Culture and place

JOE: …small town. I suppose. You have to make your own fun.

ANN: Everybody makes their own fun. F’you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun, it’s entertainment.
David Mamet, State and Main, 2000

I hesitated what to call the work collected here, wanting to avoid more pretentious or opaque terms that are sometimes used to talk about the geography of culture. Place is inseparable from culture: it provides resources and constraints and defines what is possible in very basic terms. The ceilidh, traditionally a gathering of people living in the same place to share tales and music, must have grown from the long winter nights of Northern Scotland, when there was nowhere to go and little to do. There’s a moment in David Mamet’s film, State and Main, when the bookseller of a small New England town explains the importance of this to a visiting Hollywood writer:

Rural touring and social life

My discovery of the connections between culture and place have come through invitation or responding to commission from public agencies. The first was a project developed at the suggestion of the National Arts Touring Forum, which gave the first published account of the rural touring movement, which was then perhaps at its height, in terms of the number of independent schemes, producers and audiences. I had certainly underestimated the importance of this work in people’s lives, and the resulting report offers a rich picture of a complex and changing social context. I returned to the field ten years later at the request of Creative Arts East, and the result was the last ‘Regular Marvel’.