Remoteness, isolation, and
peripherality have become lenses through which certain territories and
communities are valued and assessed. These concepts have come to be regarded as
markers of vulnerability, marginality, and lack of modernity. Yet all three
concepts are fundamentally relational.
Territories such as
Greenland and New Caledonia may seem remote and isolated from the perspective
of their distant metropolitan powers, Denmark and France, but for those living
in these territories, the periphery is itself the centre.
The city of Manchester in
Northern England is often regarded as remote from and peripheral to the
economic powerhouse of Southeast England, yet the population of Manchester's
urban area exceeds that of many European countries.
Places that were once
deemed remote, such as Australia, can come to be taken on their own terms,
while important power centres, such as Ancient Carthage, can dwindle and
ultimately be buried beneath the earth.
What do remoteness, isolation, and peripherality mean in practice? Who decides whether a place or a people in remote, isolated, or peripheral, and how do these determinations affect life in places that have acquired the label?
Being labelled in this manner
can sometimes give a community access to aid and support, but it can also
pigeonhole a community into acting out its remoteness, can hinder efforts at
embracing one's own centrality.
For Indigenous communities
and minority nationalities located on or beyond the edge of a majority culture,
an uncomfortable tension can develop between preserving local cultures and
lifestyles on the one hand and performing in accordance with metropolitan and
neocolonial expectations on the other.
From China's Great Western
Development Strategy to Australian development efforts in Melanesia to attempts
within Western liberal democracies to decentralize public administration by
relocating government bodies out to 'the provinces', initiatives to address the
disadvantages and inequalities resulting from peripherality and remoteness
often mean increased political and economic dependence on a distant centre of
power.
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