“Like Escobar (2001: 152), I understand place as ‘the experience of, and from, a particular location with some sense of boundaries, grounds, and links to everyday practices’. I am also aware, with Escobar, that this experience is emergent and not a given. A previously implicit understanding of place, in anthropology and other disciplines, as a given and natural locus from which senses of community and identity derive, has been recently displaced by more complex understandings which conceive place as a process, as ‘embodied practices that shape identities’, in part through resistance to changing ‘strategies of power’ (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997). This perspective on place-making stresses the point that the immediate experiences of place and identity are inevitably constituted within larger sets of spatial relations. Doreen Massey (1999: 18) has argued that place can be fruitfully seen as a knot made of a particular mix of threads (i.e. links and connections), ‘including local relations “within” the place and those many connections which stretch way beyond it’. I would add that, as the chapters by Russell, Rethmann, McGregor and Feit in this volume show, the links and connections that make place do extend not only spatially but also temporally, as previous ‘mixtures of threads’ are part of the genealogical make-up of contemporary constitutions of place. These chapters also remind us that place is ‘grounded’; that is, place is an emergent of the specific everyday engagement of specific peoples with specific landscapes, environments or ‘natures’ (see Dirlik 2001: 21; Escobar 2001: 6). Thus I will talk, for ease of presentation, of two kinds of ‘threads’ shaping place: vertical threads will refer to those links and connections that ground place in specific histories and landscapes; horizontal threads will refer to trans-place linkages in a spatial sense. Within the mutually constitutive relations between these vertical (history/‘nature’) and horizontal (trans-location) threads the specificity of places arises, thus contributing the elements with which people delineate their more or less stable but always porous boundaries that distinguish them from other lands and other peoples. Within this brief discussion of the meaning of place, I can advance the argument that both development and life projects are place-based; that is, both are broadly socio-cultural praxes emerging from specific mixes of horizontal and vertical threads. What distinguishes them is the relative importance that each gives to horizontal and vertical linkages and what consequences these visions have for place-making.” In the Way of Development - Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization chapter 2 p26 Mario Blaser