The Meeting Place asks what are the conditions of sociability in a globalized world. It argues that the social sciences take communication for granted and for this reason overlook the obstacles to understanding between strangers and the importance of improvised performative tactics in overcoming these. While such disciplines as sociology, legal studies, psychology, political theory and even urban planners treat meeting as a good in its own right (identifying it with the democratic procurement of wellbeing), they fail to offer a model of what makes meeting possible and worth pursuing: a prior a ... More

The Meeting Place asks what are the conditions of sociability in a globalized world. It argues that the social sciences take communication for granted and for this reason overlook the obstacles to understanding between strangers and the importance of improvised performative tactics in overcoming these. While such disciplines as sociology, legal studies, psychology, political theory and even urban planners treat meeting as a good in its own right (identifying it with the democratic procurement of wellbeing), they fail to offer a model of what makes meeting possible and worth pursuing: a prior and always unfulfilled desire of encounter. To explicate the phenomenon of encounter, Carter stages a dialogue between recent and current theories of community put forward by European and North American cultural philosophers and the theory and practice of meeting in Australian Indigenous societies. The Australian material traverses the troubled history of misunderstanding characteristic of colonial cross-cultural encounter, using recent Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropological research to throw light on the obstacles to understanding evident in the colonial record. When this literature is brought into dialogue with western ways of conceptualizing sociability, a startling discovery: that meeting may not be desirable and, if it is, that its primary object may be to negotiate a future of non-meeting or legally binding distances between people. This finding allows us to reformulate the Modernist trope, that true meeting is only possible between complete strangers, in terms of an ecological understanding of place-making and resource management.