perilous conditions

Posted on | November 7, 2004 |

It’s been a busy weekend - what is it about November? - and I’ve spent it changing clothes often. Brisbane has been inundated with buckets of rain and now I have nothing to wear to the office…

On Friday night Meaghan Morris’ lecture, ‘The Future of Parochialism’, spoke to a lot of issues I’ve been thinking about lately - namely, how to distinguish between ‘regional’, ‘local’ and ‘parochial’ sentiment, and the cumulative effect of these terms’ continued haziness. Initially, MM framed her interest in parochialism in relation to the weight of interest in cosmopolitanism, claiming she wanted to understand what it is that people think in opposition to that concept. Usually it is ‘the nation’ or ‘the local’, but each of these has its historical baggage and problems. As does ‘regional’ which in Australia is particularly nebulous: it can mean anywhere outside of the city (or to some, anywhere outside Melbourne or Sydney) as well as the wider connotation of the Asia-Pacific “region”.

Parochialism differs from insularity, for instance, because insularity still implies a way of knowing the surrounding world. A football team or an inner-city enclave can be insular; but a country town can be easily insulted as ‘happy and parochial’. The difference is that insularity assumes an ability to be culturally capable of understanding both options (witness the reaction of urban-based intellectuals who struggle with the election results - in economic centres, MM argues, parochialism can be at its most dense, with genuinely little grasp on reality). Being insular is a choice and a way of grounding your relation to reality. Parochialism, instead, is a historical lapse - that’s why it’s often condescending. Being parochial amounts to backwardness. It means being unable to bear witness to one’s own out-of-touchness.

From a teaching point of view, MM says, parochialism is a difficult problem because it narrows students’ future as well as their present. But more broadly, with the acceleration of globalization parochialism poses a threat to our emotional capacity to cope with strangers. Offering much more detail, including case studies from Hong Kong action film, the lecture closed with reference to Anne Freidman’s work, and her attention to neighbourhoods and borderlines. Freidman argues that in order to live harmoniously and successfully in the future, we need to develop competencies in inhabiting a plurality of borderlines. This means we can stay in one place if we want or have to, but that no matter what we must improve our skills in giving and gaining access.

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