‘Enabling Periphereality’: Artistic Trajectories in a Peripheral City

Abstract

The common perspective on centre–periphery power relations views central cities as the source of cultural authority and legitimacy, the influence of which peripheral cities passively accept. By following theatre artists’ trajectories in the peripheral Israeli city of Acre, the article challenges this perception of the periphery as fundamentally inferior to the centre and focuses on how its environment enables artistic creativity. This perspective is developed through Bourdieu’s definition of trajectory alongside everyday practices, in the spirit of de Certeau. By adapting super-positioning from architectural practice the research combines urban spatial analysis with ethnography. The article first identifies the macro-social structures that define Acre and its theatre field as ‘peripheral’, it then exposes the everyday micro-practices of artistic trajectories that erode these larger, top-down social structures and juxtapose both social structures. This leads to the article’s main argument, that ascent within the peripheral cultural field proceeds according to different rules than in the centre, and to developing the notion of Enabling Periphereality to articulate those different conditions and rules.