ABSTRACT

Henri Lefebvre (1996) suggests that all methods are germane to the study of what he often calls the ‘urban’, from semiology to the psychogeography of the situationists1 and the related surrealist practice of the dérive (drift), although for him the latter are too individualistic and theatrical.This short chapter sets as its ambition to produce a fusion between several different concerns and will also adopt an eclectic approach.As a starting point, I want to insist on a conception of studying social life that begins from an empirical perspective rooted in conceptions of Geertzian ‘thick description’ and detailed ethnographic study, but that links up with contemporary trends in disciplines such as human geography and urban sociology. It follows in the footsteps of many recent authorities who are keen to interrogate the fashion in which sociological constructs such as locality, neighbourhood, identity, nationality and, of course, community have become ruptured under conditions of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2001).2 It is an attempt to face the challenge proposed by Kevin Robins, also borrowing from Bauman, and search for the positive aspects of the workings of urban complexity ‘at ground level’. The aim, then, is to start to delineate the acts that people thrown together are capable of performing, ‘rather than the binding traits of collective identity’ (Robins 2001: 90). This seems a hopeful stance to begin with, but we must be

careful not to slip back into the discourses of collective identity and community as immutable and bound to geography. In the British context, Robins invites us to see the nation through the prism of London. Part of what I hope to do here is to extend Robins’s proposition and see the world through the prism of London. More particularly, I want to see the world through the prism of a district of south London: Peckham. One starting point for me in this work is the sociologically and anthropologically inspired phenomenon dating from the late 1930s that came to be called the Mass Observation (M-O) movement. I do not want to reassess the work done in its heyday (see Jeffrey 1978 for a survey), but rather to draw inspiration from the attention that the founders of the movement paid to the detail of social life. One of them, Tom Harrisson,3 took particular inspiration from the world of bird-watching. In the contemporary humanities this might seem at best dubious, but what, I think, he sought to emphasize was the value of intense, in-depth and protracted looking and listening.This is what I would wish to emulate: the sense in the work of the movement that in the ordinary details of everyday life there are worlds of meaning that have not yet revealed themselves. Surreal portents of future existences lurk on the shelves of shops, in the design of labels, in the juxtaposition of contents. We have to look long and hard for such matters to become apparent and they reveal themselves only fleetingly – hidden by the veil of custom, they are often incomprehensible to the ordinary gaze. Only from shifting, liminal vantage points do they reveal themselves.The M-O movement grasped this and, if anything, they set out to take community in a multiple sense and allow other worlds the freedom to speak. ‘Community’, however, is a slippery word and like ‘culture’ has to be served up with a variety of health warnings. In order to set this in some context we need a brief review of research into community in Britain.