailability of true knowledge’ (Meadowlark, 1979,p. 78), and I reckon that there are occasions when we are recalled to the peculiarpsycho-social circumstances of childhood—to that inkling of not being the same asadults, but knowing that one day we would become them—and also to the sights, sounds,smells, other sensations and ‘childish knowledges’ made available through this thor-oughly embodied but temporary difference. Moreover, this fragment of connectionsimultaneously draws us back towards instances in our own childhoods and provides uswith resources for an enlarged, open-handed, meeting with children in the here-and-now.There should be no arrogance about positing such a connection, no presumption oftransparency before the adult gaze, and maybe something to (re)learn is precisely thehumility of children who, as Meadowlark (1979) nicely indicates, ‘know’ that they donot know. Rather, for me, identifying such a connection is to bring into play a sense ofcommon lives, worlds and spaces that is nonetheless fully aware of its own precarious-ness.

I am therefore proposing, in part contra Jones (2001), that we can and should builda bridge of sorts, and that this bridge need not lead inexorably to the land of childrenbeing colonised by invaders from the land of adulthood (even if this remains a danger).In his piece following the present one, Jones (this issue) adds to my argument here,exposing for more critical comment the status of memory in facilitating the adultre-entrance to childhood, and considering further the emotional charge of memory whichmaybe leads to memories being so shaped by present circumstances that their meaning-fulness vis-a-vis an individual’s past is thrown into doubt. The snares and potentials ofmisremembering, of then and now becoming so deeply entangled that the relevance ofmemory in recovering ‘real’ childhoods becomes unclear, of adults reworking memoriesto allow them to cope better with the residues of unhappy childhoods, of adultsimagining paradisical childhoods informed by popular mythologies rather than by actualexperiences: all of these vital matters and more are hinted at by Jones, and in so doinghe maps new terrains for exploration by geographers and other scholars of children andchildhood. What I wish to contribute is perhaps narrower in scope, launching from thesimple fact that in children’s research all of the adult geographers and other researchersinvolved have once been in the position of the very research subjects who they nowstudy.7 In what follows, I propose to address this fact through a detour into the writingsof one particular theorist whose ideas are probably less than fashionable in thesepost-structuralist and post-humanist days, but whose message—provided that it is treatedwith caution, and probably not followed to its own logical conclusion—can, I feel, adda new ingredient to the debates indexed above about the ‘crisis of representation’ inresearching children’s geographies. I will therefore offer a reading of Gaston Bachelard’sremarks on ‘reveries towards childhood’, contained in his 1969 text The Poetics ofReverie, itself a translation of his original 1960 text La Poetique de la Reverie. Leadingfrom this reading, I will conclude by pondering the implications for research onchildren’s geographies, including a reference back to the notion of ‘not doing too much’as a researcher in this field.

On ‘Reveries towards Childhood’ and their Geographies

Bachelard is not unknown to geographers, given that his most famous work The Poeticsof Space (1969b, originally1958) offers a challenging account of the deep ‘psychology’


underlying how the spaces of everyday human habitation, notably the ordinary house, areconstituted, apprehended and lived within. As such, his ideas filtered into the thinkingof those humanistic geographers who post-1970 countered the empty abstractions ofspatial science by turning to the so-called ‘philosophies of meaning’, specificallyphenomenology and existentialism, as a window on the fundamental meaningfulness ofhuman being-in-place (Ley, 1981). The writings of these humanistic geographers (e.g.Tuan, 1974, 1977; Relph, 1976; Seamon, 1979) undoubtedly contain refrains ofBachelard’s approach, which is unsurprising given the obvious bridge that his texts offerthem between difficult psycho-philosophical territory and the substantive concerns ofgeographers with space and place (with space as place). In a somewhat different vein,his poetics of space inform what Edward Said claims about the ‘imaginative geogra-phies’ configuring how ‘us, here’ (in the West) tell our stories about ‘them, there’ (in theEast), in the account of which he explicitly borrows from Bachelard to declare that‘space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, wherebythe vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here’(Said, 1978, p. 55). The abiding interest of post-colonial and other geographers in Said’swork, and specifically in imaginative geographies (e.g. Gregory, 2000), has meant that,albeit indirectly, Bachelard’s ideas have retained a currency, if up for criticism, in thisrather different tradition of scholarship to that pursued by the humanistic geographers.

Bachelard’s last major work, The Poetics of Reverie (1969a, henceforth PR), has beenalmost if not entirely neglected by geographers. This text sees him continuing his‘phenomenological inquiries’ into the ‘poetic imagination’, confronting ‘poetic images’and striving to retrieve from them ‘their original quality … the very essence of theiroriginality’, and thereby ‘taking advantage of the remarkable psychic productivity of theimagination’ (PR, pp. 1, 3). More narrowly, he seeks to access the domain of ‘reverie’,not the dreams of sleeping for which other analyses are required, but the ‘daydreams’ ofwakefulness when we are in ‘relaxed time’ and ‘function[ing] with inattention’ to eitherthe things around us or our more reflexive senses of self, biography and intentionality(PR, p. 5). ‘By following “the path of reverie”—a constantly downhill path—conscious-ness relaxes and wanders and consequently becomes clouded’ (PR, p. 5), but in this‘raw’ state, paradoxically, reverie becomes of little use because the resulting ‘conscious-ness which diminishes, which goes to sleep’ eventually ceases to be conscious—it ‘is nolonger a consciousness’ (PR, p. 6)—and stops being available for phenomenologicalreflection. Instead of using the formal techniques of empirical psychology to probe suchpre-consciousness, Bachelard’s project is that of bringing ‘poetic reverie’, the ‘docu-ments’ of poets who are themselves drawing inspiration from reverie, into contact witha phenomenological sensibility able to distil from here the shards of an imaginativeinsight into the deeper verities of the human condition. All of this endeavour is designed,for Bachelard, ‘to restore, even to an average reader, the innovating action of poeticlanguage’, and more foundationally to ‘establish … a phenomenology of the imaginarywhere the imagination is restored to its proper, all-important place as the principle ofdirect stimulation of psychic becoming’ (PR, p. 8). Numerous reservations can immedi-ately be signalled about such a project, given that its search for essences in a conceptualframework obsessed with depths rather than surfaces sets it squarely against thatpost-structuralist preference for ‘systems of dispersion’, to adopt a motif from Foucault(Philo, 1992), present in much contemporary human geography. Additionally, thedeference given to the ‘inspired’ creations of supposedly superior poets, novelists andother writers, as linked to judgements such as that recorded above about ‘the averagereader’, cannot but smack of a cultural elitism that has been repeatedly critiquedwhenever it has appeared in humanistic and cultural geography (e.g. Daniels, 1985: seebelow).

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For the purposes of the present paper, though, there may still be merit in followingthat specific strand of The Poetics of Reverie that leads Bachelard to contemplate,precisely not ‘a child psychology’, but the reveries of childhood that arguably remainwithin adults as ‘the durable character of childhood’ (PR, p. 20). Harking back to theconnectedness of adult and child with which I began, Bachelard (PR, p. 20) hence insiststhat:

[b]y certain of its traits, childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broadsections of adult life. First, childhood never leaves its nocturnal retreats [nightdreams]. Within us, a child sometimes comes to watch over us in our sleep. But inwaking life itself, when reverie works on our history, the childhood which is withinus brings us its benefits. One needs, and sometimes it is very good, to live with thechild which he [or she] has been. From such living he [or she] achieves aconsciousness of roots … Poets will help us find this living childhood within us, thispermanent, durable immobile world.

Bachelard is not saying that adults can straightforwardly remember their childhoods, butis insisting that intimations of childhood, flickers and hints of what we experienced inchildhood, do stay within us and can be accessed,8 infused with ‘wonder’ and given a‘quality’ with the help of inspiration from poetic sources. Indeed, he is less bothered by‘a doctrine of the utility of memory’, and, even if adults were to possess an ‘exactmemory’ (memoire) able to recall with precision ‘having learned a lesson on a gardenbench’ on a particular date, his chief concern is with the imaginative constructions thatrun in tandem with whatever memory does return to our consciousness (and especiallyto the scribbling pads of poets) for us to use (PR, p. 115).9 Bachelard’s focus is hencenot ‘the historian’s memory’ wherein factual accuracy is usually the goal, but rather ‘thepsychological memory–imagination mixture’ (PR, p. 119) wherein the history of fact,detail and precision is refracted through the lenses of imperfect memory and weaklyconstrained imagination. Moreover, he argues that it is in the midst of reverie that thismixture swings most creatively into play, writing that ‘in our reverie which imagineswhile remembering, our past takes on substance again’ (PR, p. 119),10 thus permitting—as in the quote above—‘reverie’ to ‘work’ on ‘our history’ in the production of a hybridresource for phenomenological reflection with the potential for spying deeper truths.11

Again, I must acknowledge that many readers, myself included, will probably havetrouble with the latter goal, but disagreeing with this destination of Bachelard’s projectdoes not disallow us from accepting that there may still be merit in taking seriously thememories, imaginations and reveries of childhood.

According to Bachelard, childhood reveries are the reveries of the child himself orherself, normally occurring in solitude—and solitude is another key concept forBachelard—and entailing moments when, away from the ‘unhappiness’ often brought tothem by adults, childhood ‘can relax its aches’ and find the ‘peace’ for idle daydreaming(PR, p. 99). The geography of this daydreaming is important, and the image thatBachelard conjures up in this respect is of the solitary child sitting on a hill gazing downabsent-mindedly on a picturesque landscape, nothing troubling his or her thoughts, andsimply drifting off into musings that may have some anchoring in what can be seen buthardly being constrained by its factual presence. Somewhere like the home is notconducive to such reverie, being too dominated by the cares and activities of adult life;and somewhere like school is certainly not conducive to such reverie, being toostructured by what adults want children to learn (and schools are places ultimatelydesigned to make children lose their childhood). Bachelard (PR, p. 127) elaborates onwhy the spaces of childhood reverie have to be in some fashion located away from theworld of adults:


[w]hen we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profoundsense of seeing. Seeing and showing are phenomenologically in violent antithesis.And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! … They know; theythink they know; they say they know … They demonstrate to the child that the earthis round, that it revolves around the sun. And the poor dreaming child has to listento all that! What a release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go backup the side hill, your side hill!

‘[B]ack up the side hill’, maybe looking back down on the schoolhouse: that, forBachelard, is where childhood reveries can begin. In addition, he underlines the pointabout these needing to be moments of idleness, and he envisages the child by himselfor herself, ‘very much alone in the profound boredom of being alone, free to think ofthe world, free to see the sun setting, the smoke rising from the roof, all these greatphenomena’ (PR, p. 127). For the adult re-entering such reveries, therefore, ‘[t]imeswhen nothing happened come back’, these being ‘[g]reat beautiful times from the former[i.e. childhood] life when the dreaming dominated all boredom’ (PR, p. 119).12 It is clearthat Bachelard regards the spaces bound up in such reveries as more significant than theirtimings, given his observation that ‘it is no living memory which runs along the scaleof dates without staying long enough at the sites of memory’ (PR, p. 119). Theimplication is that the phenomenological treatment of reverie is preoccupied less withwhen a reverie occurred—its exact dating, something only likely if the date wasassociated with a definite ‘event’,13 in which case true reverie was probably absent—andmore with the details of the spaces where it occurred. Bachelard himself tends to speakof ‘sites’ rather than spaces, and in one passage he declares that ‘[t]he site overwhelmspoor and fluid social “situations”’, where the terms ‘situation’ and ‘event’ are probablyequivalent, before discussing the ‘great value’ of compiling ‘an album of sites’ whichwere the spaces supporting our situated childhood reveries while now also being the onesrevealed to us, as adults, in our recovery of childhood reveries (PR, p. 23). We mightcriticise Bachelard’s somewhat romanticised sense of the solitary child in reverie; wemight criticise his portrayal of such reverie in an idyllic country setting (see also Jones,1997, 2000), given the crowded, noisy and troubled urban surroundings endured bymany children today; we might criticise his too-easy assumption that children can bereleased from adult charge and concern, particularly in a modern world where ‘stranger-danger’ and other threats prompt parents to structure the time-spaces of their children ina manner leaving them scant solitary time (e.g. Valentine, 1996; 1997a,b,c; Pugh, 2000),certainly not in outdoor spaces such as ‘back up the side hill’. Even so, I would stillargue that in this respect Bachelard is introducing valuable notions—to do with the timesand spaces of boredom, reverie and childhood—that, substantively if nothing else, canbring new sustenance to the table of our geographical research.

In Bachelard’s vision, the next step—following the theme of adult–child connected-ness—is to think about how adults can indeed reacquaint themselves with the reveriesof childhood. At this juncture, the issue becomes in effect a communion betweenreveries, those of adulthood striving to reconnect with the reveries of childhood, and itis intriguing that once again for Bachelard (PR, p. 102) the geography comes to the foreas an element encouraging such a meeting of reveries to take place:

We are standing before a great lake whose name is familiar to geographers [i.e. areal location], high in the mountains, and suddenly we are returning to a distantpast. We dream while remembering. We remember while dreaming. Our memoriesbring us back to a simple river which reflects a sky leaning upon hills. But the hillgets bigger and the loop of the river broadens. The little becomes big. The world

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of childhood reverie is as big, bigger than the world offered to today’s reverie. Frompoetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world, to childhood reverie,there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of thegreatest landscapes.

The thoroughly embodied aspects of this passage back to childhood reverie deservemention, the suggestion of returning to a setting wherein everything seemed much largerbecause the child was so much smaller, and these remarks hint at another theme—theembodiment of children in space, as compared to that of adults—that has so far beenlittle explored in the geographical literature (but see Winchester et al., 1999; Aitken,2001, chapters 3 and 4). Bachelard is not saying that adults need to revisit exactly thesame spaces as spawned childhood reveries, merely that certain spaces are likely to betriggers because something about them returns to us the sensations and even contents ofthese childhood moments. It may be the attractiveness of a particular sort of physicallandscape, which is why he writes about ‘a commerce of grandeur’ between adult andchildhood reveries, as well as implying that childhood feelings about such sceneryperhaps survive into adulthood to determine what we, as adults, herald as the mostbeautiful landscapes.14 Alternatively, it may be something as humble as smells from thespaces of childhood performing this function.15 As Bachelard puts it, ‘whoever wouldwish to penetrate into the zone of indeterminate childhood … would no doubt be helpedby the return of the great vague memories like the memories of odours from the past’(PR, p. 136); and again, albeit this time more geographically, he notes that ‘[t]he roomsof the lost house, the corridors, the cellar and the attic are retreats for faithful odours,odours which the dreamer knows belong only to him [or her]’ (PR, p. 137). Bachelarddevotes several pages to smells as entry-points to childhood reverie, using numerouspoetic references to the odours of childhood and claiming that ‘a whole childhood [canbe] evoked by the memory of an isolated fragrance’ (PR, p. 141), but this emphasismerely serves to underscore the environmental (or geographical) contingencies of adultsreconnecting with their childhoods.

Finally in this exegesis of Bachelard on childhood reveries, attention must be paidagain to his insistence that such reveries only come to light through the admixture ofmemory and imagination. There is no possibility of accessing with any exactitude thecontents of any one childhood reverie, he would claim, and the phenomenologicalmethod that he follows hinges primarily on the imaginative attempts of adulthood toreconnect with the imaginative diversions of childhood: something much more precari-ous than the ‘double hermeneutic’ of ordinary interpretative social research (Gregory,1978).16 This is why he acknowledges that adult ‘[r]everie towards our past lives, reverielooking for childhood, seems to bring back to life lives which have never taken place,lives which have been imagined’ (PR, p. 112). Or, in other more dramatic words, ‘inreverie we re-enter into contact with possibilities which destiny has not been able tomake use of’ (PR, p. 112). Thus, it is in the horizon of adult imagination that childhoodis revisited and childhood reverie recast; and, while the empirical psychologist might beunnerved by the free-wheeling play of imaginations scarcely bound by the facts ofmemory or history, Bachelard’s fascination is with the resulting weave of psychic‘substances’ from within which the phenomenologist may detect patterns, depths,essences and portals on to the ‘cosmos’. Once more, we need not concur with such aphenomenological manoeuvre to accept the invitation to ponder the dynamics integral toadult reimaginings of childhood imaginings; and neither do we have to be fullyBachelardian to realise that in any one of us there are different childhoods, varyingsenses of both who we were as a child and what we could now have become had we been


able to pursue different trajectories out of childhood. ‘[P]sychologically we are bornmany times’, comments Bachelard, quoting too a poet who writes: ‘Of childhoods I haveso many’ (PR, pp. 111–112). Furthermore, when reimagining our pasts ‘[w]e go into avery nearby elsewhere where reality and reverie are indistinguishable’, an imaginativelocation that Bachelard terms ‘the Other-House’ or even ‘the House of an Other-Child-hood’, and wherein we might stumble across the promises of ‘all that should-have-been’(PR, p. 121) or at least could-have-been for ourselves. Countless factors press upon bothchildren’s perceptions and adults’ reimaginings of their own childhoods, influencesspearing from a host of different times and spaces encountered during a lifetime, and thisis why Bachelard talks about the futility of trying to capture the sources of thesechildhoods in their entirety—including their multiple geographies or histories—for anyone individual let alone for a collectivity (and hence the epigram opening this paper).Actually, the geographer of children and childhood might reply that, impossible as it willbe to ‘map’ all of these influences, there is still a vital task to undertake—yet again, onewhere we are only just starting (e.g. Jones, 1997; Gagen, 2000a,b)—in tracing thehistorical geography of those factors and influences that have patterned, and continue topattern, the imaginings of childhood for both children and the adults into which theygrow.

Conclusions and from Elite Poetry to Children’s Jottings

What can this engagement with Bachelard on the poetics of childhood reverie tell us thatmight be useful for geographical studies of children? I hope that some answers to thisquestion have already been provided above, but let me draw to a close by bothsummarising my chief claims and adding to them preliminary remarks on more mundanechildhood reveries. In the first instance, and putting aside what might be judged moredubious or extreme features of his phenomenology, I think that Bachelard does provokeus to a more sustained consideration, not just of what separates children from adults, butalso of the possible lines of connection residing in the continuity of psychic materialsfrom childhood through into adult life. Psychoanalytic insights, as already deployed bysome geographers studying children and childhood (e.g. Sibley, 1995; Aitken andHerman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000), trade on this continuity in various ways, but theimplication of Bachelard’s assessment here is that we could usefully initiate a dialoguebetween adult imaginings and childhood imaginings (an imaginative resonance betweendifferent orders of reverie) very different to that developed in the literature of psychoan-alytic geography (see Philo and Parr, 2003).

More narrowly, Bachelard does indeed alert us to this realm of bored daydreaming—perhaps we can retain the name ‘reverie’—that surely is a central component ofchildren’s everyday lives. Such reverie is arguably more significant to children than it isto adults, who are often too busy at work or with personal affairs to daydream, or whoseconsumption of imaginative ‘products’ (books, music, films, television, even sports) israrely a potent source of influences in other spheres of their lives (unlike in the case ofchildren yet to learn the adult boundaries between work, coping and play).17 It is true thatquite a few geographers studying children now do seek to reconstruct something of theimaginings, the fantasies and the like that maybe shape children’s worlds (and geogra-phies) from within (e.g. Jones, 1997, 2000), but my own view remains that Bachelard hasput his finger on a particular corner of childhood—its flitting into reveries full ofimaginative content, often with a solitary characteristic as the individual child enjoysuninterrupted time in peaceful spaces to daydream—that is far more relevant tounderstanding children’s geographies than has hitherto been recognised. Actually, the

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geographer Dennis Wood long ago urged greater attention to children ‘doing nothing’ asa time ‘of searching, a time of change, a time of aesthetic’ (in Aitken, 2001, p. 16),reflecting that:

… the kids with nothing to do were poets waiting for their muse … Doing nothingis filling. Doing nothing is an unfolding of things to do, an unfolding of things thathave no names, like mooning around a lamppost or kicking stones into the drainacross the street … Doing nothing is almost everything. As a term, it conceals as itidentifies. It is both comprehensive and evasive, simultaneously screen and mirror(Wood, 1985, p. 9).

Bachelard might respond that there is still too much activity here for the onset of reverie,but I reckon that Wood’s reference to ‘poets waiting for their muse’ implies a closenessto the state envisaged by Bachelard. Aitken (2001, p. 16) adds that the worldly contextmatters, in that ‘[c]hildren must have time to do nothing and the space within which todo it’, whereas ‘it may be argued that the freedom to be unsupervised and do nothingis becoming less and less a possibility for children, particularly in the global north’ (seealso Pugh, 2000).18 Maybe this Bachelardian corner of childhood is itself disappearing,rendering much that I have argued in the paper increasingly redundant, which is why Iecho Aitken’s and Wood’s insistence on a politics that values ‘non-activities’, ‘seem-ingly inconsequential exchanges’ and ‘maintaining portions of children’s lives that arenot organised and institutionalised by adults’ (Aitken, 2001, pp. 16–17).

There is the additional methodological provocation to contemplate precisely howadults might enter this fuzzy landscape of childhood reverie, and there are perhaps twopossible ways in which such an entry can be envisaged. The first involves the adultresearcher’s own ‘daydreaming’, entailing in effect a hermeneutic exchange between hisor her adult reveries rooted in the here-and-now and recollections of his or herchildhood, complete with its own dynamics of reverie, spearing from the there-and-then.Exactly what such an exchange is supposed to entail, release and produce is less thanclear-cut—as has always been the case for geographers considering the phenomenolog-ical method—but some indication is nonetheless forthcoming from the ‘evidence’ ofBachelard’s reflections above, presumably bearing the imprint of his own childhood. Thesecond way involves the adult researcher striving to open himself or herself up to thereveries of children around them, including those who might more formally be desig-nated their research subjects, and such an approach veers closer to the doublehermeneutic as conventionally understood. In practice, the complex bricolage19 ofelements confronting the researcher in both cases—some being artefacts of faithfulmemory, others the artifice of imaginative projection—is little different whether‘sourced’, as it were, from the person of the researcher or from the persons of theresearched. In neither instance can there be a simple social-scientific formula for how toprocess the ‘data’ to hand, and the researcher has no choice but to operate in the realmof subjective appraisal, responding as creatively as possible to the leads, hints andintimations arrived at in the process of ‘working with’ the materials of the bricolage(whether notes on personal reveries or documents recording those of others).

Sticking with the second of these approaches, that where researchers deal with thechildhood memories, imaginations and reveries of persons other than themselves, it istelling to hear Bachelard’s (PR, p. 107) assertion that:

… a phenomenological project of gathering the poetry of childhood reveries in itspersonal actuality is naturally much different from the very useful objectiveexaminations of the child by psychologists. Even by letting children speak freely,


by observing them uncensured while they are enjoying the total liberty of their play,by listening to them with the gentle patience of a child psychoanalyst, one does notnecessarily attain the simple purity of phenomenological examination.

Geographers studying children’s worlds have made liberal use of the various qualitativetechniques gestured to here by Bachelard, of course, and a collection such as Hollowayand Valentine (2000b) is full of suggestive quotes from children being interviewed in avariety of formats, commonly unstructured ones permitting them to ‘speak freely’, aswell as findings derived from detailed ethnographic observations. There is nonethelesswarrant for cautioning that these techniques all carry with them some measure ofintrusion—some sense of creating, in Bachelard’s terms, an ‘event’—that concentratesthe minds of the children in a manner quite different to the unstimulating circumstancesof bored daydreaming, of reverie. Arguably too, such techniques cannot but be hedgedaround by the patterns of adult consciousness, even by a ‘willing’ of the child to respondin ways intelligible to adult strictures of ‘reason’ and ‘sociability’, which thereby risksforcing the child into the ‘die’ of being a ‘premature adult’ (PR, p. 107).20 Jones (2001,p. 177) is getting at something similar when complaining that social science research onchildren too readily prioritises ‘(rational) representations through language’, problemati-cally expecting children to provide ‘answers’ to research questions ‘worded’ in what areeffectively mini-versions of what adults might say and reveal.21

Bachelard’s preference is hence to avoid standard qualitative methods in turninginstead to methods that he regards as phenomenologically ‘purer’, as less contaminatingof the childhood response. More specifically, he turns to the inspiration of poets, sincehe regards such writers as having peculiar powers of insight allowing them to translatetheir own childhood reveries into a shape that is both faithful to ‘real’ reverie—to thegenuine admixture of memory and imagination stirred therein—and amenable to further(phenomenological) processing. The obvious objection is that this deference to the poetsbrings in a yet more imposing barrier between ‘us’ and children, a thick line of poeticsensibility that is arguably less a zone of simple openness to the world and more one ofsophisticated adult self-awareness, intelligence and learning about poetry, its history andtraditions.22 It hence surprises me that Bachelard does not pay more heed to his ownwarning that ‘[g]rownups write children’s stories too easily’, causing them to ‘makechildish fables’ instead of appreciating that ‘it is necessary to be serious like a dreamingchild’ (PR, p. 118).23 He presumably reckons that poets do not fall into the same trapsas the authors of children’s stories, but I would still have my suspicions about adult poetstoo easily encapsulating children’s worlds, and inserting too much baggage betweenthemselves and the ‘seriousness’ of the daydreaming child.

Let me finally propose that adult geographers might take seriously the more mundanereveries of children, not those that have been converted into the ‘poetic reveries’favoured by Bachelard, but the seemingly quite banal hints at the contents of everydaybored daydreaming that can be found in the written or other inscribed ‘documents’which many children are making most days of their young lives. The stories, diaries,drawings, paintings and photographs made by children have been used by adultresearchers for years,24 of course, but it would appear that these stories, drawings and thelike have usually been explicitly asked for by the researchers as part of their projects(thus rendering the acts of production definite ‘events’). My impression is that very littlehas been done with documents that children have made for themselves in a more relaxed,unstructured and perhaps relatively purposeless manner, and yet it is arguable that suchdocuments are more likely to allow the researcher access to bored daydreams, to reverie,

Chris Philo18

to these elusive but pivotal fragments of a child’s sense of self-in-the-world. Animaginative engagement between the adult’s sensibilities and the child’s reverie, as jottedinto a story, scratched into a picture, or whatever, may just furnish a new key to unlockcertain ‘internal’ mysteries of children’s worlds (and geographies). Having dimlyrecognised this potential myself and capitalising on the connectedness of adulthood andchildhood, in this instance the palpable continuity in my own personal biography, I onceincluded in a paper on sports geography (Philo, 1994, pp. 8–11) reflections on my ownchildhood reverie—captured in countless drawings and scribblings, but still a shadowypresence in my mind as an adult—of a sports landscape full of tiny settlements, eachwith their own football team, which somehow linked my bedroom to the wider world.25

Rather than rehearse this example again, though, I will conclude by quoting two itemswritten by a friend of mine at school when she was circa 6 or 7 years old:

[o]ne day me and Donna saw a witch and the witch saw us and then we ren [ran][26]

away and we came to a house But it was a red house and we went in the house andwe saw Susan in the house and Susan went with as [us] but the witch was sail[still?] rening [running] after as [us] and then we went to the park and then we wenton the string [swing] and then we went to the zoo and we saw a rabbit and thenwe saw a bird and then we went to a play house and we saw Rhona and Rhona wasin the play house and then we went to my house and then we had an ice-cream andmum had an ice-cream and then Dad had a ice-cream and then we went to bed.

One day I saw Luice and me and Luice went on the park and we went on the swingsand when we came out of the park we saw Rebecca H and Rebecca said lets go ona boat so we did and then we came to a island and on the island we saw a witchBut the witch was good and saw [she] said come in my house and we came in thewitchs house and we went to sleep on the witchs bed and when we woke up thewitch had gone so we went out of the witchs house and we went on the park againand then we we[nt] to a island on the boat and the island was called the island ofemeralds and we saw mummy on the island and we saw Daddy on the island andwe saw granny and we all had a ice-cream and the[n] we all went to bed.

Written nearly every day as ‘news’, but also being referred to as ‘stories’ in oneteacher’s marginal comment, my friend managed to write basically the same piece overand over again, well over 100 times, and as such its production was clearly not an‘event’ but rather a highly routinised accomplishment suggesting a definite pattern in theimaginings underlying them. While these mini-narratives are mostly built around realpeople and practices—family members, named friends, lashings of ice-cream—they dononetheless embrace various imaginings, notably of witches but also of (in otherversions) wizards, pirates, robots and dinosaurs. The term ‘reveries’ would seem quiteappropriate for describing such stories, since they surely do reflect this individual’sabstracted musings every morning at school which, I suspect, were also central to herimagination, talk and play outside of school. Inspecting these reveries as a geographer,they reveal a hybrid geographical imagination full of real places—the family home,friends’ houses, the park with swings, the zoo—supplemented by numerous more-or-lessmade-up places such as witches’ houses, islands and (in other versions) woods withmany trees. It might be possible, with my friend’s help, to identify the influences feedingthe more fantastic elements of her stories, doubtless specific children’s books, televisionprogrammes and the like; and yet a full reconstruction of exactly how and why theseinfluences became mixed up as they did, both with each other and with ‘real’ people,practices and places, would almost certainly be much more difficult. Even so, I believe


that we are here travelling very close to the neglected ‘stuff’ of childhood worlds, onesenergised by absent-minded reveries that happily fuse the real and the imagined, oftendisplaying deliciously chaotic geographical imaginations. If we were to work more withdocuments such as my friend’s stories, extending the opportunities for imaginativeexchange as we—the adult researchers—try to re-envisage ourselves once again aschildren daydreaming about families and witches, friends and dinosaurs, local streets anddistant spacecraft, then, strangely enough, we might actually end up writing more‘accurately’ about children’s geographies.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks are due to Owain Jones for his extremely perceptive comments on mypaper, and would that I had been able to tackle his comments more fully and capably(but see now his own paper following mine (Jones, this issue)). Thanks are also due toFiona Smith for her encouraging remarks, as well as to Eric Laurier, Hugh Matthews,Hester Parr and Nicola Ross.

Notes

1. I say ‘restated’ because earlier rounds of interest in geographical studies of children, taking seriously theircognitive mapping abilities, their environmental experiences and play, and their spatial oppression can allbe traced in the literature prior to 1990. For reviews that emphasise the earlier work, see Aitken (1994,especially pp. 3–5), Aitken (2001, especially pp. 12–18), Holloway and Valentine (2000a), Matthews andLimb (1999) and Philo (1997). Holloway and Valentine (2000a, p. 8) suggest that ‘for the most part this[earlier] work has been ignored within an adultist discipline’, and that it is only ‘[t]he last decade of thetwentieth century [that] has seen renewed interest in incorporating children’s voices and experiences withinthe geographical project’.

2. Excellent initiatives have recently been taken by various geographical researchers to empower children inthe research process, not merely to inform them in detail of what is occurring but to consult them aboutappropriate methods for the researcher to use and even to enlist them as ‘co-researchers’ insofar as thatis ever possible: see, for instance, Smith and Barker (1999a,b, 2000a,b). In this respect, we might talkabout striving to work with children.

3. ‘Memories of childhood remain clear in the minds of most adults’, observe Margaret Jones and ChrisCunningham (1999, p. 31) in a chapter on the geographies of ‘middle childhood’, and they add that suchmemories ‘may provide ideas for the examination of childhood today’. They draw upon adult reminis-cences of growing up in Australia that tell of ‘fondly remembered childhood sounds and scents’, and theyinclude a reference to the author Ruth Park’s (1992) recollections of being like a ‘forest creature’ in herown ‘quiet kingdom’ saturated in ‘physical and spiritual influences’ (Jones and Cunningham, 1999, p. 31).

4. See also Aitken (2001, especially pp. 5–8) for further reflections on the ‘crisis of representation’ lying atthe heart of geographical and other research on children.

5. I take it that what Jones is getting at with this construction of ‘other/other’ is the ambition of writing about‘otherness’ that does not simply convert this otherness into the comforting vocabularies of ‘sameness’. Heis drawing on Bauman’s (1993) warning about ‘us’ inadvertently recasting otherness in ‘our’ standardconcepts, models and terms, thereby stealing otherness’s authority.

6. Jones takes the notion of ‘stocks of knowledge’ from the significant early paper on such matters by Thrift(1985).

7. I should acknowledge that one or two recent PhD students working on children’s geographies have notedhow few years, relatively speaking, separate them from the children and young people who they arestudying, adding that there are aspects of the lives, experiences and spaces of their research subjects whichreally do not seem so different, so alien, to them as supposedly ‘adult’ researchers: neat points in thisrespect were made in a presentation by Morris-Roberts (2000), and they bubble just under the surface ofTucker (2002).

8. ‘Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined’ (PR, p. 100), writes Bachelard, adding later the tellingphrase that ‘childhood is a state of mind’ (PR, p. 130). Were we to pursue these claims, particularly thesecond one, then geographical studies of childhood would potentially acquire a very different character(one in which children and young people per se would not always have to figure).

Chris Philo20

9. Here Bachelard counters Bergson’s faith in ‘psychic facts’ that can be retrieved as ‘framed images’,repictured moments such as the garden lesson, which a ‘pure memory’ can locate with certainty intime–space (PR, pp. 115–116). This is also another reason why what he is advocating is not an empiricalpsychology of experiences.

10. Bachelard is not saying that all adult reveries (as in the reveries of an adult) entail a return to childhood,but the impression seems to be that for him most reveries do nonetheless contain the potential forreacquainting us with moments of childhood.

11. At this point, Bachelard talks about recovering ‘a memory of the cosmos’ (PR, p. 119), a theme of utilisingreverie to access deeper truths of human being immersed within the elemental foundations (water, earth,fire) of the cosmos, a theme with Jungian undertones. Many will be suspicious, I think rightly, about suchan orientation.

12. This is also why he sometimes talks about ‘useless childhood’ (e.g. PR, p. 116), meaning those momentsof childhood when the child is simply left to be a child, free from any demands about learning,contributing to the family wage, looking after siblings, and the like.

13. ‘Events’, for Bachelard, are moments when something happened, not nothing, and he supposes that suchevents are usually ones disturbing the peace required for reverie. It is clear that he does not want hisphenomenology to be distracted by events, and that he sees psychoanalysis as the intellectual complementto phenomenology for the very reason that ‘[p]sychoanalysis studies the life of events. We are trying toknow life without events, a life which does not mesh with the lives of others. It is the lives of others whichbring events into our life. In comparison with this life attached to its peace, this life without events, allevents risk being “traumas”’ (PR, p. 128). ‘Softening, erasing the traumatic character of certain childhoodmemories, the salutary task of psychoanalysis’, he continues, ‘returns to dissolve those psychic concretionsformed around a singular event’ (PR, p. 128). Elsewhere he proposes to ‘leave to psychoanalysis … thetask of curing badly spent childhoods, of curing the puerile sufferings of an indurate childhood whichoppresses the psyche of so many adults’ (PR, pp. 99–100). Thinking about this distinguishing of the rolesof phenomenology and psychoanalysis in the study of childhood, as linked to intimations about therespective roles of time–space in each, raises fascinating questions in the light of, say, Aitken’s (Aitkenand Herman, 1997; Aitken, 1998, 2000) and Sibley’s (1995) turn to psychoanalytic theory to inform theirwork on children’s geographies.

14. The likes of Cosgrove (1984) and Daniels (1993) would of course qualify the suggestion of such ‘inherent’judgements about landscape, preferring to talk about landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ into which we are allsocialised and which is bound up with wider socio-economic imperatives.

15. See also Porteous (1985) on ‘smellscapes’.16. Wherein the issue is mediating between the ‘horizons of meaning’ possessed by both the researcher and

the researched as integral (inescapable) dimensions of their respective everyday worlds of encounter andexchange. I would contend, all the same, that such mediation requires imaginative leaps, hopefullyempathetic ones, on the part of the researcher.

17. I hesitate when writing this sentence, given that music, sport and other creative ‘moments’ can be suchan influential presence in the lives of many adults; but my point is that for the most part adultscompartmentalise their lives in such a way that their immersion in—even reveries about—such momentsis unlikely to generate influences with the potential to leak so promiscuously throughout their everydayactions, thoughts and, yes, daydreams. I would be happy for readers to argue with me on this one!

18. It should be noted that Wood’s research, ethnographically based as it was, took place in Barranquitos,Puerto Rico.

19. The bricoleur, a French term, ‘is a “jack of all trades”, a builder and handy[person] or a “tinkerer” whothe anthropologist Levi-Strauss opposed to the engineer who begins from plans and models. The bricoleurstarts from what is there and tries to make it work by adapting, innovating, reusing and refashioningmaterials’ (Crang, 2003, p. 5).

20. ‘The child thus enters into the zone of the family, social and psychological conflicts. He [sic] becomes apremature man. This is the same as saying that the premature man is in a state of repressed childhood’(PR, p. 107). This line of reasoning may also explain why we are sometimes ‘disappointed’ by thequalitative evidence that we collect through interviews and ethnography, since what the children say to usand what we write down about their activities can seem so, well, ‘banal’. This may therefore be becausewe are trying to interpret this evidence as we would the words and acts of adults—we crave the levels ofself-insight, the wide-ranging reflections, and the like; we crave something dramatic and out-of-the-ordi-nary—when really we should be seeking to be more open to, and able to work with, what children aschildren are giving us.

21. Jones hence anticipates a ‘non-representational’ critique insisting that ‘[n]ew ways of questioning andknowing the world … may be particularly pertinent for future research into children. There are theorieswhich emphasise the body (children always have bodies), non-representation and even performance’. A


relevant reference is Thrift’s (2000) account of what human geography (or social science more generally)might look like if taking seriously the need to get beyond an obsession with words—to construct anapproach ‘after words’—and thereby to register the extent to which so much of what ‘we’ are as humans,even as sociable humans, occurs in the bodily realm ‘before words’ and their post hoc cognitiverationalisations.

22. Such a critique precisely echoes Daniels’s (1985) brilliant deconstruction of an approach in literarygeography that supposes ‘great literature’ to offer a superior yet somehow unmediated, even more ‘true’,access to landscapes and environments beyond in ‘real’ earth. It should ideally, of course, be fleshed outat greater length and with appropriate referencing.

23. This remark might also stand as a plausible critique of using children’s stories by the likes of ArthurRansome and Enid Blyton as a window on children’s geographies: arguably, they are an ingredient in suchgeographies, possibly as but one influence on how their young readers end up perceiving landscapes andenvironments, but in no way are they are an unproblematic window on children’s own imaginings (andimaginative geographies). Compare Jones (1997) with Jones and Cunningham (1999).

24. I have recently seen particularly good examples in McCormack (1998) and Tucker (2002). The ‘mentalmaps’ drawn by children have of course been another oft-used kind of ‘document’ particularly used bygeographers: see Matthews (1992).

25. In effect, the ‘research’ that I have conducted here runs across both of the approaches under discussionin this conclusion: the researcher working on his or her own childhood reveries, but also the researcherworking on documentary traces of the reveries of a child (who will usually be someone other thanthemselves).

26. I am only inserting small clarifications in these quotes to aid the reader. Otherwise, I am repeating theextracts as they were written, without punctuation. These are of course wordy documents, but they neednot be, and I could have concentrated more on the pictures that accompanied them. I am certainly nottrying to convert the words into ‘rational representations’.

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Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

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