Patterns Perceptible: Awakening to Community

Date

2012-05-17

Authors

Barclay, Vaughn

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Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University of Guelph

Abstract

This paper interweaves narrativized readings and experiential narratives as personal and cultural resources for counterhegemonic cultural critique within our historical context of globalization and ecological crisis. Framed by perspectives on epistemology, everyday life, and place, these reflections seek to engage and revitalize our notions of community, creativity, and the individual, towards visioning the human art of community as a counternarrative to globalization. Such a task involves confronting the meanings we have come to ascribe to work and economy which so deeply determine our social fabric. Encountering the thought of key 19th and 20th century social theorists ranging from William Morris, Gregory Bateson, and Raymond Williams, to Murray Bookchin, Martin Buber, and Wendell Berry, these reflections mark the indivisible web of culture in the face of our insistent divisions, and further, iterate our innate creativity as the source for a vital, sustainable culture that might reflect, in Bateson’s terms, the pattern that connects.

Description

Keywords

culture, community, creativity, counterhegemony, notions of work and economy, local economy, the individual and society, intersubjectivity, aesthetics, theory of everyday life, notions of place, storytelling, narratives, creative nonfiction, theoria, globalization, Gregory Bateson, Raymond Williams, Martin Buber, William Morris, Murray Bookchin, Wendell Berry, improvisation, meaning, wisdom culture, culture and creativity, cultural transformation, sustainable culture, ecological crisis, epistemology,, sense of place, phenomenology, William Benjamin, notions of the sacred, patterns, the pattern that connects, counternarrative, the individual and hegemony, hegemony, counterhegemonic discourse, nonformal education, centrality of the body, beauty, consumption, cosmos, sense making, child development, D.W. Winnicott, notions of care, harmful effects of capitalist market economy, basic income, inequality, social justice, ideas of health and well-being, the need for beauty, GMOs, local food production, sustainable trade, culture and creativity, municipal communalism, democracy, radical culture, cultural processes, culture and spirituality, interdisciplinary work, cultural theory, cultural studies, nondisciplinary work, adult education, utopias, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Alexander, Gaston Bachelard, bell hooks, Zyt Bauman,

Citation