PLACE, COMMUNITY AND TRAVEL: THREE BOOK REVIEWSby Steve Cisler, July 1997
People, Land, and Community: Collected E.F. Schumacher Society Lectures. Edited by Hildegarde Hannum. Yale University Press, 1996
Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. James Clifford. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place Edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson. Yale University Press, 1996
Can a community flourish if it is not bound to a physical place? With the current popularity of virtual electronic communities and the publication of Net Gain, the recent book on the commodification of such entities as a business enterprise, it may seem a bit of a step back to consider the premises in these books. The 31 essays in Rooted in the Land see people, places, and ecological systems as inextricably linked. While new telecommunications and other technologies may "annihilate space and time" these writers consider love (or at least respect) for place as a necessary ingredient for community to thrive. One, a biologist at Rutgers, criticizes the use of electronic means to communicate as a way of forming "pseudocommunities." Many of the writers describe rural communities; others, the general concept, and all have the authors' own experiences as proof that community does exist. Two-thirds of the contributors are male academics in Land Grant and small colleges and seminaries in the United States. A few, like David Kline and Wendell Berry, are farmers and writers, and others are social activists. There are no articles on communes or any of the new architectural movements like the New Urbanists or co-housing enterprises. Essays are grouped under the following topics: rootlessness, local and global perspectives, valuing community, place, ecological connection, community criteria, and community development as part of becoming native.
Vitek, a professor of liberal studies at Clarkson University in New York, write the intro, as well as an essay, "Community and the virtue of necessity" in which he says, "What keeps a community together is the inability of its members to leave, either because of the dangers that lie outside the community--a forbidding desert or an enemy clan, for example--or the ties that lie within the community--traditions, laws, fear of being cast out, rejected, or destroyed." Given the options to move, to immigrate, to leave the countryside, that are available to much of the world, few communities are limited in that way.
In People, Land, and Community, a number of the authors from Rooted In The Land appear: Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Susan Witt and Robert Swann. This is not unexpected since the E.F. Schumacher Society focuses its activities not only on preserving the ideas and libraries of E.F. Schumacher but also about strengthening small communities and local initiatives aimed at self-sufficiency around the U.S. and the rest of the world. Yet one of the best essays is by Jane Jacobs from her work Cities and the Wealth of Nations in which she says: "The hard truth is that there is simply no decent way of overcoming rural poverty among people who have no access to productive city jobs." Most of the other writers ignore the city or see it as the locus of transnational schemes to weaken rural communities even further.
Reading both of these books raises the question of what self-sufficiency really means at the end of the 20th century and in the midst of the age of networks? Aren't we all becoming more inter-dependent? Jay Baldwin, an expert on tools for the Whole Earth Catalog editions upset a gathering of back-to-the-landers some years ago. A speaker was congratulating himself on how self-sufficient he had become in setting up his small homestead, and the audience agreed. Baldwin then asked "How did you make your ax?" A store-bought ax didn't count, they objected. What counted was what the homesteader had done with the ax (and the other supplies). Baldwin felt they were denying their intimate ties to the industrial networks (mining the ore for the steel, manufacturing the ax, and retailing it to the speaker) that supplied the tools of personal liberation.
One of the strongest advocates for communities of place is Wendell Berry. His thoughts and words influenced many of the authors in Rooted in the Land. He is cited by others in the indices eighteen times and has essays in both books. Berry has a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, and he has written and taught and lectured for many years. His guidelines for conserving communities focus on the local and are critical of too many ties outside of a region (in contrast to Jacobs), but his emphasis on building local economies and keeping money flowing locally is becoming more and more difficult to do. I recently toured a number of community projects in Appalachia to see how information technology was being used to solve local problems. Berry feels that adopting computer technology to achieve this is unwise, but I have seen places where it is working well.
The E.F. Schumacher Society is run by Susan Witt and Robert Swann. Their essay on local currencies is a very interesting example of an idea that towns and regions might consider not the social benefits rather than the financial ones. The essay was written in 1988 when it was true that "the banking system is one of the most centralized institutions of our economy" but the challenge now to the national banks and the privates ones as well is that the financial flows of currency and speculations are not in national control. Some, like David Korten, would argue that the centralization has shifted to a couple of hundred pension fund managers and a few people like George Soros--and away from the banks--but the lack of local control of currency is still an issue for some.
For this reason the Society has been focusing on local currencies at their annual conferences. While I dismissed it in 1996, I took it more seriously in 1997 when I attended the Second Decentralist Conference. The local currencies are based on dollars, hours, or some local commodity like cord wood, and while they don't account for much of the financial transactions within any given town or region, I see the real value in getting people to discuss their local economy and to think about where their money goes, as well as the value of labor by others in the town or region.
Many of the writers long for a more rooted existence. Eric Zency writes about "Rootless Professors" and how they get their jobs through national search services, are willing to serve anywhere (at the beginning of their career), and are generally not loyal to any piece of geography. Carl Esbjornson's essay about his academic wanderings in search of a community where he felt at home is one of the most personal. Only tenure seems to keep a professor in one place.
In Routes Clifford, who teaches in the History of Consciousness Program at University of California, Santa Cruz, believes these wanderings are not inimical to community. His writings deal with travel, "contact zones," diasporas, and immigrants. He begins his prologue with a tale from an Indian ethnographer named Amitav Ghosh who was studying an Egyptian village on the Nile Delta. He was amazed to find not a traditional and unchanging sleepy conservative settlement but in which most of the male inhabitants had worked and traveled all over the world, as had their parents and grandparents! Yet they came back to the village. "Routes begins with the assumption of movement, arguing that travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity." He says the general topic is that we may view human location as "constituted by displacement as much as stasis." This, of course, is rather contrary to the sentiments and convictions running through the other two volumes of essays.
Clifford looks at how people are "fashioning networks, complex worlds, that both presuppose and exceed cultures and nations." "The imagined communities called 'nations' require constant, often violent, maintenance." In his essay on the culture of travel he writes about authors like Pico Iyer's postmodern observations (Video night in Kathmandu) which consist of the endless juxtapositions of the old and the new (a favorite ploy of the social travel photographer). My older son spent New Year's in Bulgaria, in 1995, where he watched Babe, sitting in a Barcalounger in the Ministry of Culture movie theater in Sofia. You can't escape these strange mixes any more. Clifford looks at traditional travelers: shamans wandering in the Andes, Hawaiian musicians who never go home, and of course nomads like the Tuareg and the Bedouin.
Other essays deal with anthropology, reviews of four Pacific Northwest museums, in which he compares the ambiance and the goals of the museums, some set up by the province of British Columbia, others by Kwagiulth Indian tribe. He reviews an exhibit on New Guinea in the British Museum "Paradise: Continuity and Change in the New Guinea Highlands." I enjoyed "Museums as Contact Zones" where curators meet with Tlingit tribal elders to discuss the Northwest Coast Indian Collection. He said the elders "referred to the regalia with appreciation and respect, bu they seemed only to use them as aides-memoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs." What we see as art may just serve as a mnemonic device for others.
What this work brings to the debate about community and place is Clifford's demonstration, through citations of other works and through his own critiques, is "tribal groups have, of course, never been simply 'local': they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes, regional and interregional networks."This runs counter to Vitek's assertion quoted earlier in this review. It is unsettling to learn (not in these books) that traces of cocaine and nicotine were found in the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs, implying that there was a very ancient trade route between Egyptian and American peoples. We need to reevaluate our ideas about isolation and the preservation of community. No longer can we equate community with stasis and a single place. What does it mean for a community's borders to be so porous? Outside influences are not new; they are just more intensive. These three titles help us in thinking about what we want to preserve, or re-invent, in the communities we call home.
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