be conflictual: as a Michigan cabinet member put it to two Southern colleagues shortly before the American Civil War, '"I see how it is; you are a Virginian and you are a South Carolinian; I am not a Michigander, I am an American"'. For the individual, as well as the social institution, different levels of social space come to the fore at different times. To a Britisher, for example, '"we" sometimes narrows to southern England, sometimes broadens to refer to "Britain and America" or "Europe" or "the west"'. In precisely the same way, 'a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner' – a sequence of stratified social spaces. Pre/postmodern space 'In premodern societies, space and place largely coincided....Modernity increasingly tears space away from place'. Whereas in the premodern 'every thing has its assigned place in social space', postmodernists would proudly proclaim that 'we need to substitute for the magisterial space of the past...a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one would ever be in his final place '. The way 'migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere' in postmodernity - 'we are migrants and perhaps hybrids, in but not of any situation in which we find ourselves' - is rooted in the postmodern forms of production of social space. Lefebvre considered globalization as the creation, and superimposition on nature, of 'worldwide-social space...with strong points (the centers) and weaker and dominated bases (the peripheries)'. The insanity of place Education, formal and informal, might be described as in large part a process whereby the new recruit to the human race 'must learn to represent the many dimensions of the local social space...through the veil of degraded inputs, chronic ambiguity, and the occasional deliberate deception'. Faced with such intricacies, R. D. Laing concluded that 'it is just as well that man is a social animal, since the sheer complexity and contradiction of the social field in which he has to live is so formidable'. The madman, by contrast, is not 'someone to be counted on to know his place': in many ways, 'mental symptoms are wilful situational improprieties'. Whereas in 'public and semi-public places - streets, shops, neighbourhoods, public transportation, and the like -...a fine mesh of obligations obtains which ensures the orderly traffic and co-mingling of participants...many classic symptoms of psychosis are precise and