Unbelonging
I went back to school to do an M.A. after at least 25 years on my own painting what I felt like. I knew next to nothing about stuff like Post Modernism,
I had basically spent a decade abroad, maybe escaping from Thatcher.
In terms of informing myself about what art should be, or where I could "fit",
I had simply been looking at architecture and archaeology.
(whilst continuing to paint what I felt)
I was in fact totally out of touch with how "cutting edge art" was shaped.
Maybe a bit too much "intuitive"!
We were in India for a long time, I struck on the idea that maybe I could do art without having to be burdened with what had be produced simply by sending it home in brown paper parcels.
Unbelonging
In this presentation I want to deal with how we cope with displacement, how if possible we can look at things through other eyes, how to “unbelong” or how to be “in between”. I intend to look at the ways that this can occur in a Post Colonial, Post Modernist world thus translating cultural identity and history in today’s terminology by the exploration of cultural hybrids and transpositions.
What does it mean to belong?
Sitting in the protective basket of a balcony on a balmy evening in a tourist area of the Algarve, I was reading about and musing upon the notion of what it means to belong. When the answer or at least part of an answer was thrust into my lap as it were. Due to the wonders of satellite T.V., which is itself part of the supposed de-globalisation of interactive technology, a hoard of English supporters were able to watch an important international football match together as it was happening elsewhere in Europe. They came from all over England from varied if not dissimilar backgrounds, yet while watching a club which they could all support playing another European team they had managed to form a sense of belonging; it appeared that they thought and felt as one. This became very evident as they spilt out onto the otherwise quiet Portuguese Street, chanting together their solidarity and, I believe, triumph. They chose to sing the song “My Delilah”, which involves the stabbing of a woman as the “piece de resistance”. Maybe they were using it in some sort of allegorical sense, suggesting that the rival team like the woman in the song had been well and truly subjugated and brought to heel. I choose to use the word allegory at this early stage as it is a way of looking at things that crops up quite often later on in both Post Modern and Post Colonial forms of expression.
To me, belonging is a paradoxical thing; there is no easy way of negotiating the terrain. Sameness is often equated with belonging and is a facet that institutions (schools, prisons, the armed forces etc) utilise to change individuals through routine, rules and uniforms thus creating power structures, cohesion and control. In these environments differences may be masked or ridiculed but exist nevertheless. As such, ‘belongingness’ is a rather complex, nebulous concept with a broad spectrum of meaning; yet I will try to initiate a basic expression of this to provide a discursive starting point. My own feeling about it is that it means to have an identity, a space to exist in that we can label as our own to give us seeming stability in order to make us feel secure. Thus it also means having an appropriate position in any given environment, a rightful place that has been earned in some way, a sense of rootedness and belonging, a sense of shared values, of communal spirit. It is an elaborate, enduring process of constant re-assessment as rules, conditions and general environment continually change. It can of course also mean being owned by someone or something.
How do we belong?
There are many ways to “belong”. One means of achieving this is via the negative route of defining those who don’t belong. This is achieved by creating “neighbours”, who are deemed to be different. By doing this it is easier to put them into their own place, preventing differences producing infringements and thereby preserving our future from unwanted changes.
As Irit Rogoff comments:
“It is at the cost of horrific change and disjuncture that the West’s eternal “unchange”, it’s permanence and continuing economic superiority, can be maintained” (*1)
It is necessary to state what the differences are and to underline them. This may be achieved by the establishment of “boundary systems”, enclosing people either by physical means or by more elaborate systems such as claiming areas of territory cartographicaly (*2), thus rendering all the space contained within as “transparent” and therefore controllable. Colonisation can be used to secure extra living space by expansion, involving a mass migration of people to pre-determined areas. Ownership is claimed by simply taking the land from indigenous peoples and then re-writing history as if that was the year dot and re-naming everything for good measure so as to put an extra claim on the area. Language has an important part to play here in defining ownership, as the many English place names to be found throughout our old colonies testify. A number of disputed islands on the Turkish coastline have either Greek or Turkish names depending on whose maps you look at. (*3)
A relatively simple strategy in these days of the planned family is to simply out number your neighbours through “breeding”. This phenomenon played an important part in the recent Balkan unrest where Serbs have noted the local Muslim population’s numbers multiply quite drastically in recent generations thus presenting the possibility of quite extreme shifts in power and hence land.
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Where do we belong?
We might say that we belong in our own groups, groups that we form around similar traits in various different guises and groupings; existing in the kind of areas that can be topographically fenced in, established in a stable and fixed area of earth that is left only temporarily. Or on the other hand, a life-style that is basically nomadic involving bands or tribes of travelling people. It’s a unifying force that bonds “types” of people together, no matter how disparate they may be. As Stuart Hall points out:
“ Our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us as “one people”, with stable, unchanging and continuos frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. This “oneness”, underlying all the other superficial differences is the truth” (*4)
We develop means and we work out various strategies of belonging by building up points of reference to pinpoint a place where we can make some sort of stand. So we establish a space that gets mapped out in a manner that defines where we are and where we stop and where “they” are in order to make ourselves feel safe and secure. Guidelines, which make or seem to make our community more concrete than it actually is. People need to stabilise their existence through shape or form. Yet often a cohesive, permanent, firmly fixed existence is not the norm. There is displacement and general upheaval everywhere, whether it is forced on people or they choose it for themselves. We can, to limit the paranoia and stress that is born of the human condition, allow ourselves to pretend that we have been and are in a stable position. As Homi Bhabha comments however, there are different ways of dealing with change:
“—All forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. --the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “third space”” which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.” (*5)
This “received wisdom” that he writes about, I regard as meaning any form of instruction about how to read situations as they develop from historical, political, religious or racial view points. For all the best motives this reading is claiming the subject as one’s own, by redefining it from an outside position of assumed knowledge.
My own sense of belonging
This I find a somewhat ambivalent and challenging concept to analyse in that I have considerable and varied past experience of finding myself in positions from which I have had to reconstruct my image and identity. This has been necessary in order to present myself as acceptable in surroundings that I have emerged as a newcomer in. As such I will look at this from three different angles. Firstly, my father’s struggle for somewhere to belong, secondly how I relate to my position within Britain and thirdly how I have felt as someone living in a different country: a foreigner.
My father’s sense of belonging and the end of colonialism
My father was brought up in a household that was still holding on to late Victorian values but was also a product of the end of the First World War. He survived a long spell in hospital with Polio and when the Second World War came around, he chose to fight the Nazis as an airforce commando.
He, along with many others that he worked beside during this period realised that it was not as before, that he wasn’t fighting for King and Country, he was simply surviving. This was symptomatic of the end of Colonialism. In the First World War, people were ready to die in their millions in support of causes that they knew and understood little of. They did it because it was expected of them - it was their ‘duty’ and they had no argument with that. In the Second World War however, even though they had one very obvious enemy that needed to be stopped in order to spare the world from certain darkness, for a variety of reasons they weren’t quite so prepared to give up their lives for it. So apart from people’s general attitudes changing as to what their real beliefs and commitments were, a lot of the British Empire had been taken over by the Japanese anyway and those countries were beginning to loath the idea of returning to their former masters. After all, what was the point of subjugation when this could not even provide defence against other conquering forces? The myth of the colonial protectorate was finally being revealed and questioned.
When the war ended my father was in Indonesia. Everything for him had changed. He now intended to stay there and help the Indonesians to get rid of the Dutch who had previously been holding the colonial reigns in that part of the world. He was basically dealing with administrative and transitional work necessary to establish a new, independent, nation.
After this transfer of power was completed under the leadership of the new president, Sukano, he came back to London with an Indonesian named Subandrio who was to become Foreign Minister and another Englishman named Atkinson. They set up the Indonesian Embassy just off Grosvenor Square where he worked for the Sukano Government until the late sixties. This was when that ruling authority with all its merits and failings fell from power at the hands of Suharto and became a dictatorship which lasted until very recently.
At this point, my father left London to claim a new identity and re-establish himself in a quite remote part of Pembrokeshire. His timing meant that he was riding on the crest of the sixties wave of “going to the country”. He needed to “claim a new identity” here for two reasons: with the overthrow of Sukano, that was the end of pretty well all he had stood for during the previous twenty years. Also he was moving to a place that compared to London was quite a different country. He exchanged our fifteen-roomed suburban London house for seven and a half acres of bog-land. He didn’t want to etch out a living on this land, he simply wanted to claim it for his own. So he drained and cleared, rebuilt and replanted it. He wanted to belong to it, and in return, he wanted it to belong to his family – maybe forever. My family is still there.
Irit Rogoff’s comment about agriculture as the physical and spatial inscription of “the own” for me spells out what he was up to. It was in a sense, his first important move in belonging somewhere else.
“- Rather than drawing a line – to differentiate between “us” and “them”, we might have a line in the earth which serves to produce “the own” and the orders of knowledge and of legitimate ownership which arise from them.
What functions as legitimation – the evidence of the body in the soil.”
(*6)
My position in England
My own sense of belonging is an existence in a country that has formed slowly over the course of many years from many different countries both near and far. To be English still has connotations, which draw strength from an ideology that promotes and conceptualises our differences and superiority rather than our similarities with other peoples. This posits the idea of Englishness in a jingoistic way, which can veer towards a kind of neo-fascist stance. It is actually quite a fragile thing, which becomes evident in its sometimes-violent self-defence. This can involve Nationalism and the holding onto of Imperialism and its supposed control of various “other” groups of people. These are present historical complexities, which can be condensed, over simplified and then allegorised as “Fortress England”. This Fortress England can also be hurled at us in the form of a political agenda. This can be evidenced by Thatcherist use of language, which intentionally promoted pride in our Englishness. Jim Davidson the comedian recently said that he was a Conservative because when he thought of England and the fact that he was English, it made him feel proud. Much more recently we have had Townend the Tory backbencher worrying about the fact that we are becoming a “mongrel nation”. Here we have the rest of the world skulking outside and waiting to creep into and defile our beautiful country. This point is also touched on by Dave Burrows who comments:
“Thatcher’s famous dictum of “the enemy within”: a neurotic notion implying that Britain’s external enemies could also be discovered to have infected the nation’s health like a virus.” – Burrows, Art Monthly. (*7)
Bearing that in mind, what actually is happening in tandem with these thoughts of insecurity, is that society is rapidly changing with large numbers of ex-colonial “immigrants”, and also at present, with numbers of refugees quite often escaping here from situations that Great Britain had a large hand in making. So there can be a fair amount of confusion here – we are all “ethnic”, we are also all trying to change with the times. As Jeffrey Weeks claims:
“The sense of dislocation and disorientation, of the rules of the game subtly changing, of the co-existence within us of conflicting needs, desires and identities, is becoming a major cultural experience for us all. – Jeffrey Weeks Identity 94 (*8)
Another sign that the rules of the game are subtly changing with the times can be found for instance in the present moves to change the name of the Post Office to a more “universal one”. Or the imminent “dumping” of the Queen as head of the Commonwealth by many of its countries. Despite growing unease at the way in which members of the Royal family are being discredited one by one we still resolutely hold onto the Queen as the figurehead on our stamps without appearing to note the irony of this.
My Position as a foreigner
I lived with my wife in Istanbul for about four years in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I knew quite a lot of local people and felt quite relaxed and comfortable most of the time. We had rented an apartment in a lively part of town and we enjoyed the company of many visitors, both Turkish and ex-patriots, I learnt how to find my way around and the things that I should and should not do in order to keep my neighbours “sweet”. I could speak enough Turkish to enable me to communicate my needs and feelings. To my surprise I found that I had felt more of a foreigner when I previously lived in Cardiff as an Englishman than in this community. This is probably because I had a clearer picture of the whole. In Cardiff, I didn’t have to learn Welsh to communicate, and as such a lot of information didn’t get lost or changed in translation.
All the same I carried on in Istanbul in quite a naïve and comfortable fashion thinking that I had all my social skills boxed up quite neatly, until the baby came along that is. At this point I realised that I had actually tricked myself as to exactly how well settled and accustomed I was to a localised, Islamic, city way of life. I had been able to build up a façade which had contained and protected many of my “differences” and also helped me to filter how much “difference” I was prepared to take in at any given time.
We gave our son a Turkish name: Aydin, which helped with local people quite considerably. But, as soon as we were seen with a child we started to come under quite close scrutiny and the differences started to get more clearly defined. There was a lot more free comment and criticism about how things were and how they should be. It could be quite awkward at times, there was much less control. With a baby in your arms, the barriers have to come down; you have to attend to the baby’s needs. Many things crop up that you cannot hide anymore, further more they are often things that you didn’t even realise you were actually hiding!
Another source of new information was the fact that two close friends of mine also had children at the same time. We were all able to compare notes, there were differences with regard to the proper way to raise children. Especially from the woman’s point of view, which was an angle from which I had viewed very little previously.
In short, one way of illustrating this would be the fact that I stayed at home with the baby whilst my wife went out to work. Whist Turkish men are very good with children and spend much more time with them than their English counterparts do generally that level of “role-swapping” simply does not happen! I was getting vivid insights into how people were actually viewing me and at times I was having to explain “me” to “myself” in order to ascertain whether or not I was on the correct path at that given point in time. Having a family meant that we had now stepped over the boundary and were no longer regarded as guests to be entertained politely. Old ladies in the street felt free to criticise and comment on our different methods of child rearing. They would get quite angry at us for not swaddling our son to prevent rickets and for taking him outside at an early age when this is considered taboo until a baby is at least 7 weeks old in Turkey. It is of course also possible to experience this sort of dislocation at “home”. Helen Cixous’s comment “Why did I do that? (It’s not me) Whilst generally talking about what she describes as intimate foreignness – hearing your own language speak for the first time. (*9)
Or on the other hand as Irit Rogoff brings it down to it’s bare bones
“I have no idea where anybody belongs, least of all myself”. (*10)
Un-belonging and Negotiation
The importance for me after laying out these different factors is that over the last three or so decades for a number of reasons we have shifted more and more into a multi-cultural society or global culture. It’s easier and quicker to move, to actually get from one place to the other. It’s also so much easier to communicate with people from all over the globe albeit in a “virtual” manner with the advent and development of information technology.
I feel that it is very important to at least remember that there isn’t any one particular way of looking at anything. I also feel that it is my duty as a contemporary artist to either point this out or to “trick” people out the chosen line of thought that they have taken in order to try a slight repositioning.
I’m thinking here about a point that Marsha Meskimmon was making in a recent lecture about the historical narratives that we can carry around with us where at times we have already mapped out our future, placing it into a safe “mode”. If a diversion is placed that provokes a “glance” away from this narrative the view on return will not be in exactly the “correct” narrative position. History has then been re written.
I feel that in order to operate with an open mind or, as mentioned above, try a slight repositioning we have to “unbelong”. To exist with what is and what could be, instead of staying with the urge to control the future and for that matter, the past, with what we perceive to be “correct” attitudes. To use the word unbelonging as the basis for a total lifestyle or a sort of religion would be an extremely hard number to pull off. But as a way of looking at things, or reading unfolding events, or a way of injecting a bit of open-mindedness into situations as they crop up.
So, not as a definition, but more in the way of “quantity control”, I quote Irit Rogoff here as saying: “Unbelonging not as marginality and not as defiant opposition and certainly not as a mode of “dropping out”, but as a critical refusal of the terms. - “difference” rather than homogeny determines what we know, how we know it and why we know it. (*11)
There are steps that can be taken to approach a state of mind or thinking, with a view towards compromise. Homi Bhabha comments about reading situations with an open mind with his definition of the word “negotiate”
“—subversion is negotiation; transgression is negotiation; negotiation is not just some kind of “selling out” – on the left there’s too much of a timid traditionalism – always trying to read a new situation in terms of some pre-given model or paradigm” (12)I feel that the term “negotiation” is a particularly Post Modern one, in that we are moving out of the Modernist attitude of principled stances and magnificent gestures. Leaving behind the returning heroes of the second world war and their statements about purity towards an attitude of “what can we make out of what we have”, or “how can we rebuild what is available to us in today’s terms?”(*13)
A further important point to make about this state of negotiation is that it is not to do with being aimed toward a finite end. Things change all the time, there cannot be a simple fixed answer, A final “resolution of all conflict”, that is likely to start being wrong as soon as it is fixed in place, it’s a process of continuous debate and mutual education.
Using Taste to form Borders
As an artist I believe there are various tools at my disposal to enable me both to see life with a “curious eye” and also to comment on life with openness. To talk to the world as oppose to talk about it. To change my position, displace myself, see my angle on life from a different place.
Another side of this “voluntary displacement” is the fact that the participant is allowing him or herself the ability and opportunity to look at things that could have been forbidden or at least bordering on the dangerous and therefore to be avoided. In this context, unwritten rules that are in place to preserve the existing status quo by guiding thought process, offering the acceptable approved, tried and tested “good eye” there is no need to go down alternative routes that may provide subversive information. Irit Rogoff offers the two terms up with:
“The curious eye” to counter the “good eye” of connoisseurship. A notion of things outside the realm of the known. -The pleasures of the forbidden or the hidden or the unthought, the optimism of finding out something – not known or able to conceive of. (*14)`
“The curious eye” here used as a term to replace “The good eye” a phrase coined as a description of a discipline to keep people on the “straight and narrow” thereby preserving the established social hierarchy, the preserve of white heterosexual middle class men. The “curious eye” here is the eye that observes without following those guidelines that inform and direct.
As Dave Hickey comments “-bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.” (*15)
He is writing here about two exhibits in the Liberace Museum in L.A. The first is the world’s largest rhinestone; the second is the writing desk of Louis XV. The rhinestone is pretending to be something else, but is doing it truthfully and unashamedly, and can be regarded with a certain amount of admiration because of this. The writing desk on the other hand is alien and unobtainable but still stands for culture and authenticity.
I see the writing desk as signifying good taste or “the good eye” and bearing the label of authenticity, mapping out what is normal, natural or acceptable.
As Alex Farquharson comments,
“excluding persons that exist beyond this sphere of normality. This can include women, the lower class, different races and sexual bent. Quite a large percentage of the population who have been pigeonholed, placed, grouped and are at least in a position to look at things from a different angle, to decode various signs and then restate them from another seemingly un-obvious angle. (*16)
The few points I have made or quoted above deal with negotiating various rules and mapping systems laying down borders for “everyman” to stay within thereby preserving our Colonial history. However, looking at things from any position can provide it’s own “blinkers”. Especially if there are preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible, if there is a rulebook, which spells out how to view and judge.
Problem / Complexity of Post Colonial Discourse
Its complex because, with the decline of colonialism, how do people re-define themselves? Races or groups of people can go back to their roots and rediscover golden days of history that bond them together as one entity which in itself is a good starting point for self discovery. Unfortunately this process in itself can lock into the past with growing bitter nostalgia about what is unachievable in the present. Which seems to me to describe close to a permanent refugee state of mind, which Edward Said in After the Last Sky sums up as: “Sometimes these objects, heavy with memory – albums, rosary beads, shawls, little boxes – seem to me like encumbrances. We carry them about, hang them on every new set of walls we shelter in, reflect lovingly on them. Then we do not notice the bitterness but it continues to grow nonetheless. Nor do we acknowledge the frozen Immobility of our attitudes. In the end the past owns us.” (*17)
It is also not a very truthful vessel for as other events and changes have past, fundamentally more often than once. The historical “narrative” is always changing, its hard to be sure of what was actually originally there. It becomes, not a case of dealing with the foundations for all that makes what that sameness or belonging is, but a sense of positioning, simply a mental attitude that has been developed as a way of looking for a sense of identity. For which there cannot be any certain, supreme “law of origin”
It could be said that the most profitable way to tackle the problem would be to start in past history and identification, then move back to the present day although through and along different routes. I believe that David Hammons explains this point very well with much of his artwork, which I will cover later, but at this point I feel a good illustrative example would be the story of the statue of Marcus Garvey. Which was brought from Ethiopia via London and the U.S. to finally rest in Jamaica to the sound of reggae as opposed to the sound of traditional tribal music. All in all, a recalling of African roots, a “bringing back of the past to the present and making it work in today’s terms. (*18) The ability to do this has a greater “knock-on effect”, it spells out the ability to not only claim the past but also the present, as Irit Rogoff comments:
-In claiming and retelling the narratives (“ speaking to”) we alter the very structures by which we organise and inhabit culture. (*19)
In an article by Olu Oguibe, he covers the strengths and the problems encountered by a contemporary group of Nigerian artists who all live in a state of expatriation. They are itinerants both in Britain and America, this being a way of life, which forms a large part of the culture of the present day. Rejecting the idea of presenting their work from the peripheries of the art world and thereby operating from the positions of outsiders, they have decided to penetrate, make their comments from the centre of the international contemporary mainstream. Oguibe’s comment on their general attitude to their displacement in a different country is, “There is a list of Nigerian artists applying their knowledge of their heritage to their work on their terms, not as a condition or imperative. These artists do not perceive themselves as cultural ambassadors any more than do their Western contemporaries. They reject the burden of ancestry and ethnicity as a matter of fact, having come through multiple cultural circumstances, they lay claim to the entirety of their experiences and consider themselves as much part of their societies of relocation as any others.” (*20)
Position of Post Modernism
As I read I am finding problems concerning where post modernism and post colonialism relate to each other. This can be illustrated with a quote from Kobena Merca relating to Yinka Shonibare’s work.
“Poised between two cultures and enjoying every minute of it, Yinka produces a playful and inquisitive art out of ironies that arise when the post modern and the post colonial collide” (*21)
I don’t see the two as necessarily colliding. Whilst they aren’t the same think to me they come as part of the same package, they are both reactions to and a stance about the state of the world today. We are at the moment in the process of being dramatically altered as to the way we looked at the world through modernist eyes. Everything has changed or is changing. There is a firm line drawn over which we cannot return, except to retrieve stuff and then place it in a new light.
I don’t feel that there is a debate between the two – Post-modernism can operate from anywhere it chooses, from Calcutta or within Post-colonial discourse.
Other Positions
In this section, I am writing about five artists that I feel to be significant to some of the forms of displacement that I have covered in this presentation. I want to look at how these people adapt to and express themselves in periods and positions of change and re-positioning.
To start with, I will cover a specific piece of work from both Rachael Whiteread and Yinka Shonibare, linking them to particular aspects of my own work.
Next I will look at Kabakov’s construction of imaginary people living out odd little lives in peculiar environments. Tying it up with his installation piece about the closing of an orphanage, and what may or may not happen to the people involved. This piece, I will link up to Rogoff’s description of suitcases as her representation of displacement.
Moving on to David Hammons, his position as a street artist and his work on quilts and gardens in the form of “hair art”.
Finishing with Dittborn, covering his quotes on video as to how things change ownership as they travel and his comments about what happens to things when they are put within boundaries.
Rachael Whiteread’s Water Tower
The immediate thing that grabbed me about this installation was the fact that it was to be a piece of work that was about to into being between two potentially politically upsetting works. It seems to me that it had to be a lot lighter than the other two. I find it a very up beat comment on life.
She was exploring her position as a temporary immigrant in the middle of a city of immigrants. (*22) She was bringing something in from the outside that was recognisable as one of the same things, which it was working on representing, in that it would be immediately seen as a water tower. Whilst not being one, being in fact a water tank that was opened out from the inside – you saw its contents, not its structure. It was also there and not there at the same time, on a bright day it shone in the sky, on a dull one, or at dusk, it faded away. It momentarily enters the lives of passers-by and then leaves them go on their way. (*23)
When asked to take on the project, she had been able to see the surface of New York with a clearer vision than those passing the same buildings, structures and objects everyday. She picked to make a water tower, an essential, practical structure that has been part of the skyline of New York since the early days of the city without changing. An object that no one notices because of its abundance but still remains in all its bland simplicity because it simply hasn’t been bettered as yet. (*24)
At this point I would like to mention a tower that I made in the countryside in Pembrokeshire about a year ago as I think it holds some certain resemblances.
I made another electricity pylon, in the middle of a disjointed line of them that at times march resolutely across the horizon toward Pembroke Dock. Originally, I saw the pylons all the time, they were always there in the midst of this beautiful rolling green countryside. I heard them at night, especially when it was misty. Slowly but surely though, I managed to mentally erase them, painting landscapes of the valley without pylons, quite easy really, I just didn’t put them in. Then came the day when I decided that it was in fact time to face up to the fact that they did exist, I decided to make a temporary drawing of one of them to exist in the same area the same type of space that they did. I did it with “alien eyes” as much as possible, I was trying to be an immigrant bringing my own re-written offering to a situation that was already established as “not really being there”. Even though the scaffolding based construction was only up for a few days, I did manage to change the way that I look at that situation in Pembrokeshire as hopefully I did change the other people who saw it.
Yinka Shonbare, The Victorian Philanthropists Parlour
Here is an artist who is playing with the fact that what you think you actually see is not what you actually get. In this particular piece the surface areas are changed with the inclusion of Dutch wax pattern “dotted” with images of black football players. Certainly not the décor of a Victorian Parlour, he has succeeded in moving the viewer with a jolt of recognition into a different story.
With this “Dutch Wax,” he is tackling issues of post colonialism and cultural identity, it being a popular design for textiles in West Africa. Whilst having its origins in Indonesia and being made and thence shipped out from Victorian factories in Manchester and Holland.
Positioned between two cultures, Nigerian and British, he is addressing the problem of returning to the past to try to re-find identity and the impractical baggage that such an endeavour produces, questioning a search for origins. When too much has happened in-between and those “origins” may well have been claimed by other factors with the passing of time anyway. It is not a definitive statement on African culture, far from it, it is work under the process of constant manufacture and re-manufacture and as such it must be imprecise. As Okwui Enwesor states: ”thus to ask for a pure definition of what is African culture and identity would be as ridiculous as asking for a definition of what is European identity and culture. (*25)
Olu Oguibe comments on how he has managed to point out how much images of identity and belonging have been stretched in the past and how they can be stretched again in the present, he states, “Shonibare’s work registers the invalidity of borders and the essential inauthenticity of reality. It maps a terrain of transfigurations and transliterations, and rehabilitates impurity, Although his fabric supports are popularly described as “African” their identity is what he aptly calls “pretend identity”. (*26)
Although I find this difficult, I will try to link these printed surfaces to the tabletops that I am currently producing. Firstly, the tabletops are immediately deceptive as they look like tabletops until under closer inspection they turn out to be a form of cartographic placement and measuring device. They are a pattern, which could be very useful indeed if used in the right context or place. As it is they only serve to make where they stand as seemingly more important than it actually is. It has become mapped out as the centre of the universe, the place where all the things that are presented on the table actually relate to. They don’t and in a sense, I have created another “pretend identity”
Ilya Kabakov
The first thing that struck me about Ilya Kabakov was his ability to construct this alternate soviet existence, full of quaint and interesting personages shoved into the middle of a system which was supposed to be coherent but was in fact full of all sorts of abnormalities, and contradictions. All of his characters are in fact displaced in a sort of no-mans land and simply trying to build up some sort of identity for themselves away from the controlling norm, away from the restrictions that the state placed on them to conform. What I read from these characters was that they were in fact conforming, but each and every one in their own special individual way, they were re-inventing themselves. The best definitions that I have come across come from the show about a block of apartments in which ten different people dwell, all living side by side and using the same kitchen (*2)
(Here, I want to mention a couple of the characters and comment about their identity and life style that they have etched out for themselves in quite a transient living situation).
Moving on to a more generalised picture of how a group of people are reacting to the prospect of immediate change, I would like to look at Kabakov’s installation entitled ”we are leaving here for ever!” This is a piece of work about a group of orphans whose life is just about to be drastically changed forever, it covers their feelings as they realise what is about to happen to them. I feel that this is a useful example as it is dealing with that one moment in time the moment of change where all these children’s are poised between all the history that belongs to them and future which is going to be displaced and unsure.
A description of the piece reads: “in front of us are the final minutes before the human souls abandon “this” world. The “lights” are turned off, the world has lost its sense and colours, it is dreary and desolate. Nothing remains but a sea of useless papers, in which merciless orders, precise timetables, touching letters are all mixed together. Some recall the past and mourn for it. Almost all are full of terror before the imminent uncertainty that awaits them”
Irit Rogoff covers similar states of being using the suitcase in an allegorical way, being something, which is neither here nor there, containing memory, history and nostalgia. It can hold a part of someone’s history that has been left behind and as such is distant from the past but is also distant from the future in that it holds a prehistory of wishes, expectations, dreads and desires. (*28)
The collector
The man who flew into space from his apartment 1985
David Hammons
I want to mention David Hammons as a black artist who is finding his own space and defining his own terms. As Calvin Reid comments “His work is as much at home on a vacant lot or other unofficial urban social space, as it is in galleries. – Finding art where we are told there is none” (*29)
Without wishing to sound patronising he seems to have arrived beyond the realm of the suitcase and is rebuilding and reclaiming life as it goes along. Taking it very much from the perspective of a black man living in America, who is redefining his own roots from his own point of view and not from any presupposed norm that has carefully been laid out for him. To the extent that, white people whilst looking at his work, although being able to read it find very little of themselves there and what they do find, they find to be uncomfortable, he has explained what he sees through “black eyes”.
He is dealing with black identities from “now” as in basketball and modern jazz references, using his awareness of how clichés can be used to pinpoint commonly held assumptions about how black people “are” and to turn those assumptions back in on themselves.
I feel that works appropriate to this presentation are some of his earlier installation pieces, where he has made both quilts and gardens. The gardens being hair, threaded on lengths of wire, three to five feet high and planted at a variety of beach sites around Los Angeles, the quilts being mesh woven with African American hair.
They are a rebuilding of “what was” in the terms of “what is”. They are a comment on popular art forms, carried out in daily domestic routines amongst Southern African-American women as self-expression. Kellie Jones describing these gardens and quilts states ”these sources too cast beauty as cultivation and maintenance; they are also “popular art forms” performed as daily tasks, as everyday infusions of splendour and grace.” (*30) I see these two pastimes also as a claiming of space, a statement about “who I am and where I am.”
I find the quilt making particularly interesting, illustrating Stuart Hall’s comments about re-building Post Colonial cultural identity, by not simply returning to the past but by rebuilding the past with the tools of today. Especially as the person who makes a quilt is constructing a wholly new object from a host of scraps that come from the past, each with its own particular histories.
Eugenio Dittborn
My first concern with Eugenio Dittborn’s work is how his “air-mail paintings change ownership and identity as they pass from place to place. The fact that they disengage themselves from the place of their production and emission and also from those of their reception and consumption. Whilst talking about one of his “air-mails”, Dittborn suggested that it changed identity and ownership by the act of travelling and being claimed by various locations en-route. If you change the language you change the object. Whilst taking about a picture of a British athlete in an I.C.A. video he suggested that what was more amazing that the actual image was the fact that the photograph had travelled to America to be published in Life magazine and then distributed in Spanish. (*31)
He also comments to the effect that when a painting arrives and is opened, it is like a birth has just happened. Then when it is folded up and goes back or onward; it is dead again that is until it is re-opened once more.
Sean Cubitt sums this up as; “the whole conception of the airmail paintings is founded in the distances- historical, geographic, temporal, that divide the metropolitan from the post colonial, the American from the European; and which structure the “transperifery” (the self assumed centrality of the west and its art capitals) (*32)
Dittborn’s work is not an expression of Latin identity or even an experience of it. Its essence is displacement, not only of work in the geographical space, but of the suspension of identity between earth and sky, between coming and going. A perpetually unstill voyage.”
He is also engaged in how things travel in our memory, they cannot always be present and active. Some of them must remain preserved and then they can re-appear, for a moment placing the viewer in front of completely remote time.
This suspension of identity and perpetually unstill voyage brings me back to Homi Bhabha’s point about negotiation and Jeffrey Week’s comment on it being a process of continual debate and mutual education. But also starting this debate from a position of displacement, “becoming minor” as it were.
Another focal point in his work are his comments about the ritual marking of boundaries, setting the limits within which real objects become supernormal. I find this interesting as at present the positioning of acquired objects plays an important part my own work, giving them an uncalled for importance by
placing them within paradoxical areas.
My music box which travelled to unlikely places sitting on a table with an unlikely size.My
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Where does the (my) work belong?
In order to write about my present work and in particular as to how it is supported by and to some way evolves from this body of research, I feel it best to cover the work I have made during the course and how it has changed.
Initially, my main preoccupation was to examine the outcome of putting various forms of artistic expression together, creating multiple hybrids, mixing up sound, structure, paint and the addition of script. Being trained as a traditional landscape painter in the early seventies, I was interested in throwing off some of the handicaps that I had taken on board in terms of the preservation of the “purity of painting”!
I was thinking about forming constructions that would house these hybrids, but wouldn’t be “quite right”. It could be that they were the wrong scale, or that the space that they sat in they would not belong to. I was also attempting to build structures that would fit into practically any situation, thereby not being dictated to by Gallery or show situations also not being tied down to specific areas or sites from which any particular piece of work would only be able to work from.
Chris Drury, "Dewpond" The pattern is the samr as that used in a basket made ten years previously
Chris Drury is an artist actually committing his work to particular places, who I feel to have ties to but who works in a more rural setting “out in the wilds” (*33). I mention him here as I felt that in comparison, I was concentrating on structures that could exist pretty well anywhere. Making an effort at making a mark on that area and injecting their own narrative into it. They would also be about “humankind” (or man-unkind as e.e.cummings would put it) and the way that we react to our surroundings, trying to make them work for us.
The thread that ties my earlier work on this course to my present work could be summed up in the word “displacement”, I was thinking about looking at life through a new pair of spectacles, a displaced pair of spectacles, albeit briefly.
A piece of work that I constructed one summer could be seen as the pivotal structure between earlier course work and stuff from the present. I was interested in installing a foreign body into a given space when I built my temporary “Angel” in the middle of forestry and countryside in Pembrokeshire. It was a drawing in space, an imitation of the electric pylons that seem to breed in that area. It is immediately recognisable as a pylon, but it is not “quite right”, it was different. In the past, I have tended to ignore pylons in the area, nowadays when I look at them I see them in a different light
.
I was attempting to build something akin to Rachael Whiteread’s Watertank in New York (*34) in that I had built a “migrant” albeit a very temporary one, it was something from the outside that had come to join the “locals”.
Whilst building towers that could exist quite comfortably in a lot of areas. I felt that I had to tackle the other side of the placement issue and construct something that was more specific to a certain place, in fact something that was exactly situated there and could not exist anywhere else. Because of this “siting”, I had given it an air of importance that it didn’t have before.
I have continued in this “siting”mode at present, I am making a series of tables to be placed in a specific area, which give narratives of displacement, movement, migration and hybridity.
The discipline of cartography is also entering my work at present as a locating factor. It seems to be a term that can have various interpretations, for better or for worse. Woods says that maps are used to make us feel better about our place in the world to reassure us of our boundaries. The line where the “haves” end and the “have-nots” begin.
A comment on colonialism, with a list of aquired territories and countries
by the British Empire and a poem on the box by e.e.cummings
reflecting on a general American redneck view on people from S.E. Asia.
Rogoff sees maps being used at times to subjugate various groups of people who have come under the ruling umbrella of a larger state i.e. the large areas of pink on the globe. She also argues that maps can be used to promote the lie that mapped areas are “Transparent” demonstrating that the onlooker can see and thereby control every-thing that is going on in that place.
But they can also be used in subtly different forms to make statements about localised areas or bands of similar happenings going on through various sites.
I am working on turning structures into non-maps, alternative maps, into “un-homed geographies”. Its not a case of obliterating the past to a bright new future but a brief pause, a new version, a step aside from the way things are meant to be.
What I want the work to do is to displace the viewer, detract them from the line or direction, the premeditated path that gave them a supposedly comfortable, predictable and relatively carefree journey, if only for a short while, disengage them from themselves. All in all: a transportation out of the present, followed by a delivery back into it with (hopefully) sharpened awareness. (*35)
how to use a knife & fork
in Chinese
Exploring what happens to things when they are put within boundaries or placed in a particular way. Looking at how things change when they are moved and how they can be reclaimed to a different tune.
My work seems to be entering into a “political comment” type of space. A place that I have been in before, but one that I generally tend to fight shy of
,it is very much concerned with the rapidly evolving cross-cultural society that I find myself growing in at the moment. Exploring ways that we can change our perspective on different situations that maybe we find hard to accept or understand, often due to the fact that we would rather stick to our chosen path and change is seen to be a little too uncertain and uncomfortable. I’m thinking about and commenting on how we can situate ourselves in little spaces, all neatly mapped out with little boundaries and by so doing making everything within those little boundaries seem more important. What happens when these boundaries get altered or moved or redefined and what happens to the objects that are placed within these boundaries?
My work is also dealing with scale, with little and large, matters of huge importance sitting next to very trivial matters, one area of understanding changing or transmuting into another. The shifting of views and hopefully the shifting of understanding.
I am putting various domestic objects, usually furniture into the “wrong place”, thereby changing the perspective of them. Reclaiming them, re-writing them, re-positioning them and changing their narrative.
I have also made everyday objects in an unusual scale or with unusual materials. It’s a different way of looking.
Footnotes
-
Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p 60
-
Look for a good definition of the term “cartographic” as to how employing this as a means of labelling land and thereafter seizing is a useful tyrannical tool.
-
Names of Geek and Turkish Islands
-
Stuart Hall, Identity, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, p 223
(5) Homi Bhabha, Identity, The Third Space, p 211
(6) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, pg135
(7) Dave Burrows, Art Monthly
(8) Jeffrey Weeks, Identity, pg94
(9) Helen Cixous, Rootprints Video,
(10) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma
(11) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, pg5
(12) Homi Bhabha, Identity, The Third Space, 216
(13) Dave Hickey, Air Guitar
(14) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, pg33
(15) Dave Hickey, Air Guitar,
(16) Alex Farquharson
(17) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, pg39
(18) Stuart Hall, Identity, p232
“- the legacy of Marcus Garvey, tells the story of a “return” to an African identity which went, necessarily, by the long route through London and the United States. It “ends”, not in Ethiopia but with Garvey’s statue in front of the St Ann Parish Library in Jamaica: not with a traditional tribal chant but with the music of Burning Spear and Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. This is our “long journey” home.
“-These symbolic journeys are necessary for us all – and necessarily circular. This is the Africa we must return to – but “by another route”: what Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of “Africa”: “Africa” – as we retell it through politics, memory and desire.”
(19) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, pg32
(20) Olu Oguibe, Art Journal - summer 99, Nigerian Artists in the Contemporary Art World – p 31
Okwui Enwesor: Ike Ude: Yinka Shonibare: Osi Audu: Oladele Bamgboye: Mary Evans: Donald Odita: Chris Ofili: Folake Shoga.
(21) Kobena Merca
(22) A global artist being nothing less than a new form of immigrant, a person perpetually half assimilated and airborne, a living soul, always there and not there.
Her water tower takes on many of the qualities of the immigrant as it rises above the domain of the people – a sceneless structure – the new condition of the global work of art.
(23) She wanted to produce a brief difference, an interruption, a peaceful moment – that would draw no particular attention to itself. – She wanted to make something not there.” Molly Nesbit.
(24) Rachael took on the device of the “white crow”, there are black crows everywhere, and then there is this white one – as though they formed an enormous flock of strange birds that have landed on the rooftops. A small riddle – an incomprehensible miracle” Ilya Kabakov
(25) Okwui Enwesor
(26) Olu Oguibe
(27) Kabakov’s apartment
(28) Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p36 ; “Like many other important terms such as “exile”, “Diaspora”, “migration” or “hybridity”, the suitcase has become the signifier of mobility, displacement, duality and the overwrought emotional climates in which these circulate.”
(29) Calvin Reid
(30) Kellie Jones, David Hammons and Hair Culture in the 1970’s
Third Text 44, Autumn 1998, p 23.
(31) ICA Video (talking art) Eugenio Dittborn in conversation with Kate Bush
(32) Sean Cubitt
(33) Chris Drury who has recently been constructing shelters, cairns, signposts, and containers “in situ” and out of materials that come to hand from that particular area. Marking and commenting on the place that they rested often a very much an “out of town” site often situated in the wilds. But someone who is also dealing with boundaries or edges as he labels them here;
The edge is the division.
What is known is always from the past.
Through knowledge the new is a reworking of the old.
The sum total of Knowledge is culture.
Culture is the veil through which we describe nature.
The process of nature continues despite our analysis.
Our analysis is part of the process of nature.
The process of nature must include the actions of man
Whether or not they are destructive.
Man’s description of nature as something separate-
Out of town – where the edge is the division
Between “nature” and “culture”, is an illusion.
“Nature” and culture are the same thing.
There is no division.
Chris Drury, 1995 Silent Spaces. Thames and Hudson 1998
(35) Marsha
Bibliography
Identity – The Third Space, - Homi Bhabha
Cultural Identity and Diaspora, - Stuart Hall
Dressing Down, Yinka Shonibare – Kobena Merca
Terra Infirma – Irit Rogoff
Root Prints, Conversation with Helen Cixous
Beyond Recognition – Craig Owens
(Adorno) “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home." – I.R. 152
Some differences
I have also been interested in trying to explain the differences between the different life styles of the different groups in the area. For instance the different haggling techniques employed by, firstly:
The sari buying fresh memsahib
Being charmed by a new culture, she wants to play the game and tries the sari on patiently whilst knowing all the time that the price that is being asked is far more that she is prepared to pay, but does not want to upset anyone. She doesn’t really attempt to get the price down, which is what is expected of her and then swiftly leaves.
The Bombay cowboy
Wanting to buy something trivial at rock bottom price, he pulls out all the stops becoming almost theatrical with “shaking head” and “turning to go” motions. He gave the trader all the chance that was necessary to follow him on departure but has annoyed the chap sufficiently for him not to bother.
Incidentally neither managed to buy what they wanted for the price that they wanted to pay!
Or the difference between the two beaches which were joined by just a single promontory.
The atmosphere on the Indian beach was definitely family orientated
The extended family all out in the water together
The Seurat bathers
Populated in areas nearest various seaside conveniences by large family groups with very strict moral codes of conduct, for instance the women going into the water almost fully clothed.
Some Territorial Divisions
Map with red characters, to use to divide the area up into some territorial divisions.
Free for all or open-
The car park (Bombay cowboy)
The Flea market.
The preserve of mainly family groups of Indian tourists and up market holiday makers. (Pointing out the hotel complex)
The Hedonistic westerners’ Banana Beach area, also the Bamboo Jungle.
Finally some backstage areas. Chapora fishing village, inside the church (not many tourists went there)
Then on a smaller scale backstage at the tailors
On the other beach people were taking a much more hedonistic slant with the age range being, generally speaking, closer together. Whereas, the middle class Indian families would often be wearing clothes that would be better suited to wearing at the office, the hippies would be wearing scant casual wear, almost as a badge to show that they weren’t in fact working.
Both groups did stick to the areas of beach that they had selected, although the hippies were a lot less interested in the middle class Indian families than the other way round.
Motorbikes on the cliff-top
The Indian families tended to arrive in complete self-made groups in coaches, the young “westerners” arriving separately to a scene that had been built up gradually beforehand.
The Local Goans
Nearer the coast they seem to be more Christian, possibly being more useful to the seafaring Portuguese like that.
They form into two sections;
Those tourist oriented and those whose basic economy
has been based around fishing.
The tourist oriented Goans are very good managers, they don’t miss many tricks and are not by and large very popular with the visiting Indian tradesmen. That they don’t give an inch and are very money orientated, seems to be the general consensus of opinion. Maybe this is how they have managed to tolerate the amount of intruders foisted on them over the years!
They tend to own and run most of the cafes importing staff from all over India along with security from Nepal.
Our landlord did have a soft spot, he enjoyed being called “granddad” by my son, it probably saved us from being moved along when the ruthless reshuffle just before Christmas came along.
The Kashmiris
Selling Hindu Gods
The Kashmiris, long established tourist tradesmen for visitors from all over India. Being hard salesmen who also cant resist going for deals sometimes loosing in the gamble. They are the Muslims in the melting pot and consider themselves to be comparatively clear minded. They have always come to Goa for the winter season and generally have the family and financial back up to support well stocked tourist shops. At the moment of course things are different, they have to make a good living as there are not a lot of tourists going to Kashmir at the moment due to the troubles at home which by and large they want to know nothing about anyway.
Run down of the different groups
Six Tribes
Run down of the different groups involved in this tourist-generated set up, a very basic guide to how all these people generally affect each other.
I feel that it could be convenient to divide the people in Goa – at least during the cooler months into five tribes, each of course having its sub-divisions.
Tradesmen and Craftsmen
There is a middle group comprising of tradesmen and craftsmen, The tailors from Rajasthan and the seasonal workers like security guards from Nepal and waiters from all over, often Orissa.
All of these imported workers rely heavily on what they can pick up from the tourists to supplement their incomes. This is often in the forms of tips and handouts for extra jobs or favours.
The tribes people from Karnataka.
These are the poorest group of people on the scene. They are in Goa basically to lift themselves a little bit further off the bread line. As they can’t build themselves shanty beach villages they have to rent breezeblock and tin shed houses, hot and without power or water.
Many of the men folk spent much of their time steeped in a cheap alcoholic haze. They tell their wives what to do.
Cheap things on the beach
The women and children sell cheap things on the beach with a bit of begging on the side, (the women are reputed to be prostitutes) They are often desperate to make a sale, it can mean the difference between food or not tonight.
Because they have to hustle they are often past by without much of a second glance. I find this a little strange, as visually they are the most exciting group around. If I were to stumble across their village in some wild area near Hampi I would certainly feel that my cultural touring for the day was complete!
Tactics
Majik Dancing Cow
The Beehive Hairdo
At this point I don’t think that it would be fair to pass without mentioning the more resplendent characters forming part of a much harder nosed group from Hampy in Karnataka they are making their money off the mysticism that they represent for the visiting tourists
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
The hedonistic educated kids
Last but not least, are maybe what used to be the hippies. Although a lot of this clan has been around living the free life for years and years. They have brought their own children up there teaching them “at home”, or not as the case may be.
The current phase of hedonism is called trance music. It involves trance music and something that is called a party and goes on all night often involving upwards of a thousand people. Its rules seem to be quite simple, but to be in contact with these kinds of groups especially when the music isn’t involved can be quite dangerous. There seem to be many rules that weren’t written for the cultural tourist. Even more so when the growing numbers of young Indian hippies get involved.
Having said that, they are tolerated, even though you hear the music all night. These are the modern savages, going wild to jungle drums by the edge of the beach. Around these parties grow up little multicultural villages selling them all their needs and thereby making a living.
Early in the morning you can see the villagers going to work across the fields across which float the dying embers of Trance music.
A small scale representation
Although this diversity occurs right the way throughout the whole area that I have covered, it cannot be better represented than by the little bazaar street on the cliff tops in Anjuna – Stall by stall all the characters change in all aspects;
The Kashmiri drug Baron
Not a very welcome outsider in the area from the point of view of local Goans. Mainly because of the fact that he was making money from his business that they were not.
The “Sunset” Café
One of the haunts of the hedonistic Westerners, decorated in an Indian “trance” style by Goan teenagers
The Rajasthani Tailor
The Trance Stall
Complete with associated clothes stall, supplying clothes suitable for wear at “trance parties” and run and owned by comparatively well off people from the neighbouring state of Karnataka.
Local Artist
Painting Hindu Gods in very bright fluorescent colours exclusively for the tourists.
Conclusion
My work has always been about living situations, about what people do with their lives, also what they do with their living situations in order to affect their lives and the lives of the people around them. This is in physical, spiritual and material terms. I have basically painted stories in life situations, little scenarios about what is happening, what has happened and what could happen.
A short spell in Goa, and being tuned in to researching these types of event fine tuned me into putting my finger onto what was actually happening and also to the reactions that were taking place between all concerned. This Indian State was also on reflection a good place to base a quick visit perspective. In general, the people living there have years of experience of different types of people visiting them, as a general survey it wasn’t full of very basic cultural misunderstandings.
I felt that walking around with a video camera and looking for shots or stories pushed me into a stronger perceptive stance. It meant that I was constantly on the look out for fresh information, for further clues. It also helped me to define what I was looking for.
Having used the camera as an aid to perception I feel that it has also been helpful in terms of explaining the little anthropological scenarios that I have come across. Also at times being “proof” of what I have been talking about, visible evidence of people reacting to each other in “this or that” way. A scenario that will affect more and more people as time goes by this century as races, religions and cultures get more and more mixed up.
I have tried to make this a fun and entertaining look at multicultural life. In this objective I was helped greatly by reading amusing extracts from Geertz It was refreshing to be reassured that I did not have to be a kind of morally and politically correct “nice guy”. Which presented me with a format for going about the job just being myself.
I also found that Boissovan gave me a clearer insight into various ways and strategies that have evolved and help local people deal with sometimes a seemingly endless stream of tourists. In particular the way that local people need their “backstage areas” in order to rest from activities outside. I was aware of these private areas and felt that at the times when I was actually invited in, I was able to actually grasp the invitation and act on it knowing that I was welcome.
Bibliography
(1) C.Geertz
Local Knowledge “From a Native’s point of view”: Anthropological Understanding. Pg 56
1983 Basic Books, Inc.
(2) C.Geertz
Local Knowledge “From a Native’s point of view”: Anthropological Understanding. Pg 58
1983 Basic Books, Inc.
(3) C.Geertz
Local Knowledge “From a Native’s point of view”: Anthropological Understanding. Pg 58
1983 Basic Books, Inc.
(4) Jeremy Boissevain
Coping with Tourists Pg 2
1996 Berghahn Books
(5) Jeremy Boissevain
Coping with Tourists Pg 7
-
Berghahn Books
Other Relevant books:
Annabel Black
Coping with Tourists “Negotiating the tourist gaze”
-
Berghan Books
C. Geertz
The Interpretation of Cultures “Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight”
-
Basic Books, Inc.
E.M. Forster A Passage to India
