Harry Parker (University of Cambridge) is this year’s winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize. We spoke to him about his research and winning essay ‘The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain’. Congratulations to Harry whose essay will be published in full in a future issue of the journal.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your PhD project ‘Popular auto-ethnography in Britain, c. 1870-1940’ and describe how this essay relates to that larger project?

Harry Parker: The essay comes from what I think is probably going to be the third chapter of the thesis, which broadly looks at various attempts within the human sciences across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to turn the anthropological gaze inwards. I do that through looking at a series of surveying projects across the periods that enrolled non-specialists to become observers of their own culture.

I begin in the 19th century, when anthropology in particular was more oriented towards the question of the origins and the composition of the national community. I look at one of the first large scale projects to try and attempt this, which was known as the ethnographic survey of the United Kingdom. As a component of that I’m particularly interested in folklore collection, which  was a major part of that project. I then look at the photographic survey movement, which was running more or less at the same time (around the 1890s). And then I jump ahead a bit to the interwar period to look at regional surveys, which seemed to absorb much of the energies that those earlier projects set loose. The other case studies are also focused on the interwar period and look at early attempts to do community studies. So that’s the ‘auto-ethnography’ bit.

The ‘popular’ bit comes from my training (if you can call it that) as a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Some of the work that I’ve most admired has used the archives of social sciences to try and understand what we might call its vernacularization: how social science concepts were being employed in everyday life. My project isn’t so much about vernacularization per se, but I think that some of the projects that I’m looking at offer a way into understanding how people of various kinds grappled with the question of what it meant to obtain a perspective on one’s own culture.

HHS: What was the regional survey movement and how do you treat its ‘amateurism’ in your analysis?

HP: A regional survey was a technique for studying the social world developed by the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. The way it worked in practice was essentially as a mass data gathering exercise. Practitioners of the survey involved themselves in collecting information on everything from the climate of the region to major industries to population. It was an attempt to create a total knowledge of a place.

The amateurism of it actually played quite an important role in the way that it was promoted. Writers on regional survey tended to stress that you didn’t really need to have any specialist skills in order to do a regional survey. In fact, they almost thought it would be better if you didn’t. They conceived it very consciously as a civic or participatory exercise. The survey was, in an important sense, both a social scientific endeavour – trying to create useable knowledge – and a form of social practice – trying to reunite people with their communities.

I’m also interested in the way it related to social thought in Britain at the time. As many historians of sociology have pointed out, many of the distinct innovations or problematizations within social thought tended to come from outside of what we might think of as the sociological discipline itself. This seems to be especially true in Britain, where sociology institutionalized rather late in comparison to elsewhere in Europe. Amateurish social inquiry seems to me to be a significant current within the interwar period, where lots of proto- or quasi-sociological work was being done, not necessarily by professional sociologists but by social workers and reformers.

HHS: Why do you claim that the regional survey movement could be understood in relation to the discipline of ‘social anthropology’?

HP: Anthropology is undergoing a pretty significant moment of transition right at this moment. It’s a moment when something like the modern ‘culture’ concept is coming into being, the idea that cultures are discrete, bounded systems of affinity that can be made knowable via the work of a field worker. Although most of the regional surveyors didn’t conceive of themselves as anthropologists what was striking to me is that they seemed to be articulating many of the same problems. Namely, they were keen to stress that social inquiry should be a field science or something that should be done by a kind of participant observer, someone who’s embedded within the culture, but who also also has to try and gain a detached or scientific perspective on it.

HHS: Who was Patrick Geddes? How did he understand society/social ‘types’ and how was this reflected in the survey method he developed?

HP: Patrick Geddes was a rather eccentric and idiosyncratic thinker. He operated across a range of different disciplines. He was at various points, a botanist, a biologist, a sociologist, a geographer, a town planner. He started his career studying biology under Thomas Huxley. Increasingly, over the course of the 1870s and 1880s he became interested in how one might apply evolutionary theory to the social world. In biology, he was particularly interested in this question of cooperation among organisms and that seemed to underpin a lot of his thinking about society. He developed – and this in large part owed to the influence of a lot of French thinkers, including Frédéric le Play and his followers – he developed his model of the ‘valley plan of civilization’, where he delineated seven distinct social types that he saw as the basis of modern civilization. Much like in his biological studies, he was interested in how those social types were engaged in processes of cooperative adaptation. The task for the regional surveyor was to understand the balance of those social forces within the industrial city.

HHS: How did Geddes conceive of ‘modern life’ and its relationship to ‘pre-modern life’?

HP:

He took up an interest, in particular when he was studying cities, with what he called paleotechnic and neotechnic forms, which I think he intended as a play on the way that archaeologists and anthropologists were writing about paleolithic and neolithic ages. Although he conceived of his paleotechnic and neotechnic forms as being of much more recent origin. The paleotechnic city was powered by steam and the neotechnic city was powered by electricity and oil. He was trying to seek out possibilities for social and environmental progress within what we now know as the moment of the second industrial revolution.

HHS: How did the regional survey movement sit in relation to the broader contemporaneous autoethnography movement? Why do you believe that this approach – ‘the exhortation to “begin where you are”’ – had such traction at this historical moment?

HP: The interwar period is sometimes seen as a moment of of introspection. It’s a moment of imperial contraction. It’s a moment within culture where Greater Britain themes are being replaced by little England ones, if you like. Those developments seem to have prompted some kinds of renewed attempts to try and understand the British nation anthropologically. Jedy Esty’s work on high modernist writers like Woolf and Forster and Eliot, for instance, whom you might think of as these rather metropolitan characters, shows that by the 1930s are turning inwards to invoking and representing the ‘imagined community’. I think the regional survey picks up on some of those themes. It’s a method for trying to get people to rediscover their community. Geddes wrote about the survey as a sort of recuperation from war, a sort of convalescence.

HHS: Though you seem to express some skepticism about that in the paper…?

HP: Geddes was never particularly clear about exactly what a survey might involve. He was much more interested in what its effects might be on civic life. His followers who took up the survey project in the interwar period seemed to take from his ideas what was convenient for them or what suited their own political attachments or intentions.

HHS: You discuss Geddes’ use of visual metaphors – what metaphors did he use and what do they reveal about his approach to observation?

HP: When Geddes wrote about surveying being a convalescence from war, one of the things he was particularly concerned about was this kind of inertness to one’s environment.

In trying to promote observation as a social good he was trying to  define a form of it that would allow the observer to rise above their acculturated self to transcend their inherently limited or partial perspective. The first metaphors he used were the metaphors of the child and the tourist. This was about trying to get at a raw visual experience, to access a dehabituated form of vision. At the same time, he also was interested in the survey as this total apprehension of the region. He called this synopsis. He also used visual metaphors that related to viewing things from above or on high: the hillway traveller or the airman. He was particularly interested in flight as a way of apprehending space.

HHS: In the interwar years, who were the regional surveyors and what was their relationship to the local cultures they studied?

HP: They were a rather heterogeneous group with some divergent interests. They included regional geographers (regional geography was the dominant approach to geography in the period), town planners, antiquarians, amateur naturalists and a core group clustered around the Sociological Society ( relocated to a new group of organisations called Le Play House). They all had slightly different approaches to what a regional survey was. The Le Play House group was probably the most tourist-like. Especially from the 1930s onwards, most of their work involved organising field trips in Britain and across Europe to conduct regional surveysBut other projects were much more committed to the survey as a civic project. There were surveys in Manchester and Liverpool, for instance, where the survey did seem to operate more through the organs of civil society, through local naturalist societies and civic societies of various kinds, like the Workers Educational Association and other bodies committed to civic improvement.

HHS: How would you characterise the political orientation or aims of the regional survey movement in the interwar years? For example, how were notions of community, democracy or ‘good citizenship’ articulated in discussions within the regional survey movement?

HP: The political orientation of the regional survey is hard to characterize partly because of the movement’s heterogeneity but partly because it was never very explicit about what its politics were. Some writers on regional survey even seemed to claim that the survey was a means of of transcending politics as such. They never had an explicit analysis of class and were very much opposed to doing that. If they had a conception of what an ideal region might look like they were probably reliant on what we might think of as a rather conservative conception of an organic community. Although interestingly, in the interwar period that notion resonates with parts of the left as well.. There were some advocates for regional survey who would probably have considered themselves ethical socialists. They were drawing on some of the thinkers that had inspired Geddes, like Ruskin, but also Kropotkin and his  ideas about mutual aid. I suppose that’s probably where their idea of community was coming from.

HHS: It seems people involved in the regional survey movement grappled with tensions between the part and the whole, the specific and the general, the social and the geographical – how did those tensions play out in practice? Could this perhaps be linked to a point you make at the end of your article that they paid little attention to the national question? You talked earlier of a notion of an ‘imagined community’ but if the imagined community isn’t a nation but is something smaller, more micro, what then is it that they’re imagining?

HP: I would say that they never really came up with a satisfactory answer to that question. The idea of the region comes from Geddes’ engagement with French geographers and it partly comes out of his bio-social approach, in which he’s conceived the survey as a study in human ecology. The region plays the role of a rather ill-defined ‘environment’. That was certainly how many of his geographical followers understood the region. In some of his other writings, Geddes would more tightly define the region as a central city surrounded by the countryside on which it relied for its resources. He borrowed there from Auguste Comte: this is a Positivist ideal of a world of autonomous city states. In practice, regional surveyors were operating at a much more micro scale. They liked to begin with small rural parishes and so on, but generally the aim was always to work up to something they imagined as a ‘region’. Part of what they were doing, and there were a number of advocates of regional surveys who wrote about this, was assuming that they shouldn’t start with a predefined notion of community or space in which they were conducting their investigation. This was something that had to be worked up from the ground.

The region would emerge from doing the survey, rather than the other way round.

What I think is interesting about that is the way it departs from other autoethnographic projects emerging in the interwar period. So something like Mass Observation, which looms large in histories of interwar social science, is much more oriented towards the nation. This I think is mainly because it had a different conception of what the observer was supposed to do. M-O’s founders liked to claim that they were turning everyone into anthropologists of their own lives but in another sense they were also committed to a much more modernist data gathering project in which observers would function as these kind of human antennae that would report back to a national mainframe. So really the main task of doing the analysis and forming social theory would happen at the national centre rather than in the field, whereas the regional surveyors were committed to a project of knowledge production at the fieldwork site..

HHS: Finally, where do you hope your research leads next?

HP: In the next part of the PhD project I’m going to be thinking about early attempts at doing community studies. At the moment I’m looking at one rather experimental community self-study project in a place called Brynmawr in Wales.

More broadly, I’m interested in histories of the field sciences, and the possibilities of anthropological archives for illuminating these.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor.