The Pyrenees as place: Lefebvre as guide

Geographers have taken a portion of the voluminous writings of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and put them at the center of current disciplinary debates about space and place. In doing so they have constructed an intellectual biography of Lefebvre that highlights his connection to the Pyrenees region of southwestern France. The theoretical arguments of Lefebvre are often translated to fit within disciplinary themes, and the biographical elements are interpolated to give an experiential or lived basis to the theory. Lefebvre's geographical interpretation of his ancestral region in a popular text, Pyrenees, gives additional and alternative insights into his complicated relationship to this region and the difficulties of representing place and region. This text illustrates both elements of Lefebvre's social theory and classical geographical themes about narrating place and region.