James Brow, “Notes on Community, Hegemony, and the Uses of the Past,” Anthropological Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 1990): 1-6.

To open, Brow turns the anthropological lens back onto those who would be observers, to argue that ‘we’ and ‘they’ are/have been subject to similar social mechanisms. He states, for example:

While it is plausible to maintain that, having already happened, the past cannot be altered, it is equally evident that memory is less fixed. Moreover, it is clearly not only in so-called traditional societies that culturally constructed versions of the past are authorized to shape a people’s sense of identity. Representations of the past are an equally prominent feature of hegemonic struggle in modern industrial societies.

It is story-telling as a tool of hegemony that Brow sets out to tackle, laying out a “conceptual apparatus” – an ordered description of the hows and whys of group cohesiveness – “to facilitate the task of grasping the mechanisms and significance of these complex processes.”

He is careful about core terminology. For example, Brow notes that the term ‘community’ is often applied loosely to either a place or a collection of people. He uses it more precisely, limiting it to refer to “a sense of belonging together” (following Max Weber). He explains this subjective state includes both affective and cognitive components: a feeling of solidarity combined with an understanding of shared identity.

Working from that basis, Brow is able to define “communalization” as any pattern of action that promotes a sense of belonging together. He describes ‘pattern of action’ as a continuous process with two prominent characteristics that are in effect opposing tendencies.

• The one suggests a communal relationship in which “the orientation of social action . . . is based on a subjective feeling of the parties . . . that they belong together.”
• The other suggests an associative relationship in which “the orientation of social action … rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement.”

Brow maintains that while most social relationships have the first communal characteristic,  it is usually determined (meaning decided/influenced) by the second’s associative factors. In his view, there is a “constant interweaving,” therefore, “of economic utility and social affinity.” (He is describing what in Marxist terms would be called a dialectic.)

Brow cites Weber’s observation that this interweaving of social pattern-making occurs at many scales of interaction — from “a religious brotherhood, an erotic relationship, a relation of personal loyalty, a national community, the esprit de corps of a military unit” to “the family.” He then notes “Marx, of course, emphasized the creation of communal relations on the basis of common class position as a crucial aspect of the transformation of a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself.”

Brow then turns to furnishing examples “largely concerned with the interplay among processes of communalization that emerge from different bases situated between the levels of the family and the nation, as these are conditioned by changes in the distribution of power within the capitalist world economy.” He describes Benedict Anderson’s  “much-cited definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political community’” as affirming that the sense of belonging together is an active process, while at the same time it “tacitly” accepts that people look to generating a sense of community in conditions where a feeling of solidarity is effectively absent, or appears elusive, because the community is too large for face-to face contact. Brow takes the argument a step further, however, to argue that communalization – no matter the scale — always contains an imaginative aspect. He then discusses vertical community ties (here he assumes the model of a hierarchically organized society applies). In his view, these are as important to consider as horizontal ties (meaning class). He takes issue with the idea (Marxist) that “communal relations are always exclusively horizontal.” Brow acknowledges that there may be instances of “communitas,” (egalitarian social organization) in which horizontal relations of equality are pronounced and the vertical dimension hardly exists. But, he implies that condition is really only an abstract, utopian ideal. He is more interested in arguing that in communities with a vertical dimension the experience of community transcends class, tying the lower to the upper:

The popular British identification with its royal family, for example, bears ample testimony to the persistent power of vertical solidarity even in class-divided industrial societies. Communal relations may, in other words, possess both egalitarian and hierarchical dimensions.

Thus Brow is able to regard nation as a larger community that contains separate relations to communities ‘nested’ within it.

[A this point in his description, Brow has stipulated so many potential scales of interaction that I have to wonder if community, as a word, is in fact useful in this discussion? Despite Brow’s attempt to limit its definition, like the words ‘power’ and ‘culture’ in academic texts (roughly 1960s into the 1990s), here ‘community’ seems to be applying to everything and anything, thus progressively moving towards becoming representative of nothing. I have an uneasy feeling that Brow has perhaps set up a distinction without a difference. (More worrisome yet: is the term ‘community’ really only functioning as a way to reference previous works on the basis of homonymic similarity? After all, the works cited do not necessarily share Brow’s definition. See notes on the Donnan and Wilson text below and the discussion of McGuffin-esque metonyms)]

Brow avers that “All communal relations are socially constructed.” He qualifies the statement, however, by observing “some communal relations are felt to be more deeply binding than others,” so much so that they “seem to flow more from a sense of natural . . . affinity than from social interaction,” and come to possess “an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves.” They seem to be, in essence, primordial (an innate drive) and therefore inevitable.

Brow is interested in delineating the political aspects of assuming “primordialization,” the term used to describe “the process whereby certain kinds of communal relations are promoted and experienced as if they possessed an original and natural inevitability.” This would be an instance of Boudeau’s “doxa”: where the culturally constructed world is “seen as a self-evident and natural order” that is “taken for granted” because opinions to the contrary have not been voiced; no one has chosen to consider alternatives.

In his present, Brow finds nationalism and ethnicism to be “pervasive and forcefully propagated forms of contemporary primordialization.” He lists among the components of nationalism and ethnicism: kinship, language, religion, locality, and “etc.”, all of which interact with one another “and with communalization on other bases, especially class, in extremely complex and varied ways.”

Brow then addresses story-telling about the past to remark:

Almost everywhere, it seems, the sense of belonging together is nourished by being cultivated in the fertile soil of the past. Even newly established collectivities quickly compose histories for themselves that enhance their members’ sense of shared identity, while solidarity is fortified by a people’s knowledge that their communal relations enjoy an historical provenance. Communalization is further strengthened by the conviction that what ties a group of people together is not just a shared past but a common origin. Anthropologists hardly need to be reminded that claims of descent from a common ancestor are among the most effective and commonplace means by which human groups forge bonds of community. But what gives kinship its special potency as a basis of community is that it can draw upon the past not simply to posit a common origin but also to claim substantial identity in the present. Kinship thus provides a standard idiom of community for collectivities ranging from the family, the lineage and the clan to the nation and the race, and is extended also to include religious brotherhoods, feminist sisterhoods, fraternal orders of all kinds, and even the whole family of nations.

Despite the rhetoric of kinship (“blood is thicker than water“), the power of the past to shape communal relations in the present is more a matter of culture than of nature. What is at stake is not genetic affinity or the inertia of habitual behavior but the moral authority of tradition, the maintenance of which requires continuous cultural work. Various means are available to bolster the authority of tradition, of which one of the most widely adopted is its sacralization, as Weber noted when he described the ideal-type of traditional authority as “resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions.”

Construction of an authoritative tradition that identifies all who accept it as members of the same political community is particularly prominent in the creation of nations and sub-nations. Tradition typically composes a version of the past that not only binds the members of the nation to one another, by proclaiming their shared descent and/or common experience, but also associates the nation as a whole with a particular territory that  –maintaining the domestic imagery of the family — is its homeland. Such renditions of the past establish the enduring character of the national community despite all the ruptures and vicissitudes of history.

Brow also observes that:

The essential continuity of the nation is often also represented in the figure of the countryman or peasant, doubtless because his way of life seems endlessly to reproduce that of ancestral generations, while his (less often, her) intimate connection with the land epitomizes the nation’s inviolable attachment to its territory.

[The point is interesting when applied to Métis constructions of community, given that originally connection to the land ‘from time immemorial was maternally conferred.]

Brow then outlines hegemony: the “state of `total social authority’ which, at certain specific conjunctures, a specific class alliance wins, by a combination of `coercion’ and `consent’, over the whole social formation.” Brow accepts as given the Foucaultian axiom that there are “intimate and intricate connections between knowledge and power.” So that

at any moment socially organized knowledge of the past both reflects and affects the distribution and exercise of power. Memory is thus an important site of political conflict, and contending versions of the past figure prominently in what it is useful to describe, in the sense opened up by Gramsci, as the struggle for hegemony.

The attainment of hegemony, according to Brow “is very rare.” [I would have said ‘exceptionally transient’ and then worried about scale again, and perhaps sought to define hegemony as a perception/imagining of condition (see Williams below)]. Brow, referencing Gramsci, describes the struggle for hegemony, as another continuous process “whereby the interests of other groups are coordinated with those of a dominant or potentially dominant group, through the creation of ‘not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity’.” Communalization therefore, can be seen to be “an indispensable component of any hegemonic process.”

Brow cites Raymond William’s description of hegemony as continually “renewed, recreated, defended and modified . . . [but] also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own” (another example of a dialectic). He then lays out William’s formulation in a way that suggests ‘hegemony’ too is a term that applies so much in the everywhere that it threatens to fizzle into defining nothing essential found anywhere: “the relations of dominance and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness … in effect [saturate] … the whole process of living … to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense.”

[Is this just a complicated way of repeating that 'people are sheep’? Where is individual agency here? Do we opt to be 'co-erced' and 'trapped' in a system? Or is it an accident beyond our control? Do we just get “swept up in the times” (as Bayly put it)? Or do we pick sides? Is it really too much of one and the other happening simultaneously for us to know? I prefer to believe that the possibility of choice is ever-present. To plead a lack of awareness of the existence of choice is to feign innocence and deny personal responsibility for contributing by tacit agreement to outcomes. To my way of thinking, there are times when choosing one form of ‘common sense’ over another – and I would argue there is always another -- is motivated by considerations other than logic, although it might still be ‘rational’ in that there is a rationale: a choice is a reasoned response. There is an aspect of self-preservation to choosing, and sometimes self-interest, but I believe people are capable of altruism – or at least learning to mimic it. Otherwise, the ‘might is right’ approach is ‘naturalized’ and personal responsibility goes out the window. The historical result of that social scenario, as Innis argued, is that people who en masse decide to be mighty and righteous, so far, haven’t hung on to their superior position indefinitely. ‘They’ seem always to have got their ‘come-uppance’ – and a pretty ancient assessment of the state of the human condition that one is – ‘the meek,’ if the  Beatitudes are to be read as any indication of ancient reflection/prediction, inevitably see roles reversed.]

Brow moves on to note that “to bring into question and discussion what was previously unquestioned and therefore undiscussed is an act of political consciousness-raising. Conversely, primordialization, as an instance of what Bourdieu claims is the tendency of ‘every established order . . . to produce . . . the naturalization of its own arbitrariness’ is an act of political consciousness-reduction.”

[I remain leery of this shifting of responsibility off the individual. What a lazy bunch, who individually won’t be conscious – and will tacitly agree not to deride each other for said lazy unconsciousness.]

Brow introduces a new term: “Departicularization.” This he defines as “the process whereby historical discourses and practices are emptied of their local, concrete meanings and universalized, made the property of all who are incorporated within the hegemony. And he defines another process: “Idealization is the process through which the past is cleaned up and made the palatable embodiment of dominant values.”

[imho: Overseers of knowledge and its dissemination can be held as responsible for this – but agreement and acceptance of this domination is a choice.]

Brow winds up his construction of community as intrinsic to hegemony with a number of statements, notable among them:

Anderson’s remark that the nation is imagined as ‘inherently limited’ applies also to other kinds of community. Just as ‘no nation imagines itself as coterminous with mankind,’ so every community is defined in opposition to others. Communalization is, then, a process both of inclusion and of exclusion. At the same time differences among those who are incorporated within a community are often muted or obscured, while differences between insiders and outsiders are loudly affirmed. This pattern of polarization between communities and homogenization within them can then be fortified by appeals to the past that represent a cultural distinction as an original and essential difference.

None of these processes, however, is either uniform or unassailable. The contradictions and distortions within any hegemonic discourse, as well as the discrepancies between it and the popular understandings of common sense, leave it ever vulnerable to penetration, criticism, and refusal. The struggle for hegemony is always an open-ended process of contestation as well as incorporation, of negotiation and resistance as much as of accommodation and consent.

The political connection that Gramsci discerns ‘between common sense and the upper level of philosophy’ should be understood in the broadest possible sense. State officials and political parties are certainly among the major agencies that determine this relationship, but cultural, educational, and religious institutions, as well as the family and all kinds of voluntary organizations, are also fundamentally involved. As Williams stresses in the passage quoted earlier, the concept of hegemony looks at relations of domination and subordination … as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living — not only of political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and relationships.

In short, hegemonic struggle is ubiquitous in social life.

[Which is all very well, except, saying that community is apparently so much a part of hegemony and hegemony is so much a part of community (in modern industrial societies) that the two comprise a ‘natural’ (because indivisible) dialectic, Brow seems to be concluding that for the individual, the ‘sense of belonging together’ is in fact a primordial need -- one so overwhelming that it compels people to group together and play power games? No matter what other conditions exist?]

Sources Brow cites:

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic.

Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central problems in social theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——. 1984. The constitution of society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hall, Stuart. 1980. Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological theories: Race and colonialism. Paris: UNESCO.

——. 1986. Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 5-27.

Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1982. Recasting Marxism: Hegemony and new political movements. Socialist Review 66 (12: 6): 91-113.

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——. 1980. Problems in materialism and culture. London: Verso.

Upper Fort Garry in snow, 1858

At Anchor

Arriving for Dinner

Delivering a Pudding

Sea Legs & Pudding

Christmas Rescue

Christmas Ghost Ship and Pirates

George Seton, watercolour, “ Winter Travelling in Rupert’s Land,” dated 1857. Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1950-63-9.

C.A. Bayly, “The British and indigenous peoples” in Martin Daunton, and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and others: British encounters with indigenous peoples, 1600-1850 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 19-41.

Editors Daunton and Halpern describe this collection of essays as designed to enlarge the scope of British and American history while retaining a coherent centre from which to examine the ‘European’ perspective. They seek to  ‘reintegrate’ history of colonial North America with imperial and British history in order to extend chronology and obtain a wider set of contact/conflict histories for comparative analysis. Aboriginal peoples worldwide are not the central subject scrutinized; rather their presence serves to define European subjects. Identity is meant to be viewed as a category for analysis in which recognition of multifaceted multiplicity has displaced essentialism.[1]

Bayly‘s essay, though not explicit about it, is in effect ethnicizing the British. As Bayly puts it, “historians have begun to expose the particular conjunctures of political and economic change which created both ‘the British’ and ‘native peoples’.”[2] He does not use the term ethnicity for the British, therefore, but describes the formation of a widely shared acceptance or consciousness of a distinct ‘identity’ at the national level.

This was an identity based on the perception that unity of purpose and strength in numbers could confer power and allow domination on a world scale. Such domination was seen as a means of assuring homeland security, comfort, and prosperity. Past British subjects appear to have been pretty much correct about all of this up to a point. The state’s position got much stronger and it is still the unit of national governance. The country was not destroyed by warfare. Empire didn’t pan out though, Britain did not sustain its position as leading economic or military power, nor did the British people turn out to be higher up the evolutionary ladder than everyone else.

In tracing the emergence of Britishers, Bayly notes that “far from being a given Britishness was a recent, fragile and contested ideology of power. The century between the accession of George III and Benjamin Disraeli’s first ministry witnessed the creation of a still friable sense of British identity and British statehood, overriding regional patriotisms and local particularism.”[3] He describes catalysts of identity formation as including domestic economic integration, international war, revival of strenuous Protestant Christianity, and reinvention of the British Crown, along with the experience of ‘empire’ (meaning empire building).

While he acknowledges that “during the century from 1760 to 1860, domestic economic expansion and the experience of empire were finally absorbing the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the British Isles themselves,”[4] Bayly’s discussion seems to refer to Scottish and Irish people very generically – the point that there were communities among them that included spouses and progeny whose heritage reflected indigenous origins in other parts of the world is not made. He does note, however, that “This pattern of assimilation was not a smooth one. It raised sharp conflicts about identity, language and control of local resources within Britain itself.”[5]

Of attitudes towards assimilation and peoples elsewhere, Bayly suggests that “Outside the British Isles, the years from 1760 to 1860 also saw the creation of a new concept of indigenous peoples. Eighteenth-century ideas about the unity of mankind and the diffusion through the world of the lost tribes of Israel were slowly being replaced by the vision of a ladder or hierarchy of development up or down which societies must pass.”[6] It is worth noting, however, that Canadian historian Olive Patricia Dickason, Myth of the Savage, traces the history of these ideas to much a earlier period.

Bayly mentions that the question of whether North American Métis were ‘indigenous’ or not was asked, but he does not elaborate on where or when. Overall his commentary on the “debate about origins” of peoples is loose — he comments that it has “considerable resonance today, at a time when United Nations and other agencies are targeting economic resources at ‘indigenous peoples’, often very narrowly defined,” but does not delve deeply into whether such debates are solely about origins, or in what sense. Is he speaking of geographic, cultural, or biological arguments? By what measurement are arguments judged to be narrow?[7]

George Seton, watercolour, “Indian Dog Feast. Ruperts Land 1857.” Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1950-63-1.10R.

In the context of the book’s collection of essays, it is acceptable for Bayly to argue “that the period from 1760-1860 was a critical one in the epistemological and economic creation of ‘indigenous peoples’ as a series of comparable categories across the globe … also … that a consideration of the nature of British imperial expansion and of British intellectual history is central to an understanding of the invention of these ‘indigenous peoples’.” Nevertheless, the lack of a balancing North American perspective presents problems. One of the first difficulties I had with the text was the seeming — and rather heavily seeming — implication throughout most of the piece that being indigenous was somehow a British invention that other peoples had no deliberate part in (Bayly reserved for the essay’s end a comment that “Non-European societies were not, of course, passive victims of these material pressures or ideological constructs,” they “fought back against, ‘wrote back’ against and creatively negotiated the advances of colonial rule”).[8] Even in his acknowledging that there is a need to “locate the voices of the marginalized in a broader context” Bayly persists in maintaining a centric position that places ‘them’ on his margins – which the language of the entire text suggests are ‘our’ margins.[9]

My biggest problem with Bayly’s historical assessment lays in the tendency to make rather sweeping statements about North America that don’t seem to recognize how big a place it was/is, how greatly varied its peoples, and how time matters when it comes to instancing. For example his observation that “In North America, the new rifles of the  American and British forces came into the hands of American Indians who used them with great effect against the European invader,” apparently refers to 1750. But, which ‘Indians’? Where? And ‘came into the hands’ does not adequately take agency into account — were these guns bought and paid for? Nor is any explanation given as to how access to French guns might have figured in conflict.[10]

George Seton, watercolour, “Buffalo Hunters of the Far West, 1858.” Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1950-63-1.8R.

I am even less comfortable with Bayly’s handling of the ‘prevalent idea’ that “indigenous peoples were to be subject to stricter controls, and if possible exploited as a labour pool.”[11] Though this was definitely a British idea, at a practical level it was not always possible to implement — in the vast territory of Rupert’s Land for example. And, once again, if  the agency of the ‘other’ is considered — as numerous North American historians have done — ‘exploitation’ seems, at times, to have been a two-way arrangement. Further to the matter of ‘stricter controls’ it seems to me that Bayly’s description of historical patterns is likely to foster a misapprehension. He cites Elizabeth Mancke as recently pointing out:

the role of the domestic British state and of its military and naval forces in what became Canada had long been much more obtrusive than it was further south in the Thirteen Colonies. … After 1783, British territorial expansion into central and north-western Canada and treaty-making with native peoples continued to be driven forward by rivalries with the Americans and Russians and by the need to secure revenues to pay for an exaggerated military presence. These concerns continued to influence the nature of Canadian political culture until well into the nineteenth century. In Mancke’s words, ‘the red coats of the army, rather than the red coats of the North West Mounted Police preceded British settlement’ in nineteenth-century Canada.” [12]

Some definition, of which manifestation of ‘Canada’ is being referred to and at what particular time, is needed here — especially to explain how one can argue that British naval ships, soldiers, and coastal settlements were not all preceded by fishing sailors and their shore stations. Or, to take an inland example: If the above quote is meant to include Lord Selkirk’s Red River Colony begun in 1812, where a small settlement already existed, then the first red coats bent on control appeared in 1816 and were worn by North West Company [NWC] Métis, who had previously fought for the British against the Americans (in the War of 1812), but who were at that time antagonistic to that particular version of the settlement. The next militaristic regiment to appear was a mixed assemblage of mercenaries primarily made up of de Meuron’s retired Swiss regiment (also from the war of 1812) hired by Lord Selkirk as soldier/settlers. Selkirk was taken to court in Montreal over having deployed them against the NWC post at Fort William while enroute to Red River, and found guilty of unwarranted trespass in 1818. His ‘troops’ failed as farmers and deserted the settlement by 1826. The original Métis settlers continued to pursue their own interests as they had from the outset. An actually British military contingent appeared in 1846, led by John Ffolliett Crofton, ostensibly slated to somehow handle the Oregon Territory problem much further west. They did not stay long in North America — apparently Crofton saw no point in being there — but were replaced by a small band of Chelsea pensioners in 1848.[13] These generated complaints from settlers for being drunk, some were arrested, and then most went home (though throughout Red River’s history there were individuals who had arrived with various groups, opted to integrate with the community, and remained as settlers). Settlement continued in Red River without any official military presence until 1857 when a contingent of Royal Canadian Rifles arrived (in black coats) — once again finding there was nothing much to do, though Major George Seton created a number of sketches of the settlement, some of which illustrate this post. The Canadian Rifles departed in 1861.[14] Another temporal gap occurred until Canadian militiamen from Ontario and Quebec arrived with Colonel Wolseley as the Red River Expeditionary Force in 1870 — with the promise of 160 acres of crown land apiece if they remained as settlers. It was at this time that the control of life in the Canadian West was radically altered, and not by red coats’ soldiering, but by an inundation of settlers from Ontario, supported by the expansionist program of the new Dominion of Canada.

George Seton, watercolour, “ Fort Garry, Rupert’s Land,” dated 19 March 1858. Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1950-63-1.19R.

I find very little of what Bayly goes on to say about such things as ‘garrison mentality’, ‘military imperialism’, or forestry concerns meshes well with Canadian historiography, simply because very little is done to specify where or when in North America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his comments are meant to apply. I found the lack of precision distracting to the point that I have to admit failure when it comes to appreciating his argument — though perhaps the real problem is my unwillingness as a reader to suspend my own sense of place and assimilate to a perspective generated an ocean away.

George Seton, watercolour, “Men’s Barracks from the Officers Messroom Window, Fort Garry, Winter of 1857-1858.” Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1950-63-1.12R.

Additional reading:

See Sharron A. Fitzgerald, abstract, “Hybrid Identities in Canada’s Red River Colony,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1340069.

Frances Ann Hopkins, oil on canvas, “The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls,” dated 1877, with inscription: “”This picture represents a portage on the ‘Red River Expedition’ commanded by Colonel G.J. Wolsely (afterwards F.M. Viscount Wolsely). It was painted for him by Mrs. Edward Hopkins. Colonel Wolsely is on a very low seat in the boat with Union Jack and has a puggaree on his hat. Louisa, Dowager Viscountess Wolsely presented it to the Dominion of Canada in 1917, in memory of her husband.”  Source: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1989-400-1 In memory of Viscount Wolsely.

m

[2] Bayly, in Empire and others, 19

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 20.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 21-22.

[8] Ibid, 22.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 24.

[11] Ibid, 25.

[12] Ibid, 26. According to the end notes, Bayly is referring to Mancke, “Another British America. A Canadian model for the early modern British empire,”  Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 1 (1997): 1-36.

[13] On red coated Chelsea pensioners see http://www.chelsea-pensioners.co.uk/

[14] See Charles N. Bell, “Some Red River Settlement History,” Manitoba Historical Society Transactions Series 1, No. 29 (Read 29 April 1887), http://bit.ly/ci8iSG.

Hastings Donnan, and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity Nation and State (New York: Berg, 1999). l[Google Books preview: http://bit.ly/7mhMmS.]

Donnan and Wilson outline the history of the anthropological study of boundaries, the turn to recognizing geographical borders as a site of interest, and the emergence of borderlands as an abstract concept. Along with an extended introduction, they include studies of cultures at state borders from the U.S. and Mexico, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Spain and Morocco, and various parts of Southeast Asia and Africa. Border studies are shown to allow the inclusion of the relation of nation and state in anthropological examination, thus illustrating how people experience the nation and state in their everyday lives. To quote a few exemplary statements:

• “Borders are places where wars start, as Primo Levi once wrote. But they are also bridges – that is, sites for ongoing cultural exchange.”[1]

• “There has always been a tension between the fixed, durable and inflexible requirements of national boundaries and the unstable, transient and flexible requirements of people. If the principal fiction of the nation-state is ethnic, racial, linguistic and cultural homogeneity, then borders always give the lie to this construct.”[2]

• “Anyone studying how nations and states maintain distinct identities while adapting to new ideas and experiences knows that borders provide particularly revealing windows for the analysis of ‘self’ and ‘other.’ … Without borders, whether physical or symbolic, nationalism could not exist, nor could borders exist without nationalism. …” [3]

In Donnan and Wilson’s analysis of past anthropological directions they opine that “Differences may have been stressed at the expense of similarities, edges emphasized rather than overlap.”[4] A stated hope is that “our book might be read as a modest attempt to integrate divergent trends in the anthropological study of power and culture, trends which sometimes seem to be at loggerheads.”[5] It is worthy of note that they do not propose a synthesis. Nor is one provided. Rather, the text supplies description — a respectably thick one that, for the most part, I found satisfying.

The text is especially valuable for its overview of how the construction of identity and culture has been understood, as well as of how problematic the nature of academic construction has proven to be, given the difficulty that language, in particular, poses. For example, though terms such as ‘boundary’ and ‘border’ are common to multiple texts, they are accorded meanings by individual authors that are in fact different enough that commensurability must be questioned.[6]

THE MCGUFFIN

Donnan and Wilson are critical of too loose an application of trendy words as substitutes for any actual theory that might anchor anthropological description:

“The recent interest in theorizing the borderlands of identity, in urban and rural centres and peripheries everywhere, may seem on the surface to be especially relevant to the politico-territorial borderlands, but it does not take us very far unless we also examine how state power is situated in place, space and time. Although images of frontiers and international borders may further the intellectual pursuit of other metaphorical borderlands of self and group identity, they may indicate a superficial and exploitative use of these borders as metonyms, as plot devices necessary for the furtherance of the narratives of identity elsewhere, in an anthropological equivalent to Hitchcock’s ‘McGuffin’ (the thing, event, or moment in a story which gets the plot started, but which is irrelevant to the narrative once it gets going.”[7]

They tackle the McGuffin muddle by historicizing its development. They do not seek to get rid of the notion that studying boundaries is informative, but to make clear that if one is to engage in this kind of work, one must be aware of what one is doing — where analysing the schism between the construction of nation and the lived realities of people is the goal, one ought to be conscious of the schism between construct and subject that academic writing necessarily embodies.

OF NATIONS, STATES, AND NATION-STATES

It is important, for example, to be aware of conceptual overlap when it comes to describing nations, states, and nation-states.[8]

Nations obviously matter, in that subject people become the object of anthropologists’ studies, but, Donnan and Wilson aver, people under the sway of nationhood cannot be isolated from consideration of the state, because “try as they might, political anthropologists cannot escape the particular polity of the nation-state.”[9] The state, they note, has “distinct properties of its own.” They cite Carole Nagengast to explain:

“the state is not just a set of institutions staffed by bureaucrats who serve public interest. It also incorporates cultural and political forms, representations, discourse, practices, and activities, and specific technologies and organizations of power that, taken together, help to define the public interest, establish meaning, and define and naturalize available social identities.”[10]

The nation-state, they, point out, “is an artificial construct.” Further, they describe the construct as:

“dependant on the historical experience of only two states, Britain and France (Wallace 1994: 61). While the origins and evolution of the nation-state are hotly debated, there can be little doubt that the twin concepts of nation and state sit uneasily with each other. This is due in large part to the appeal each concept has for its members. In fact, the crisis of the state may be due as much to shifts in people’s perceptions of the importance and efficiency of the state as it is due to the state’s loss of real control and power.”[11]

It is, therefore, important to be cognizant of the underlying — and outlying — dynamics affecting the “competing world systems” vying to harness international capital.[12] While territorial integrity and monopoly of force are “hallmarks of the nation-state,” Donnan and Wilson observe the institution’s ‘crisis’ reflects its “experiencing … twin threats” — the internal and external pressures of “supranationalism from above, and ethnonationalism from below,” both of which might “impede its provision of the national and international order necessary for the working of its politics and economics.” [13]

Perception, then, is no small matter.

OF BOUNDARIES, BORDERS, AND BORDERLANDS

About anthropological analysis, Donnan and Wilson state:

“We must be careful … not to let the images and metaphors of frontiers and borders blur our view of the politics of both anthropology and the borderlands themselves. As [Josiah McC.] Heyman cautions, in regard to the US-Mexico border, ‘It is … when the border is condensed as an image, and when this image symbolizes wide-ranging political or theoretical stances, [that] understanding of the border becomes relative and delocalized‘[14]

Anthropology is political, therefore, as well as constructive. Donnan and Wilson examine different approaches taken to the concepts of boundaries and borders by anthropologists. They note that while sometimes careful distinctions are drawn among social, cultural, and geopolitical or territorial borders/boundaries [places and/or spaces of divide], at other times they are conflated, adding: “Of course, these three elements … are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They may distinguish different types of boundary but they need not; they may, in fact be aspects of a single boundary.”

The three anthropological approaches that Donnan and Wilson discuss — 1. Social and Symbolic Boundaries 2. Geopolitical and state Boundaries 3. Cultural and Postmodern Borderlands — they regard as the “dominant patterns of usage or emphasis in recent anthropological research … marked  … by an associated body of literature.”[15] They caution that the three approaches are ‘valuable’ “only as long as we keep in sight of the ways in which they differ” and they are critical “of how some minimise the role of the state and the nation, and even the geopolitical border, in their effort to be fashionable or persuasive.”

OF BOUNDARIES:

Beginning with ’1. Social and Symbolic Boundaries,’ Donnan and Wilson note that in early anthropological works, boundaries:

“were of interest only in so far as they enabled ‘closure’ of the research population [which could in some sense be regarded as socially and culturally discrete]: what was of real interest was not the boundary itself or relations across it, but the practices, beliefs and institutions of those it encompassed.” Hence, the practice of “bounding” one’s study.[16]

They credit the publication of Fredrik Barth’s 1969 text, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference [see entry for Barth], with shifting the anthropological focus onto the boundary itself.[17] In 1983, Judith Okely’s work on traveller-gypsies and giorgios confirmed the importance of “viewing any boundary from both sides, from both within and without.”[18] They discuss at some length Sandra Wallman’s theorizing, which apparently she began publishing c.1978, on the consistency of boundaries: she argued that they did not divide sides like walls, but were more akin to a teabag in permeability. In evoking that ‘prosaic’ analogy, Wallman’s point, Donnan and Wilson say, “is that we must never forget that a boundary occurs only as a reaction of one system to another, and is thus necessarily oppositional, having two sides.” The divided systems are social [I would say socio-political] and may be systems of activity, of organization, or of meaning. The interface between them “following Douglas (1970), is liable to be characterized by ambiguity and danger.” They set out Wallman’s visualization [approximately] thus:

identitymmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm interface

inside (us) We identify ‘us’  mmmmmmmm the border around

in opposition to ‘them’mmmmmmmmmmm the familiar, the

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm normal, the un-problematic

We use the boundary for our purposes

according to our needs(s) at this time/

in this context

mmmmmmm

outside (them) they identify themselvesmm the beginning of

by contrast to the rest of us.mmmmmmmm another system.

They use the boundary formmmmmmmm

their purposes. mmmmmmmmmmmmmm Performance, appearance,

m activity, social or symbolic

m structure is different.[19]

The questions Wallman raised included: “What kind of resource is this boundary? What is it used for? In which (and how many) contexts is it relevant? What is its status in situational time? For whom is it an asset, for whom a liability? With what other differences is it congruent or associated? What meaning does it have on the other (outer) side?” [emphasis in the original].[20]

Anthony Cohen is discussed as another influential author (Donnan and Wilson cite a series of books published during the 80s). Cohen, dissatisfied “with the analytical inadequacies of classical sociological and anthropological notions of ‘community’ which stressed structure or morphology as its defining feature,” turned to boundaries to argue that “A community exists … only by virtue of its opposition to another community. The notion is thus relational, implying both similarity and difference.”[21]

Cohen maintained that boundaries between communities:

“are constructed by people in their interactions with others from whom they wish to distinguish themselves but, unlike the markers of national boundaries, we cannot objectively determine in advance what the distinguishing features of these symbolic boundaries will be, nor exactly where the boundaries will be drawn. Moreover, they may mean different things to different individuals, both to those on opposite sides of the boundary as well as those within it.”

He warned that such boundaries may be invisible to those who were outsiders to the communities and not involved in their boundary making, so that the “task of the researcher … is to uncover these boundaries and the meanings they are given.” To Donnan and Wilson, this suggests that Cohen was “principally concerned with what Wallman earlier called the ‘identity element’ of a boundary.”[22]

In Cohen’s view, the symbolic marking of boundaries increased as local diversity [based on ties of locality, kinship and class] decreased in the face of “technological advances in communication” that promoted cultural homogeneity. As the local becomes more firmly enmeshed with the “wider political and administrative structures of the state,” structural distinctiveness no longer sets apart locality and community, one from the other. Nevertheless, Cohen observes, “their sense of difference and distinctiveness” [reads identity in next sentence] remains.[23]

Donnan and Wilson do not mean to imply that to Cohen structure is unimportant. They point out that he argues “any local collectivity must be viewed in context of the wider societal relationships and entities of which it forms a part.” This, they take to be an expression of Cohen’s interest in showing how experiencing a collectivity at one scale can mediate the meaning of collectivity at another scale: “how wider political and economic forces impinge upon locality and vice versa.”

A criticism that Donnan and Wilson note Cohen has been subjected to (in light of Talal Asad’s work on post-colonialism for example), is that his theorizing seems to lead to an emphasis on focusing on the ‘inside’ — a complaint that has been levelled at Barth as well. There is a need to include analyses of the ‘outside,’ if only to signal that external constraints exist, but better, to know something about them.[24]

Of GEOPOLITICAL AND STATE BOUNDARIES [WHICH ARE BORDERS]

It seems Donnan and Wilson are most concerned about promoting interest in borders.  They decry a tendency in academic literature to invoke borders only to relegate them to the background, while lines of inquiry and discussion range elsewhere. They are dissatisfied with anthropological studies that adopt borders as “no more than an analytically distant presence with a vague influence on whatever the topic in hand: at worst, they are merely part of the obligatory ‘scene setting’, their study relinquished to political scientists and geographers.”[25]

Donnan and Wilson trace the history of borders in anthropological work to Abner Cohen’s middle eastern studies of the mid-1960s in which he presented an analysis of ‘The Border Situation’ — “a constellation of economic and political conditions.” Cohen found 4 main occurrences/components particular to the situation”:

“(i) some families cut off from land and kin

(ii) villages were cut off from political centers/national organizations

(iii) villagers were increasingly incorporated within framework of ‘outsider’ society from which they derived economic advantage

(iv) the [geographic] area suddenly became of strategic importance.”

Cohen went on to argue that this situation evoked an interesting reaction: “the revival of an old, indigenous political form.”[26]

The work of American anthropologists John Cole and Eric Wolf, is credited with moving border studies forward in the mid-1970s. With The Hidden Frontier, a study of ‘ecology and ethnicity’ in the Italian Tyrol, Wolf pursued issues such as: “why ethnic and nationalist loyalties so often seemed to transcend class loyalties and ties of formal citizenship.” Though Donnan and Wilson note that Abner Cohen had previously raised questions similar to those of Wolf and Cole, the latter authors concentrated interest on “the transformations of local … political alignments in relation to the promptings of market and nation-building” and assigned urgency to these transformations, in locating them “at the politically sensitive margins of the state; and (again in both studies) among ethnic minorities incompletely incorporated into the national body or resistant to it.”[27]

Donnan and Wilson see Cole and Wolf reiterating Barth’s observation “that ethnic boundaries may be maintained despite relations across them,” but it was “in showing how we must move beyond purely local influences to understand and explain this process” that their contribution had significance. Their work supplied:

“an example of where ethnic boundaries arise as a result of, and are sensitive to, the rise and demise of state boundaries. One can only be understood with reference to the other… In this respect Cole and Wolf could be said to represent the coming together of a symbolic boundary focus with a political economic perspective which attempts to situate local boundary making within wider historical and political processes.” [28]

Wolf and Cole’s “new anthropological interest in how local developments can have an impact on national centres of power and hegemony” owed some of its inspiration to historians, such as Sahlins, who looked at “localities and the construction of national identities.” Not surprisingly, then, is Wolf and Cole’s injunction that the anthropology of borders needed to be ‘historical’ anthropology. From Wolf and Cole’s work, Donnan and Wilson interpret borders to be “spatial and temporal records of relationships between local communities and between states. … a perspective in which the dialectical relations between border areas and their nations and states take precedence over local culture viewed with the state as a backdrop.[29] They attribute to Cole and Wolf’s influence, an increasing number of studies into “the historical and contemporary intersections of state and symbolic boundaries in, for instance, the creation of a proletarianised and disenfranchised labour force.”[30]

OUT OF BORDERS — BORDERLANDS

Donnan and Wilson are of the opinion that, as a genre, borderlands studies evince “the potential overlap between different [conceptualizations of] ‘borders’ sometimes being used as a stylistic device to imply resonances and connections not always demonstrated or warranted.”[31]

They illustrate their point by discussing “the work of those who suggest that ‘border’ be metaphorically extended to all situations characterised by contradiction and contest in the light of critics who challenge this metaphorical approach for distracting attention from the ‘real’ problems of state borders and from issues of power.” While they allow that “In a sense, of course, borders are always metaphors, since they are arbitrary constructions based on cultural convention,” they quote Avtar Brah’s observation that “far from being mere abstractions of a concrete reality, metaphors are part of the discursive materiality of power relations” and therefore “can serve as powerful inscriptions of the effects of political borders.”[32]

[Note: 'culture' and 'power' have a similar track record: everything they stand for is 'found' everywhere, descriptions can go on ad infinitum and yet nothing actually gets said as far as explanation goes -- the problem being that cultures colliding in borderlands where power is the operational dynamic is meaningless if culture is everything and borderlands are everywhere and power emanates all over the place. All that really gets said is that interaction is very common among people and they have to negotiate with each other on a constant basis. It would be helpful if with a study of 'identity' one was able to ask why negotiations include grouping together with other individuals under a common appellation.]

OF CULTURAL AND POSTMODERN BORDERLANDS

Donnan and Wilson define ‘Cultural and Postmodern Borderlands’ as a “line of inquiry which recruits the ‘border’ as an image for what happens when two or more cultures meet.”[33] They reference the writings of Renato Rosaldo to explain:

“The borders concerned exist at many different levels, and may be cultural, social, territorial, political, sexual, racial or psychological, while the notion of ‘border crossings’ is similarly varied and is just as likely to be used to refer to cross-dressing or the synthesising of cinematic genres as it is to traversing state lines.”

The enthusiasm for borders as a metonym apparently arose out of dissatisfaction with “conventional anthropological concept of culture, an inadequacy which propelled … many … who … sought to understand cultural disjuncture to devise new strategies for studying both the interstices between cultures and the differences within them. … Borderlands surface not only at the boundaries of officially recognized cultural units, but also at less formal intersections, such as those of gender, age, status, and distinctive life experiences. … According to Rosaldo, social analysis must reorient itself to the study of such borderlands, which ‘should be regarded not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production that require investigation.’”[34]

[At this point in their discussion, it occurred to me that if I was to imagine 'identity', it would be by dropping the idea that there is a line or a symbolically tangible if permeable boundary, in favour of recognizing the idea of 'difference' as a cloud-like vapour that shifts, like a fog bank, or a wisp of smoke – there is nothing solid about it, it is however sensed, and therefore accorded a presence. It is this sensation that is talked about as if it were real. It is accorded status and made ‘real’ – realized -- in politics and economy, in that policies are organized to accommodate it as if it were actually there. There is a response to these inventions/interventions, and so it goes on and on, as a self-perpetuating, constantly modifying mechansim/process/thingism.]

POINTS OF INTEREST FROM FINDINGS EXPRESSED IN TEXT:

ON SCALE

Robert R. Alvarez and George A. Collier are presented describing borderlands “in the wholesale markets [that seem] to share some of the socio-political processes characteristic of borders between states; namely, both involve ‘differential access to formal channels of power’.”[35]

ON MOBILITY: DO PEOPLE CARRY AROUND THEIR OWN BORDERLAND?

In studying Mexican wage labourers who migrate, Roger Rouse describes an instance which “suggests … [the original people] now constitute a single community across a variety of sites, each with its own history, language, political system and cultural code. They inhabit a world which shows few signs of synthesis or homogenisation and where competing cultural forms can be managed only buy developing skills of ‘cultural bifocality’.” This he thinks of as exemplifying conceptually a ‘border zone’ which exists across space even though the sites [people who carry a shared 'identity'?] might be far apart.[36]

ON FORESTS AND TREES

Relying on the observations of Heyman, Donnan and Wilson comment that “Such images [as that above] can be seductive.” But they caution “vigilance against being carried away by the rhetoric.” [Again, it seems, when culture and borders get combined, borders end up being everywhere because cultures are not homogeneous]. “By falling for this metonymic usage … our understanding of the border becomes reductive [not to say impossibly relative], and risks leaving power out of the picture.”[37]

The studies of Gupta and Ferguson are discussed as examples of using borderlands to evoke the ‘postmodern condition’ and places of ‘incommensurable contradictions’; a zone where cultures overlap. [At this point in the text it seems as though this kind of postmodernist approach reflects a disinterest in tying together diffuse occurrences; a disinterest that is indicative of an avoidance of discussing, or taking any responsibility for, inequalities that might qualify the investigator, or narrator, as -- by association -- one of the reasons why these inequalities persist. The approach protects the use/deployment of a kind of scholarly myopia from the reader's view – one can’t see the trees for the forest.]

Gupta and Ferguson are quoted as observing “The term [borderland] does not indicate a fixed topographical site between two other fixed locales (nations, societies, cultures), but an interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorialization that shapes the identity of the hybridized subject.” [It seems to me that in this instance, it appears 'borderlands' is something internalized by individuals, something that might as easily be described as 'past experiences' or 'sense of alienation' and attached to the discussion of 'identity' -- the analogy to territory seems gratuitous -- an unnecessary confusion.][38]

ON MUTABLE IDENTITIES

“Much recent writing by natives of this border [US/Mexican] region has similarly attempted to expose the ‘multiple subjectivities’ of borderland life by describing how those who live there draw strategically on multiple repertoires of identity (for instance, see Behar 1993; see also Hicks 1991; and the essays in Welchman 1996).”[39]

ON LOYALTIES, LONGING, AND BELONGING

“These intellectuals find themselves in exile among the Ashkenazi … elite of Haifa and Tel Aviv, yet equally perceive their return ‘home’ to their natal villages as exile from exile.”[40]

ON FRAGMENTATION OF CATEGORIES

Smadar Lavie “draws attention to the explosion of identities which characterises postmodern borderlands – explosion in the sense both of proliferating and fragmenting identities – as well as to how the dilemma of negotiating identity is magnified there.” [italics in original] [41]

ON ‘BORDERZONE’ FESTIVITY AND PLAY

“from the perspective of these scholars [for example Lavie, Turner, McMaster] the borderland is simultaneously a zone of cultural play and experimentation as well as of domination and control. The ‘borderzone is not just a dangerous space, but a festive one, because of the creative energy liberated by the common struggle of resistance’. It is liminal space, an ‘experimental region of culture’, whose appeal is ‘the access artists have to many languages (discourses) from different communities’.”[42] But, it seems, it isn’t always empowering. [In my opinion the fun is only understood as fun from the outside – from the inside it is wry, ironic, and even sometimes desperate – a coping strategy – see comments on Pocahontas’s Daughters.]

‘DANGERZONES’: ON ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN HOSTILE GROUPS AS DEVISIVE

Dan Rabinowitz argues “that borderland encounters … have deepened the rift between Israeli and Palestinian identities rather than produced a synthesis, and the same is arguably true of Catholic and Protestant identities at the Irish border.”[43]

Conclusion?

In thinking about Donnan and Wilson’s text — which I enjoyed — the principal impression I was left with was a suspicion that transference and projection were inescapable tendencies for researchers — no different really from the older notion of ‘bias.’ I am not sure that Donnan and Wilson — informative as their book was — have resolved any problem. Is this an integration? Is it integrating to show how disparate perceptions can be by providing a ‘thick description’ of diverse views?

[2] Horsman Marshall, quoted in Ibid., 1.

[3] Donnan and Wilson, Ibid., back cover.

[4] Ibid., 40.

[5] Ibid., 41.

[6] Ibid., xiv, 4.

[7] Ibid., 16.

[8] See Umut Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), for example.

[9] Ibid., 151.

[10] Carole Nagengast, quoted in Ibid., 154.

[11] Ibid., 153.

[12] Ibid., 2, 153.

[13] Ibid., 1, 152-154.

[14] Ibid., 16.

[15] Ibid., 19, 41.

[16] Ibid., 20.

[17] Ibid., 21.

[18] Ibid., 22.

[19] Ibid., 23.

[20] Sandra Wallman quoted in Ibid., 23.

[21] Ibid., 24.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 25.

[25] Ibid., 26-27.

[26] Ibid., 30.

[27] Ibid., 32.

[28] Ibid., 33.

[29] Ibid., 34.

[30] Ibid., 35, they cite, for example, Heyman, 1991, and Kearney 1998, in chapters five and six, of this volume.

[31] Ibid., 41.

[32] Ibid., 40.

[33] Ibid., 35.

[34] Ibid., 35-36.

[35] Heyman quoted in Ibid., 37.

[36] Donnan and Wilson, Ibid., 37.

[37] Ibid., 38.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., 39.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid., 40.

borderlands and 21st century pop culture: danger entertainment as play, avatar identities:

“Borderlands Intro,” posted to You Tube by TheCyborgNinjaJaguar, 13 October 2009.

John W. Bennett

John W. Bennett. Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life. Chicago/New York: Aldine/Atherton, 1969. [Google Books limited preview: http://bit.ly/5vmaeW]

With this text, Bennett proposes to extend “the horizons of ecological analysis” by applying ‘cultural ecology’ — the study of how human utilization of nature both influences, and is influenced by, social organization and cultural values. He is of the opinion that only through “relating of cultural patterns to economic needs are processes visible.”[1]

Bennett studied the people of ‘Jasper’ a fictitious name for a real region in rural Saskatchewan, near the American border. He focused on four groups that he found had devised distinctive approaches to living in the area — Cree, ranchers, homesteaders, and Hutterites — to show how within this “ambient community of neighbours,” each group had “established its distinct ecological niche through a process of adaptive adjustment, both in its techniques of production and in its institutional arrangements.” The methodology adopted is eclectic and the concept of adaptation is stressed. He describes adaptation as a behaviour that is manifest in choices, decision-making, and coping strategies, and explains that deciding to choose alternative strategies involves taking into consideration ‘opportunity costs’ — weighing the value of a particular resource in its best “alternative use” [italics in source]. He notes that factors external to the locality affect decision-making and outcomes.[2]

The study makes for a fascinating read, in good part because of Bennett’s talent for turns of phrase when it comes to pithy observations. A number of statements struck me as particularly quotable/footnotable:

Bennett, perhaps because American, discerned a distinctively Canadian “middle-class nicety” in his subjects: “the strong middle-class outlook which characterises Canadian culture – emphasizes the ‘protestant’ virtues: thrift, sobriety, concealment of violence and conflict when it exists, and a genial, neutral manner of behavior.”[3]

He found North American agriculturalists, though conservative enough in their preference for tried and tested strategies, and in according cultural sanction to time-honoured techniques, “are still less inclined in these directions than most of the people called ‘peasants’” — an interesting distinction given Gerhard Ens’ thesis.[4] Bennett avers that “if the term ‘peasant’ means anything, it refers to agriculturalists who for very long periods of time have had to cope with extreme shortages of capital, exploitative practices by landlords and governments that inhibit their opportunities, and weakly developed national economies.”[5] Further, Bennett rejects characterization, by economists and social scientists, of behaviours among people of the Northern Plains, who were non-agrarian or whose agrarian practices seemed arrested, as ‘backward’. Nor does he think the term properly applies to conservative peasants.[6]

Bennett judged the Great Plains to be a remarkable case of the cultural ‘melting pot’, averring “the ecological constraints required relatively uniform adaptations … and ethnic cultures survived only by conscious policy … as a consequence of exclusion and discrimination…” although he notes that distinctions of difference don’t necessarily show up in written records.[7]

Bennett describes competition and cooperation as ‘two sides of the same coin.’ Cooperation, he notes, “generally refers to strategic activities involving two or more persons, carried out for mutual benefit. Competition refers to separate efforts to accomplish identical goals on the part of two or more persons, in accordance with certain rules.” He points out that the “power in numbers” is an impetus to group formation when it comes to competition over resources. In his view competition brings about an “amorphous sense of group identity,” and conflict ensures group maintenance because people intensify relationships when threatened by cultural change.[8]

A fifth group that receives mention in the text is the Métis. Bennett does not delve deeply into their history, except to point out that the basis of their organization of the buffalo hunt originated with the Plains Cree. By the time of Bennett’s present, he observed the Métis to have become a “non-people’ in the West – at least in the eyes of “eastern politicians out of touch with the history of the old West.”[9]

The greatest insights that Bennett’s approach offers, in my estimation, relate to culture. In bringing the realities of living in the rural West to light, he shows culture to be a human resource that enables survival, informs adaptation, and — where there is competition for access to natural resources — does not lead to homogeneity. Pluralism within the region he studied was workable. As for contests, between rural peoples and the Canadian nation (as imagined by its proponents), Bennett suggests these ought to be regarded as trial and error processes working their way out, not as consciously planned operations.[10] In his view, “Perhaps most essential is an understanding … that most rural north Americans have never rejected involvement in the nation, but have actively sought it as part of their desire to be incorporated in the national entity.”[11]

[2] Ibid., viii, x, 5, 15, 45.

[3] Ibid., 6.

[4] Ibid., 16.

[5] Ibid., 317.

[6] Ibid., 122, see also 104 where he confirms that a farmer can profitably have his land in scattered plots.

[7] Ibid., 57, 65.

[8] Ibid., 70, 85, 157, 168, 186, 225, 277, 289.

[9] Ibid., 54, 148, 151.

[10] Ibid., 321.

[11] Ibid., 276.

Comments on Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969).

The description quoted below is excerpted from a text I found very useful: Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: frontiers of identity, nation and state (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 21-22 [Google Books limited preview: http://bit.ly/4wkpNt].

Donnan and Wilson describe Barth‘s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries as:

An edited collection of essays which set out to address ‘the problems of poly-ethnic organization’ (1969: vii), or what happens when different cultural groups come into contact. In his introduction to this collection, Barth questions the value of a view that sees the world as divided up into social collectivities which correlate neatly with discrete and discontinuous cultures. Instead, for Barth, ethnic groups are socially constructed, made up of individuals who strategically manipulate their cultural identity by emphasizing or underplaying it according to context. People may cross boundaries between groups should they find it advantageous to do so, and may maintain regular relations across them, but this does not affect the durability and stability of the boundaries themselves. Cultural emblems and differences are thus significant only in so far as they are socially effective, as an organizational device for articulating social relations.

… [I]t will be useful to summarise some of the salient points [Barth and his colleagues] make about ethnic boundaries. Above all, Barth argues that ethnic groups cannot be understood in terms of long lists of ‘objectively’ identified cultural attributes. People may stress some cultural traits in their dealings with other groups but ignore others, and we cannot predict these in advance. Instead, it is much more productive to view ethnic groups as an ‘organizational type’[1]; as categories, in which membership is based on self-ascription and ascription by others. As long as individuals themselves claim membership in a particular ethnic category, and are willing to be treated as such by others, they express their allegiance to the shared culture of this category however that shared culture might be signaled. From this perspective, the boundary between categories becomes the critical focus for investigation: how and why are such boundaries maintained in the face of personnel flows and systematic relations across them? What sorts of rules structure behaviour at and across boundaries in such a way as to allow those boundaries to endure? Ethnic groups are not simply the automatic by-product of pre-existing cultural differences, but are the consequences of organizational work undertaken by their members who, for whatever reason, are marked off and mark themselves off from other collectivities in a process of inclusion and exclusion which differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them’.[2] The pressing question as far as Barth is concerned, therefore, is why inter-group boundaries are sharply marked even as people cross them and even as the cultural differences between groups change.[3]

Barth’s observations clearly challenged existing wisdoms and his suggestion, in a phrase which has been widely cited since, that critical focus of investigation should be ‘the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (Barth 1969: 15, emphasis in original) set the agenda for much subsequent research.

Ground breaking though Barth’s text may have been in the 1960s, by 2000 some researchers had moved past some of the precepts. Canadian historian D.N. Sprague, for example, described Barth’s work as simplistic.[4] I am not entirely comfortable with the term ‘ethnic‘ as it is used in Barth’s collection — or anywhere else for that matter. As far as I can tell, ‘ethnic’ should apply to all socio-politically organized communities of people, in which case it becomes a term that signifies a distinction without a difference. The groups that figure in Barth’s text (notwithstanding his theorizing), appear to be categorized according to their cultures. They are examined as situated in relation to ‘neighbouring’ ethnic groups. Barth notes the importance of the boundary between groups as a dynamic site for investigation. ‘Where is it and how constructed?’ ‘where is it solid and exclusionary and where permeable?’ and ‘who constructs it?’ are presented as questions that have to be asked. History enters into the examination of the dynamic because obvious questions are raised as to when the boundary got the way an examiner found it, and how long it had been acting as a ‘stable’ enough boundary for an examiner to be aware of it.

In Barth’s text there appear to be hierarchies of ethnicity – in terms of prestige – that various researchers describe in any given area, but it is not entirely clear to me whose perspective is accessed when one group is considered to hold a rank ‘beneath’ another group. Barth seems to note that valuation is relative in some circumstances. I’m left wondering if he thinks a dominant group is always regarded as a desirable group to join — if all else were equal. I’m not convinced that, given a chance, people in a ‘less esteemed’ group would necessarily choose to belong to the apparently ‘more esteemed’ group. The obvious problem being that one needs to be aware of whose perspective is adopted when any esteeming is being done. Certainly, history has shown the ‘less desirables’ among peoples colonized by imperialist powers to be quite happy to ‘reclaim’ their distinctiveness and reject the mythic norms of the ‘conquerors’ — suggesting that the once vaunted ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is not universally attractive after all.

Additional resources:

Fredrik Barth, “Towards greater naturalism in conceptualizing societies,” in Conceptualising Society, ed. Adam Kruper (Routledge, 1992), 17- 33, limited preview (pages 21-22, 28-29 omitted) available through Google Books http://bit.ly/7YTLYA.

Richard Jenkins, “Rethinking Ethnicity: Identity, Categorization, and Power,” in Race and ethnicity: comparative and theoretical approaches, ed. John Stone and Rutledge M. Dennis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 59-71, available through Google Books preview http://bit.ly/5gvBwB.

[2] In my opinion, if this marking off behaviour is important, then the phrase ‘for whatever reason’ is regrettable turn of phrase, implying as it does that the reason is not particularly important.

[3] On that question, see Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

[4] D.N. Sprague, “The Cultural Bias of Metis Studies,” review of The New Peoples: On Being and Becoming Métis in North America, edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown, Prairie Fire 8 (summer, 1987): 66-67.

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“Interview with the anthropologist Fredrik Barth,” posted to You Tube by ayabaya, 28 October 2006.

“Victorian Christmas Card.” Source: Victoriana Magazine, www.victorianamagazine.com, via Victorian Home and Garden, http://www.victoriana.com/christmas/christmascards.htm.

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sincerely,

Norma

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“Victorian Christmas Card.” Source: Victoriana Magazine, www.victorianamagazine.com, via Victorian Home and Garden, http://www.victoriana.com/christmas/christmascards.htm.

William R. Morrison. Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894-1925. University of British Columbia Press, 1985.

William R. Morrison supplies a well-written, scholarly account of the formal introduction and function of the North-West Mounted Police in Canada’s North that is entertaining for the insight offered into the personalities and informal social interactions of individuals. It is not possible to say Morrison offers a ‘balanced’ view because I have not read enough NWMP historiography to make that determination, but his account reads as thoughtful. If he is sympathetic to individual officers (F.J. Fitzgerald for example), he appears wary of straying towards myth.

Morrison departs from previous portrayals of the NWMP as agents of the National Policy in support a historiographical model of progress. He instead seeks to show how metropolitanism was a working theory internalized by past Canadian policy makers. He describes the assertion of Canadian sovereign rights over the Yukon and the Northwest Territories as a process with two facets: symbolic and developmental. Assertions of  symbolic sovereignty consisted “of actions taken to fulfill the formal requirements of sovereignty under international law,” for example when constables were sent to far northern locations such as Ellesmere Island simply to establish a Canadian presence, or, when they were charged with delivering mail. Assertion of developmental sovereignty occurred “when the government act[ed] on a specific policy for a territory under its control.” The Dominion lands survey and the treaty and reserve policies serve as examples.[1]

Morrison supplies an interesting account of the NWMP behaviour during the Yukon Gold Rush. The account is followed by descriptions of police activities in the High and Eastern Arctic and the Mackenzie Delta. Morrison does a reasonable job of including Aboriginal persons in his account. He is less concerned with demonstrating that the NWMP brought change to northern people than with revealing how individual mounties were influenced by their contact with Aboriginal people. The stories of understanding and accommodation on both sides actually outnumber those of misunderstanding and conflict, although examples of paternalistic action and culturally arrogant statements are provided. These illustrate ways in which constables denigrated the poor and indigent by supposing their condition to be the consequence of ‘race.’ Misunderstanding is also visible in the way that mounties distinguished between ‘Indians’ and Inuit — asserting that the latter group was morally superior to the other, again attributing the difference to ‘race’ rather than to socio-economic circumstance and political history. To a limited extent, Morrison displays a similar bias: he attributes Inuit ‘good manners’ to a culture formed in adaptation to harsh conditions, and avows the ‘Indians’ had not faced the same degree of difficulty and thus did not develop the same generosity or industriousness to see these values embedded in their culture. The lack of excessively violent confrontation between mounties and native Northerners seems in part due to good sense and level headedness on both sides but due as well to the latitude that individual constables were accorded in devising on-the-spot responses to the situations they were confronted with – there were few policy directives to guide them and distance from any superior regulatory power was great.

Morrison does not fall into the trap of mythologizing his subject, but it is hard not to come away from this text without having been impressed with the boldness that these young – and sometimes naive – men displayed in acclimatizing and acculturating  themselves to Northern life.

Additional Resources:

J.G.A. Creighton, “The Northwest Mounted Police Of Canada,” Scribner’s Magazine 14 no. 4 (October, 1893): 399-41, with illustrations by Frederic Remington, http://bit.ly/7IIgnj.

From The Beaver, listed chronologically by publication:

“How Smith’s Landing Became FitzGerald,” The Beaver 1 no. 4 (January 1921):4, http://bit.ly/4JTQ3W.

“Fur Traders, Sailors, Scientists and Police,” The Beaver 13 no. 2 (September 1933): 34-35, with photographs, http://bit.ly/85vCwM.

Photograph, “The Hudson’s Bay Company and R.C.M.P. posts at Port Burwell in northern Labrador,” The Beaver 14 no. 3 (December 1934): 4, http://bit.ly/6WXzIr.

Photograph, “Corporal Kerr, R.C.M.P., with HBC Apprentice Dixon, at Chesterfield,” The Beaver 18 no. 2 (September 1938):61, http://bit.ly/4s2KKt.

R.C. Fetherstonhaugh, “March of the Mounties,” The Beaver 20 no. 1 (June 1940): 20-25, http://bit.ly/8inw2k.

Movie stills and candid photographs, “Scenes from ‘North West Mounted Police’,” The Beaver 20 no. 2 (September 1940): 56, http://bit.ly/4TsuNJ.

Photograph, “Const. Hastie, R.C.M.P., with Mrs. O.M. Demment at Cape Dorset,” The Beaver 22 no. 4 (March 1943): 51, http://bit.ly/6TTvAv.

Sgt W.H. Nevin, “Policing the Far North,” The Beaver 25 no. 2 (September 1945): 6-10, with photographs, http://bit.ly/7UGTrw.

Walter Hildebrandt, review of Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894 to 1925, by William R. Morrison, Manitoba History 15 (1988), http://bit.ly/7bKb5b.

Judith Roberts-Moore, review of Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894 to 1925, by William R. Morrison, Archivaria 25 (1987) 138-140, http://bit.ly/8fsJKF.

“The Force in the North,” Virtual Museum of Canada website, http://bit.ly/8VgTV7.

“‘Without Fear, Favour or Affection’: The Men of the North West Mounted Police,” Library and Archives Canada website, http://bit.ly/65lrrX.

A.A. Chesterfield, “Inuit couple seated,” dated c. 1901-1904, Quebec, with notation: “a vintage silver gelatin print showing an Inuit coupled seated side by side, on a box covered with a piece of fur, and against a plain white backdrop. Such approach highlights the details of their clothing, while the neutral backdrop prevents them from being as closely identified with the location of the post at Great Whale and Fort George as their Cree counterparts are.” Source: Library and Archives Canada / e008299869.

Kerry Abel, and Ken S. Coates, eds. Northern visions: new perspectives on the North in Canadian history. Peterborough, N.: Broadview Press, 2001. [Google Books preview: http://bit.ly/7xGIiz.]

Kerry Abel and Ken S. Coates supply an essay collection that responds to a paradox they discern in Canadian historiography. In their view, the North has been presented as defining the Canadian identity, yet historians have largely ignored the experience of the vast majority of people (particularly the Inuit), who have inhabited the Canadian North (as opposed to the Canadian south below the 48th parallel, and the ‘middle north’ that extends to approximately the 60th). They note that both the North that is Canada (the territory above the United States), and the Canadian North have been romantically and mythically conflated as cold, vast, isolating, and central to Canadian ‘character building’ on an individual and group scale.

Abel and Coates, and the other authors presented in this text, argue that the North deserves examination that takes it on own terms, in order to take into account the people who have most consistently dealt directly with those terms. With this approach, the authors believe that the North as a place and Northern peoples will be recognized as having discernible and concrete — as opposed to ambiguous and ephemeral — importance within Canadian history.

The overall consensus (or thesis), of the book is that little of the work that is necessary for a truly Northern historiography to emerge has been done. Much of the material presented is, therefore, forward looking and suggestive of research potential. These are not essays that draw on already completed research, polished into what might be regarded as comprehensive revisionist representations or descriptions of the past. The authors do not argue that historical interpretations need to be revised so much as they need to be devised – and committed to paper — in the first place.

Several themes are explored to make the point outlined above. Coates and William R. Morrison examine the historiography of winter and its impact on human life to argue that it may be regarded as a discrete, and important, factor in the North. In their view, winter is determinant of political economic, cultural, and social aspects of Northern and Canadian history. They point out that for northerly community groups, counter to perceptions generated in geographically removed regions to the south, in the past “winter was not simply a time of hardship and peril; it could also be a time of ease and opportunity.” Among Aboriginal peoples, technology and society developed to the point where in fact spring and fall tended to be the more difficult times of year. Thus the experience of native Northerners of North America diverged greatly from that of the newcomers. Although accounts of newcomer experience and perception predominate in current historiography, the most prevalent pattern of newcomer behavior was — and, Coates and Morrison argue, remains — one of fleeing from winter, acting in a limited capacity as seasonal sojourners to the North.

Walter William May with J. Needham, engraving, “H.M.S. Assistance and Pioneer in Winter Quarters. Returning Daylight,” dated 1855. Source: Library and Archives Canada, online MIKAN no. 2837864.

Bill Waiser examines how “the tyranny of distance,” which W.L. Morton described as fundamental to Canadian regionalism, has been understood with respect to the North in Canadian historiography. He argues distance is not just a spatial dimension; it is also a mental construct. As such, in his view, distance deserves to be employed as an analytical tool. He suggests that distance and ideas of distance may be analyzed with an eye to determining what Canadian constructions of distance reflect(ed) about various social and cultural groups in a variety of regions over time.

David Neufeld looks at Parks Canada and the ways in which aspects of the North have been evaluated as worthy of commemoration. In distinguishing between ‘history’ (meaning abstracted, because non-locally generated, historiography), and ‘heritage’ (meaning indigenous voicings of local traditions), he finds that, until comparatively recently (beginning in the 1990s), a distinctly Northern sense of valuation had not been applied to the selection process of commemoration sites. In consequence, Neufeld argues, the criteria for site selection is more illuminating for the way it charts southern Canadian hopes for, and interests in, progress and development over time – a circumstance he would like historians to change.

Mary-Ellen Kelm reviews the historiography about the First Nations of the North to argue that seeking to illustrate evolutionary stages of development is not an adequate means of addressing the impact of economic systems on Northern peoples, because it does not adequately differentiate between what is economic and what is human. Speaking of stages therefore serves to generate, or maintain, stereotypes rather than insights.

“The Pas – Life in a Northern Town,” posted by ctreber, 15 July 2009, who describes the video as “Some impressions of The Pas, Northern Manitoba, Canada. A bit of winter, a bit of summer, some glimpses of the (not so far away) past… “.

Kelm suggests that historians need much greater understanding of how Inuit and Dene, for example, were able to “contain, resist, and subvert” outsider impositions. In her view, a greater awareness of how oral history can be utilized is a first step that researchers of the past ought not to overlook. Similarly, Shelagh D. Grant points to a paucity of available historiography shedding light on Inuit perspectives. In addition to pointing to cultural differences in the way that history is presented and interpreted, she notes that this lack of existent work can not be overcome without adequate support – especially financial — to researchers wrestling with the very real barriers that distance presents.

Region as it relates to various social paradigms is also addressed in this collection — particularly as it defines the middle and provincial Norths. Nancy M. Forestall argues that gender and region is a theme that could be explored in greater depth. For her part, Charlene Porsild notes that regions are populated by a wide variety of distinct communities and more work needs to be done to distinguish between communities if commonalities, and most importantly, transfers between them are to be fully appreciated. Abel supplies a historiography of Northern Ontario and concludes that not enough is known about self-definition among those classed as hinterland dwellers. Stephen Hayes argues that undertaking comparative east-west history between northern regions (for example the Alaskan and Canadian Norths) is needed to balance the tendency to only consider north-south interplay. Aileen A. Espiritu, on the other hand, compares Russian North historiography to Canadian and similarly suggests that such comparison at the very least might inspire new topics of interest. Bill Hodgins closes off the text with a personal testimony to just how rewarding researching the North while in the North can be.

Overall, the most resounding message of this book is that historians would render a greater service if they tried finding “what is Canadian in the Canadian North, rather than trying to describe what is northern about most of Canada.”[1]