Category Archives: writing: anthropology

Sent to Iceland: The idea of rural in contemporary society

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Apologies to readers for the 2-week hiatus – I have been mid-adventure and things have been too hectic to write. This piece and the next few will follow up on this. Posts will be back to regularity from this week.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the protagonist Bernard Marx finds himself on a holiday visiting a rural reservation. The visit is an insightful event showing a strange community that live outside of the “social norm” of this urban-centred world. This journey marks a decisive moment in the novel, where Bernard’s story is turned on its head by the people that he encounters and the adventure that he has with the “savages” in the wilderness.

This separation of urban and rural in Brave New World was part of Huxley’s tongue-in-cheek mockery of the society that he believed he was watching develop. The greatest  threat brandished to citizens in Huxley’s dystopia is being forced to move to Iceland – a desolate and unpopulated island. This relocation was the deepest fear for Bernard, who was pleasantly settled in the urban landscape of central London.

A dichotomy between urban and rural environments can always have been said to exist, with the bohemian bourgeoisie living surrounded by the infrastructure and metropolitan grandeur of cities and large towns, while smaller villages and country houses have a more sombre, classical cliche attached.

Certainly, like any stereotype, there is some level on which these assessments are true. Highly developed urban areas are centres of development and technological advancement. Due to the centralisation of funding and higher populations, urban areas are privy to more contemporary art, performances, innovation and ideas. The result is that in an urban environment there is often more susceptibility to change, whereas in rural environments this is not an issue that is so often dealt with.

The urban/rural divide in thinking can be seen in its influence on political decisions in the US. In a piece by Bill Bishop on statesman.com, the writer quotes statistics stating that “By 2000, however, the average Democratic county had three times as many voters as the average Republican county”. This showed that heavily populated urban areas had a higher Democratic vote, showing a leaning towards more left-wing policies in these areas. With the Republican party representing a more conservative wing of the two-tier system, the statistics point to the stereotype of conservative attitudes in rural areas, at least in the US.

The English Independent posted an online article in 2007 documenting a rise in poverty and racist attacks in rural areas in Britain. The economic wealth in rural areas has begun to decline from a traditional abundance due to the vast increase in population in urban areas. In 2008 the UN published a report stating that cities hosted over 50% of the world’s population for the first time in global history. The increase in population has positively affected the economics of urban life, in turn having a detrimental effect on rural areas. However, the mental health of rural dwellers shows lower levels of social stress than those in urban areas, as shown in a 2010 study by Dutch researchers.

The above theories may show signs that the rural/urban divide is broadening, but with the relentless development of internet technologies rural people may be becoming more centralised than in the past without ever entering into the urban sprawl. The availability of social networking, mobile telephone coverage and other information through advanced communication techniques has increased accessibility and created new opportunities for rural people. An indepth study on the effects of the internet on rural communities was conducted by Namsu Park in a dissertation available from University of Texas online (click here) and included studies that showed the positive effects of internet media on rural dwellers.

Through the internet the field of work has also broadened for rural people. As a graphic designer much of my work is contracted in urban areas but conducted from my own rural home. The instantanaeity of the internet allows for better communication with clients, eliminating the necessity for face-to-face meetings.

This blog and others like it are an opportunity for the sharing of information from any area with little influence from whether the writing was made in an urban or rural context. The internet is making the world smaller, but the rural/urban divide seems to still have weight in certain areas.

 

Having lived in a small town in a sparse region of Iceland I have to admit that Aldous Huxley’s model of rural seclusion in the north Atlantic island is not necessarily a torturous thing. Although the isolation of living in a rural environment can seem to stifle creativity at times, there are certainly advantages to the separation and freedoms that are offered in non-urban settings, including the aforementioned loss of social pressure.

Where the border exists between urban and rural when the internet is involved is still being determined.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Red Phone-boxes: Ireland North and South

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On a very recent trip to the north of Ireland from my home south of the border, I was asked by a friend and fellow traveller if I had encountered any culture shock after crossing into Northern Ireland. She had never visited up north before, being from further south in the country. The thought had never struck me.

When I was growing up Northern Ireland was the place that scandalised the headlines constantly with news of the bombings and beatings and various atrocities of the ongoing war in that area, and also where my parents would go to shop cheap. As a young child the troubles were an ambiguous thing at the very least, and the mention of towns I knew quite well like Omagh and Enniskillen were just mentions of places where awful things happened, but they never seemed that bad. The money was Pound Sterling, not the good old Irish Punt, the post-boxes and phone-boxes were red, not green.

My memories are mixed. In primary school the lads used to ask if you support Celtic or Rangers – innocent as it seems it was a big question, and get it wrong and you could be in for harassment. The toilet walls sometimes had “Up The Ra” written on them, which I presumed was where the waste went. We read Seamus Heaney poems in class and thought about what the police were doing at his house. A friend moved to the north when I was around 11. And that was more or less the last I ever heard from him.

But apart from that I didn’t think too much about it.

Borders are remarkable things. Even on a community level, rivalries can kick up over the ownership of land, as Bull McCabe and William Dee thought us. Last year Dublin hosted the inaugural Dublin Contemporary, which featured an array of artworks that dealt with borders as a central theme, the most humerous being Javier Téllez’ One Flew Over The Void (see below) in which a human cannonball is shot over the border separating Mexico and the United States. The most striking was a dark piece by Chen Chieh-Jen about border controls between mainland China and Taiwan named Empires Borders I. In the former swarms of border police monitor the unusual and jovial daring attempt to enter the States, and in the latter stories of oppression and intimidation from border control police are recounted by victims. The idea of cultural difference between these distant nation states seems massive in comparison to red phone-boxes, but certainly in past times border controls were intense in the north, and firing a cannon into either country could have sparked a political storm.

So it is interesting to think about the idea of a cultural difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic in terms of the invisible border that separates both states. Historically, there are of course differences in terms of the settlement of protestants in particular during the Cromwellian and pre-Cromwellian days with the large settlement of English and Scotch protestants in the north of the country. Today there are certainly more towns that you can pass through with Union Jacks on display (the total being approximately zero in the south), and there are times when you can sense that the southern accent is unwelcome, but Ireland is one island – we deal with the same weather, we have similar geography, and we are sea-locked so as nations we have little choice but to communicate.

On the roads you can notice some differences – the speed signs show miles per hour, not kilometres like in the Republic. The road markings are different too, and at times, especially in Derry and Belfast, the infrastructure is noticeably different – like different architects were employed to do the same things that were done in Limerick and Cork but went about it in an unorthodox manner from a southerner’s eyes. The footpaths and railings seem slightly off kilter with the south, and the phone-boxes…

Having grown up and seen the troubles end and a relatively stable peace fall over the north, I have come to visit it more often. The differences that I used to notice have become fewer and fewer, to the point where I would barely notice that I was across the border were it not for the subtle aesthetic differences or the accent.

The interesting thing about a border is that it is an invisible line – there is no great red stroke across the land like there is on maps. The border is an ambivalent player in the game of cultural animosity – it is a cartographer’s line that notices nothing about the people who pass in and out of a place. It is the people that notice the difference, and in the case of the difference between the north and south of Ireland, the most noticeable difference is in the history, not in the contemporary. More and more emphasis is placed on attempting to build bridges with the nations connected by land. The Good Friday agreement has pushed history further into the past, and peace is generally welcome on both sides of the border. The orange order are looking to set up bases in the Republic, and the Irish language is being spoken at cultural events in Northern Ireland. The high-street stores and international events are similar in both states, and the European autonomy is the same.

All except the red phone-boxes, but they will soon all disappear.

“I Want to Get Out!” – Supermarkets as Non-Places

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While browsing a shopping aisle in a Tesco supermarket some time back I witnessed a young child sat in the constrictive rear-facing child seat of a shopping trolley. I would have passed little notice of this regular occurrence had the child not been in some consternation as to its current predicament. The young fair-haired boy wailed repeatedly at the top of his voice, to the pained facial expression demonstrating his busy mother’s exacerbated patience “I want to get out!”

It may have been the fact that I was on the way to the Electric Picnic music festival with my girlfriend, full of anticipation for impending youthful whimsy and unsolicited feelings of freedom from the rat-race for a weekend at least, but the repetition of the phrase, and in particular the context of uttering “I want to get out!” repeatedly in the anti-labyrinthine supermarket geography made me turn and muse whimsically to my better half, “Is that not the perfect social statement?”

It amused me to picture a whinging child trapped in reverse inside the floating capsule of the unsteerable supermarket trolley making a statement for the youth of today; one simple phrase that defined to me not just the supermarket experience, but the experience of living within a consumer-driven contemporary culture that is failing our youth.

“I want to get out!”

I was reminded of a wonderful ethnology book that I read several years ago, and subsequently based an art project on (which is the source of the lead image for this post), named Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity by ethnologist and anthropologist Marc Augé (the link will bring you to  Google Books preview with the first half of the wonderful prologue).

Rest assured that with a title like that you are not putting yourself in for an easy read, but it is a profound and fascinating study nonetheless and I can only highly recommend the book and other writings by the deep-thinking French observer. The book is an in-depth analysis of a phenomenon that the author coins “Non-places”. The theory is well constructed and the explanation long-winded, including investigations into our notions of time, philosophy, anthropology and place.

Essentially (and bluntly) a non-place is a space that contains no inherent identity or memory for the person or people who are interacting with it. It is instead just a functional space that is passed through and leaves as little of a historical imprint on the mind as the one that was offered from it on first entering the non-place. One example is barely different from another; Augé points out that when you take off from one airport it can regularly feel like you have just landed in the same one – getting from A to A as it were. To qualify as a non-place, a space must not have any reason to be remembered, either before or after a current visit – it must be functional only and have all other aspects a secondary nature. Examples include hotel rooms, ATM machines, motorways and supermarkets.

Which returns me to the original point. Anecdotal social observations on supermarkets are few and far-between. People tend to avoid thinking about these mundane places as much as possible, unless a shopping excursion is necessary. Here is a brief list of casual observations on supermarkets:

  • The layouts are designed to assist the shopper in emptying their coin-purse
  • The crude lack of decoration is glaring, the ceilings and floors are always industrial to a fault
  • The closest thing to an artistic touch is the bright yellow and red discount signs or the photographs of smiling managers held against their will for shaming public snaps
  • The aisles are straight and uniform, designed for a quick in-out

The underpaid and thus uninterested staff simply langour, and often do not communicate at all – If you are paying by VISA the machine tells the customer what to do – ENTER PIN…PLEASE WAIT…REMOVE CARD. A thank you is usually the height of the conversation between the living creature behind the counter and the shopper who is determined to leave this unwelcoming place as fast as possible.

There are rules of supermarket etiquette too – don’t shop on an empty stomach. Make a list if possible. Shop in the correct order (doubling back for bread that you forgot can result in shopping-trolly jams and all sorts of shopper uncertainty. Also, only buy a discount item if it compares to something that you were already looking for, etc. And, as Eddie Izzard observes (see video link at the end of this post), we are all experts in contemporary supermarket theory.

One of the rules that does not get mentioned very often is an odd one that I have discovered – do not stop moving in a busy supermarket. This causes an atrocious amount of confusion and social ostracism. Stand in an aisle not looking at any product on the shelves with keen eyes and see how long it takes before someone shoots you an awry look. Another unspoken rule is “do not take photographs in a supermarket” – one which I have politely ignored on many occasions and have yet to be pulled on. A good example of what can potentially happen in this instance is below – a pre-Christmas shot taken by a friend Aaron.

Photo by Aaron Robinson, taken from Broadsheet.ie

It’s a bit moot, I know, but I love it. Supermarkets are a fascinating cultural anomale that are a focal feature of late-20th Century capitalism, and for this reason they are a wonderful scourge on our existence. Although this point can be further explored under the concepts of globalisation or free market trade, that debate is for another post perhaps. The main point here is that the observation of supermarkets as non-places could potentially create a sense of place in individual supermarkets. If there was something unique and individual about one supermarket that made it stand out, it could potentially achieve a sense of place. Herein lies the possible value of having art on-site; an artistic input of any kind could give a supermarket a different image; something to remember or view, and something to separate it from other members of the same chain. But public art in a supermarket would also slow the movement of shoppers, which, at the end of the day, is contrary to the goal of these non-places.

At the end of all this, I can still rarely shop in a supermarket these days without thinking to myself “I want to get out!”