Regionalism
Since I grew up in a small town in the South, I was always sensitive to how the region and its inhabitants were perceived and portrayed. I remember that my roommate-to-be at Goucher thought she might have to teach me about indoor toilets! I am exaggerating, but not by much. At the same time, I felt constrained by the parochialism of my hometown, and knew that I needed to leave. But the pull home has always been there and, while more muted now, still remains. I can say with certainty that I won't be going to any Snuffy Jenkins (pivotal figure in the development of bluegrass-style banjo) festivals up here in NY.
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When I left NY and moved to Knoxville to run Alternate ROOTS in 1981, someone suggested that I read Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Regional Motive,” in his book A Continuous Harmony. This essay continues to have a powerful impact on my thinking. Berry has an expansive notion of regionalism as “local life aware of itself… It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in….The motive of such regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge.”
However, In the same essay, he issues a stern critique of what he describes “regionalism as nationalism.” He writes: “The regional motive is false when the myths and abstractions of a place are valued apart from the place itself; that is regionalism as nationalism. It is also false when the region is made the standard of its own experience–when, that is, perspective is narrowed by condescension or pride so that a man is unable to bring to bear on the life of his place as much as he is able to know. That is exploitative regionalism.”
As the concept of hyper-localism has taken told, I think about Wendell Berry’s deep understanding of its complexities. I have often thought about sending out a questionnaire that would look at our cultural health, community by community, and judge that health not by whether there is a symphony orchestra or major museum in the community, but on how supportive the community is of its own individual creative voices and those close-to-the-ground organizations that support those artists.
Do you feel you have a deep knowledge of the place you live? How does this knowledge have an impact on your work? How would you rate your community's support for its creative workers?
