Compleat Contemplators and Pertinacious Schismaticks: Speculations on the Clash of Two Imaginary Sovereignties at Dale Farm and Meriden (UK)

“Free as birds, nomads make nonsense of state borders and respect no law but their own demanding moral code”.

Germaine Greer, in The Telegraph (UK), 15 October 2011

Abstract

In this essay two photographs taken during the events (2011) at Dale Farm and at Meriden—both involving issues of gypsy and traveller settlement in rural areas—are analysed and interpreted in some depth. Use is thereby made of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653). This book, as is argued in this contribution, includes, in embryonic form, a whole imaginary of forms of sovereignty which, it could be said, is still to a significant extent structuring conflicts between gypsy and traveller communities on the one hand, and rural residents on the other. The exploration of Walton’s imaginary in which supposed compleat contemplators are pitched against intransigent, dogmatic, pertinacious schismaticks, enables us to tease out images of nomadism and sovereignty and allows us to argue how the clash of imaginary sovereignties both at Dale Farm and at Meriden is, at the core, a clash of irreconcilable forms of life which, each, rest upon what existentialists would call an original, radical choice. We conclude with some notes on the need to acknowledge but also to interrogate, in and during conflicts between gypsies and travellers and rural residents, the radical nature of the existential choices that underpin such conflicts. Without any such acknowledgement, and without any meta-communicative interrogation of the choices that underpin imaginary forms of life, one may not hope to be able bridge the chasm between radically chosen, diametrically opposed forms of life.