A pattern language of Celtic traditional music and dance for social, economic, and ecological regeneration

• Main Author: Beresford, Anna Theresa
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Waterloo 2023
• Subjects: socio-economic and ecological regeneration; pattern language theory; traditional music and dance; vernacular culture; socio-economic sustainability; distributism; Celtic traditional music and dance; oral music cultures; Christopher Alexander; community resilience; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/20051

This thesis investigates the potential role of Celtic traditional music and dance (CTMD) cultures in creating more resilient, embedded, and sustainable societies and economies. It does so by synthesising the ideas of the vernacular architect Christopher Alexander and an ecological form of political economy derived from the work of Karl Polanyi. With an empirical emphasis on a historically connected diaspora of the North Atlantic, the study explores the development and place-making potential of CTMD for marginalized communities exposed to the vagaries of global markets. Grounded in distributist economic theory, drawing heavily on Polanyian (‘substantivist’) economics, inspired in-part by anarchist visions of decentralization and sufficiency, the analysis starts from a historical sociological approach to capitalist modernity (Weber, Marx, Elias, Bauman). Challenging the conventional opposition of individualism versus collectivism, both state and market are seen as both interdependent and dependent on an anthropology of autonomous, transacting, ‘billiard-ball individuals’. For the purposes of this dissertation, and with a view to resilient local development, the counterpoint for all permutations of the State-Market is better understood in terms of the Polanyian category of ‘livelihood’. From this perspective, any transition to a sustainable modernity requires the re-emergence of more bottom-up, communitarian, and localized networks of families and place-based communities. Such a partial re-embedding of social and economic life would be predicated upon increased levels of trust and reciprocity, mutual obligation, community engagement, and informal markets and market places. Although the effects of capitalist modernization are sweeping, influencing all areas of life from the structure of whole societies to our very conception of self, there do still exist vestiges of pre-modern, place-based societies. In A Pattern Language, ecological architect, Christopher Alexander, documented the 253 replicable architectural ...