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experience at the College as one of ‘accompaniment’.
This is a notion that is described in detail in the work of Andrej Grubačić and Staughton Lynd (an anthropologist of anarchist bent and a civil rights activist respectively).26 What accompaniment entails, in other words, is more than the ‘looking-in-order-to-report’ experience that is captured by the label of ‘participant observer’. In the process of accompaniment, instead, we make our own belonging to a supposedly external and neutral community of scholars open to challenge. In the process of experiencing Transition as a participant observer at Schumacher College, in fact, I have had to revisit not only the initial theoretical framing for my inquiry. The very purpose of that inquiry (gaining admission to the circle of professional academics – to a community that relies on certain practices of discourse and bodily orientations) has been tested through my belonging in Transition, and the sharing of other people’s lives and experiences. In fact, I grew aware of the tensions inherent even in the role of ‘participant observer’, sensing a risk lurking in the assumption that a reporter oriented to an audience who are gazing in from the outside can nonetheless fully attend to and participate in the occasions that present themselves to him or her. From the constant inability to fit life in a pre-formed theoretical frame, to the physical strain that my averagely sedentary academic body experienced in settings where bodily engagement was more explicitly valued and practiced: all of this provided an awareness of my own conditioning. Of the recurring temptation – which can be squared with a ‘participant observer’ frame of inquiry – to retreat back to a comfortable intellectual centre, giving one the illusion of travelling without having to move. What I experimented with, instead, was to try and become the ways of seeing and the embodied sense that I was being invited into. I had to lighten my bag so as to be able to follow more freely the loose ends and the wandering paths. This is a realm where the ‘participant observer’ has to wait behind, as the thrill of accompaniment takes one forward.27
Alongside my stay at Schumacher College, I also conducted a number of interviews with individuals involved in various capacities in Transition.28 The interviews were semi-structured. In layperson’s terms, this means that I tried not to steer interviews in any particular direction. My intention was for the phenomenon of Transition to shine through the individual experiences that participants would relate to me, and coming in with my own pre-set list of questions would risk derailing this process. For this purpose, interviews would often set off from a generic question as to how the interviewee had come to be involved in Transition,29 and subsequently build on what elements were then described as relevant.
Transition, Totnes and comparison
It follows from the above that Totnes forms the basin of my experience of Transition. Juxtaposing this observation to the knowledge that Transition initiatives exist in a number of different towns and cities in the UK, from Totnes and Forest Row to Bristol and Brixton in London, and abroad, the question arises to justify how it is possible to subtitle this book ‘Growing Transition Culture’, despite the single ‘case study’. This question, in fact, goes at the core of the approach I have adopted in thinking about this book.
A common academic methodology is to undertake comparative studies. In a comparative study, one is expected to single out a number of traits or ‘variables’ that purport to describe a particular phenomenon (in this case, Transition). The second step to a method of this sort is to then undertake a number of observations across different units (that would be different Transition initiatives in this case) and then extrapolate a number of conclusions from the comparison. This would be a viable method to examine, for instance, the impact of income distribution or ethnic composition on particular measures of ‘success’ of Transition initiatives (such as the amount of volunteers they engage, the number and type of projects they undertake, and so on). Studies of this sort, therefore, are appropriate to provide information about the distribution of a particular trait across a number of different units, and to enable inferences about how that particular trait might be more or less dependent on differences observed across the various units.30
What a methodology of this sort does not enable, however, is in-depth observation of the qualitative process by which a phenomenon comes into existence. So, were one to undertake a comparative study, it would be necessary to begin from some definition of Transition, in order to make sure that what we are trying to observe in different units is roughly the same ‘thing’. This essentialisation of Transition bypasses the whole question of how Transition comes to be, obliterating that process in a ready-made definition; it ‘hides from us (or at least makes it difficult to recognize) the reality of growth, the irreversibility of time, and the possibility of genuine creativity; we fail to realize the still incomplete nature of what it is we seek’.31 It is difficult, in a comparative study, to offer a detail-rich account that retains some of the complexity of the phenomenon under observation, without reducing it to a set of variables, which the scholar has pre-determined according to this or that theory that he or she wants to apply to explain the phenomenon.
In fact, I would say that my disagreement goes deeper than one of pure technical difference, and reaches as far down as the pretence that the task of a scholar should be to ‘explain’ a phenomenon. The search for explanation is often married to a quest for mastery over the phenomenon, for the ability to explain it away, diluting it into a theory that is able to elide its uniqueness.32
I tend to align myself in opposition to this approach, with a tradition of scholarship that tends to be more interested in observation than in explanation (see the box in ch. 2). A central task of my effort in this book is precisely to introduce the phenomenon of Transition not in the extensive manner (i.e. through comparing different ‘units’ external to one another), but in an intensive manner. What I try to do, in other words, is to go as deep as I can into the fine details of the phenomenon of Transition. In providing a rich empirical account,33 our knowledge of the qualities of the phenomenon becomes more intimate and less informed by a pre-existing theory we super-impose on the phenomenon itself.
This is why, when I chose the subtitle ‘Growing Transition Culture’ for this book, my attention was not on ‘Transition’, understood as an entity that exists and that can be examined extensively (which would leave me open to the criticism that I plan to do what would require a comparative study, without having actually undertaken a comparative study). Instead, my emphasis is on the ‘growing’. Where I judge the success of the enterprise of writing this book, in other words, is in being able to take the reader into the qualitative moving through which a distinctive culture of Transition develops, and I do so through the detailed observation of one initiative.
What this focus allows, despite its modest beginnings in one particular case, is to get a glimpse of the whole phenomenon; of Transition as an unfolding whole. By going deeper into its moving, my hope is to develop some facility with the process whereby a culture – which I understand as broadly as possible, as any set of discursive and material attachments34 that orient engagement in the world – comes to be, through a motion of relating difference and achieving fittingness in a dynamically unfolding whole. By turning to the process in its proceeding, it becomes possible to understand how the whole comes to be, how it ‘moves’. This, in the end, is something that requires a shifting of attention away from this or that ‘end-product’ of the unfolding of a social phenomenon, and into the making of those observed outcomes: these, after all, are only crystallisations of a fluid motion, not the motion itself.35
2. Transition: A Publishing History
Many studies of Transition begin by looking at existing accounts that may offer guidance as to what ‘it’ is supposed to be ‘about’. In this sense, the written materials produced by prominent individuals who have been continually involved in the life of Transition are the customary starting point for the sort of analytical enquiry that I distanced myself from in the Introduction. In this chapter, my goal is to show how, even if we set off from where most social scientists start in relation to Transition, we need not end up where they have. Indeed, an initial glimpse into the unfolding, dynamic quality of Transition – as a moving and not a completed movement – already shines through a synoptic reading of various introductory texts produced within the Transition milieu. If we take them separately, as is often the case, we risk missing a dynamic motion in the horizon of Transition,