This paper articulates a framework for thinking about the role of place in human experience. The question of why physical place is important in all experience is dealt with through a review of recent work on the concept of place, including Keith Basso's ethnographic work with the Western Apache on their belief that an enduring sense of place entails a complex array of symbolic relationships with their physical surroundings. This suggests that an ethnography of lived topographies has to combine the symbolic and the concrete. Basso's example offers specific ways that physical place plays a role in the daily practice of another culture and suggests that an an ethnography of lived topographies cannot simply deal with the physical characteristics of places but must also deal with the moral imagination that persons bring to the sensing of those places. An agenda for further research about place in the field education is presented. (Contains 42 references.) (AEF)