GARY McDONOGH Intro/Bio
In some ways I am not sure where home is apart from the places created by my family and friends: home is people rather than space. On the one hand, my life has followed a simple trajectory from my family of origin in Louisville, Kentucky to schools on the East Coast and in Canada to a decade teaching at New College in Sarasota Florida before coming here and raising a family more than two decades ago. With a final move ahead to New York City some day, where my wife teaches at CUNY (I will be the commuter). On the other hand, as a cultural anthropologist, my immersive ethnographic work also has focused on the ideologies of urban conflict –how people understand and represent their differences and how and where these understandings clash and change and depends on long term residence in diverse cities. My primary published work has dealt with questions of class in Barcelona, race and religion in the American South, and colonial power in Hong Kong, my wife’s home. I am now collaborating with my wife on a long term project on the history, space, imagery and meanings of global Chinatowns. The immersive experience of anthropology also means that I have many friends and foundations in Barcelona where I have been living and working since the 1970s and in Hong Kong, where I held a Fulbright Fellowship and have taught at HKU. I like that sense of movement but realize that it is not for everyone.
What I enjoy about the cities I call “home” is their serendipitous, even problematic variety: the juxtapositions that come with density and the change to meet new people and do new things, even if this comes with costs, often unequal, that we all need to grapple with. I realize that I settle into the same networks and routes in New York or Barcelona but those routes still include markets and crowded streets and mass transport. This kaleidoscope has kept e open not only in my ideas but in my work, my conception of cities Hence, I am frustrated by the intense privatization of spaces that I see around me in the Main Line – the sense that all spaces are not only owned but buffered, emptying out sidewalks and parks unless people have dogs to walk. Even beauty seems to be privatized – there is little to be experienced as shared patrimony in the way that buildings, parks, streets and even small plazas might be treasured in Barcelona or New York. It is interesting that with Whyte and with post-Franco planning in Barcelona since the 1970s, urban administrations have specifically focused on fostering small, “attractive” sometimes accidentally usable spaces throughout the city –places to meet, talk, have a cup of coffee read a book. As I walk around here, benches and trees are owned: it has been interesting in the pandemic how seemingly semi-public spaces like the Haverford Nature Trail have become closed to neighbors. Many layers of choice, from defining property values to establishing “good” schools to politicized images of suburban an urban life have defined this intensive separation, which has become omnipresent in the pandemic. Having raised a family with an anchorage here, now that the nest is empty I look forward to moving away from what has always felt like a temporary home. I don’t think I will solve problems that most people in my neighborhood do not see as problems so I would rather go to a place where I can participate in different problems and celebrations.