Cultural Cartography

GEORGINA COBURN responds to Kenneth White’s lecture ‘Return to the Territory – A Highland Reconnaissance’ in Inverness

KENNETH WHITE’S lecture “Return to the Territory – A Highland Reconnaissance” revealed an approach to life and culture that is as complex as it is relevant.

Recently appointed as HI~Arts first International Fellow, White’s three date tour of the North included Inverness, Ullapool and Kirkwall, each lecture documented as part of a set of standing archival recordings that are now accessible on line.

I believe that not only will these recordings prove to be a valuable resource for the future but also a reflection of the assimilated ideas and concerns of our time.

Poet, essayist and theorist White raises important questions that are not without precedent in the Scottish and Celtic literary traditions, encouraging a thorough examination of the forces which shape our cultural identity and the choices we make about our creative future.

White himself is an interesting figure, a representation of “extension and expansion” of indigenous culture, a creative thinker and academic for whom distance and exile seem to give a great deal of clarity to the problem of living in our current world climate.

Someone with ancestral roots in Scotland but living outside its borders, a living example of Milton’s assertion that “no man is a poet in his own country” and an heir to the creative tradition of Buchanan, Hume and R. L. Stevenson.

White describes a culture defined through its “physical area, social context and horizon of intention

Sometimes in order to really see something clearly we can only do so from a distance or “with a wider field of reference you expand”, as White would express it. It is in this respect that White’s insight is invaluable to the current state of cultural politics in the Highlands and the broader questions that arise in living here.
In our globalised world where profits equal power, he suggests a more essential path of an “open world.”

“Every language and human being has long roots”. If we are “wide eyed local(s)” and “large mind(ed)” then we will be naturally “global”, interconnected in a way that has nothing to do with our region defined by its market values but as a “territory” with its own “aura” or creative energy linked to the whole.

Central to his geopoetic reading of Highland culture and history is this belief in “territory” rather than an administrative “region” defined only by its market values. Where “regionalism becomes cultural policy identity replaces (real) cultural energy.”

In response I immediately think of the “Inverness” advertising campaign for our city and the recent criticism by an Edinburgh architect about Inverness being nothing but a “great big housing estate”. Our “IN” status as a city is built upon expansion by Tesco and Tullochs rather than the shaping of a “mindscape within a landscape”.
White’s geopoetical argument is that “real living, real democracy is the possibility of choice for all, life and thought for everybody.”

It is absolutely appropriate at this moment in time that we engage with the idea of the Highlands as “territory” rather than a narrowly defined administrative region “wallowing in myth” for tourism. “Rather we should look deeply into the myth” and not blindly “accept… ancestral tradition” but “begin where we are”.
White’s idea of a Highland Reconnaissance is an exercise in “cultural cartography.” He invites us to investigate and scrutinise, to turn elitism into enlightened discernment, make value judgements about elements within our culture and to encourage a “regrounding” of ourselves in our “territory” and the world.

In the tradition of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment of Ferguson and Smith, White echoes their fundamental questions and debate about a society “enriched but impoverished.” White describes a culture defined through its “physical area, social context and horizon of intention”.

I feel it is easy to apply White’s language of geopoetics to the reality of our current social context, disconnected from the wider world and “embedded in regional couthiness.”

What will our “horizon of intention” be in 2007 and beyond? For me this is the most pertinent question of them all.

© Georgina Coburn, 2005

Audio of Kenneth White’s full lecture, “A Highland Reconnaissance”, is available to download here.