Much of what I have written celebrates place, but the shadow of place must also be acknowledged. The Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, comments that “Place-making, by setting up boundaries gives rise to the polarities of ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.[i] At the moment in which I am writing this is very evident in the increasingly bitter arguments about Brexit. Where do we belong? Are we European, British, English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish, or citizens of the world, which, ex-PM Theresa May asserted meant being a “citizen of nowhere”? What does it mean to be patriotic, to love the place where you are? Does it inevitably mean wanting to restrict the possibilities for sharing that space.
David Goodhart, in his book “The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics” identifies two tribal identities at the root of some of the strife we currently experience. The Anywheres are people who do not have a prounounced sense of belonging to a particular place, who are happy to move where their lives and jobs take them, and are often enabled to do so because they are wealthy and employable enough to be able to relocate. They are likely to embrace cultural diversity, and to see themselves as part of a wider community – the EU, the world. They may have a very sketchy sense of the places in which they live and work, and little connection to the local community, preferring the virtual networks they are part of. As Edward Relph comments , “Rootedness is only one element in the diverse topographies of sense of place, only one way to connect with the world, and in the present day it is an option rather than a necessity.” [ii] The Somewheres, by contrast, are people who may never have moved far from their birthplace, and do not want to, for whom local identity and history matter very much. They are likely to be less wealthy and less highly educated, and to have more resistance to change and diversity, according to Goodhart. The shrinkage of Britain’s manufacturing industries will have hit them harder – the collapse of ship-building or mining, for example – because those industries often employed large numbers of the local population. Somewheres will also be more aware of immigration because they have a stronger sense of the place they live being “theirs”. Goodhart’s analysis is probably over simplistic, and he acknowledges this himself. In reality, people are on a spectrum, tending more to the Anywhere or Somewhere position, but not entirely defined by it, but it is, nonetheless a useful snapshot which illuminates the tensions currently besetting us, and some appreciation that varying views on geographical “identity” develop for good reason is an important element in finding a meeting point between extremes.
The alternatives to understanding this tension are dark and frightening. Relph comments on the possibility that we can develop a “poisoned sense of place…, which promotes nimbyism, discrimination and resistance to difference,” and Marc Fried talks about the “pathologies of place attachment”. “Unrestrained rooted place connections can feed the stupidity that stands behind the worst forms of human brutality”, something which was all too evident in the 20th century nationalisms which led to WW2.
Perversely, our love of “our” place can become the reason why other people are denied any sense of place at all, if we close our boundaries to refugees and displaced people. If our rootedness is allowed to become what Fried calls an “addiction to continuity”, we can condemn others to rootlessness, treating them as what Goodhart might have thought of as a third tribe, the “nowheres”. In reality, of course, there is no such thing. To exist is to exist in a place. Nobody is “nowhere”, but that is precisely the problem; to be “somewhere” means, if you have no place of your own, that you must, necessarily, share someone else’s space.
Perhaps there is no land which demonstrates this more vividly than Israel/Palestine, a place which cannot even be named without layering the name of one nation hard against another. The experience of being there is of communities attempting to do what should logically be impossible (and often, practically and politically is), to exist in the same space as one another, seeing the same geographical locations in entirely different ways, like an anamorphic or holographic picture which changes when you view it from different angles. Jews, Muslims and Christians see the landscape differently, sometimes sharing sites which they regard as sacred or significant for entirely different reasons, like the area of Jerusalem which houses the Dome of the Rock, the last remnants of the Jewish Temple, and the sites associated with the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is not surprising that violence sometimes erupts, what is surprising is that it sometimes does not, and people seem to manage to worship and live in their own realities, sliding past each other as they do so.
[i] Yi-Fu Tuan quoted in Malpas p. 183
[ii] Replh in Malpas, p 183
No comments:
Post a Comment