The spaces around us manipulate our every interactions out in the world. The forces manipulating these spaces are invisible: designers and architects and city planners pulling invisible strings that spawn “one-way” and “please do not sit on the grass” signs in areas that you’d never think twice about. These strings would be of notable interests to anthropologists of the likes of Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold, both masters in theorising how people interact directly and indirectly with the material world around them.
But it is someone like Tim Ingold who can help bridge a gap between understanding one’s position in public and/or private spaces. I recently spent a week in Paris and the thought that constantly filled my mind was the difference in organisation of public space and places, and how people interacted with them compared to London. Ingold argues that one cannot understand space and landscape without moving through it – that is to say, experiencing it and living in it. This “insider’s view” is critical to understanding how landscape and space interact with and are affected by culture, and conversely, how culture affects them. Not having ever spent much time in Paris I was very much coming in with a newcomer’s eye. The differences I perceived between Paris and London relate more to public space rather than the private. Museums and street-side bistros were the focal points of my attention in regards to this topic.
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who made the connection first that structures of power are made to control the people, but someone like Michel Foucault more directly tackles the issue of architecture and institutionalised violence being agents in the domination of common people by the elite (Foucault, 1977). A Foucauldian analysis of institutionalised violence permeating through architecture is something that always resonates with me in London, places like Buckingham Palace and the Horse Guards (despite being inherently public/tourist areas) still represent a divide in power and separation of space between the common people and a residual force of autocratic monarchy. French history of course saw the monarchs’ heads roll back in 1789, and conversion of previous Royal estate like the Louvre into public museums marks for me one of the most significant remodelling of violent and oppressive spaces within a city. This kind of remodelling of public space is a more effective way of decolonising space whilst effectively retaining a cultural and architectural heritage. It speaks to the finesse and respect that the French cultural identity places upon artistic and aesthetic quality even whilst reconciliation this identity with a less violent and Foucauldian separation of space prior to a social revolution.
The bistro is an extremely Parisian setting. Sitting out on the street with a coffee and book or a beer and a cigarette is something that seem inherently Parisian to me and certainly is an association that a lot of people have with this city. Restaurants and bars in London at least are always hard to find and isolated from the main streets. Dingy, crowded stuffy bars are swapped out for open air bistros that spill out onto the pavements in an inherently more socialised and public experience for communal drinking and relaxing. The fact that one can sit in a French bistro and order a single coffee and thereafter spend as long as one wants seated outside with a book is testament to the inherently more social side to eating and drinking that exists in France. Spaces and places are not just green-screen-esque backdrops for sociocultural activity, but as Eric Hirsch (1995) argues, the relationship between culture and nature is more of a complicated symbiotic relationship constantly interacting with itself to reflect the actual experience of social aspects like sitting in a bar. Locked away inside and away from the public eye stigmatises and elevates the exclusivity of social gatherings, in contrast to being in plain sight of the public, also a means to extend a small social gathering to a larger public of passer-bys. The establishment of more public social spaces, like the bistro, is one of several reasons that I feel that anthropologically speaking Paris accommodates a much more open and inclusive social scene where there are little to no social borders between people, and one where the social “backdrop” works conceptually in unison with a sociocultural identity.
As Ingold argues, moving through a space is the best to understand how it functions in relation to the individual and their experience of the space around them as well as the experience of social interactions within public spaces. I had only known Paris to the extent of a few tourist places with my family many years ago, but rediscovering it with new eyes allows one to see through into the intricate mechanisms that makes this city feel so alive and so vibrant.
Foucault, M (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin
Hirsch, E. and O’Hanlon, M. (eds) (1995). The Anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
INGOLD, T (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge.
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