Space is the place you occupy and the material conditions of that place. Its climate, resources, buildings, and streets might seem like things outside your identity. Yet those exterior things can play a role in forming your interior life.
They influence what you eat, what you worry about, and which activities feel ordinary or even possible. Over time, adaptations to a place can become habits. Those habits can become traditions. Eventually, we might describe them simply as “the way we are,” without thinking much about the conditions that helped produce them.
In Uzbekistan, food made me think about this connection. Meat, carrots, tomatoes, yogurt, sour cream, and tangy vegetable dishes were recurring parts of the meals I encountered. Looking at those meals, I began wondering how much of what we call a cultural preference also reflects the practical conditions of living somewhere.
Water is one part of that question. In Uzbekistan, irrigation and water management are important to agricultural production. Efforts to improve vegetable farming include water-saving techniques such as drip irrigation. What people can grow depends partly on the resources and infrastructure available to them.
But I also think we have to be careful here. It would be too simple to explain an entire cuisine through a shortage of water. Food carries histories of migration, trade, family traditions, and changing technology as well.
The Korean-style carrot salad found in the region is a useful example. It belongs to the culinary history of the Koryo-saram, the Korean diaspora in the former Soviet Union. Its use of carrots and local seasonings reflects a cooking tradition developed in a different setting from Korea. The familiar tanginess usually comes from vinegar, rather than necessarily from fermentation.
To me, that makes the relationship between space and identity more interesting. People bring traditions into a place, encounter different ingredients and conditions, and develop something that later generations experience as familiar. The environment becomes part of the tradition.
In Penang, buildings raised a similar question.
George Town’s historic center is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its preserved streets and buildings carry the history of a trading city shaped by many communities. The area includes shophouses, religious buildings, residences, and other structures, rather than one uniform type of architecture.
These buildings are places where people continue to live, work, cook, and worship. Preserving them means maintaining a connection to the past while also meeting present-day needs.
Where older buildings contain timber, fire safety becomes part of that responsibility. A material feature of someone’s home can affect how they use it and what precautions they take. The Chinese Muslim we interviewed, whose home had burned down in an incense-related fire, made that connection especially personal to me. In his account, an event in his physical surroundings became a turning point in his religious life.
That is how something outside us can reach deeply inside us. A place provides opportunities, imposes limits, and exposes us to particular experiences. We respond to those conditions, sometimes without recognizing how much they have shaped us.
So when you think about who you are, how often do you think about where you are? Which habits depend on the resources, buildings, or climate around you? And if you lived somewhere very different, which parts of yourself might change?
