twentieth century, and popularised through the writings of Fritjof Capra.21 Last, but not least, are ideas about human-scale economics. These are most clearly articulated in the work of E.F. Schumacher himself, and have been further developed in the life of the College through the writings (and the teaching) of Manfred Max-Neef22 and Vandana Shiva.23
Against this background, Schumacher College started offering a postgraduate course, known as the MSc in Holistic Science, in 1991, alongside other short courses on topics that fall broadly within the College’s purview.24 More recently, with the taking off of the Transition concept, the College has started offering an additional postgraduate degree, the MA in Economics for Transition. This is also the course I audited for a period of four months, during my stay there.
From previous contacts with the College I was aware that this course had been developed in co-operation with the Transition Network (the ‘outreach’ arm of the formal organisation of Transition). What this meant was that it would afford me the opportunity to get to know a number of individuals involved in various capacities with Transition, as well as to gain an overview of the main projects happening in Totnes through field visits.
Beyond the ‘formal’ connections between Schumacher and Transition, I was also able to take advantage of a number of informal channels. It is, for instance, not infrequent that alumni of the College remain in Totnes after their degree, and were able to direct me to contacts working on a number of Transition projects. Lecturers at the College also often doubled up as speaker invitees for a series of talks – with the name ‘Adventures in New Economics’ – that was organised by the REconomy Project, one of the projects initiated by the Transition Town Totnes. Last, but not least, Transition activists would cross paths at the College, either in the capacity of course participants or as occasional volunteers.
Therefore, Schumacher College does have a connection to Transition that allowed me to approach it from a position closer to that of an ‘insider’, making it easier for me to navigate. More generally, it has been brought up in interviews that Schumacher College and Transition are different expressions of a similar movement of ‘consciousness’, that is they articulate a common sentiment with slightly different bents: Schumacher being a centre of intellectual reflection, and Transition a site of solution-focused practical action, stemming from a common impulse to facilitate the development of a more holistic, embodied and sustainable mode of dwelling.
In my time at Schumacher College, I was what is often called a ‘participant observer’: a scholar in the position of taking part in activities, which are simultaneously being observed with a view to reporting about them to non-participants.25 However, I prefer to describe my research experience at the College as one of ‘accompaniment’.
This is a notion that is described in detail in the work of Andrej Grubačić and Staughton Lynd (an anthropologist of anarchist bent and a civil rights activist respectively).26 What accompaniment entails, in other words, is more than the ‘looking-in-order-to-report’ experience that is captured by the label of ‘participant observer’. In the process of accompaniment, instead, we make our own belonging to a supposedly external and neutral community of scholars open to challenge. In the process of experiencing Transition as a participant observer at Schumacher College, in fact, I have had to revisit not only the initial theoretical framing for my inquiry. The very purpose of that inquiry (gaining admission to the circle of professional academics – to a community that relies on certain practices of discourse and bodily orientations) has been tested through my belonging in Transition, and the sharing of other people’s lives and experiences. In fact, I grew aware of the tensions inherent even in the role of ‘participant observer’, sensing a risk lurking in the assumption that a reporter oriented to an audience who are gazing in from the outside can nonetheless fully attend to and participate in the occasions that present themselves to him or her. From the constant inability to fit life in a pre-formed theoretical frame, to the physical strain that my averagely sedentary academic body experienced in settings where bodily engagement was more explicitly valued and practiced: all of this provided an awareness of my own conditioning. Of the recurring temptation – which can be squared with a ‘participant observer’ frame of inquiry – to retreat back to a comfortable intellectual centre, giving one the illusion of travelling without having to move. What I experimented with, instead, was to try and become the ways of seeing and the embodied sense that I was being invited into. I had to lighten my bag so as to be able to follow more freely the loose ends and the wandering paths. This is a realm where the ‘participant observer’ has to wait behind, as the thrill of accompaniment takes one forward.27
Alongside my stay at Schumacher College, I also conducted a number of interviews with individuals involved in various capacities in Transition.28 The interviews were semi-structured. In layperson’s terms, this means that I tried not to steer interviews in any particular direction. My intention was for the phenomenon of Transition to shine through the individual experiences that participants would relate to me, and coming in with my own pre-set list of questions would risk derailing this process. For this purpose, interviews would often set off from a generic question as to how the interviewee had come to be involved in Transition,29 and subsequently build on what elements were then described as relevant.
Transition, Totnes and comparison
It follows from the above that Totnes forms the basin of my experience of Transition. Juxtaposing this observation to the knowledge that Transition initiatives exist in a number of different towns and cities in the UK, from Totnes and Forest Row to Bristol and Brixton in London, and abroad, the question arises to justify how it is possible to subtitle this book ‘Growing Transition Culture’, despite the single ‘case study’. This question, in fact, goes at the core of the approach I have adopted in thinking about this book.
A common academic methodology is to undertake comparative studies. In a comparative study, one is expected to single out a number of traits or ‘variables’ that purport to describe a particular phenomenon (in this case, Transition). The second step to a method of this sort is to then undertake a number of observations across different units (that would be different Transition initiatives in this case) and then extrapolate a number of conclusions from the comparison. This would be a viable method to examine, for instance, the impact of income distribution or ethnic composition on particular measures of ‘success’ of Transition initiatives (such as the amount of volunteers they engage, the number and type of projects they undertake, and so on). Studies of this sort, therefore, are appropriate to provide information about the distribution of a particular trait across a number of different units, and to enable inferences about how that particular trait might be more or less dependent on differences observed across the various units.30
What a methodology of this sort does not enable, however, is in-depth observation of the qualitative process by which a phenomenon comes into existence. So, were one to undertake a comparative study, it would be necessary to begin from some definition of Transition, in order to make sure that what we are trying to observe in different units is roughly the same ‘thing’. This essentialisation of Transition bypasses the whole question of how Transition comes to be, obliterating that process in a ready-made definition; it ‘hides from us (or at least makes it difficult to recognize) the reality of growth, the irreversibility of time, and the possibility of genuine creativity; we fail to realize the still incomplete nature of what it is we seek’.31 It is difficult, in a comparative study, to offer a detail-rich account that retains some of the complexity of the phenomenon under observation, without reducing it to a set of variables, which the scholar has pre-determined according to this or that theory that he or she wants to apply to explain the phenomenon.
In fact, I would say that my disagreement goes deeper than one of pure technical difference, and reaches as far down as the pretence that the task of a scholar should be to ‘explain’ a phenomenon. The search for explanation is often married to a quest for mastery over the phenomenon, for the ability to explain it away, diluting it into a theory that is able to elide its uniqueness.32
I tend to align myself in opposition to
