Can provincialism be rehabilitated?
By implication, the provincialist approach could be seen as offering a possible defence against the levelling effect of global capitalism on local cultures. If we are to champion the provincial, then this needs to be accompanied by attention to Antonio Negri’s famous injunction to ‘fight power everywhere.’ It’s not enough to challenge the hierarchies promoted by the centres, the injustices and inequalities of one’s provincial backyard also need to be tackled.
An alternative term that we’d like to suggest, which carries many of the positive associations of provincialism, is eco-communalism. This radical green notion brings together a lot of utopian anarchist thinking and calls for human scale, cooperative communities that both allow the development of humans but respect the rights of the non-human world. In this vision, progress is measured by the degree to which human communities are able to adapt to eco-systems. The establishment and growth of small scale cooperatives or ‘liberated zones’ could provide a possible solution to the multi-faceted crisis of the modern world. In our opinion, art is able to act as a liberated zone for putting into practice experimental ideas. One such example of a liberated zone could be recognised in the activities of the Balatonboglár Chapel in the early 1970s.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
www.translocal.org
