Thursday, 08 December 2011

Neighbour relations can reinforce boundaries - or break them down

We have builders working on the house, this time it’s Dave from just five doors away, and his mate. Yesterday was pretty cold up on the scaffolding, so I heated up some of the apple crumble that my next door neighbour had brought round a little earlier, and took two portions up the ladder for them. They had the chance subsequently to thank her from above as she popped out.

A slightly unusual triangle of service and support then - perhaps an exception to theories of standard neighbour behaviour. Theory tends to inspect some wider social problems - class tensions, ethnic relations - in neighbour relations and then to generalise back out from there. There are symbolic boundaries that we use to differentiate ourselves, and according to this recent paper in Sociological research online, neighbouring reinforces those boundaries rather than breaking them down.

It seems to me that people do both in the neighbouring setting. I can learn a bit about Nigerian culture from a family a few doors along, crossing cultural boundaries with ease for example just by asking for a recipe; or I could shut out all contact from the Irish Catholics next door if I was minded to, just by limiting interaction to a grunt.

 

 

8 Dec 2011 11:39:03 | Neighbourhood relations, Vignettes

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Taxes and governmental powers: what are they for? When I dropped out of school and went into ‘the world of work’, as it used to be called, I remember being disturbed by the fact that the education system left me utterly ignorant of what government and local government do, and what taxation is for. It looks like things have got little better, in spite of the introduction of citizenship to the curriculum. Yup, it’s time for a bit of seasonal gloom, with the British Social Attitudes report published today and plenty of publicity given to this statistic: The proportion who think we should pay (more) taxes to improve health and education and social benefits is only 30% in England, 40% in Scotland. A decade ago it was 60% in both nations. (BBC) Like a separating galaxy, it looks like we are moving at speed away from the traditional civilising notion of the ‘common weal’. (In case you missed it, here’s the link to requirements for people who don’t want to pay taxes). Do people who think like this imagine, for instance, that business could function without publicly maintained roads and systematically tested vehicles, or a managed wider economy? Or that the police could maintain order without some sort of funding; or that the food and water they consume could be guaranteed to be hygienic without public agencies? Perhaps it does not occur to them? Ah wait, perhaps what really bugs them is that poverty is self-imposed, not structural: 63% believed parents who don't want to work were to blame for children living in poverty. I suggest you blink hard, and re-read that figure: almost two thirds. According to Mark Easton on the BBC site today, the UK ‘has long been the most judgmental of the needy in Europe.’ In a way, that’s a relief; but yes we do seem determined, disastrously, to become more and more like the US. Income inequality is increasing, with a government apparently comfortable with polarisation. And we seem to be a bit angry too. Dark age ahead, as Jane Jacobs warned. Jane listed five pillars of culture including ‘taxes and governmental powers that are directly in touch with needs and possibilities’. But civilisation will pay a heavy price if too few citizens really appreciate what they’re for.
PREVIOUS POST
Network ennui Today the Guardian community action hub published an article by Rosie Niven on ‘social media in community building and development’, and I added two or three comments explaining some aspects of the Online Neighbourhood Networks research which I carried out with Hugh Flouch. I thought I’d mention here that in passing I refer to the notion of ‘network ennui’, which I have decided will become contagious - a period not too far in the future when swathes of the world’s population just get pissed off with the dreary effort of maintaining our social networks and do other stuff like looking where we’re going on the street, experiencing silence and playing solitaire WITH REAL CARDS… the age of social media will just quietly die with an untweeted whimper. I can’t tell you more cos it’s already started, must go.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments