Thursday, 06 March 2014

What the preachers should be doing

'The world is full of people who want to tell others how they should be living, when what they should be doing is sitting down with them and finding out what their lives are really like, and why they're like that in the first place.'

Photographer Jim Mortram in a recent Guardian article.

 

 

6 Mar 2014 15:19:24

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C2DE? Postcodes and social class Postcodes are commonly associated with the lottery of poor service provision, but not so much with being common. I learn from a BBC magazine article by Jon Kelly today that many people are preoccupied with postcodes and dissatisfied with their own. Is this more a cause of class divisions, or an effect? If we didn’t already live in a highly stratified society, maybe these arbitrary strings of letters and numbers would be a matter of universal indifference and do no more than serve their function of distinguishing one place from another. But I think it’s more likely that the very act of ‘distinguishing one place from another’ implies hierarchical arrangement for many people, and the prospect of superiority and inferiority, in a way that our culture likes to reinforce. Kelly reports that ‘aggrieved groups who feel their postcode somehow doesn't reflect their sense of place are campaigning for change’ – I didn’t realise you could – and doing so with ‘a separatist zeal’. It strikes me that you have to ‘come out’ as a snob in order to organise or participate in a campaign of this sort. You can’t just mumble behind the net curtains, you have to make public statements about yourself in relation to others; and you have to make those statements with other people and to other people. It’s this readiness to accept being identified as a snob – almost as if it were something to be proud of – that I find most curious. Is our age uncharacteristic in this sense, or is this a phenomenon universal across history and geography? (Is there a social anthropologist in the house?) (And what's their address?)
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This could be a breath of fresh air Radical community work journal will go live in October 2014. 'We are inviting practitioners, activists, community organisations and academics to send us material for inclusion in the the first edition. Please email the editors with material, questions, ideas, etc.'

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