Mass-Observation: Mapping the Elephant
Introduction by Peter A. Hall
The Mass Observation group was founded in 1937 to promote an "anthropology of ourselves" with subversive intent. Its organizers invited the public to observe in writing everyday life in Britain, in order to expose facts "in simple terms to all observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly transformed." Drawing from Surrealist notions that a liberated unconscious would lead to a societal revolution, Charles Madge, a Communist, poet and journalist, Humphrey Jennings, a Surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker and Tom Harrisson, an anthropologist, then published what they called "weather-maps of public feeling".
Their most famous project, published as May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by Over Two Hundred Observers captured observations made during festivities on the day of the coronation of George VI, arranging them with a filmic editing technique. In a sense, Mass Observation was envisioned as a response, by the masses, to mass media. Although the initial movement was short-lived, and criticized by anthropologists as unscientific, it left an intriguing body of texts, a participatory literature of snapshots of everyday life; a kind of Twitter feed in longer, and crafted form.
In June 2009, as part of a one-day workshop at LCC, we practiced mass observations of the Elephant and Castle area. Our hypothesis was that the space of Elephant & Castle is already "practiced" by the people who live, work and travel through there. How might a mapping of existing everyday life be brought to bear on the grander ambitions for the area? Elephant & Castle recently attracted the attention of former US president Bill Clinton for its ten-year, £1bn, 170-acre regeneration programme, which was being touted as a carbon positive development. Conscious of the historical tendency for large-scale regeneration plans to prioritize an aerial view at the expense of street life, we set out to create a "bottom up" text-based mapping of the area, using the technique of mass-observation: writing what we see, as we see it.
References
Crain, Caleb, "Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life" in The New Yorker magazine, September 11, 2006. Web, retrieved May 1, 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911crat_atlarge
Jennings, Humphrey and Madge, Charles, May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day Surveys 1937 (London: Faber & Faber, 1937) pp. ix-xi, 89-102, 377-389
Hubble, Nick, Mass Observation and Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) pp1-37
Southwark Council, London Development Agency & Elephant & Castle Regeneration Team, Information Pack "The Thriving Quarter of Central London" www.elephantandcastle.org.uk
