Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario 9780773564633, 0773564632

Table of contents :
Frontmatter (page i)
Acknowledgments (page vii)
1 Introduction (page 3)
2 English Immigrants' Narratives of Discourse Entitlement (page 33)
3 Morris: An "English Male Dance Tradition" (page 64)
4 Selling Stratford as an English Place (page 126)
5 Anthropology and I: Participating in the Creation of Culture (page 152)
Notes (page 161)
Bibliography (page 173)
Index (page 189)

Citation preview

Ethnicity in the Mainstream

McGill-Queen’s Studies in Ethnic History Donald Harman Akenson, Editor

1 Irish Migrants in the Canadas tr Best Left as Indians

A New Approach Native-White Relations

Bruce S. Elliott in the Yukon Territory,

- , oo, 1840-1973

2 Critical Years in Immigration Ken Coates Canada and Australia Compared

Freda Hawkins 12 Such Hardworking People (Second edition, 1991) Italian Immigrants

oo, in Postwar Toronto

3 Italians in Toronto | Franca lacovetta Development of a National

Identity, 1875-1935 13. The Little Slaves of the Harp

John E. Zucchi Italian Child Street Musicians

ae ; in Nineteenth-Century

4 Linguist ics and Poetics Paris, London, and New York

of Latvian Folk Songs Jobn E. Zucchi Essays in Honour

of the Sesquicentennial 14 The Light of Nature of the Birth of Kr. Barons and the Law of God

Vaira Vikis-Freibergs Antislavery in Ontario,

Johan Schreder’s Travels

1833-1877

5 in Canada, 1863 Allen P. Stouffer Orm Overland 15 Drum Songs 6 Class, Ethnicity, and mam P "AL ot Dene History ry Abe Social Inequality

Christopher McAll 16 Louis Rosenberg

7 The Victorian Interpretation Canada’s Jews

of Racial Conflict Edited by Morton Weinfeld

The Maori, the British, and 17 A New Lease on Life

the New Zealand Wars Landlords, Tenants,

James Belich and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada

8Popular White Canada Forever ; Attitudes and Public Catharine Anne Wilson Policy toward Orientals 18 In Search of Paradise

in British Columbia The Odyssey of an Italian Family

W. Peter Ward Susan Gabori

(Second edition, 1990) 19 Ethnicity in the Mainstream 9 The People of Glengarry Three Studies of English Highlanders in Transition, Canadian Culture in Ontario

1745-1820 Pauline Greenhill

Marianne McLean

to Vancouver’s Chinatown Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 Kay J. Anderson

Ethnicity in the Mainstream Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario PAULINE GREENHILL

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston ¢ London ¢ Buffalo

© McGill-Queen’s Press 1994 ISBN 0-773 5-1173-3

Legal deposit second quarter 1994 Bibliothéque nationale du Québec

: Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published by the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Department of Canadian Heritage, Multiculturalism Programs.

, Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Greenhill, Pauline, 195 5Ethnicity in the mainstream: three studies of English Canadian culture in Ontario (McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history; 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-773 5—1173-3 |

1. Canadians, English-speaking — Ontario. 2. Ethnicity — Ontario — Case studies. 3. Ontario — Civilization. I. Title. 11. Series. FC3100.B7G74 1994 305.811°20713

C93-090680-2 FI059.7.B7G74 1994 Typeset in Sabon 11/13.5 by Cait Beattie; Montreal

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 3 2 English Immigrants’ Narratives of Discourse Entitlement 33

3 Morris: An “English Male Dance Tradition” 64 4 Selling Stratford as an English Place 126

5 Anthropology and I: } Participating in the Creation of Culture 152

Notes 161 Bibliography 173

Index 189

BLANK PAGE

Acknowledgments

Most of this book results from work done with the support of a Canadian Ethnic Studies Research Grant. I gratefully acknowledge backing from the Multiculturalism Sector of the Department of the Secretary of State, particularly because it involved taking the first step of recognizing the English as ethnics. A pilot study was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada small grant through the University of Waterloo, which I appreciate. I also acknowledge the Social Science Federation of Canada’s funding for this publication through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program. The much-needed time to work on the manuscript’s many stages was provided through

course release by John Hofley and Michael McIntyre, deans of Arts and Sciences at The University of Winnipeg; I am most grateful for this assistance. Many friends and colleagues read and commented upon drafts of this study. I particularly thank Anne Brydon, Parvin Ghorayshi,

Stephanie Kane, and Rachelle Saltzman. The two anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Social Science Federation’s Aid to Scholarly Publications Program provided me

not only with enthusiasm and affirmation for my ideas but also with well-thought-out, incisive criticism that greatly assisted me in preparing the final draft. My correspondence with Theresa Buckland about Morris was profoundly encouraging. Steve Jones gave editorial assistance, and Elizabeth Hulse was a careful copyeditor. Wendy Stocker made the excellent initial transcriptions of my audiotapes, and Wendy Trask assisted with word processing.

vill Acknowledgments Rita Campbell prepared the index. Herb Mays gave me some very much appreciated computer assistance. I acknowledge permission from Routledge to draw upon an earlier version of “English Immigrants’ Narratives of Discourse Entitlement,” orig-

inally published in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1992. I also acknowledge Tony Barrand and Morris Dance in America for permission to use my “Morris Meaning: A Folklorist’s View,” published in Morris Dance in America: Proceedings of the 1991 Conference. I have made every attempt to contact those who may hold copyright to the material published here. I would appreciate being notified of any omissions so that they may be rectified in future editions.

This study is based primarily upon the material shared with me by a number of people throughout Ontario. Some asked

to be pseudonymous, and I have also given pseudonyms to those I was unable to contact for permission to quote them. A couple of people refused outright to grant me such permission; others wanted selected passages from their interviews removed. I have in every case respected their wishes. I am grateful for the absolutely essential contributions to this work of Jane Aldwin,

John Arthur, Florence Margaret Bart, Brian Bartholomew, Phillipa Bartholomew, Andrew Beamish, Jamie Beaton, Nora Boyce, Heather Brooks, Isobel Burton, Maura Coates, Norman Coates, Jane Evans, Susanne Fletcher, Janet Johnston, Stafford Johnston, Steve Jones, Hugh McCaul, Rebecca McClintock, John Mayberry, Lucy Montgomery, Gerald Moore, Robert Oloman, Peggy Podmore, James Reaney, Ian Robb, Paul Siess, Tom Siess, Sandra Stanley, David Stoyles, and Sharon Sutherland. I hope my

debt to them is obvious, but I also appreciate the kindness and hospitality they and their families showed me during my fieldwork. And speaking of hospitality, I thank Margaret Wilkinson and Eric Jones for frequently putting me up when it was necessary or useful for me to stay in London while working with the Morris dancers.

Ethnicity in the Mainstream

BLANK PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

CARNIVAL AND POWER

Several years ago I gave a series of lectures on folklore at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to coincide with the exhibition “From the Heart: Folk Art in Canada” (see Crépeau et al. 1983). In the week devoted to ethnic folklore, I presented Robert B. Klymasz’s National Film Board production Luchak’s Easter (1975), which shows a Ukrainian Easter ceremonial complex in

rural Alberta: preparations, church ceremony, and the culmina- , tion in the blessing of graves and a celebration — including eating and drinking — in the graveyard. After the film was over, an extremely angry Ukrainian woman accused me of misrepresention. This wasn’t Ukrainian folklore, she said. Ukrainian folklore was the beautiful decorated eggs and the colourful dancing. She suggested that the film was a fiction rather than a documentary, and

she asked me where the people were from. I reiterated the rural Alberta locations and the Ukrainian background of the filmmaker and then commented that the group who practised these traditions had originally come from Bukovina. “Oh well, Bukovinians,” she said dismissively and marched away.

I often use this story to illustrate that there are differences between insiders’ points of view on ethnicity, as well as the more commonly recognized differences between insiders’ and outsiders’

views. But it also shows another issue central to this work. Though Canadians generally perceive ethnicity in terms of carnival — revelry and celebration — their view is contrary to that of

4 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, who comments on carnival’s implicit political dimension when he says that it “celebrated tem-

porary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (1984, 10). The celebration in Luchak’s Easter clearly epitomized several of those qualities; yet their presence made the activities depicted highly problematic as ethnic folklore. Canadian ethnic carnival events are controlled and expressed in celebratory occasions and displayed in “festival” contexts such as Caravan in Toronto and Folklorama in Winnipeg. These events may have the carnival look, but they lack apparent carnivalesque meaning in Bahktin’s terms. They divorce themselves from the politics of ethnicity; they are generally perceived as fundamentally apolitical. But carnival ethnicity, superficially benign, nevertheless masks serious issues; “it asserts and denies, it buries and revives” (ibid., 12). Nevertheless, the latter aspects tend to emerge periodically and disruptively, as when Queer Culture Canada (Qcc) mounted the

“Multi-Culti-Queer Pavilion” at Folklorama in the summer of 1992. Folklorama organizers initiated legal action against QcC for appropriating the event’s name without permission. As I argue elsewhere (Greenhill 1993), among many other issues at stake for

the organizers of Folklorama was the obviously political intent of Qcc’s statement. People who have a stake in the establishment find carnival’s disruptions potentially threatening. I will argue here, though, that the carnival look holds implicit promise for carnival’s disruptions. As questions of ethnicity move increasingly into the public arena — affirmative-action programs, core teaching curricula, and

so on — and pluralism and diversity are recognized as political issues, the links between carnival and power become less covert. Their presence makes English ethnicity in Canada a particularly significant subject for study. Because the English have not been considered an ethnic group — in the sense that they are seen as lacking carnivalesque traditions — they are usually located solely in the domain of power. By demonstrating the existence of several manifestations of an English carnivalesque tradition in Canada

Introduction 5 and discussing how power interrelates with them, I show how ethnicity itself has involved the obfuscation of power issues in a discourse of carnival as celebration.

ETHNOGRAPHY OF SELF It wasn’t originally my idea to study the English as an ethnic group in Canada. For some ten years before I began the research that resulted in this book I had been pressed to consider the topic

by Magnus Einarsson of the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies (CcFcs) at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I first met Magnus in 1978 when working on contract at ccFcs. Almost immediately he began commenting on the popular and academic neglect of the English as a Canadian cultural' group and of main-

stream traditional and everyday culture generally, and he suggested my suitability to undertake such a study. Magnus is an Icelandic immigrant who came to Canada after graduate school at the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Thus he was sensitive to aspects of Canada of which those born and raised in this country might not readily be aware, yet was also convinced that studies of ethnicity could fruitfully be accomplished best by an insider whose knowledge would always surpass that of an out-

sider. I was an English Canadian and thus had the appropriate entrée into tacit cultural knowledge, but as a trained anthropologist and folklorist? I could maintain an analytical perspective on its contents. I don’t want to suggest that Magnus was the only one to notice the lacuna in Canadian ethnographic scholarship where the English were concerned. It’s commonplace at meetings of Canadian folklorists, such as the annual conference of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada/Association canadienne d’ethnologie et de

folklore, to hear a participant bemoaning the fact that Englishorigin and mainstream cultures (which aren’t the same, though they are sometimes confused — I’ll discuss this issue later) are not

perceived by the Canadian public as either ethnic or folkloric, though we think they are. This difference is a sore point for folklorists in this country. As historian of Canadian folklore Carole.

Carpenter has pointed out, most Canadians see ethnicity and

6 Ethnicity in the Mainstream “otherness” as our bailiwick (Carpenter 1979), whereas we see

ethnicity and “self” as equally, if not more, important. As an English Ontarian folklorist, I counter a stereotype when I study family photographs in Toronto (Greenhill 1981) rather than Ukrainian dance in Alberta, or look at community newspaper poetry in Ontario (Greenhill 1989a) rather than old ballads in Newfoundland.

Despite in some ways working against expectation, I kept away from English ethnicity as a topic. Why did it take me ten years finally — and somewhat reluctantly — to turn to this area?

Most of the explanation, I think, can be found in my insider status. I am English Canadian not only because of the language I first learned to speak and write but because my father is an English immigrant who arrived in Ontario just after World War 11. My background is both mainstream — middle-class, white,

English-speaking, and so on — by upbringing and English by origin. Though many subscribe to the patriarchal, patrilineal concept

that a person’s ethnicity comes from his/her father (who got it from his father, and so on), individual experience of ethnicity is often located elsewhere. Patrilineally of English origin, I learned

more about what was to become my cultural identity from my mother and from my early childhood milieu in North Toronto

in the late 1950s and early 6os. My mother is a typical nonFrench-speaking Franco-Ontarian. Her birth name is recogniz-

ably Acadian; she does not know if her father spoke French, though it appears that his father did; and her English-origin mother was raised in a small community in Haliburton County. North Toronto, where I grew up, was at the time a middle-class,

primarily Euro-Canadian neighbourhood. Like most others of my place and generation, I never identified myself as English Canadian; I was Canadian, pure and simple. I did not readily perceive my background — English-origin or mainstream — and as an academic I was more than somewhat apprehensive about what success I might have in identifying it for others. One turning-point for my awareness of personal cultures was

when I went away to graduate school. While doing a master’s degree in folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland in

Introduction 7 St John’s and later a Ph.D. in anthropology with a concentration in folklore at the University of Texas at Austin, I encountered cultural difference. Newfoundland presented linguistic, spatial, aesthetic, and much more variance from my Ontario background. And while I have frequently joked that Texas allowed me to dis-

cover the true distinctiveness of Canadian culture — we have butter tarts and Americans don’t — I experienced a considerable range of ideological and practical variations between my own cultural background and what I saw in Austin. I increasingly came to understand, personally as well as intellectually, that there was something to discover — and to talk about — in Canadian English ethnicity. Yet even when I had decided to research this topic, I was un-

comfortable with the project. Though I had always wanted to study culture and tradition in Ontario — in fact, the majority of my research was done in that province — I invariably managed to work On aspects somewhat removed from my own experience. Much of the impetus was to explicate aspects of expression and behaviour I was surprised to have found and certainly had never encountered when I was growing up: folk poetry (e.g., Greenhill 19892), shiv-

arees (Greenhill 1989b), and mock weddings (Greenhill 1988). The English were a discovery for me in a quite different and profoundly personal sense; asking what it means to be ethnically English is asking what it means to be culturally myself.

I was more than vaguely apprehensive. The conventional anthropological paradigm? asks for truth and honesty about the cultural configuration described but allows that an ethical perspective may dictate dissembling or even silence on some topics, in order to protect one’s informants* and/or their group from possible negative effects of publishing one’s results. I was concerned

about how I would deal with the discovery, common to ethnographers, of negative aspects. It’s one thing to cover up part of another’s behaviour or expression to protect innocent others but quite another to protect an “innocent” self. And the question was by no means moot. Some of what I learned about the English in Ontario is not a source of pride, and about some I anticipate considerable negative controversy. It has taken time for me to decide that I can ethically raise the issues involved and discuss them.

8 Ethnicity in the Mainstream They are as much a part of the problem of what English ethnicity is as they are my personal problem as an anthropologist and folklorist working with my own group.

The self I speak from, however, is not only recognizably English; it is also white, middle-class, and female. As I’ll argue throughout this book and in the conclusion, these characteristics have profound effects upon my findings. In addition, my feminist convictions have clearly led me to such topics as race, class, and

gender as areas of concern. , This preamble isn’t just solipsism or an unusually great interest

in the first person singular pronoun. Anthropologists and folklorists have recently begun to look at how their own sociocultural

location and identity, and their background and assumptions, affect what they learn about the groups they study. The particular unfolding of this project clearly had a great deal to do with my

own personal opinions and approaches, and my conclusions speak to a need to reconcile myself with what I’ve found as much

as to how I see my place as ethnographer. Readers should have the opportunity to evaluate my work and its validity with the recognition of the context in which it was done. I will outline that here as honestly as possible.

THE RESEARCH CHRONOLOGY This work began in 1987 as a pilot study, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant through the University of Waterloo, on “English Ethnicity and Traditional Artistry.” The following year, I received generous three-year funding from the Multiculturalism Directorate of the Secretary of State’s Canadian Ethnic Studies Research Grants pro-

gram. My fieldwork base was my home in Waterloo, Ontario, and most of the research was conducted in 1988-91 within 150 kilometres of that location. During fieldwork, I directed research to three relatively distinct subjects that — it initially appeared to me — had little relation to one another: immigration experience narratives, Morris dance, and English and indigenous cultures in

Stratford. However, as I wrote up the results, the final product began to unify around common issues in the symbolic creation

Introduction 9 and development of ethnicity. From different sources and a variety of genres and approaches, I explore how English ethnicity is invented, reproduced, recreated, used, and practised in cultural performance. For the first part of the study in 1988-89, I interviewed immi-

grants from England about coming to Canada. I located some interviewees through acquaintances and friends; others answered a letter published in Britannia magazine’ asking for personal sto-

ries of immigration. I was in no way surprised to find that the experiences they described were substantially similar to those reported by immigrants from other countries, including culture shock and discrimination. Problems may have been exacerbated by these immigrants’ feelings that in an English-speaking (former) colony of the British Isles, they would not find linguistic or other

cultural differences between themselves and Canadians of dissimilar origins.

More surprisingly to me since I partly share this group’s heritage — my father having immigrated from England in the late 1940s —I found the interviews more difficult and stressful than others I’ve done. Many non-working-class people I interviewed, but by no means all, spontaneously expressed opinions on the place of various racial and ethnic groups with which I profoundly differed. I never asked questions such as “What do you think of Canada’s immigration policy?” or “How do you feel about the contributions of non-European-origin peoples to Canada?” but | was nevertheless told that we should let in fewer people of nonEuropean origin and that Caribbean, Asian Indian, and Oriental people (among others) should be compelled to give up all traces of distinctiveness. During the interviews I dissembled or was non-

committal about comments against which in other contexts | argue strenuously. The positivist paradigm in social science would suggest that not arguing — being “objective” — was the appropriate response for an ethnographer. Yet it did not feel right to me; nor did I really want to make this material the focus of my work

on the English since I felt — perhaps wrongly — that whatever these people might say to me in the privacy of their own homes, even though they knew the tape recorder was running, would look quite different to them quoted in an academic venue. I dis-

IO Ethnicity in the Mainstream cuss this issue in greater detail in my consideration of the English as an ethnic group.

I was placed, then, in an ethnographic bind. The opinions of these English immigrants about other groups weren’t what I was asking for; nor were they what I wanted to talk about. I didn’t want to know that some interviewees thought that Sikhs who wanted to wear their turbans and daggers in the Rcmp should go back to wherever they came from or that the violence which sometimes accompanied the Caribana festival in Toronto showed

that Caribbeans should not have been let into the country. Yet that such issues were consistently raised, particularly when I never asked about them, made their significance to the people I was interviewing obvious. And the fact that I myself found the issues so uncomfortable only confirmed their importance. The final straw was a discussion in which one English immigrant referred to a music-hall performer as a “Brummagem Jew boy,” a description that could fit some of my own relatives. My response at the time was a retreat. I didn’t want to consider these issues or

the questions they raised about the English. I wanted to retain my rosy view of ethnicity as carnival not as power, and so I chose

to remove myself from the situation. After some months’ field research with English immigrants, then, I began looking for alternative directions. Eventually I saw a salvage opportunity for some material gath-

ered in these interviews by looking at language and cultural background and their role in creating a sense of difference for English immigrants — an ostensibly non-political, non-explosive issue. I examined what I provisionally call “generalization narratives,” which record immigrants’ observations of “Canadians” in broad terms rather than in the specific ones found in the alternative type, personal experience narratives (a well-known and documented genre’). My first analysis of these narratives (Greenhill

1992) did not link them with the stereotypical commentary in which they were embedded; I simply looked at how English immigrants express their observations, using narrative to con-

struct an ethnic identity through their difference from other Canadians. However, in my first case study, presented in the fol-

lowing chapter, I argue that the move from a specific instance

Introduction II to generalization is the kind of logical leap which allows stereotyping of individuals and groups and leads to the sorts of commentary I encountered so unwillingly during the interviews.

After my experience with English immigrants, I wanted to examine something that could not be racist cultural dynamite. I decided to look at Morris dance, a practice that had the double advantage of being universally recognized as English and of seem-

ing unlikely to reproduce the problems of my previous study — how could there be bigoted dance? Further, I already knew several members of Morris teams — my sister and brother-in-law have danced with them — and correctly perceived them as liberal

in viewpoint. The second case study is based on participant observation from 1989 to 1991 (when I moved from Ontario to

Winnipeg, Manitoba) with Forest City Morris of London, Ontario. I attended and participated in everything from weekly practices to performances and collective events with other Morris groups from Ontario and the United States.

In chapter 3, I document the (re)creation of an artistic and expressive form clearly recognized by participants and audience

as an English, traditional, male dance form. This concept of Morris persists even though it is performed by women as well as men from a variety of ethnic origins and contains a multitude of elements that are new and indigenous, Canadian and/or North American. I also encountered cultural stereotyping in the overdetermined distinction between male and female Morris dancers and because the practice is incontrovertibly white. In this case study, I explore how participants’ and scholars’ assumptions about the nature and practice of Morris affect not

only how they perceive it but also how they perform it. This exploration provides additional support for the emerging hypothesis that ethnicity is culturally created, rather than essentially arising as a result of origin or invariant traits. The ideological bases for studies of Morris dancing, as well as the analytical obfuscation, disregard, or misconstruction of issues of gender, class, and race, are examined, along with an exploration of the invented and traditional elements of Morris. My ultimate point is to deconstruct what “English” means in the context of the dance and its performance and presentation.

12 Ethnicity in the Mainstream The third case study was begun in 1990 and ended, like the work on Morris, when I moved in 1991 to Winnipeg. I exam-

ined a rather different aspect of the invention of Englishness in Ontario: the complex of activities surrounding the establishment and development of the Shakespearean theatre at Stratford and the elaboration of that city as an “English” place. Through interviews with current (newcomer and long-term) and former residents, examination of promotional materials and histories about the city and festival, and investigation of civic events such as Festival City Days, I came to see the devel-

opment of notions of local culture as Canadian, indigenous, female, economic, and ethnographic and of its Shakespearean theatrical counterpart as English, extraneous, male, aesthetic, and fine.

THE TRIPARTITE STUDY

Though the three parts of this book consider quite separate topics, they are linked by more than their connection with the English. Ideas and arguments recur, forming the main points and raison d’étre of the book. These pertain most clearly to the notion

of ethnicity itself as it is expressed by the English in Canada. Thus, though some readers may prefer to examine only one of the case studies, they will understand my points better if they read the whole book. The English are not generally seen in Canada as ethnics. This perception is not only esoteric — held by members of the group itself — but also exoteric — held by others. English Canadians lack the secure and conscious self-recognition familiar to groups such as Ukrainians or Italians who find in their own cultures a multi-

tude of distinctive traits. Yet the creation and maintenance of boundaries between themselves and other peoples is a significant and conscious issue for mainstream and English-origin cultures.

Anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969) and folklorists Richard Bauman (1971), Robert Klymasz (1970), and José Limon (1977)

see such activity as central to the creation of ethnicity. Hence, it seems valuable, at least in academic terms, to explore English ethnicity.

Introduction 13 Ethnicity does not result automatically or “naturally” from a person’s having been born in a particular location or to particular parents; nor does it include a series of invariant, unique, clearly recognizable traits. Ethnicity pertains to linked, but not equally

_ pervasive, issues: power, symbolic content, and origin. These three aspects of ethnicity — the first being the one most often ignored in traditional Canadian studies of single ethnic groups — are linked expressively. That is, the discourse of Englishness is expressed in terms of symbolic oppositions, the most common of which is same/different. These are elaborated in such sub-areas

as male/female, self/other, local/(inter)national, and mundane/ exotic. Issues of gender (see, for example, Mosse 1985; Parker et al 1992), class (see, for example, Hunt, 1991), and race (for example, Anderson 1983; bell hooks 1992 a and b) are consistent elements

of English ethnicity. Tradition and heritage are frequently invoked, and these concepts themselves are imbued with an English quality. Further, English ethnicity is often expressed in terms of what it is not, rather than as a secure and invariant content. In the absence of a clear vocabulary, linguistic or otherwise symbolic, to express English culture, other concepts are brought into play.

These three studies affirm that despite their lack of terminological ethnicity, English people nevertheless practice ethnic-like

activities: they form associations such as the United Kingdom Club of Cambridge or the Royal City Guild of the Great Britain Social Club; they perform distinctive dances such as Morris; they cluster residentially and occupationally. My focus here is on expressive aspects — narrative, dance, and so on — but the tri-

partite study of unself-conscious ethnicity makes it difficult to gloss over how different kinds of ethnic expression actually vary not only in form but also in scope and intent. That is, to discuss such ethnic forms as dance, song, and community associations as “ethnicity” alone may obfuscate how they are otherwise differ-

ent, as well as how they are elaborated in diverse areas not explicitly seen as “ethnic.” Ethnicity is emphatically not the only

reason to dance, sing, form associations, or visit a particular place; to link them all under the same rubric does not allow the kind of individual elaboration encouraged by conducting three separate studies.

14 Ethnicity in the Mainstream In the materials presented in this tripartite study, I have found much support for the hypothesis stated in my original research proposal (Greenhill 19874), that in a pluralistic society

such as Ontario’s, traditional expression is the product of diverse influences including, but not limited to, the need to (re)create an ethnic culture. Certainly, it seems obvious — if not tau-

tological — that a group which does not see itself as “ethnic” will often be motivated in its expression by concerns that have little to do with ethnicity. However, I have also discovered that apparently non-ethnic issues, such as gender, place, and genre, are often conceived of in ethnic terms or (re)interpreted as having a component of ethnicity. For example, as discussed in chapters three and four, in a diverse range of expressive genres, Englishness is interpreted by its performers and presenters as a “masculine” symbolic form. I have attempted throughout these studies to allow participants ~ to tell me about their ideas and feelings, rather than to link them at the outset by a single concept like “ethnicity” or to direct them toward questions that I feel will explicate issues I see as central. As a result, I perceive similarities and differences in groups’ and individuals’ expressions of English ethnicity as discoveries, rather

than as confirmations or denials of hypotheses. Each project developed and emerged separately, and each looks at a different group of people as they express and create Englishness. As a folklorist and anthropologist, I base my analyses upon thinkers whose works are currently influential in my field, from Mikhail Bakhtin to Pierre Bourdieu to Eric Hobsbawm. An academic opportunist, though I see a unity of perspective in these three studies, I draw selectively and where I feel it is appropriate

from a broad range of anthropological and folkloristic ideas. Using three separate case studies encourages me to be pluralistic in my analytical frameworks, as well as in my ideas and sources.

This work is ethnographic in its focus on cultural description and in its willingness to consider a variety of expressions. However, it is not exclusively an ethnography of communication (e.g., Bauman and Sherzer 1974), of semiotics (e.g., Barthes 1957), of postmodernity (e.g., Dorst 1989), or even of process (e.g., Tedlock 1983).

Introduction 15 ETHNICITY AND ENGLISH CANADIANS It is relatively unconventional in Canada to describe the English as an ethnic group. Traditionally, especially outside academic discourse, the idea of ethnicity has been defined by its application to a specific group of sociocultural collectivities. Though the definitions have occasionally overlapped and the groups included

by them are not always the same ones, these notions have in common the exclusion of Englishness. For example, when I tele-

phoned the Kitchener-Waterloo Multicultural Centre in the summer of 1989 to try to locate any English groups affiliated with them, the representative paused for about ten seconds after my request and then said, “We’ve never thought of the English as being ethnic.”*® Ronald L. Grimes describes a similarly telling experience in researching the presentation of the Towneley Cycle of mystery plays in Toronto. “When I asked the artistic direc-

tor of the Poculi Ludique Societas if he thought of the event as ‘English’ in the same way there were Italian or Portuguese festivals in the city, he said emphatically not. He viewed this festival as more universal. But, of course, this is a view that a dominant or majority group can have of itself. Therefore, one might interpret his response as indicating intentions, whereas the question had to do with functions. And one of the functions of the Towneley festival was to consolidate Anglophile culture” (1990, 104).

Ethnicity has been defined as a maintenance of boundaries between one group and another (Barth 1969) or as a series of common traits or as a “reference group invoked by people who share a common historical style (which may be only assumed), based on overt features and values, and who, through the process

of interaction with others, identify themselves as sharing that style” (Royce 1982, 18). These need not be mutually exclusive definitions; they address different areas of ethnicity and provide different perspectives on its study.

Thus ethnic studies have been based upon two different notions of ethnicity: that it is a kind of content and that it is a kind of boundary formation (ibid., 1-13). The first idea, that ethnic groups are distinguished by particular kinds of distinctive

16 Ethnicity in the Mainstream traits or by constellations of features — food, dance, language, and so on — is probably most familiar outside social scientific circles. However, the second idea is that “the critical focus of investiga-

tion ... [is] the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (Barth 1969, 15). This concept is more processual than some of the studies it inspired. Barth talks not only about boundaries but also about how they are developed and maintained. Such operations must in some way involve content — a group’s beliefs, practices, attitudes, and actual demography — as it is used by that group to dif-

ferentiate itself from others and by others to differentiate themselves from it. Ethnicity cannot be found only by counting and charting residence, association membership, mother-tongue maintenance, and so on. It is also in people’s minds and discourses, as

concepts of both ethnicity and ethnic identity. Thus, note the emphases in Royce’s definition upon the invocation and identification of ethnicity by members and non-members of that group.

The ethnic group is one type of sociocultural grouping in which folklore is communicated. Ethnicity is expressed in traditional cultural expressions as a display of difference from another culture, however it is perceived. Both the ethnic group’s own chosen “esoteric” expressions and the “exoteric” evaluations by members of other groups (Jansen 1959) have an exclusive/

excluding or differentiating function. Ethnic folklore’s ethos, then, sharply contrasts with the traditional cultural expressions of rural Ontario communities (see Greenhill 1989a), which aim to incorporate individuals living in that community into the mainstream or to display their identity as an inclusive example of the mainstream writ small. Two main concepts underlie the conventional idea of what makes groups ethnic in Canada. The first attributes ethnicity to groups other than the so-called founding nations, the English and French.? For example, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, administrative apportioning by sociocultural origin has resulted in three divisions: Ethnology, covering Native peoples; History, incorporating French and English culture; and Folklore — later the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies (ccFcs) — taking

responsibility for all other “immigrant” groups.'® The second

Introduction 17 concept, which helps to explain apparent anomalies in CCFCS’s ethnic studies, perceives some francophone and most anglophone culture — especially the latter - as “mainstream” while defining the rest as “ethnic.” Again, this has often allowed the definition of certain English-speaking — even British — groups, but not those who trace their ancestry to England itself, as ethnic. I will discuss

this aspect of English ethnicity in Canada in greater detail later."

Canadian academics have, to an extent, participated in this exclusion of the English from ethnicity. A few common patterns are manifested. Some studies equate ethnicity with minority status

and finding English-speaking Canadians (but not necessarily Canadians whose sociocultural origins are in England) in the majority, implicitly exclude them on those grounds (e.g., Krauter and Davis 1978). Others associate ethnicity with languages other than English (e.g., Wardhaugh 1983). Many include discussions

of the English in their studies yet use them as a group against which others are compared (e.g., Gardner and Kalin 1981). Outside Canada, historically motivated studies focusing primarily

upon immigrants have looked at English and British ethnicity (e.g., Berthoff 1953; Coleman 1972; Fischer 1989), but few have

examined contemporary aspects. Those that do the latter (e.g., Oudsby 1990; Ryder and Silver 1970) generally avoid questions of ethnicity.

Recently scholars have recognized the lack of system in such approaches and presented alternatives. Sociologist Edward Herberg, for example, highlights the “ascriptive” quality of ethnicity, using the term “to include people who have been counted, and/or who have counted themselves, as belonging to a particu-

lar group, usually by birth and by practices and perceptions” (1989, 3). An ethnic group, then, exists very much in the eyes of its participants. Yet ethnicity is also in the eyes of its beholders — its audience.

Early work by folklorist William Hugh Jansen (1959) suggests that ethnic traditions have esoteric and exoteric aspects; respectively, the groups’ own ideas of themselves and the ideas of others. And, as I will discuss in greater detail later, the concepts of origin and of practices and perceptions used by a collectivity — and by others — to inventory ethnicity are problematic. The group

18 Ethnicity in the Mainstream or nationality of origin itself is often pluralistic, varying by class, region, religion, and so on; members of a self-described ethnic group often count plural or multiple origins. Distinguishing traits, if they exist at all, are often wrongly perceived to be unique. Further, practices and perceptions are subject to change as the group moves through time and space. However, Herberg’s subjectively focused definition highlights

a significant quality of ethnicity given attention by anthropologists and folklorists at least since Fredrik Barth (1969): that ethnicity is a sociocultural creation, not an essential, inherent, objective fact.** Current perspectives on ethnicity present it as an emergent process; “countervailing folk beliefs (shared by some academics) in ethnic purity, ‘ethnicity’ ... emerges not as a thing (let alone a static, permanent, or ‘pure’ thing), but as the result of interactions” (Sollors 1989, xix). The concept of ethnicity as an “invented” construct is an extremely useful recent addition to the theoretical repertoire. Advocates of such perspectives contend that ethnicity “marks an acquired modern sense of belonging that replaces visible, concrete communities whose kinship symbolism ethnicity may yet mobilise in order to appear more natural. The

trick that it passes itself off as blood, as ‘thicker than water,’ should not mislead interpreters to take it at face value. It is not a thing but a process ... Looking at ethnicity as modern does not

imply that ethnic conflicts thereby appear less ‘real’ simply because they may be based on an ‘invention,’ a cultural construction” (ibid., xiv—xv). Particularly important to an understanding

of ethnicity as a construction is that “it is not any a priori cultural difference that makes ethnicity ... It is always the specificity of power relations at a given historical moment and in a particular place that triggers off a strategy of pseudo-historical explanations that camouflage the inventive act itself” (ibid., xvi)."3 Power, as suggested by Werner Sollors, is central. The Cana-

dian attitude that relegates folklore and ethnicity to other groups , is not simple ignorance. For example, many Québécois clearly perceive the double-edged quality of being considered folklorique.

They recognize that while being folkloric speaks of distinctiveness, it also expresses being an anachronism in one’s own society. Mainstream attitudes suggest that the folkloric — the traditional

Introduction 19 and culturally distinctive — will eventually die out and that such a death is probably not really a bad thing. Being folkloric not only

relates to former, rather than current, times but it also excludes those who are so described from power: money, urbanization, and modernity. Fewer English than French Canadians are explicit about the construction of the notion of folklore in those terms; however, few English Canadians see folklore and ethnicity as pertaining to themselves; neither are they happy when others so describe them.*4 Much work on ethnicity in Canada — and elsewhere (e.g., Stern and Cicala 1991) — fails to recognize the inchoate political context in which the concept operates. Ethnic power relations are manifest in this study in the fact that English immigrants and mainstream Canadians are relatively free not only to express how they see their own cultures but also sometimes to impugn that of others. It is not coincidental that members of these groups commonly express interest in maintaining a unified Canadian culture and that they lack enthusiasm for pluralism. If the latter pertained only to expressive culture — doing dances, singing songs, being folkloric — ethnicity would

not be a common concern. But it becomes problematic when the issues are Sikh Rcmp officers or the language of outdoor or indoor signs; when jobs, money, and power enter the picture. As John Porter’s sociological classic The Vertical Mosaic (1965) suggests, cultural pluralism in Canada means differential access to hierarchies. Power relations are also obvious in Morris men’s symbolic and actual rejection of female dancers, which follows a near-universal denigration of women’s cultures. Concerns of hierarchy and enti-

tlement to everything from group membership to “authentic” performance even enter into the creative/expressive domain of dance. And the creation of ideas of place in Stratford centrally implicates the kinds of traits that are used to characterize that locality but are also indications of who controls its economic system. Though ideas of Stratford may periodically converge in an aim to present it as an English location, the need to valorize the local pertains as well to insiders’ concerns for maintaining checks on outsiders’ hegemony. Even where power is not foregrounded in this study, it is a constant background issue.

20 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Given the central significance I assert here for power issues, readers might wonder why I nevertheless retain the conventional idea of ethnicity as display carnival, at least where I focus upon the construction of ethnicity within the group. In part, this decision results from my concern with the intrinsic interest of generating a description of ethnicity where none is asserted to exist. Yet, in addition, power relations are expressed and maintained by relegating ethnicity, culture, and carnival to the “other,” and non-ethnicity and non-culture, as well as power, to mainstream or English Canadians. I am not sufficiently naive to expect that simply pointing out their culture to English Canadians will cause them to see that they are constructing themselves and others in this form and will inspire them to give up, or at least share, some of their power. I do, however, see the rhetorical value in a deconstruction of dearly held notions as a first step. Understanding and education are not the solutions, but they may be keys.

MAINSTREAM AND ORIGIN CANADIAN ENGLISH CULTURES

Before I am accused of an unreflective centrist bias, buying into the very arguments I try to deconstruct, readers should note that I call this “Canadian” English ethnicity rather than simply

“Ontario” English ethnicity for polemical reasons. Granted the geographical/regional focus is in one province. But in calling

this a study of “Canadian” English ethnicity, I do not intend to suggest that it refers without caveat to all Canadians, regardless of region or group. The fact that this study was conducted in Ontario resulted from my own location, but I am not convinced that there is any essentially or exclusively Ontarian quality to the results. I would like to see consideration of the extent to which my ideas and conclusions apply nationally, and I am concerned that it would be too easy simply to dismiss this work as pertaining exclusively to one province — and, in fact, to a limited number of regions therein.

English ethnicity in Canada, then, presents a paradox, having two apparently contradictory aims: the expression of ethnic difference and the expression of Englishness as the sociocultural

Introduction 21 mainstream. This leads to some difficulty in identifying English-

ness; for example, one of the Forest City dancers suggested, “Because our culture is sort of derived from [the British], it’s hard

to say what’s distinct” (Sharon Sutherland, 90-17).'5 Geoffrey Gorer, in his essay on English identity in England, suggests that “English identity depends on the relationship with other English-

men exclusively” (1975, 156). Thus identity is not based upon difference from some other group, as is usually the case for ethnicity and as is the case with English immigrant narratives on the topic. Research on their identity in Canada indicates that British (probably British-English) Canadians see themselves as the main representatives of Canadian society and the Canadian state: “They have tended to interpret Canadian identity and a form of Canadian nationalism in their own terms ... The Canadian state has been identified with British Canada to the greatest extent possible” (Anderson and Frideres 1981, 84).

The notion of English Canadian is rendered problematic throughout the country because of the status of English as both a language and a national/ethnic descriptive term. “English (Canadian) culture” can be used in two senses: to refer to every cultural form expressed in the language or to cultural forms traced to or associated with people from England. The first is what most people — including folklorists - seem to mean when they say “English culture.” As suggested above, I provisionally call this mainstream. It is, to follow a linguistic concept, “unmarked.” Other cultural expressions are seen by participants and outsider audiences as “different”; English mainstream is seen as the usual, the quotidian, even the norm. Maria Tippett’s The Making of English-Canadian Culture, 1900-1939: The External Influences (1987) exemplifies these usages. Though she never problematizes the idea of “English culture,” her book considers fine or academic culture by or associated with English-speaking Canadians — the

mainstream. She identifies the primary external influences on English Canadian culture as Britain and the United States.

Yet Tippett also comments on English-origin (artistic) culture’s development in an almost stereotypically ethnicized form. She documents the extent to which Canadian cultural forms refer back to those of the culture perceived as the “original.”

22 Ethnicity in the Mainstream For example, “American, British, and French musicians and dramatists ... were brought in to officiate at music and drama festivals and preside over music examinations” (ibid., 7). Similarly,

“non-Anglo” ethnic groups refer to practices in the place of origin for guidance, as when international folk dancers import teachers from the old country so that the Canadians can learn “the right way” to do the steps and sequences. English immigrant Morris dancers occupy a pre-eminent role in the North American scene, being seen to embody a personal connection with “tradi-

tion,” whether or not they come from a locale with a Morris team or even danced it when they were in England. This attitude suggests that nationals have an inborn sense of “their” cultural forms but also that ethnic culture is or should be a replication of what is being done in the location of origin. Language and origin as concerns are not limited to the English. In Quebec since the 1960s there has been a tendency to focus on language as the source of distinctiveness — French, rather than English, being the majority language — since the relative decline in the popularity of and interest in the Catholic church. Quebec itself is now politically constructed in some contexts as a kind of origin culture (Handler 1988). Quebec politicians and most of

their constituents having more or less given up on the idea of French culture across the country — the French Canadian diaspora — provincial legislation focuses instead upon cultural issues within Quebec’s borders. Language means something quite different to national minorities from what it means to the majority.

French in Canada is a marker of distinctiveness, of culture, or ethnicity (nation); English is the norm, but it also allows access to power. However, it is important to note that no cultural grouping — English or French — is monumental or uniform; variation

by region, religious group, gender, class, and so on is always evident. Origin — Herberg’s “birth” — is certainly of interest here. When discussing the non-mainstream English in the present study, I dis-

tinguish them from the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh. The latter groups, sharing origin in Britain, have nevertheless been granted “ethnic” status fairly readily. However, most people who trace their ancestry to England do not call themselves “English” but

Introduction 2.3, rather “British.” The political term “Britain,” of course, includes

England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Popular usage by the English as an ethnic group, on the other hand, makes English (language) the most broadly inclusive term and distinguishes the

British from the Scottish, the Irish, and the Welsh. For example, , “You know, Britain doesn’t really have a specific dress. Irish people have costumes, Welsh people have costumes, Scottish people have, but the British don’t really have a costume” (Sandra

Stanley, 88-4). This is an esoteric use of language, peculiar to English ethnicity; Scots, for example, do not generalize themselves as English but follow the terminology of political hierarchy, identifying themselves as Scots and possibly also as British. These conflicting notions of English ethnicity muddy the demo-

graphic waters when one tries to interpret statistical information such as the 1986 Canadian census. The question “to which ethnic or cultural group(s) do you or did your ancestors belong?” does not clarify which of the above usages of the terms “English” and “British” were intended by those who answered the question — or by those who asked it. A total of 4,306,855 residents of the province of Ontario (total population 9,101,694) identified themselves as ethnically English, either as their sole origin (2,194,405)

or in combination with some other ethnic origin (2,112,450). In total, 7,802,765 residents had single or multiple British, Scottish, Irish, or English ethnic origins. Of all Ontarians 452,345 | are immigrants from the United Kingdom. There is no indication in the aggregate statistics of country of origin or ethnic group for the latter. Country of origin as a basis for determining ethnic affiliation becomes problematic even for immigrants. Vast regional, class,

racial, and other distinctions between people born in England make the notion of a unified English culture extremely suspect. England itself is plural and variable. It includes formerly colonized peoples who settled in England — Asian Indians, Caribbeans, and so on — many of whom immigrated to Canada. Few, if any, Canadians would class these non-white people as “English.” As Benedict Anderson suggests, “nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage, and birth-era — all those

things one cannot help” (1983, 131). I would add that ethnicity

24 Ethnicity in the Mainstream in Canada partakes of these same elements. One would be hard pressed, in any case, to locate substantive cultural similarities between a Caribbean Londoner, an upper-class resident of the Midlands, and a Cornish fisheries worker; they would not even speak the same variety of the English language. Finally, even if similarities did exist, it would be difficult to demonstrate their uniqueness, that being a popularly preferred quality of a “true” ethnic trait. Significantly, few studies have focused upon practices and per-

ceptions of English ethnicity, whether in England (Gorer 1975) or in Canada. The attempt to assemble an inventory of English cultural traits can be difficult and rather unrewarding. Englishness has not remained uniform with the passage of time. The cultures of English immigrants who came to Newfoundland in the eighteenth century, mainly from the farming peoples of the West Country, may only superficially if at all resemble that of people who came over in the post-World War 11 period, many from urban areas. A trait remembered by an immigrant who came in the 1980s may no longer be relevant to the English in England; aspects remembered by earlier immigrants or their descendants may have undergone profound variation. Beyond the immigrant generation, the confusions are multiplied, for example, by the fact that exogamy is common. Immigrants from England do not necessarily marry within their own group. As the interviews and my father’s experience indicate, often they marry people of other origins. Ascription of ethnicity in these cases may be contradictory. While surnames in Canada are passed down patrilineally, I have encountered individuals who ascribe their own ethnicity according to different principles. For example, a student of mine whose surname was a common French Canadian one, ultimately of Acadian origin, identified himself as Ukrainian. His mother is Ukrainian, and his participation in his home community is based upon membership in the Ukrainian Orthodox church and other markers of that group. Though his specific family situation, which included his mother’s remarriage, has influenced this “choice” of ethnicity, such cases are by no means rare or particularly unusual, both because individuals frequently ascribe their own ethnicity and because one of

Introduction 2.5 the hallmarks of modernity has been complications in the traditional notion of the family (see McDaniel 1988). Further, since the English are frequently not considered “ethnic,” a person of British origin asked to comment on his/her ethnic affiliation may

draw on, for example, a Scottish or Irish grandmother. Thus simple origin, determined patrilineally, becomes a highly problematic indicator of ethnic identity.

Herberg’s notion of “practices and perceptions” is equally complex and problematic. Customs definitely associated with particular ethnic groups can be taken over and/or performed by people who do not see themselves as part of that ethnic group. For example, the Morris dance team with which I have been par-

ticipant-observer and which is the subject of the second case study contained until 1991 only one British member — AngloIrish. The others are attracted to the dance form at least in part because it is English, but their participation has other dimensions as well. In fact, the exotic “other” of ethnicity, as literary critic Edward

Said’s work on the phenomenon of orientalism (1978) indicates, is a creation of the society with which that other is compared, rather than an objective reality. Hence, I concentrate upon process, rather than on objectively quantifiable characteristics. As historian Eric Hobsbawm suggests, many aspects of tradition are in fact invented and cannot be traced through a lengthy chronology or genealogy (1983). Thus, in looking at English culture and English tradition in Canada as it is expressed in Ontario, I examine the process of ethnicity-making: the cultural texts chosen, the bases for ethnic distinctions, and the sources of expressed cultural identity. The slipperiness of the idea of the English as an ethnic group does not result from their not being ethnic; it results from the slipperiness of the idea of ethnicity itself and the implicated power relations. Equally, other ethnic groups’ notions that they are unique, distinctive, and closed by their traits and origin must be seen as illusionary and invented in a particular context. This focus and approach somewhat mitigates my ethnographic

dilemma described above. Had I subscribed to an origin-plustraits notion of ethnicity, I might have been tempted, on the basis

of observation and generalization, to identify certain kinds of

2.6 Ethnicity in the Mainstream attitudes, such as racism, as “English.” Following the association of ethnicity with “unique” traits, I might even have suggested that the English are unusually or especially racist. Others have constructed them in such terms. In 1985 the Toronto Star conducted

a “minority report” in which it looked at a variety of different ethnic groups in the city. For most, the survey questions were: “Have you personally experienced prejudice or discrimination? How satisfied are you with Canada as a place to live? To what extent do you feel you are participating in the wealth of Canada?

Is there prejudice toward [e.g., Italian] Canadians in Toronto? How serious is it?” (Star, 5 December 1985). In contrast, the questions asked of “Anglo-Saxons” (people of British descent — and implicitly probably also what I here call “mainstream”), the last group in the series, were: “How serious a problem is prejudice toward minority groups in Toronto? ... Would you be concerned or not concerned about more and more minorities moving into your neighbourhood ... [being] your fellow workers ... [being] your children’s classmates ... [being] members of clubs you belong to? Would you be sensitive or not sensitive to various minorities moving into your neighbourhood?” (Star, 15 December 1985). These questions are suspiciously vague, particularly the last.

One would want to note that being “sensitive” to minorities could include both recognizing, celebrating, and encouraging the empowerment of their differences and the opposite: wanting to exclude them. Significantly, too, non-Anglo groups were asked

questions about prejudice against them and Anglos about their prejudice against others. If each group had also been asked the other set of questions, a different picture would have emerged. The idea of Anglos as (uniquely) racists is clearly constructed by the set of questions they were asked. Further, the cultural traits

associated with Anglos in the body of the article were psychological repression, guilt about sex, performance anxiety, and obsession (on the negative side) and altruism (on the positive side). The commentary enters the same kind of stereotypical racist discourse often directed at other groups, such as “Anglos fit easily into the isolated workaholic mold ... ‘We make good bureaucrats, but we’re no good at creativity or innovation’” (ibid.). This atti-

Introduction 27 tude does not appear to be all that different from saying that blacks have rhythm and Italians are emotional.

When I began to perceive a pattern of English-immigrant cultural expression that involved making statements against non-

European cultural and racial groups (see also Saltzman 1991), I fell into the trap of combining traits and origins to create a unified stereotype. (I will discuss this process at greater length in

the first case study.) A conclusion that the English are racist is neither “true” — clearly many English people are not racist — nor

a distinctive trait — clearly many non-English-speaking, nonEnglish-origin people are racist. I cannot, and do not want to deny that racism exists among English immigrants to Canada and

in the mainstream, but to express it as an ethnic trait is to fall into exactly the same stereotyping tendency that I find problematic and disturbing among some people I interviewed. All groups maintain and express some level of xenophobia. Racist commentary is clearly one aspect of ethnic expression (in that it speaks to

difference) for some people, and for some English people; for

others, it clearly is not. |

This concern with the differences between British-English and other forms of Canadian cultural expression and behaviour appears most clearly in its public social context when mainstream Englishness is seen as threatened. Various English cultural and political organizations in the province of Quebec, such as Alliance Quebec, clearly exemplify the place of minority Englishness in Canada. In those rare circumstances where having culture is associated with having political power — as in Quebec (see Handler 1988) — the powerful seek to bolster culture. It is not the intent of my study to ground ethnic cultural study in this context. Instead, I suggest that the avoidance of their own cultural distinctiveness has been a mainstay of the conservatism of English Canada and of many English-origin Canadians. In relegating culture to other

groups, English Canada has marginalized them (see Carpenter 1979). Perhaps alternatives to this worldview exist when it can be demonstrated, as in the case of this research, that culture and power are not inherently antithetical. If English Canadians can come to discover that they share the fact of their cultural distinctiveness with groups with whom they do not also share hege-

28 Ethnicity in the Mainstream mony, the ideological employment of culture as a method of marginalization can be deconstructed. Ideology without action is meaningless, but if Canadian society is to reach its pluralistic ideal, a recognition of the culture and ethnicity of “mainstream” groups is essential.

A FOLKLORIST-ANTHROPOLOGIST’S PERSPECTIVE This study of the creation of English ethnicity employs the perspective of an academic anthropological folklorist. Folklorists’ orientations to their subject, as Elliott Oring has pointed out, are to “the communal (a group or collective), the common (the every-

day rather than the extraordinary), the informal (in relation to the formal and institutional), the marginal (in relation to the centers of power and privilege), the personal (communication faceto-face), the traditional (stable over time), the aesthetic (artistic expressions), and the ideological (expressions of belief and systems of knowledge)” (1986, 17-18). These elements are all evident in the material examined here, though not simultaneously or even consistently. The characterization of folklore implied above differs impor-

tantly from the popular notion, which highlights only tradition

or uses “folklore” (along with the similarly misunderstood “myth” and “old wives’ tale”) to mean misconceptions or even lies. Folklore is not limited to oral tradition or conservative esoteric group expression. However, the academic concept of folk-

lore is closer to the popular one than it might at first seem. Popular usage, like that of folklorists, recognizes the creation of a difference — often specifically a critical one — between what is actually going on — reality or history — and those folkloric things — stories or superstitions — which are cultural creations. This distinction refers, I think, to the informal, marginal, common, and ideological aspects of folklore, which can express opposition or

even provide alternatives to hegemony (see Lombardi-Satriani 1974). But the communal, personal, traditional, and aesthetic can also present cultural alternatives to the individualistic, the impersonal, the new-fangled, and the anaesthetic. Folklorists tend to

Introduction 29 focus upon individuals’ subjective understandings of their own lives - in the present study, upon how they construct their ideas of themselves as ethnics — rather than upon what could be construed as objectively making them ethnics. Folklorists also differ from some other social scientists in their concern not only for making the text central but also for listening to and attempting to represent the actual voices who speak it. The text represents or reflects concepts in some aesthetic, ideological form, but its nature is by no means given. As I use the term here, texts can range from words — individual lexical items —

through lengthier forms of discourse — sayings, jokes, poetry, narratives, and so on — to non-verbal presentations, from dances to items of material culture (see Abrahams 1976). Folklorists assume that texts are deliberate and meaningful and that they have a close and intentional relationship to expression and behaviour. People do not passively acquire and transmit folkloric texts; they actively choose to (re)create and perform them. Thus texts are culturally central as a way of presenting and, at times, of transforming the world — in this case, by constructing what members and audience see as the content of English ethnicity. As for what those texts may be and where they may come from, folklorists and anthropologists assume they are relevant, though everyday, material. We see current practice as significant, as well as poorly understood. We do not assume — at least ideally

— that one cultural group is more relevant and worthy of study than another. We perceive meaning in all cultural statements no

matter what form they may take, and we assume that our assumptions do not arise in a vacuum; they are part of the ideological points we are making. I am not the first folklorist-anthropologist to approach tradition and ethnicity in Canada as an ideologically motivated invention. Richard Handler’s Nationalism and the Politics of Culture

in Quebec (1988) looks in part at some very similar issues — traditional dance, distinctive language, tourism — and at some different ones as well. He analyses them in a conventionally political (governmental) context and perceives Quebec’s ethnic movement

as nationalistic, in that it asserts the existence of a distinctive people.*® But, as I will discuss in the final chapter, Handler’s

30 Ethnicity in the Mainstream work, like my own, also implicates folklore-anthropology’s construction of itself, as well as social scientific and political uses of its concepts. Anthropological folklorists privilege the text as a source for

understanding sociocultural configurations, but they do not assume primacy as other disciplines traditionally — if not currently

— do for particular institutions. Nor do we remain wholly committed to the idea that we are a social science, emphasizing quantification and the paradigm of objective experiment. We recognize the creativity and subjectivity involved in our own interpretations and in those of other academics. I feel that being an anthropolo-

gist and folklorist allows me to analyse English ethnicity in Canada as I see it, while at the same time admitting that my perspective and that of my informants and other interlocutors may differ.

By focusing on folklore and on texts, I examine cultures with

the assumption that their re-creators-participants “make their own history” (Marx 1852, 437), at the same time as I recognize that this takes place “under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (ibid.). This attitude to folklore, and to individuals in society, is not conventional in Canadian folkloristics, which has mainly concentrated upon the study of origins (Greenhill 1987b); nor is it common in ethnic studies, which tend to focus upon statistics and institutions (see, for example, Samuda et al. 1984) and only parenthetically or anecdotally (see, for example, Harney and Troper 1975; Monteiro 1977) upon individuals and their reactions. In strong contrast to such studies, I view ethnicity as a construct of the people who participate in its discourse, not as an essentially objective form. Also integral to my approach as a folklorist is the fact that this

research is based upon fieldwork. I study cultures and texts by participating as fully as possible in ongoing sociocultural life, through participant observation of groups and events (such as

my work with Forest City Morris) and through open-ended interviews, soliciting others’ perceptions and opinions of what is going on. As I have stated, the role of the ethnographer in field research has become a compelling issue in current anthropological thought

Introduction 31 (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). Most works that contextualize ethnographers in the cultures they study do not deal with situations where the ethnographer is truly a self, not an other. It is common for anthropologists and folklorists to study groups to whom they are strangers. My situation for this study, as I have described, is rather different. For example, being the daughter of an English immigrant — a fact I mentioned to most English immigrants I interviewed — I was located by the majority, who were around my parents’ ages, in an analogical daughter relationship. In Stratford, similarly, I fit a locally recognized category of outsider — a tourist, shopper, Festival visitor — as well as being an academic (and by no means the first of those) studying the area.

Though not profoundly different from the groups on whom my research focused, I did not share the characteristics with which I fundamentally identified them: English immigration or long-time residence in Stratford. Interestingly, however, when working on Morris dancing, I matched my fellow dancers pretty closely by age, occupation,

region, and class. In addition, for most folklorists or anthropologists, at least the fact that they are doing research sets them apart from those with whom they work. Yet in Morris dancing, the dancer-researcher is a recognized part of the culture. Some

dancers become interested in the origins and forms of the tradition and conduct historic studies or observe and record dances performed by their own and other groups. Normally, the folklorist or anthropologist would avoid “interfering” in cultural process; however, as a dancer-researcher I was expected to give | opinions and suggestions. I will deal with the problems and dilemmas that arose as a result — and with the rewards — in greater detail in chapter 3.

Canadian culture denies English ethnicity because it denies a carnivalesque component (which is equated with ethnicity) to English-origin or English mainstream groups. I argue here both that English Canadian culture includes the carnivalesque and that its existence does not deny that of parallel power relations. That is, if the English have carnivalesque ethnicity (as “others” do), if this fact implicates their power role in Canadian society, so must the carnivalesque and power interrelate for “others.”

32 Ethnicity in the Mainstream In these three case studies are examples of power discourses disguised as carnival display and of the integral relationship between the two. Humour, play, spectacle, and difference mask struggles over the entitlement to dictate what is culturally right and proper, as well as obscuring the arbitrary exclusion of groups in order to consolidate power. Thus what you will read here is an interpretation, one which will not be rendered incorrect if those I worked with and interviewed disagree with it. I feel certain many who are English — origin or mainstream — will differ quite strongly with what I have

to say. Some may feel, contrary to my assumptions, that they truly are not ethnics. Others may agree that they are but will con-

tend that my assumption that their ethnicity is created makes it spurious (an opinion I do not share); or they may argue that birth, practices, and perception are identifiable, quantifiable, and distinct. Finally, I hope that my readers include those who cannot

in any way be construed as English. I trust all will understand that my aim here is to contest, rather than to bolster, the status quo. Accordingly I turn first to the most objectively English, the immigrants, and examine how they do and do not perceive themselves as ethnic.

..3. CHAPTER TWO

English Immigrants’ Narratives of Discourse Entitlement

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND GENERALIZATION

As suggested in the introduction, in some contexts English people’s cultural behaviour is fundamentally ethnic. Such markers as accent, language use, and religious affiliation characterize the immigrant generation particularly. But, in addition, many English

Canadians retain their distinctiveness through residential concentration, voluntary association,’ and other conscious acts of cultural maintenance. This ethnic display — to members of their own group as well as to others — must be recognized. Yet at the same time we must continue to resist the notion that ethnicity can be identified simply in the elaboration, deliberate or otherwise, of origin and discrete traits. English immigrants are a compelling group, and their creation of ethnicity peculiar, since most I interviewed commented that they did not expect the linguistic and cultural divergences they found between themselves and other Canadians. It appears paradoxical that concerns with language especially should be so significant, particularly because English people in Canada usually

define themselves as non-ethnics on the basis that their native

tongue, like that of so many other Canadians, is English. “I mean, when we came here, it was a bit of a jar ... Because I never thought of [Canada], to be perfectly honest, and if I did, it was as though it was an extension of the British Isles. The language was — and you know, the Queen, the same sovereign, and basically

34 Ethnicity in the Mainstream the same type of parliament, and all this other — you were taught

it in school, and it was somewhere at the back of your mind there, and I thought, oh, it was just going to be like [England]. But I got the shock of my life when I arrived, I really did. It was so different” (Norman Coates, 88-11). Most immigrants similarly expected that as English-speaking people from Canada’s “mother country,” they would find a faithful reproduction in the former colony of the language and culture they had left behind. Yet English immigrants in fact encounter extensive discourse? variations, and they construct stories of ethnic difference from these experiences. These narratives are the subject of my first case study on ethnics in the mainstream. In researching this material in 1988-89, I interviewed people

born in England who live in Ontario: Metropolitan Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph, Hamilton, London, Mitchell, Stratford, Haliburton, and surrounding areas. I located interviewees from personal contacts, through ethnic associations such as the United Kingdom Club of Cambridge and the Royal

City Guild of the Great Britain Social Club, and by soliciting information through Britannia magazine. Most people I talked to had immigrated in the decade following the end of World War 11 and are now in their sixties or older, but the earliest arrived in the 1930s and the latest in the 1970s. This sample is suggestive, rather than representative. The interviews themselves

consisted of a series of open-ended questions, allowing immigrants to reflect upon their experiences of coming to Canada. I also conducted participant observation, joining and attending events and meetings of the English and British clubs in Cambridge and Guelph mentioned above.3 The texts transcribed from these interviews and discussed in

this chapter take two generic forms. One I call “generalization narratives” because they represent the tellers’ perceptions in storied terms, which suggest an extensive, rather than a specific, application. Usually English immigrants’ generalization narratives

note a difference between their own and Canadian discourse style, which they interpret as having widespread application. In the alternative, personal experience narratives,* the speaker describes a specific incident she/he recollects. Those I collected

English Immigrants’ Narratives 35 from English immigrants are usually about situations in which they noted differences between their own discourse and that of other Canadians. Both story types commonly deal with responses by the speaker or another to particular situations in which some kind of divergence between what is expected and what actually took place is recognized and/or created. Through such narratives, English people record their observations but, more important, use them to construct an implicit identity, as “English” Canadians, by and/or for themselves and/or others. I identify these two narrative forms because as a student learning the techniques of folklore field research, I was always taught to elicit personal experience accounts in preference to generalizations. For example, if I were to ask a question such as “What were Christmas traditions in your family?” the interviewee might answer: “Well, the family got together on Christmas Eve and the kids

got to open one present before we all went to midnight Christmas Eve service at church. The next morning the kids would get up really early to see if Santa had come, and wake up the parents, and we’d open all our presents before breakfast.” My professors suggested that after this general description was complete,

proper form would be to follow up by asking something like “Can you describe a particular Christmas that you remember?” “Well, it was my first Christmas back home after I went to university. My parents picked me up at the airport.” Teaching this technique instilled the idea that the generalization — and note that

it is told in a chronological narrative form — was not authentic folklore; one had to elicit the personal experience narrative. Recently, folklorists have begun to attend to personal experience stories as a narrative genre’ and as an emic® story category. North Americans do repetitively tell stories about incidents that happened to them, but they also conventionally narrate generalizations. Several years ago, while researching aspects of Ontario folklore, I frequently read local accounts of community traditions or history expressed in general terms, such as “We had to make our own fun. We had Sunday School picnics, fowl suppers, and Christmas concerts.” At the time, I noted only their frustrating lack of detail and information. Now I see them as a recognized mode of communication, particularly about the past. And the

36 Ethnicity in the Mainstream distinction between personal and generalization narratives is not simply one of oral versus written forms; I have encountered generalizations in similar conversational contexts to those in which personal experience stories are used. In any case, during my interviews with English immigrants, they spontaneously employed generalizations and personal experience stories alike in response to my questions. I will argue that tellers strategically use these two types to make different kinds of statements. Thus both types of narrative are metacommunicative — they communicate about communication (Ruesch and Bateson 1968, 209) — by marking the mode in which the testimony is made. How, then, does the generic meaning of a personal experience

narrative differ from that of a generalization narrative? Most clearly, I think, the generalization implies the relevance of a situation or observation beyond a single incident, where a personal experience does not. The personal experience narrative recounts reportable events; the generalization makes them (stereo)typical. In the latter especially, English immigrants create a sense of their own personal distinctiveness but also construct, by implication, groups of others. The generalization can lead to the kind of attribution of specific traits essential to the formation of racist ideas

that are used to stereotype and to exclude non-members; however, it need not do so. Finally, the issue of whose generalizations become pervasive and/or accepted — who is entitled to dictate discourse “correctness” — clearly pertains to power, and the English commonly assume that right.

Observations of difference tended to fall into fairly consistent categories. As I have already suggested, when asked about

what they noticed in Canada as different from what they were accustomed to, English immigrants talked about discourse variation more than they did about landscape or historical issues, for example. Language form — accent and word or expression — and language use — place, person, and connotation — were the significant issues. After discussing these areas and specific

examples of narratives, I will turn to the expression of ethnic

difference in language and how it pertains to the issues of power, symbolic content, and origin addressed throughout this work.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 37 NARRATIVES OF DISCOURSE CONFUSION The narratives presented below — both generalization and personal experience — reflect to some extent existing variations between forms of the English language spoken in England and in Canada.

Linguists Peter Trudgill and Jean Hannah contend that “perhaps the most noticeable differences between [English English] and [North American English] involve vocabulary” (1985, 75). They divide them into four basic categories: same word, different meaning; same word, additional meaning in one variety; same word, difference in style, connotation, frequency of use; and same

concept or item, different word (ibid., 77-81). An alternative would be to divide variations into the linguistic areas of phonology (sound or accent) and morphology (lexical items or words). One could comparatively and systematically describe aspects of discourse pertaining to how language is used, as well as to what language is used, but as suggested in the introduction, that is not the purpose of this book. Rather than addressing actual linguistic

variations between the forms, styles, and contexts of English English and Canadian or North American English, I want to look

at how English Canadians observe discourse and use it to construct their own ethnography of ethnic difference.

In order to explain the narrative development of ethnicity, I divide stories mainly about verbal confusion from those in which contextual and/or cultural divergence predominate. They cluster to include verbal concerns about accent and word meaning and

contextual/cultural issues of place, person, and connotation. Selected narratives illustrate these uses.

Accent Narratives about accent focus, as one might expect, on observed difference between English immigrants’ pronunciation and those of other Canadians. Some generalizations assert the inability of Canadians to understand the English immigrant. For example, “I felt very different, because to begin with, people didn’t under-

stand my language” (Jane Aldwin, 88-6). Most immigrants attribute value and correctness to their own speech styles, and

38 Ethnicity in the Mainstream locate comprehension difficulties in Canadians’ poor linguistic skills. In contrast, the following generalization illustrates a relatively uncommon attitude toward language: “I didn’t like people

not understanding me ... So if I find that, and if I found that, I was saying something that people couldn’t understand, then I would very soon consciously change it so that they could. It didn’t mean that I could no longer speak my original language or accents, but that if it was inappropriate, then I wouldn’t do it. I don’t think many people do that ... I deliberately changed so that I could communicate with people. And I think that communicating is — if you’re not communicating, you’re not doing anything. There, there’s a barrier in between you” (Robert Oloman, 89-13). Robert Oloman’s conviction that he must change his speech under some circumstances to achieve his aim of communicating with others is not shared by the majority of English immigrants I interviewed. As will be evident throughout this chapter, part of the construction of ethnicity in these generalizations and personalexperience narratives involves a certainty that the English English form is correct and the North American English form incorrect. The feeling of most English immigrants — unlike Robert Oloman’s

attitude — is that Canadians should adapt their speech to the English form, not vice versa. Thus for many, English ethnicity is

constructed not only in terms of perceived divergences in language and culture but also in terms of the English person’s right to dictate which is the “correct,” “natural,” or “proper” form. Occasionally, interviewees admitted that inability to understand an accent could be mutual. “I’m sure there are people who have difficulty understanding me, in the same way that I often say to Rita, some of our neighbours here — well, you know, I get along just fine with them, but I only understand about fifty per

cent of what they’re saying. I can usually get the gist and we can carry on a conversation. And they probably think exactly the

same thing about me, you know. They can’t understand that fellow” (Gerald Moore, 89-19). This generalization suggests that the difficulty does not bar meaningful communication. In the following personal-experience account, however, accent is a com-

plete barrier: “I don’t think I’ve ever had any problem about

English Immigrants’ Narratives 39 people not understanding me, although if they — they might have

had and not mentioned it, were too polite to. But I will admit that in the first few weeks I was over, I found it hard sometimes to catch on to what people were saying. I found the accent a bit difficult ... I can remember taking the bus ... into downtown Hamilton one day, and it was a packed bus, and everyone was talking at once. And I sat there and I thought to myself, they could all be talking Greek for all that I can understand a word of this” (Isobel Burton, 89-8). Misunderstanding is another issue. In the following personal experience narrative, the Canadian interprets what he hears completely differently from what the English immigrant intended: There was a grocer not far away and he would deliver, so I thought, well, P’ll phone. They couldn’t understand me ... They picked up the phone, they recognized the voice, and he’d say, “Just a moment please,” and he’d pass it to some[one else] ... There were three brothers ran this

grocery store, and none of them wanted to speak to me, that was the truth. Because I used to phone and say, “Send me some blancmange powder,” and they said, “Some what? some what?” ...

One day I thought, well, the dessert powder was always a bit of a problem, and I thought, I wonder how they’d like a currant loaf with some butter ... So I said well, “If you’re coming this way on Mary Street will you please leave a currant loaf.” “Oh yes.” So during the afternoon I heard the side-door slam ... and I thought, oh that’s the grocer ... So I

went down and on the ... steps at the side-door there was this round green thing. I thought, what in the world’s that? That’s not a currant loaf. Whatever is it? ... So I picked it up ... and put it in the kitchen. My husband came home and I said to him, “Here, come and look, come and look. What’s this thing?” He said, “Oh, don’t you know what it is?” I said well, “I wouldn’t be asking you if I did. What is it?” I said,

“I phoned for a currant loaf and that’s what they sent me.” He said, “It’s a cantaloupe.” (Jane Aldwin, 88-6)

This personal experience narrative is similar to several others

in Jane Aldwin’s repertoire in which her words are misinterpreted. In most, as in this example, the Canadian’s misinterpretation at least inconveniences her, and may even implicitly threaten

40 Ethnicity in the Mainstream her ability to function successfully, as well as to communicate. Yet despite the drawbacks of this strategy, she invariably maintains her own correctness and makes no concessions to Canadian verbal styles. Clearly, having an English accent could be a liability in terms

other than simple communication, as this personal experience story recounts: “I applied for a job with Procter and Gamble. At this time, their main factory was in Hamilton. And everybody had said they were a great company to work for. They turned me down on the first interview. They said that I had too much of an English accent, that might irritate some people. So, about a year

later I reapplied ... There was another ad in the paper, and | applied again and said that, you know, maybe I’d lost a bit of my British accent. I don’t think I had at all, and I don’t think I have now ... Finally the sales manager hired me — well he said, ‘We don’t seem to be able to discourage you, so I guess we’d better hire you” (Gerald Moore, 89-18). Gerald Moore speculates on a

possible change in his accent, but he carefully reports his employer’s comment to confirm his opinion that it is his persistence, not any change in his linguistic style, which is responsible for his eventual employment. There are no narratives in my collection in which an English person actively misinterprets — as opposed to simply not understanding — a Canadian accent. As the issue of power in discourse is clearly significant in this material, the absence of such stories may not be surprising. That is, an English immigrant’s misunderstanding of a Canadian’s language would challenge her/his right

to dictate the correctness of what is being said. Such a notion does not fit the ideas of English ethnicity being constructed in these narratives.

Word or Expression Accent is not the only variation between the speech styles of English immigrants and other Canadians. Often the meanings of words or expressions are dissimilar in the two linguistic systems or are unknown in one. This personal experience narrative gives an example in which using a particular term identifies one English

English Immigrants’ Narratives 4I immigrant to another: “There was a beautiful greengrocer’s shop ... and I was sailing past there one day and I saw strawberries ...

And I thought, oh there’s dessert for tonight ... So I sailed in and the proprietor came forward, middle-aged man, and I said, ‘How much are strawberries a punnet?’ His whole face glowed, and he put his hands on my shoulders, and he said, ‘When did you get here?’ I said, ‘About ten days ago. What’s that got to do with it?’ He said, ‘I haven’t heard that word since I left the old country’ ” (Jane Aldwin, 88-6). It is clear from Jane Aldwin’s segue into generalization, which immediately follows this narrative, that she sees variation not merely as a divergence but as a flaw. She is entitled to determine what is correct — the English form to which she is accustomed. “And the thing you buy fruit in isn’t a box, it’s a punnet. And you can look it up in the dictionary, but I’ve never heard it used, I’ve always heard it called a box here. And this is why I think there’s something at fault with education here. It’s too too sloppy. People don’t learn the right names for things” (ibid.).

Such concerns for “correctness” may be at the heart of the ambivalent attitudes several immigrants encountered. Some discourse-conscious Canadians may be convinced that the English person’s entitlement — what I am calling the sense of a right to dictate proper form — to decide on appropriateness is warranted, in which case they are made to feel inferior; or they may feel that it is unwarranted, in which case their own right to linguistic enti-

tlement is usurped. With either alternative, Canadian speakers are at a disadvantage; in order to be correct, they must either change their communicative style or they must defend it.

Most of the narratives I collected are about English usages that are unfamiliar to Canadians. Examples of the obverse, such as the following, are rare: “I said to him, ‘Look, we’ve seen the house at the lake that was for sale. We wanted to know something about it.’ And he said, well, ‘If you had it, what would you do with it?’ And I said, well, ‘I don’t quite understand it, Mr Jones, but we would be living in it. What else would we do with it?’ He said, ‘I’ve had people here wanting to turn it into a blind pig.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what a blind pig is’” (Jane Aldwin, 88-7). The reason for a relative lack of concern with unfamiliar Canadian words may be, again, the issue of entitlement

42 Ethnicity in the Mainstream to the power to determine what is appropriate discourse. There is little need to tell stories about Canadian-coined words; to immi-

grants they are irrelevant because they are wrong, even unnatural. While it is almost inconceivable that English immigrants would not assimilate Canadian vocabulary, they evidently do so without consciously noting and marking it. Cases where English words or expressions are familiar to Canadians but where their meaning or use is not the same in Canada are extremely popular subjects for commentary and storytelling. The words and expressions that become topics are legion. For example, “I couldn’t get over the word lunch, because you don’t eat lunch at 11 o’clock at night” (Jane Aldwin, 88-6).’ Or, “My vocabulary is unreconstructed English. I still find myself sometimes talking about the bonnet and the boot rather than the

hood and the trunk, but people seem to understand” (Andrew Beamish, 88-13). Andrew Beamish’s generalization implies that Canadians’ sense of entitlement is less rigid than that of the English — and less rigid than many of the other English immigrants’ narratives imply — by commenting that people understand even his nonstandard (in North American English) usages. Much commentary on word and expression divergence are simply general observations like this and the following example, rather than narratives: “Vest — that means undershirt in Canada. And then a waistcoat — that means vest” (Andrew Beamish, 88-14). Or, “Oh, there are

many things like that. Drapes instead of curtains, closets instead of cupboards, dome fasteners instead of press studs, Santa Claus instead of Father Christmas” (Brian Bartholomew, 88-21). However, there are also a number of personal experience narratives about word-meaning divergence. “Oh, we had moved from

Collingwood to Cambridge, which was Preston then, and my husband was on nights or something — I can’t remember — and

here this guy came to fix my gas stove up, and it was the early hours of the morning — bang bang came on the door. And I said, ‘Gosh,’ I said, ‘What an unearthly hour to come and knock anybody up!’ And do you know that I didn’t realize what I had said for the longest while, and you know I was really scared to open my mouth for a long while after. I never realized — oh gee, that

English Immigrants’ Narratives 43 guy was so fast! Came in, did his job, went out. God, he didn’t even look at me. I think he was probably more embarrassed than me” (Sandra Stanley, 88-4). Having encountered a number of stories about “knocking up,”

I asked Jane Aldwin whether or not she had had problems with that particular phrase. Her answer indicated that it was a commonly recognized problem: “Never living in that part of the country it didn’t come into my vocabulary at all, but I was warned about that” (88-6). Since the Canadian connotation of “knocking up” (“making pregnant”) is relatively taboo for polite conversation, that meaning appears to be communicated between

immigrants, rather than from Canadian to immigrant or vice versa. Both Jane Aldwin’s comments and Brian Bartholomew’s, given below, suggest that the uninitiated were consciously educated by more experienced immigrants. However, it is also apparent that this particular confusion makes such a good story that it need not be realistic. In the following narrative, it seems unlikely, to say the least,

that the secretary would have interpreted the Canadian meaning of “knocking up” in that context; it becomes nonsensical: “Well, when I came up to Canada, I visited a British friend in my

former company in Toronto, and he was helping me to try and get placed in a job. And he said, ‘Have you seen Joe and Tom, Dick and Harry?’ And I said no, well, I hadn’t seen Harry, but I thought of knocking him up and asking if he could help me. So at that the secretary in the room got up and walked out. So my friend laughed and he said well, ‘I must tell you, that’s an expres-

sion you do not use in Canada’” (Brian Bartholomew, 88-21). Though this is told as a personal experience, it is possible that some creative elements have entered. That is, the narrative is not

simply reportage of an event but must be made “storyable”: entertaining because humorous, culturally truthful, and so on. Again, the constructed quality of ethnicity becomes manifest.

However, even non-narrative forms can contain evaluative ethnicity-constructing material. Consider, for example, the following comment, which implicitly suggests the superiority of the British word, but couches it in “objective” terms: “Elevators instead of lifts. Generally, the English word is more concise.

AA Ethnicity in the Mainstream There are hardly any instances where the English is longer than the American’s or the North American” (Brian Bartholomew, 88-21). On divergences of language, it was common, especially during

my interviews with English immigrants of upper-middle- or upper-class origin — though they were not the only ones — that they assume their form to be the sole standard. Jane Aldwin’s stories exemplify this attitude, but there are others. BRIAN BARTHOLOMEW: Our Canadian accent isn’t too prominent, I’m afraid. PHILLIPA BARTHOLOMEW: We still speak English. (88-21)

Obviously, these language divergences are not approached as meaningless or trivial. Their significance is discussed and often constructed in narratives, expressing not only the form but also the ideology of linguistic difference. They are intended to some ex-

tent as a catalogue of variations observed, but they also evaluate the cultural and linguistic content perceived in English and Canadian culture. Such material works to create a sense of ethnicity. As well as differences of actual linguistic items, English immigrants perceive divergences between themselves and Canadians that pertain to the context of language. Some may occur when physical places have divergent discourse uses in the two countries and others when persons have varying discourse roles. Finally, there is the important issue of connotation, where conventional usages may be found in some way inappropriate in the new country. Each of these concerns is discussed in turn.

Place Place is associated with significant discourse variation. For example, one would expect differing kinds of discussions to occur in a

washroom and a boardroom. Even if the topic were the same, one would not be surprised to find different styles of speech, terminology, and attitude in the two locations. These linguistic connotations of place are by no means natural outcomes of location; they are culturally constructed.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 45 Until recently, the place to which a person would go for an alcoholic drink — in England, the pub, and in Canada, the pub or bar — was probably the most obviously divergent discourse location for newly arrived immigrants, as this generalization nar-

rative indicates: “[My husband] never went to pubs in Canada after the first couple of weeks he was here, because he said that they were just places here to go and have a drink, whereas in England they were places where you went to meet your friends. They were a social gathering and that was what he went for, more than for the drink. And when he went here, he found that you could stand at the bar and you could drink a couple of bottles of something and nobody would say a word” (Isobel Burton, 89-8). However, the pub is not the only location in which drinking is associated with informal sociability. “There is one English custom that doesn’t seem to happen over here and that’s coming around to have drinks with someone. I’ve been thinking in particular of ‘Come around after church and have a glass of sherry,’ not to stay for lunch, that’s not the idea at all, but you come and you sit and you chat for an hour, an hour and a half maybe, and drink two or three glasses of sherry. And that kind of entertain-

ment doesn’t seem to happen over here” (Andrew Beamish, 88-14). This and the following examples enmesh discourse context with politeness. That is, an invitation to have a drink at a particular time implies a certain kind of sociability and discussion that has no counterpart in Canadian culture. “It’s easier to strike up a conversation somehow back home, isn’t it. We’ve found anyway ... Of course the pubs help ... because they are a meeting-ground, let’s face it. And I bet you don’t stand more than a couple of minutes and if there’s someone next to you, he’ll turn around and you’ll say something, you know. It’s just one of those

things ... It’s just natural, isn’t it?” (Norman Coates, 88-12). Again, divergence is expressed as being “natural,” not cultural. Norman Coates may not realize that a Canadian might find such a discussion context — particularly when the two speakers are unacquainted — at least vaguely uncomfortable. Entitlement, in his view, is clearly with the British person, whose expressions and actions are reasonable and expected.

46 Ethnicity in the Mainstream There are other situations that are likewise considered contexts for discussion with strangers in England, but not so in Canada. Norman Coates generalizes: “Like, you meet people when you’re going for a walk, you know. They’re just strolling with a dog or something. It’s almost automatic to stop and speak to them, you know, pass the time of day, and ‘What’re you doing, and you’re on holiday, or where are you going,’ you know. It’s almost — you

take it for granted” (88-12).The same entitlement occurs with the “automatic,” or “taken for granted,” as with the “natural.” Again, Norman Coates perceives something lacking in a person, Canadian or English, who does not act in this manner. All of these examples are generalization narratives, rather than stories of personal experience. Such usage emphasizes the degree to which the speakers feel that their own way of doing things is natural, reasonable, and expected, rather than culturally derived.

Person Contextual variation in language pertains not only to the types of speech one expects in certain places but also to those one expects from social categories of persons. Much academic and popular literature has been devoted, for example, to differences between male and female language use.’ English immigrants describe divergence in gender association, but also in terms of age and class. For example, one man felt that educated Canadians (implicitly of his own class) should speak better Eng-

lish. He described an upper-year undergraduate seminar he attended in which the students commonly used hesitation phenomena such as “well” and “you know” to open their contributions to the discussion. He found this practice annoying; educated people should be more articulate. He expressed the speech style

he identified as Canadian as not simply divergent but pathological. He also employed age as an analogy in characterizing the language of government and advertising as a form apparently aimed more at the intellectual capacities of children than of adults. Though Jane Aldwin discusses variation in common topics, she is concerned with gender-appropriate discourse.

English Immigrants’ Narratives A7 I came over in the later 1930s ... and I must say I felt a bit of an oddity.

Some of them didn’t understand me at all ... I met a group of young housewives. Oh, they were quite pleasant women, you know. They knew much more about housekeeping and babies and operations and things that I didn’t know anything about. But when I asked them about Ottawa and I said, “Is it a two-party or a three-party government?” they didn’t know. That’s true, they didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Well, as a young English woman, we’d always talked poli-

tics around the dining-table. We knew what was going on; we knew jolly well when it was election time and what was happening and what the different candidates were blathering on about ... But I found that Canadian women at that time weren’t interested ... Their conversation was mostly domestic. (88-6)

Similarly, comfort with topics may lead English people to choose to affiliate together in an ethnic club. NORMAN COATES: It’s a natural tendency to try and keep together,

because you’ll understand each other better, you know. It’s no good to run into a pub and say, “How’s the Blue Jays doing?” you know. Who'd care? But if you went into a Canadian club, then everyone is talking about the same thing and readily understanding

what you’re saying, you know. So basically that’s why we belong to a British club. We — so you’ll be understood more readily. MAURA COATES: And they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about ... Somebody’ll come up and say, “Did you see such

and such in the paper?” And we find that they’re quite ready to discuss anything and everything, regardless of what it is, you know. Almost anybody

at the club, once they get to know you, they’ll come up and say, “Oh, did you see so and so in the paper?” and of course that’s the opening gambit, then

for a conversation, and you’re half way there. And “What are you writing to so and so?” and if nothing else, “Oh, did you see what Mrs Thatcher’s done now?” (88-12)

48 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Although Maura Coates says that she and the other people in the UK Club of Cambridge will discuss “anything and everything,” she would certainly find numerous topics highly inappropriate, uncomfortable, or otherwise problematic. However, her feeling that they could discuss anything comes from a known and shared understanding of reasonable — and, by extension, unreasonable — topics and style, and how matters may appropriately be broached. Maura Coates also attends to conversation openers. Her fellow club members, like herself, know how to converse. By following certain rules, “you’re half-way there.” She can feel comfortable

knowing that she shares with them an idea of how discourse should proceed, a feeling that reinforces her entitlement. She is not the only one, as she might be in a crowd of Canadians, who knows what is right and natural. She knows that anything they discuss will be appropriate and that the protocol or procedures with which she feels comfortable will be followed; they can “discuss anything.” In another example, English ethnic identity limits the speaker’s

level of comfort with discourse. “Well, I think I - Pll tell you quite honestly one thing that I — that I think I have found out since we came here, that despite the fact that I think all Canada is very kind and hospitable, it’s not permissible for us to criticize

anything ... We have to be very careful ... what we say, or else you, you upset people, if you think that anything could be done differently” (Peggy Podmore, 88-29). One man asserted that Canadians could take criticism from anyone except an English person. He seemed to consider attempts by Canadians to assert their own entitlement as personal insults as well as a usurping of power. This discourse issue was raised at four separate points in our interview by Peggy Podmore; clearly it is significant to her as

well. One man expressed divergence in language as a variation in “freedom” or “honesty” in communication. Canadian character is interpreted through English patterns of language use. Similarly: It’s taken me a long time to realize, after all kinds of discussions about this, that this particular teacher, and probably a lot of English teachers

English Immigrants’ Narratives 49 too, do not teach the English language. They teach English literature or literature in the English language. But they do not teach the language. And I think this is why a lot of people over here in North America — I don’t just mean Canadians, but in North America — the language is very sloppily used. People use adjectives ... when they should use adverbs, and they use short forms. They ... shorten everything and I think this is because the language itself is not taught. And I don’t think any other language would let people get away with that ... And I hate to see what I consider my language used carelessly, and used sloppily, and misused. (Peggy Podmore, 88-28)

This clear example of linguistic ethnocentrism employs an explic-

it claim to entitlement. Not only is the North American other’s | language taken to be incorrect and lacking, but the “incorrect” usage is taken as a personal affront.

Connotation Connotation can be more difficult to specify than person or place;

it pertains to how speech is interpreted and what meanings are assumed. Thus, connotational issues include what is thought of as polite, as opposed to rude, and what is humorous and what isn’t. Politeness in one linguistic style may be seen as unfriendliness in

the other, as in the following example: “I’d been there about a week and I was still calling the lady of the house Mrs Morrison, because — things have changed somewhat in England now I know, but in those days you really didn’t call people by their first name

unless it was a very old family friend or a cousin” (Jane Aldwin, 88-6).

The next generalization illustrates what the English person sees as excessive — though pleasing — politeness on the part of Canadians, which results from a divergent method of expressing the discourse function of giving orders. “People did not give orders but offered suggestions ... I soon realized the friendliness of most of the people we met. And they would use an expression

like ‘Would you like to — do you think if you met the good Dr Pauline, do you think you’d have time to ask her if she could give me a phone call? I wanted to ask her something or other, and

50 Ethnicity in the Mainstream would you like to?’ ‘Oh yes, sure I would.’ And within a month or two I thought, well, Canada is the country for me, is the country for us. They’re so friendly. And they didn’t say, “Oh, Bill, give this to Joe Blow, will you, or John Bull, or.” ‘Would you like to, do you think?’ So that was fine” (Brian Bartholomew, 88-21). Class distinctions in linguistic expectations may lead to variations in interpretations of difference. Where Brian Bartholomew sees excessive politeness in Canada, Maura Coates finds Canadians lacking in everyday friendliness. When you met somebody [in Britain] you always said “Good morning,” automatically, whether you knew them or not, you know ... But I found

when I said “Good morning” to people over here, they either ignored me or went [gives a puzzled look] or they just looked at me as though “She’s out of her mind, or something. What’s she saying good morn — |

don’t know her,” you know ... I found that difficult, because it was a natural thing for me ... I used to go into work and I would say, “Good morning everybody,” and they’d look and they’d have faces like a mile of bad road. And I’d think to myself, oh lord, what have I done now ...

Mind you, it was a difficult one ... I got to know a couple of English women [at work] and they said, “Do you know, you’re the first person that’s said good morning, that comes in and says good morning.” And I said well, “What’s wrong with you saying it. You were brought up the same as I was, you know.” Well, “We did at first.” It was silly things, really, but they were hard things to get used to. The rest of it you got, more or less took it in your stride, you know. (88-11)

Maura Coates does not identify the variations she perceives as the result of Canadians’ modes of expressing themselves but instead as an absolute difference in politeness; a divergence in attitude, not in communicative style. That is, she approaches Canadians as she would English people and interprets the reaction as if it were from a fellow English person. There are also some circumstances in which an English person might see Canadian forms of address as not merely impolite but

laughably incongruous. One man was somewhat shocked that new acquaintances expected to use his first name instead of his surname when addressing him.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 51 Humour opens a multitude of opportunities for misunderstanding or inappropriateness. A comment that is humorous in One group may be taken as rudeness in another. We went to the Masonic Temple to the tennis club dance ... And then the chap that nearly always played in men’s doubles with my Fred — his name was Jan Sunderland — so Jan came over and asked me for a dance. Well, that was fine. We started off and going around, and the next thing

I saw that my husband had gone over and asked Mrs Sunderland to dance, which was the usual procedure ... Now all my life P’ve had cold hands. Even today they’re not warm. It’s something to do with circulation ... But at a dance it’s quite nice because quite a lot of people get hot-handed. Anyway, I didn’t.

So we’re dancing around and Jan tried to start a conversation. He said, meaning my hand I know, he said, “My, but you’re cold.” And I said, “Yes, but I have my moments.” He waltzed me around to where I was sitting and he sat me down and said, “Thank you very much,” and left me. I put him off ... And [my husband] came over and sat down, very agitated, he said, “Are you all right?” And I said, “Yes.” He said well, “What are you doing sitting here?” Well I said, “I wouldn’t go and

sit anywhere else, would I?” He said well, “What happened.” I said well, “I don’t know but Ian Sunderland just came and brought me back to my seat.” Well he said, “What did you say to him?” So I told him and he said, “Oh my God, I wish you wouldn’t be saying things like that. You know they don’t understand that kind of humour.” Well I said, “I don’t think that was particularly smart. I thought that was a very ordinary kind of remark. He asked for it, didn’t he?” He said, “Come on, we’re going home.” So that was the end of that dance. (Jane Aldwin, 88-6)

The divergence encountered may not be storied but simply expressed in a generalization. NORMAN COATES: It’s a humour was very difficult for us to understand.

We don’t see basically what there is to laugh at, you know, at first. Some of it we understand, but it’s totally different from what it is over the other side.

52 Ethnicity in the Mainstream MAURA COATES: ‘The humour seems to be based on taking a knock at

somebody, you know, the humour that you come across here ... It seemed to me you had to knock somebody down to get a good laugh, it was that kind of thing. (88-11)

In the following case, there are contexts, as Jane Aldwin herself knows, in which the use of the word “bloody” would be acceptable in Canada, but she makes it ambiguous — quite deliberately, I think, though she pretends innocence. Her joke might be taken

as a humorous play on words in England, but her Canadian listener sees it instead as swearing. The significance of discourse — and the sexist notion that the woman is an index for a man — is underlined by the fact that her husband warns her he may lose his job because of her language. And another time was even worse. I don’t know that I should tell you (laughs). But anyhow, I was inveigled into joining a bridge club. Well I wasn’t heart and soul into it. I’d cope ... There were twelve women, and among them was a Mrs Smithson, whose husband was considerably senior, I would say, to the rest of us, and very much in favour with the hierarchy at GM. So she stopped me on the street one day, did Anne Smithson, and she

said, “You get your eggs from Mr Watson, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes” ... She said well, “How do you like them?” Well I said, “How do

you mean, fried, or boiled, or what?” She said, “No no no, what do you think of his eggs?” So I said, “Oh, I don’t know what you mean, eggs is eggs.” She said, “I don’t mean that but I really am getting a bit fed up with them.” I said, “Oh,” and she said well, “The last two weeks that he’s brought them around,” and she said, “I always get a dozen and sometimes a dozen and a half from him,” and she said, “The last two weeks every other one that I’ve gone to crack’s had a speck of blood in it and I don’t like it. And I don’t like to serve it like that even though it cooks,” and so on and so on. So she said, “I don’t know what to do about it.” I said, “Well just tell him you don’t want any more of his bloody eggs.” Oh oh oh oh (laughs) oh, it was — her face, it was just like pulling a blind down. She went absolutely blank and cold and she said well,

English Immigrants’ Narratives 53 “It may be all right for you but we don’t use that word here.” I said, “There’s nothing wrong with it.” She said, “That’s good afternoon,” and away she went. She never spoke to me again (laughs). She never spoke to me...

So when my poor long-suffering husband came home for his supper,

he said well, “What went on today?” ... So I told him about this and he said, “I don’t know how you — you, you really will lose me my job if

you go along. Now will you please keep your mouth shut and think what you’re saying.” I said, “Look, there was blood in the eggs, they were bloody eggs. Now there’s no blasphemy or anything else there and

she should know that.” Well he said, “She wouldn’t know that. She doesn’t think that way. And that’s a word that is absolutely taboo.” (88~6)

Jane Aldwin does not admit any possibility that Canadian usage would be more appropriate. For example: “‘A bitch is a female dog, but please don’t use the word when you’re referring to a female dog. That’s —’ ‘But I don’t know why not.’ He said ‘Because Canadian women particularly don’t like the word. Don’t say it.” So I - from then on I had to say lady dog, which I think is absolutely daft. Daft. Bitch is a perfectly good English word” (88-6). While both meanings of the word are possible in England, the swearing usage in Canada has so contaminated the one which refers to a female dog that the swear word is unmarked (standard), rather than the more benign usage. Similarly, one man discussed using the term “you young bugger” to refer familiarly to a young man; clearly, his interlocutors were shocked. There are unique coinages, apparently particular to English immigrants in Canada, which do not pertain to the English context at all but are instead developed as a tool for dealing with the context of immigration. “There was a phrase around when we first arrived in Canada — the $5,000 cure — for people who’d emi-

grated with stars in their eyes and then after a year and a half, two years, thought this is hell, I can’t stand it any more, and packed up and gone back to Britain, and found that life was even

worse hell over there and come back again. They were finally

cured, they were finally settled here, at the cost of $5,000” (Andrew Beamish, 88-13).

54 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Clearly such narratives do not simply note divergences in language and culture. If it were an objective inventory, each narrator’s storyable contents might be similar. Instead, we find that a difference observed and evaluated by one speaker — Canadians are more polite, for example — is quite differently perceived by another — Canadians are less polite. Rather than inventorying

variations, these narratives evaluate and express a consensual point of view: that English language and culture are more correct

than, even superior to, their Canadian counterparts. ETHNICITY AS DIFFERENCE

Even the decision finally to come to Canada can be expressed in terms of language, via reported speech. “At this time, I had an English boyfriend. He was the only English boyfriend I ever had. And he says to me, ‘Choose. Canada or me.’ I said, ‘Oh I choose Canada’” (Florence Bart, 88—9). But concerns with discourse do not cover every problem encountered by English immigrants. Culture shock is magnified by the fact that most English people

do not expect to find Canada much different from their home country. And in the following discussion, a discovered divergence is not described as indigenous, but its source is located in another colonial relationship — with the u.s. “I find that I was surprised

how much adjustment that you had to make, because it seemed to us that coming from Britain, we wouldn’t have to adjust very much. We felt that Canada was a British colony, or had been, you know, it was a British dominion, and probably we'd fit in pretty well. But the amount of Americanization over here was one thing that surprised me. I don’t see why it should have, because I realize now that when you have that border, you know, and when people can cross it without any great difficulty, there’s bound to be. And

there’s more now, of course. But even in ’56, there was quite a bit of Americanization over here that I hadn’t expected” (Isobel Burton, 89-7). Only occasionally do a few immigrants, like Isobel

Burton, actively invoke the Canadian colonial past in order to bolster their sense of superiority or correctness. I would suggest that this is because other Canadians recognize their colonial position as well as, and sometimes better than, English immigrants.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 55 Of course, not all Canadians accept English entitlement. “My daughters ... took a while to settle into school over here. It was

very different for them, in school. Plus they found that their clothing was different. We didn’t have to have the big heavy winter coats that all children have to have over here. So I think they got a lot of snide remarks from other school kids about what

they were wearing and about their accents, and they were a bit unhappy from time to time. But they settled in. Give them — after about a year they were fine. By that time they’d got adjusted and

people had accepted them as normal human beings in spite of their accent. And I’d got around to getting them their winter clothes that they needed for them, for the second winter they were here” (Isobel Burton, 89-7). Or the divergences immigrants expect are based upon stereotypes. When I asked Phillipa and Brian Bartholomew what they knew about Canada before coming here, they replied: BRIAN BARTHOLOMEW: _ Very little. As a Britisher, we had a regard

for Canada, Canadians, and of course we thought mainly of Mounties and snow and ice and — what else besides that, Mounties? — there was ...

PHILLIPA BARTHOLOMEW: Husky dogs.

BRIAN BARTHOLOMEW: Husky dogs probably. And most Britishers

had a high regard for things Canadian, which we learned afterwards wasn’t entirely

reciprocated for the Canadians in their regard for the British. (88-21)

Yet language remains central. I asked a member of the UK Club of Cambridge whether she noticed any differences when she first

came over and she replied, “Only in the way we spoke, you know, and trying to get across to people what you — you know, it was so aggravating, trying to express what you were wanting to say, and it would come out wrong, you know” (Sandra Stanley, 88—4). Although Sandra Stanley maintains that her speech is “wrong,” she may be implying that the fault lies with the Cana-

56 Ethnicity in the Mainstream dians who fail to understand her, despite her obvious efforts. Thus, the storyable material presented in this study implicates linguistic and discourse issues: “improper” or divergent use of language by Canadians, English people’s misunderstanding or lack of appreciation for Canadian humour, and vice versa. Immigrants find the English form truly funny, truly comprehensible, and so on.

Though it may be suggested, as Herberg (1989) does, that ethnicity is subjectively based upon origin and traits, I have argued that these terms are as problematic as “ethnicity” itself. In the case of ethnic folklore such as the personal experience and generalization narratives described above, I find it fruitful to avoid terminological and conceptual problems by recognizing that most such traditional and popular culture focuses upon difference (see also Abrahams and Bauman 1981). The significance of this kind of marked, culturally elaborated difference is, of course, central to the study of symbolism and semiosis (e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1969; Barthes 1957). Similarly, English immigrants use observed cultural variation to construct a sense of how they are different from other Canadians. Variations among forms of English can be divided according to the usual parameters of linguistics: phonology (accent), morphology (word forms), syntax (word order), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (uses and strategies) (see, for example, Platt et al.

1984; Trudgill and Hannah 1985). The central concern for English ethnicity in Canada, however, is the use of language — control and power in discourse — that is, with ethnic difference rather than with simple linguistic variation. Thus linguistic and other issues can become intermingled, but the actual variations described are transformed through the power issue of entitlement — the right to determine, decide, or dictate correct, appropriate discourse — into the creation of ethnic difference. The difference need not be from some perceived mainstream; it

may be from local or other ethnic cultures. Perception of ethnic

difference, a sociocultural counterpart to linguistic marking, results from an alteration in what is usual or expected. To immigrants especially, concern for difference is evident in the experience of culture shock, when they notice the absence of practices

English Immigrants’ Narratives 57 or materials they have hitherto taken for granted or they find that what they would consider unusual in their home country is conventional in Canada. But difference applies to esoteric and exoteric aspects of ethnic folklore, not only to these particular narratives. Exoteric forms, based upon non-members’ notions of an ethnic group, focus upon

differences, such as jokes that highlight varying standards of cleanliness, expression of sexuality, and so on. Esoteric forms, presented by members to others within the same group, such as foods, practices, or performances, also highlight the unusual, the divergent, or the special.? Robert Klymasz was a pioneer among Canadian folklorists in bringing ethnic studies and folklore together in his examination of ethnic jokes, which looks at them from esoteric and exoteric perspectives and how they are motivated. “Aside from its implications as a manifestation of contemporary mainstream folklore, the ethnic joke plays a special crucial

role within the minority ethnic group itself where its impact is largely but not solely degenerative in nature” (1970, 325). Klymasz goes on to discuss the issue of language — including dialect and accent — as represented in ethnic jokes. “An important segment of most, if not all, ethnic joke cycles is the so-called ‘dialect’ or language joke corpus ... Collectively these amount to a vicious onslaught on the mother tongue of the ethnic group and point to its impotency in mainstream society” (ibid.). Evidently, language differences are not always the locus of esoteric and exo-

teric entitlement that they are for English immigrants, as I will discuss later. The narratives quoted above are not so negatively charged as are ethnic jokes, but their presenters and users are members of the group itself; therefore the narrative is a more fully esoteric form. Further, the former colonial relationship of Canada to Britain gives many English immigrants a sense that their language is indeed the original and correct form. While dialect jokes point out the failings of the immigrants, these stories dwell on those of Canadians.

Klymasz’s commentary reminds us that language and its uses | are never neutral; neither are they univocal. As linguists studying

language variation by region and class have pointed out, when dominant social classes and regions empower their own discourse

58 Ethnicity in the Mainstream (as in colonial situations), it is often voiced as a “superior” form of language. For example, the idea that Black English is a simplified, incomplete version of the language has nothing to do with its intrinsic form and structure but much with the lack of power of those who employ it.'° Linguists affirm that the anthropological concept of ethnocentrism — the belief that one’s own culture is inherently superior — and its opposite, cultural relativity — the recognition that one society cannot be judged using another’s system of values — apply to

language as much as to culture (see Roberts 1958, 474-5). The English are no more ethnocentric than any other group. As linguist Paul Roberts comments: “Aren’t some ... speech communi-

ties better than others? That is, isn’t better language heard in some than in others? Well, yes, of course. One speech community is always better than all the rest. This is the group in which one happens to find oneself” (ibid., 474). Roberts suggests that the normal bias is to prefer one’s own linguistic style; subjectively, it is both more comprehensive and more comprehensible.

However, it must be noted that even the right to be ethnocentric has power implications. Women, racial minorities, and colonized groups often internalize negative images and ideology and turn them into self-hate, including a rejection of their own language.'' Groups who are disempowered, whether by sex, race, or religion, for example, are taught to internalize the impropriety of their culture and language. Given the colonial context, it is not surprising that many Canadians are anglophiles, particularly with respect to language and accent; nor is it surprising that American values of progress and individual achievement have become so popular. The ability to communicate within the dominant discourse — beyond the simple use of accents, words, or even grammatical constructions to the ability to construct jokes and stories, to converse, and so on — confers the potential to operate successfully within the social system of which it is a part. Middle- and upperclass Canadian (North American) English is a power discourse, but so are middle- and upper-class varieties of English English in Canada. In most prestigious employment situations, an immi-

English Immigrants’ Narratives 59 grant is advantaged by an ability to speak “BBc English”; other varieties of the language are not similarly privileged. Werner Sollors implicates power when he notes that “texts are not mere reflections of existing differences but also ... productive forces in nation-building enterprises ... It must be possible to acknowledge and describe concrete ethnic differences without necessarily reifying the concept of ethnicity” (1989, xv). Variations between English and Canadian culture and language are certainly the focus of the narratives reported above, but their fundamental point is to present attitudes and ideas about such diver-

gences that construct a sense of cultural membership which amounts to, but is only very rarely called, Canadian English ethnicity. Avoiding the self-description of ethnicity while noting and storying difference is for English Canadians a power-based activity.

LANGUAGE AND POWER-ENTITLEMENT Nationality symbolically becomes a discourse issue when one swears an oath in order to become a Canadian citizen. Even here,

it is possible for an English person to consider that her entitlement is greater. “He said well, ‘I’m afraid if you want to take this

position, you have to be a Canadian citizen.’ Hm I said, ‘Oh, I guess I can do that.’ So I went into Toronto and it was nothing

at all, but I thought the woman that swore me in was a bit stupid. After I’d taken all the oath and everything, she said to me, ‘Do you understand this, or do you realize what you’re doing?’ And I said well, ‘Madam, I’ve lived under the crown all my life. I certainly know who the Queen is’” (laughs) (Jane Aldwin, 88-8). In England itself, the bias of power and preference for certain linguistic styles is exacerbated by class (Trudgill 1972); that is, middle- and upper-class English immigrants may already be accustomed to comparing their own style of speech favourably to that of others with whom they interact on a day-to-day basis. In Canada, even when the comparison is weighted in favour of Canadian culture, it may be problematic.

60 Ethnicity in the Mainstream I was a little homesick at first. In fact, we [she and her husband] were both very homesick for two years. And it’s funny because when

we went for our interview at — we went to Liverpool, to Canada House there, for our medicals and interviews — and one of the things that the man said to us was “You'll find that you’re homesick for two

years. It just about lasts that long. So stick it out that long, because after that you'll find you’re just fine.” But he was absolutely right. He also made a very interesting comment, which I really — really comes

back to me when I read the paper these days, because there are so many letters from people saying that we should be so nice to the new immigrants and, you know, that we should do this for them, that for them. Nowadays, it’s almost a business of falling over backwards to fit everybody into what — give them what they want. And this fellow said to my husband and I, “One thing I should warn you. When you get to Canada, always remember that you’re going there because you choose to. They’re not asking you to.” So he said to my husband, “When you go to work, don’t ever turn around and say to

the fellows you’re working with, ‘Oh we do that much better in England.’” And I thought, “Yes, that’s wise advice.” And I don’t think my husband ever did, you know. I think he took that to heart, because he said, “After all, you have to admit that that’s the way they do it in Canada. They’re entitled to. And you have to fall in with what they do. It’s not the other way around.” And I agreed with that and so did

Ed, and I think we both tried to work along with that and fit into _ Canada, rather than expecting Canada to fit in with us, which — don’t you think that’s fair? I do, and I did then. And I think always would. We had asked to come here, just as this gentleman said we had. (Isobel Burton, 89-7)

This is a pivotal text, since it appears that these people are open-minded; they admit that entitlement is not solely theirs. Isobel Burton and her husband’s decision in favour of adapting to their new circumstances, focusing as much on cultural as on linguistic matters, de-colonizes some Canadians by ceding entitlement to them. She recognizes, and shows a willingness to avoid, the temptation to see her own culture as prior and correct. Others’ inability or unwillingness to do so is worked out in the narratives presented and discussed earlier.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 61 Yet this personal experience narrative’s embedded generalization simultaneously reasserts the issue of power by disentitling other groups. It colonizes other immigrants and disentitles them

not only to language but also to other services. Isobel Burton obfuscates the opportunities she and her husband had over other immigrants who did not have their evident advantages, including, but not limited to, cultural familiarity if not identity, a colonial heritage vis-d-vis this country, and ability to speak a form of English comprehensible to most Canadians. My research has shown that discourse entitlement and difference are crucial to the creation of ethnicity in the generalization and personal experience narratives I collected from English immigrants in Ontario. Their conviction that they speak a more original, pure, or correct form of the language allows them to express clearly — even to an obviously North American English-speaking person like myself — the cultural variations they have observed and the meanings they give to them. That this evaluation of their language — English English is a superior form — is probably shared

by a large number of Canadians makes their concern for having

the power to control expression problematic. It is so not only for themselves but also for the North American English-speaking Canadians with whom they interact, as their stories show. Accordingly, much of the material quoted in this chapter focuses upon conflict as well as on perceived difference.

Many of the personal experience narratives are amusing, or revealing. They may seem more like reportage and less “constructed” than the generalizations, which purport to explain a category of behaviour. But it is important to remember that what is considered reportable is selective. Many of these personal expe-

rience narratives would be esoterically understood to suggest Canadians’ ignorance, unnaturalness, incapability of proper speech, and so on. However, as an outsider to English immigrant

culture, I perceive the generalizations as more problematic because they present the explicit indication of entitlement as . well as of stereotyping. Further, the two types are often linked: a personal experience narrative leads to a generalization as a moral or point, has an embedded generalization (as in Isobel Burton’s narrative above), or is used to illustrate a generalization.

62 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Since the construction of ethnicity — not just the cataloguing of objective cultural differences — is the implicit aim of these narratives, the perception of a divergence is more consistent than any particular content. That is, while one English person finds English English more concise, another complains that North American

English is full of “sloppy” short forms. And while one finds Canadians more polite, another finds them much less so. Linguistic precision about the objective variations between language

is possible but is not my topic of concern. I have considered instead how English immigrants in Ontario mark divergences and

culturally code them with English and Canadian connotations and meanings. English immigrants retain entitlement, which values — as well as noting the presence of — difference. And they

can do so because of a colonial heritage they can invoke, explicitly or implicitly, even when it is rejected by other Canadians. Entitlement allows them to define all other forms of language and culture as “other,” and thus to de-ethnicize themselves, at

the same time as they mark their differences. This is a rather complex symbolic expression of power. Thus, studies of ethnicity should not focus upon the actual content of an ethnic category, such as language or practice, but instead on how group members’

perceptions of the meaning of competing discourses they encounter become material for the construction of ethnicity. I am sensitive to the fact that my analysis may be interpreted

as insulting to the people I interviewed, though I do not so intend it. I have obviously selected those narratives and comments, from a number of lengthy interviews, which illustrate my points. Another analyst working on the same material might have chosen

quite different aspects. While I want to emphasize that I very much appreciated the opportunity to meet and to interview a group of people who were without exception both hospitable and open with me, I want also to show that many at times participate — perhaps unwillingly — in a system that privileges them.

So do many other Canadians like myself, who happen by accident of birth to be white, European-origin, middle-class, and so on. The construction and valuing of difference is not exclusively a property of English immigrants; it is, however, a property of ethnicity.

English Immigrants’ Narratives 63 I have not foregrounded the creative, carnival aspects of English immigrants’ narratives; though present, they do not pre-

dominate. In the next chapter, when I turn to Morris dancing, carnival is manifest and overt. This cultural expression, which constructs English ethnicity, does so with relation to another set of symbolic ideas. The notion that Morris is English is probably its least explicit, most inchoate aspect; it is rarely if ever questioned. But examining the concepts of Morris more readily elaborated by its participants — that it is male, traditional, and dance — helps to sort out other aspects of English ethnicity than those expressed in immigrants’ narratives.

CHAPTER THREE

Morris: An “English Male Dance Tradition”

BACKGROUND

In the late spring of 1991, I was preparing to leave Forest City Morris, the London, Ontario group with which I had been working since the winter of 1989, because of my impending move out

of the province. As we discussed my plans, the team’s “bag” (treasurer), Jane Evans, asked if I would write a description of Morris that could be used at dance-outs (public presentations) to tell interested audience members about Morris and encourage them to join the team, as well as in soliciting money-making engagements. Opportunities are scarce for ethnographers to repay — even in such a small way — their intellectual debt to their informants in a mode actually chosen by the informants, so I willingly agreed.

The description I composed can provide an introduction to Morris for readers unfamiliar with the practice. But the obstacles I encountered in writing about Morris for Forest City also suggest some of the difficulties of this research and its dissemination. First, my academic concerns have little to do with developing the most compelling and attractive account of Morris, the kind that would encourage community members to join or to hire Forest City as performers. But a more fundamental dilemma is that my

research perspective counters participants’ own ideas of what

they are doing. I attempted to clarify that the focus of my research was current practice, but I think they expected instead

that I would take the familiar historical perspective of most

Morris 65 Morris scholarship as a research model. Jane’s request, then, presented the challenge of composing an account that I felt was representative yet would acknowledge and respect the participants’ own ideas of Morris. I extend those aims to this entire case study. Fortunately, other Morris descriptions, written by two Canadian groups and intended for similar purposes, had come my way during two and a half years of research. I modelled Forest City’s

on these excellent capsule descriptions’ of what many Morris performers — dancers and musicians — think about what they do.

Common elements include the practice’s roots in Britain or England; its implicit or explicit connection with rural culture; its age; its magical, ritual, symbolic relationships and link with the seasons; and its association with luck. Vancouver’s Tiddley Cove Morris’s account raises the issue of gender without deciding for a male or female association, whereas Ottawa’s Hog’s Back — a mixed team — leaves gender inchoate. Tiddley Cove also mentions

the musical accompaniment and obliquely refers to “passing the hat” — collecting money. Hog’s Back refers to particular village styles in dance and costume and to Morris’s modernity. Though these two groups perform different styles of Morris, not all variations in these accounts are the result of stylistic variation. My description follows. Forest City Morris is the original Morris team of London, Ontario; we danced out for the first time in 1978. Some of us see Morris as a symbolic celebration of the earth and the seasons; others simply enjoy the sociability, the colourful costumes, the paraphernalia, the tuneful music, and even the exercise! Everyone also likes to think that we are keeping up an ancient tradition, as well as entertaining those who watch us. But what is Morris, and where did it come from? Morris is an English dance performance tradition. People have spec-

ulated that its origins may be in rural communities’ celebrations of Spring fertility. However, the earliest written accounts of Morris from around the fifteenth century show that it then formed part of courtly entertainment. Its functions and meaning have changed considerably through the years. At times it was danced to celebrate festive occasions;

at others it marked the boundaries and space of common property. When the famous English folklore collector Cecil Sharp first recorded

66 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Morris in 1899 at the village of Headington in the Cotswolds, it was a “quéte” custom, used by working people — mainly men — to raise money from the middle and upper classes during hard times. When we pass the

hat now, the money goes toward renting our practice hall, travelling to annual Morris Ales — get-togethers with other teams — and also for the occasional refreshment, but asking our spectators for funds is clearly part of the Morris tradition! Now Morris is performed by groups like Forest City across several continents. Some teams are all male, some all female, and some mixed.

The historical accounts suggest that more men than women danced Morris, but it was never an all male tradition. If you’ve seen more than one team, you'll observe that their costumes are distinct. You may also notice that each group performs the steps, leaps, and hand gestures in a slightly different way. When Sharp collected Morris in the Cotswolds at the beginning of this century, most villages had teams with their own distinctive styles. Forest City draws inspiration for its dances from the village of Kirtlington, but much of what we do is as much Forest City as it is Kirtlington.

Forest City has danced at numerous locations and occasions. We are regulars at such London events as the Home County Folk Festival and Interiors, and we’ve performed at the Elora Music Festival, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa-Hull, and the Marlboro (Vermont) Morris Ale. At Christmas we do the “Wassail!” show, and in the summer with other local teams we co-sponsor the annual London Morris Ale which brings together dancers from Canada and the United States. We’ve also performed at parties, conventions, and festivals.

My perspective on the historical may have surprised many Forest City members. Their way of seeing Morris, and its relation to the scholarship of the genre, is one focus of this work. But

the case study is not just about why people think or say they do Morris but about why doing Morris happens at all — the sources of its symbolic value. Specifically, I examine the ideas, manifest in these descriptions, that Morris is English, at least in origin; that it is traditional — linked to the past; that it is a dance —

explicitly so described; and that it is male, or at least linked to gender. Such concepts, I will argue, are not the commonsensical descriptions they may appear to be but are instead ideological

Morris 67 organizations of material, some of which pertain to the issues of ethnicity and power that pervade this book. What Forest City members say about Morris is based upon assumptions that it is a traditional male English dance; what scholars select as topic and evidence are also governed by those assumptions. I separate these four elements for heuristic purposes and then try to reassemble them. I generalize from my experience with Forest City, while freely acknowledging cultural variation between the knowl-

edge and practices of teams, cities, provinces/states, and countries. In seeking to answer the question of what Morris means, I enter into dialogues with Morris scholarship, with my fellow team members (usually as they represented themselves in interviews), and with myself as folklorist-dancer. Finally, I use these discrete ideas — English, dance, male, and tradition — to examine

the underlying construction of Englishness in terms of class, gender, and race.

ELEMENTARY MORRIS Let me begin with a story familiar to Morris scholars, as well as to many participants. “At Christmas 1899 Cecil Sharp happened to be staying at Headington. On Boxing Day he looked out of the drawing room window and saw a curious procession of men in white clothes coming up the drive. It was the Headington Quarry Morris side, William Kimber among them, coming to give a performance of their dances (at the wrong time of year, because they were out of work, and wanted to turn an honest penny)” (Peck 1974, 4). This axiomatic narrative about the prologue to English folklorist Cecil Sharp’s monumental work in collecting and disseminating Morris approaches the status of a creation myth for dancers and scholars alike. It is almost invariably used to describe how Morris became known outside its native locale, to indicate the serendipity of its arrival on the academic and popular scenes, and to name Sharp as the Christopher Columbus who “discovered” — made significant to urban middle- and upper-class British people especially — a practice already known by the rural working class and upper class in the English Midlands. The narrative also

displays Morris as an English male traditional dance.

68 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Initially the story’s fame appears paradoxical because it describes, not the direction that Morris dance scholarship followed (which will be considered below), but instead the road not taken. Academic and non-academic studies alike clearly aim to show that Sharp’s context of first encounter was, as he said, an

aberration, not the norm. Morris dance has consistently been divorced, by those who do it and study it, from its discovered context of working-class, money-making performance for the upper classes. Aspects of class and economics have been replaced with a gamut of discussions about Morris’s culturally and socially

remote origins, from medieval pageantry to pagan ritual. Research on Morris dancing has concentrated almost exclusively upon content (What were the dances? What did they look like?) rather than upon context (Who did them? For what reasons?). Scholars who have examined Morris — including Sharp himself —

, have done so in chronological, historicist modes, trying to reconstruct the earliest tradition of which they felt the manifestation he had discovered was a pale reflection. Exceptions are recent and

few but telling, and they suggest some fundamental differences between historic and contemporary Morris rarely attended to by Morris scholars. “We thought we were reviving a former style of

the Morris from our area. There are some Ironmen who still think that they are reviving things, despite all of my talks and writings. I know now that much of the Shropshire Morris in the last nearly two hundred years was based primarily on economic

necessity; it was a function of poverty and no more than that. Nobody was dancing simply for fun then; they were out of work pit men who were dancing. They were desperately poor, and dancing for those reasons. Maybe a little bit of fun crept in, but first, before you have fun, you need to fill your belly and the bellies of your wife and children” (Ashman 1987, 113). Gordon Ashman’s research with “traditional” team members clearly reflects the practice’s historical circumstances. “When I talked to some of these quarrymen and said things like ‘How did you come to form? How many people were there? Could anyone join’ ‘Oh yes,’ they said, ‘anyone could join.” They thought for a moment and said ‘Well, you wouldn’t want too many joining, for the share-out, would you?’ In fact, they severely limited partici-

Morris 69 pants to about seven in order to maximize the share-out” (ibid.). Scholarship has tended to explain away Morris’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century form of money-making enterprise as a

survival, the functionally altered detritus of a once complete ritual. The direction to remote origins, rather than to more contemporary class and economics, in Morris scholarship was based

for some upon colonialist notions of traditional culture (see Dorson 1968) and for others as much upon a search for alternatives to the present as for sources in the past (see, for example, Bustin 1982). Morris is described as a custom associated with the English

Midlands and certain more northerly and westerly regions, involving choreographic sequences of common figures and cho-

ruses, of which the latter make the main distinctions between named dances. It is seen as ceremonial — “tied to the calendar and executed in a performer/audience context” — rather than social — “not necessarily tied to the calendar and ... performed mainly for recreational purposes” (Buckland 1982, 4). In fact, Morris could have been included in the broader genre of ceremony as easily as in dance since it has some formal similarities with quéte* customs

such as Christmas mumming, belsnickling, and so on (Bauman 1972; Halpert and Story 1969; Lovelace 1980). As in Sharp’s description, it often involved ceremonially gathering money, food,

and drink for the dancers and their cohort.

The form done by Forest City is usually called Cotswold Morris after the region of England in which it was discovered. Current Morris teams follow Sharp’s assumption that each village had a distinctive style of performance; Forest City bases its dances on those of Kirtlington.3 “We’ve tried to change every year

for four years and we always end up back with Kirtlington. Why don’t we do the one thing, and do it well? And [Tom Siess, the team leader] agreed, so I think we’re probably going to be doing Kirtlington forever now, which is fine” (Paul Siess, 90-11). The

team returns to it because “almost nobody does Kirtlington. I don’t know what that says about us ... I chose it for that reason” (Tom Siess, 90-15). It has distinctive angular arm and leg move-

ments and an unusual “hey” (closing chorus in which dancers execute a weaving pattern around one another), “the best part of

70 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Kirtlington, the only reason for even considering continuing to do Kirtlington” (Tom, practice 13/9/89, 89-54). Dances are normally executed by a set number of performers. Six is clearly the most common, but almost any combination is possible. Solo and double jigs are conventional performance pieces;

dances for eight, four, or odd numbers are usually explained away as necessitated by team numbers, particular dancers’ capabilities, and so on. Dancers wear bells arranged on leather garters tied below the knee and use large handkerchiefs or sticks as part of the dance movements. Each team has a distinctive “kit” or costume; in most, white predominates. The music is in jig (6/8) or reel (4/4) time, played on concertina, pipe and tabor, drum, fiddle, banjo, and other “folky” instruments. The beginning of Morris in Ontario is usually traced to Green Fiddle Morris, an outgrowth of the Fiddlers’ Green Folk Club in

Toronto, about 1975.4 One principal organizer of Forest City danced occasionally with Green Fiddle before 1978, when the group was formed in London. In 1981 and 1982 differences between members led to the formation of three new teams, and all four continue actively to this writing. Between 1989 and 1991

Forest City alternated between having mixed dancers, female dancers with male musicians and squire-foreman (directorteacher) fool character, and male and female “sides” (performance groups). Practices take place weekly throughout the year from around 7 P.M. until around 9 P.M., but some are foregone in the summer because of dance-outs and other activities. Inexperienced dancers

should start in September, but when numbers are in danger of falling below critical mass, they can join as late as February and still be incorporated into spring performances. Autumn is spent preparing for the Christmas “Wassail” show, presented with other interested “folkies” from the area and involving songs and plays as well as dance. In winter and spring the team works toward the summer’s climactic performances. Periodically Forest City may dance out at some location in London or nearby, such

as at a local school’s multicultural festival or (for a fee) at a convention. Ales are eagerly anticipated. The London Morris Ale,

organized jointly by Forest City and other London teams, takes

Morris 71 place in mid-June. Groups from Ottawa, Toronto, and the U.S.

come to London for a weekend of dancing out there and in the nearby cities of Stratford and St Marys. Forest City also attends other teams’ ales, such as the Toronto Ale on the Labour Day weekend and the Ottawa Ale usually on the Thanksgiving weekend.

THE ETHNOGRAPHER-TEAM MEMBER As I have suggested earlier, a folklorist-anthropologist brings to research assumptions shared with similarly trained academics but not with most Morris dance scholars. Among them are the following premises. Current practice is a significant, but minimally understood, subject for research; thus understanding Morris will not come only from investigating its development or historical practice. Every social group and all its activities are worthy of study; hence no Morris group — traditional or revival; English or North America; male, female, or mixed — is intrinsically more or less important in understanding the genre or contemporary practice. All cultural phenomena make relevant symbolic statements and engage in symbolic dialogue; Morris is meaningful in ways that extend beyond its physical, social, and psychological benefits

for dancers and audience. And assumptions that I and others make about what we do are ideologically motivated; there is no purely objective Morris research. What makes any account more

or less trustworthy is the extent to which the writer is explicit about her/his assumptions. However, my approach is not totally distanced from current Morris scholarship; in recent studies (e.g., Sughrue 1987, including Barrand 1987; Barrand 1986) there are echoes of reflexive or

dialogic anthropological perspectives (see Ortner 1984 and Tedlock 1983). Their personal and anecdotal mode is shared with

modern ethnographic writing; current anthropological scholarship problematizes ethnographers’ roles and underlines the necessity of placing them in the field research context (see, for example, Clifford and Marcus 1986). In keeping with this tradition — an attempt to elaborate upon one’s subjectivity — I will briefly explain how I came to Morris personally and intellectu-

72 Ethnicity in the Mainstream ally, particularly because it affects what I discover about the dance and its practice. Most Morris performers were an audience before becoming

participants. My sister and later my brother-in-law belonged to Morris teams in Toronto, and like many other non-participant family members (Reynolds 1990), I found the teams selfabsorbed, the dancing and music initially fun but later repetitive, and the interaction between teams and their members not unlike

that of the average soap opera. I could not imagine ever performing Morris. For a 1985 research contract for the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, I attended and tape-recorded the

inaugural meeting of the Toronto Morris Men (TFMM)5 — to which my brother-in-law still belongs — and attended a few of their first practices and subsequent pub get-togethers. My sex lim-

ited me to observation of TFMM, but the nature of the contract and my academic interests at the time precluded my finding a team with which I could be a participant-observer. It was a brief, not startlingly productive, period of research. Four years later, having decided to focus some of my English ethnicity research on Morris, I discussed with my sister which group I should approach. She suggested that I come along to a country dance in London and meet Tom Siess, then squire and foreman of Forest City. She introduced me, and I told Tom I was interested in attending their practices. My choice to work with Forest City was aided by my feeling that the drive from Waterloo to London would be more pleasant than to Toronto, where there were a couple of teams with which I might have chosen to work. Other strong reasons were that I wanted to see both men and women dance Morris, that my sister told me Forest City was a good reflection of North American Morris, and, of course, that they were willing to take me on. I joined the Forest City Morris team in February 1989 — or, at least, that is when I first began attending practices. Since I felt that belonging to a team would probably involve some kind of rite of passage, I did not express my intentions in terms of “membership.” Thus Tom was initially confused as to exactly what I was going to do with Forest City, a problem that was resolved when I continued regularly to attend practices as well as to

Morris 73 perform. I remained with Forest City until the summer of 1991. I tried to clarify my purpose to team members — observation as well as participation — but I think they often forgot, particularly

before I conducted interviews with them. I brought my tape recorder or videotaped practices about three times. I made more

notes about dances during practices than other members, but often they regarded my action as keen interest not ethnographic observation. Tom commented in spring 1990: “From my standpoint, you’ve become a member of the team this year. I mean I know that you are continuing to collect data, and so some of the

activities that you’re engaged with are for reasons other than what other people would have, but it’s certainly not been in any way a disruptive kind of thing” (90-16). My work with Forest City was an object lesson in the differences between observation and participant observation, but it also raised compelling questions about the role of the ethnographer, which are in line with current concerns in anthropological scholarship for reflexivity. As a member of the same sex and sim-

ilar age, occupational, regional, and class groups as my fellow dancers, I was in a situation familiar to most ethnographers of their own societies. For the people I worked with, I fit existing, recognized social categories and roles (see Greenhill 1989c, 204).

“Everybody there comes from a different rung of life. You get your ex-hippies. You’ve got your professors of folklore. You’ve got students who just want to keep physical. You’ve got middleaged women who want to keep physical, keep in shape. And you have people who are theatrical and traditionalists. And they all come together, and they all learn new things” (Jane, 90-21).

The reference to “professors of folklore” was not simply an attempt to include me personally; at the time I was teaching Canadian Studies not folklore. It was instead an indication that in Morris a researcher’s investigative and analytical activity is a conventional part of the ongoing cultural scene. Dancer-researchers have an accepted, even pivotal role; I fit a pre-existing category.° I was fascinated, then, to see at the 1990 Toronto Morris Ale a skit in which the folklorist-historian-dancer figured prominently;7 a “history” of Morris included this foolish academic, whose chorus

after each scene was “This is great! I must learn how to do it,”

74 Ethnicity in the Mainstream along with a feeble attempt to imitate the dancing that had been illustrated. Commonalities between members were a focus of interviews.

Lucy Montgomery, Heather Brooks, and Jane Evans provided extensive commentary on our creativity; for example, “The general interest in the arts in all forms, whether it’s in theatre, in drama, more fine arts — I mean there are people who are quite involved in painting, sculpture, music, whatever aspects you want

to mention. I have kind of a general layman’s interest in all of those. I think that’s probably a common thread with most of the

members” (Heather, 90-19). The separation we maintained between each dancer’s confidence with the steps and sequences

and inclusion in the group led Heather to suggest that being a dancer and team membership need not correlate. “I guess I’d have to make the distinction between me thinking of myself as a Morris dancer and thinking of myself as a member of Forest City Morris. To me those are still two separate things. I still don’t consider myself a Morris dancer; I do Morris dancing and I do that with Forest City Morris. I felt like a part of that particular group from the moment that I started. There wasn’t any sense, for me anyway, that I had to prove myself. If anything, I was more en-

couraged because I was brand new ... If I ever get to the point where someone can show me a step and I’ve got it, like that, and they don’t have to show me again, then maybe I’m a Morris dancer. But that hasn’t happened, Pauline” (Heather, 90-19). Not all members shared this feeling; there was a range of opinions as to the extent to which Morris should dominate one’s life. Tom, who had been part of Forest City since its beginning, suggested: “There’s a sense in which it, for me, is not just a recreational activity. It’s a part of my life, and I look for people who would make that same kind of commitment. And I think we’ve got several of them now; I would say that’s true of a significant number of the people who are there ... People do have jobs, and sometimes their jobs make it impossible for them to be there, and it obviously can’t have that kind of priority. But in terms of one’s

recreational life, I would like to see people give it priority and say, all right, if there’s a choice between a chance to dance with

Morris 75 the team or a chance to do this social thing, I’ll nearly always opt for dancing with the team” (Tom, 90-14).

As I travelled a 230 kilometre round trip from Waterloo for weekly practices and performances, I was probably seen as more Morris-obsessed than others. Lucy commented: “Heather [also] commutes. I’m surprised with you guys that you do this. I don’t

even know if I’d do that, to go that far, to commute back and forth” (90-23). With three other teams in London, self-selection in membership was possible. People did not have to stay with Forest City in order to do Morris; it was not uncommon for its dancers to join the all-male Thames Valley or the all-female clog Goats Head

team, and several did so during the time I participated. Both Thames Valley and Goats Head were more élite than Forest City — regularly invited to prestigious ales, more English members, and

so on. Thus, to say, as my sister did, that Forest City was a representative group is problematic. It would be difficult even to sug-

gest that it was a conventional, non-obsessed, non-élite team, since I observed a variety of attitudes to Morris and participation in it among both individuals and teams.°®

The team’s definition of membership indicated that I was one. “If someone just came to practices through the year and never danced out with us, I don’t know that I’d consider them a member of the team ... I guess that if you finally dance out publicly in Forest City kit then you’re a member of Forest City”

(Tom, 90-14). Because of my feeling of belonging, I became increasingly comfortable participating in the process of creation and recreation that is everyday practice. For example, during one interview I commented, “I think we should take — I’m not supposed to do this, ’cause I’m just the ethnographer — but I think we should take a team trip” (90-21). My reflective caveats were eventually silenced, if not forgotten entirely, and my interventions

extended beyond making suggestions of activities to making changes to a dance.? I would have been an inadequate participant if | had not undertaken such activities, rather than abnegating my role as ethnographic observer by doing so. During an interview with Tom, we discussed my active participation.

76 Ethnicity in the Mainstream PAULINE: But that’s a problem for the ethnographer.

TOM: Yeah, no, I don’t mean you as the ethnographer, I mean you

as a member of Forest City who just happens to have thought , about it more. (90-16)

The interviews show team members’ concerns for my experience of dancing, together with some misconceptions about why I was studying it. Lucy: Well, I know why you joined Morris dancing, because you wanted to interview us, but have you enjoyed it? PAULINE: Yeah.

Lucy: You’ve learned — have you ever thought that you would actually, maybe, become the leader of a Morris group? PAULINE: No, I don’t think so. (90-24)

Lucy was not the only one to consider my interest a possible entrée into teaching Morris. And since the interviews were conducted when we were critically low in members, many took the Opportunity to try to ascertain if I intended to stay. At the time I was unsure and so was noncommittal. JANE: — How long are you going to dance? I mean, you’re studying this, but — PAULINE: Oh, that’s a kind of a good question, because —

JANE: — The only reason you’re dancing is basically because of the study, is it not? Or the reason you started? ... Are we talking commitment here? PAULINE: It’s a lot of driving, it’s a lot of going back and forth. But there

are some things I really enjoy about it that I never thought I would. JANE: — But do you see yourself starting a team? Like, if you were to

stop dancing with us, basically because of commuting or whatever reason, do you see yourself, if not next year, in the future, starting your own team wherever you’re residing and developing your own tradition? PAULINE: I don’t think I have the wherewithal to actually start a team.

JANE: It’s just interesting with you studying it so much, I mean. (90-22)

Morris 77 Or: DAVID STOYLES: When you’re research is over, you’re going to continue

to dance, are you?

PAULINE: Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. (90-10)

Or, “We already know that we’re losing one person and I don’t know what your long-term commitment is” (Tom, 90-15). Yet the team members had a lot in common. Forest City people

were not only similar socially; they shared a particular kind of relationship to Morris. Most had other interests, in contrast with those teams whose involvement verged on obsession with practices and performances and who derived most of their social relationships from Morris connections. I would have found it diffi-

cult to belong to such a team but was quite comfortable with Forest City. Even after my research focus turned to Stratford’s creation of an English symbolic place, I continued to dance with them. Because members of the group did not centre their lives on Morris, I very much enjoyed team activities, from practices to dance-outs. Some might suggest that our dancing reflected this more casual attitude; unusually strong interest in Morris is sometimes correlated with unusually good dancing (see, for example,

Whear 1991). Tom described the group thus: “I think we’re doing quite well as dancers. I think it’s not as together as in my ideal it would be, but I don’t know if it would ever be as together as my ideal ... But I think there are times when we look awfully awfully good” (90-15).

“A LOT OF HOGWASH”: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE TRADITIONAL Scholarship — participant or observer, ethnographic or historical —

constructs Morris in a particular mould. The most extensive, detailed consideration given to Morris as a traditional male English dance refers to the first aspect. Ideas of Morris as “tradi-

tion,” held not only in written academic studies but also by Morris participants, are by no means simple. Like its predecessors (see Buckland 1982), recent Morris scholarship is devoted

78 Ethnicity in the Mainstream almost exclusively to the form’s origins (see, for example, Bil-

lington 1978 and 1980; Chandler 1983; Forrest 1984; Garry 1983; Heaney 1985; Heath-Coleman 1985). Considerations of Morris as dance in England usually see it as a historical, rather than a contemporary, phenomenon (e.g., Rust 1969). The origins

of Morris scholarship, as well as of Morris itself, have been examined (see Judge 1984; Wortley and Dawney 1977). Few ethnographic studies in England or elsewhere have been undertaken,'° though periodically materials of anthropological interest are published, such as studies and/or biographies of individual dancers (Flaherty 1968; Schofield 1984) and ethnographically informed historic studies (Bathe 1985; Pettitt 1981). Recently attention has turned not only to what original Morris may have been like but also to how it may differ from what is currently practised and performed (see Sughrue 1988). A central distinction in recent studies is between the “traditional” and the “revival.” “Traditional” teams trace an unbroken line of Morris activity back into the nineteenth century or earlier; “revival” includes teams in English towns that did have Morris but cannot trace a continuous group of performers and those in British, North American (see Barrand 1988), Australian, and other™’ communities not historically associated with Morris. Some scholars focus on areas of divergence between traditional and revival yet assume substantial similarity within types. Many assume sufficient continuity that they posit, for example, that a traditional team in the 1880s would do the same Morris as that observed in the 1980s. This idea is critiqued by John Forrest, who contends that traditional Morris had more variation and less rigid structure than Sharp’s works have indicated — “the essence of the Morris is not regularity but variety” (Forrest 1985, 29), — and that the notion of “village” traditions is at best problematic — “in his manuals Sharp emphasized, and fossilized, the ephemeral stylistic differences between the villages” (ibid., 33). Regularity,

village traditions, and other concepts from Sharp have been accepted more or less without question by revival Morris. Further, Forrest suggests that for traditional Morris, “performances were rarely seen in the Cotswolds very far from Whitsuntide ... The annual enterprise was part duty, part money-making venture,

Morris 79 and part sport, with the emphasis primarily on the recipients. The

point was to put on a good show. Revival teams, on the other hand, treat dancing as a hobby, and turn their emphasis inward on to themselves. They are happy to dance for the sake of dancing, and are equally content performing for each other as for a non-dancing audience. Many teams dance year round, sometimes performing forty or fifty times to a wide spectrum of audiences. For revivalists the merits of the dance are mostly intrinsic; for traditional performers, extrinsic” (ibid., 33). Forrest’s polarity of revival and traditional dance is reversed by anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku, who asserts that traditional folk dances “are performed primarily for the benefit of

the dancers rather than for spectators” (1972, 397-8). Though the distinctions between “modern” and “folk” societies inherent in Kealiinohomoku’s idea are absent from much Morris scholarship, these commentators have in common an assertion of difference between the traditional and revival, the ancient and modern, and sometimes the genuine and spurious. Forrest is probably on shakiest ground when claiming that the

revival includes parody dances, whereas traditional dances are

invariably serious (1985, 33). His claim is disputed by Roy Dommett, who gives examples of several traditional dances with an “undercurrent of fun and holding up to ridicule” (1985, 40). Similarly, in other genres, parodic and satiric forms indicate liveliness and currency (see Greenhill 1989a; Narvaez 1977) rather than revival status. Anthony G. Barrand (e.g., 1985) has been a strong voice in the

argument that the differences between traditional and revival Morris are outweighed by their similarities. He contends at length with Forrest’s assertions, based on his own participant observation of revival and traditional sides. He concludes that both conceive of Morris as an occasion of “mutual interactions between the structure of the movements of the dance, the dancers (includ-

ing the characters and musicians), and the community (which includes the people who watch, the time, the place, and the reason or excuse for dancing)” (Barrand 1986, 111). Barrand’s fellow dancer-scholar Roy Dommett has also shed light on similarities and differences between individual Morris sides (1982).

80 Ethnicity in the Mainstream He finds a maze of complex issues and describes a variety of influences affecting the continuation and revival of dance traditions in England, including support from “the ‘big houses’” (ibid., 62) — upper-class patrons — family involvement, use of newspapers, and interest shown by collectors. I would like to recast the traditional versus revival issue in light

of other distinctions. Dance ethnologist’? Felix Hoerburger, for example, suggests that “first existence” dancing, in which “folk dance is an integral part of the life of a community,” differs from “second existence,” which is an activity of “only a few interested people” (1968, 30-2).%3 Practices have different kinds of functions for communities when they are seen as part of everyday “first existence” than in “second existence,” when they are apprehended as “traditional” or “folkloric.” Hoerburger’s idea is not dissimilar to literary critic Raymond Williams’s distinction between the archaic and the residual. “I would call the ‘archaic’ that

which is wholly recognized as an element of the past, to be observed, to be examined, or even on occasion to be consciously ‘revived,’ in a deliberately specialising way. What I mean by the ‘residual’ is very different. The residual ... has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (Williams 1977, 122). Hoerburger’s and Williams’s schemas must be qualified with

the observation that many practices go through phases of relative acceptance and relative obscurity, from the residual to the archaic and possibly back again.*4 On initial examination, it might appear that the first/second and residual/archaic distinc-

tions could apply to traditional and revival Morris dancing respectively. Yet it is at least somewhat questionable that Morris

_was in “first existence” at the end of the nineteenth century. Available accounts suggest that it was hardly integral to local life and may have become archaic or secondary even at that time in some communities. However, any attempt to align these various systems may be doomed to failure; they refer to different domains of experience.

For example, concepts of tradition and revival used by Morris

scholars refer to continuity or lack thereof with respect to

Morris 81 performance, that is, to the public presentation of Morris within particular communities; Hoerburger’s first/second thesis refers to continuity of function — how Morris is used by performers and audience; Williams’s residual/archaic distinction to continuity of meaning — what its significance is to performers and audience.

Finally, contemporary Morris resembles Eric Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition”: “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past ... [The practice]

includes both ‘traditions’ actually invented, constructed, and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period ... and establishing themselves with great rapidity” (1983, 1). Forest City members did not consciously incorporate the idea of invented traditions into their concept of Morris, but it was nevertheless manifest.15 Though elements from movements to associated practices are recent inventions, members retained an overarching notion that Morris had historical links with a defined

past and that this continuity made “traditional” whatever the group did — even change. Thus one Forest City member described

Morris as “something that went back a long, long time. It was something that was quite an ancient tradition, and yet was carried on with such enthusiasm ... I feel it’s a tradition that has been

carried through probably from pagan times and it has changed and evolved from there into what we now see” (Janet, 90-8).

At the meeting of Forest City marking the beginning of a new dancing year in September 1989, the foreman Tom spent some time discussing Morris with the team. “There’s a whole lot of debate about where it comes from, whether they’re descendants of ancient pagan fertility rituals or whether they’re mil-

itary in origin or what, and I don’t suppose it a whole lot matters ultimately, but one thing that does matter is that the dances were done to celebrate the season ... and hence you want

them to be exuberant. They’re to be energetic; they’re to be strong. They were danced in the spring time. People were saying,

82 Ethnicity in the Mainstream ‘Thank God the winter’s gone’ ... These dances, dances of the sea-

sons, have been around a long, long time. There’s no doubt that there’s some link to old, old dances” (practice 13/9/89, 89-53). Evident in this discussion are the complex notions associated with

Morris as a tradition. Movement, style, and context remain in some ways the same yet also differ from what they once were. Forest City should maintain Morris tradition, which means both changing and staying the same. Since Morris is a tradition, varia-

tion and maintenance alike must be traditional. The processes involved in rationalizing and justifying practices in terms of these

apparently contradictory ideas are central to the process of inventing traditions, but their complexity makes it less than surprising that precise consensus on what tradition means — and on what Morris means — is difficult to locate. Morris “tradition” is reified in order to be manipulated: preserved (or not), carried (or not), and respected (or not). The link

with a sequence of movements and practices from the past implies not only the preservation of Morris but also its continuation. It was important to the dancers that they felt part of the tradition rather than vehicles for it. “I think because it’s such a small thing, I’d like to see it kept very traditional and remain the same, just until it’s widespread. And then if you want to make it more of a North American Morris, then that’s great. I hate to see the

arts die, and so that’s why I like to keep it the same, so that people can learn what it really was and what it was all about before it changes” (Jane, 90-21). The team saw an intrinsic good in “preserving” Morris and assumed that the content and practice of doing so were authentic. The implication of Jane’s commentary, too, is the Morris being preserved is the original English — not North American — Morris. The incorporation of innovation, then, is problematic. Forest City members sometimes perceived “maintaining the

tradition” as, among other things, not altering movements or not practising and presenting the tradition of more than one village. Yet the dances were not left unchanged, and most were not actually from the village of Kirtlington but instead were stylistically reminiscent of those few that are known. The group danced original works as well as adaptations of other villages’ dances.

Morris 83 Elements of Forest City Morris’s own practice, then, were | “invented”: newly coined, changed, conflated, and so on. Because tradition involves continuity, Forest City members interpreted their experience of variations in the dances to reflect this understanding. Often changes were obfuscated; if they were noted, it was in the understanding that change is traditional and hence is part of the continuity of Morris. The expression of traditions as “emerging” showed Tom’s ambivalent relationship to these issues. It’s this idea of preserving tradition. And that really kind of excites me,

to help carry on something that has existed for a long time, to be the carrier of that and to treat it with respect ... Tradition is the bedrock ...

I don’t like to muck with tradition that much; I like to be true to it. If we’re going to do Kirtlington, let’s do it ... Just as it evolved in England, you could have a tradition that emerges in London, Ontario. No reason why that couldn’t happen. But I think there is this notion of a link with the past, that kind of historical and ritual continuity, that you are doing

in 1990 to celebrate the season something that somebody did in a village in England in 1790, say. And that’s an exciting kind of thing, so I would not want to completely abandon those links. (90-13, 14)

There was little question in Tom’s mind that Forest City is in some way replicating an earlier process, yet he would recognize fundamental differences between revival and traditional teams. Though, as discussed above, Morris people rarely agreed on the content of those differences or on the extent to which they were

part of a historic sequence, it is evident that traditional and revival teams — and traditional teams over time — share neither

uniform dance movements nor common social context. Thus Forest City members also recognized creativity and change in dance movements as part of the traditional process. “Even Tom going over and getting all the work for the traditions, he changes them, and he makes up his own dances within that specific tradi-

tion ... Kirtlington ... is basically our tradition, and there are only three or four dances that are still alive so you’re forced, almost, to create your own dances. I think what he’s doing is keeping all the different steps and movements ... At first I wanted

84 Ethnicity in the Mainstream to do everything exactly the way it was. That’s the historian in me; you don’t want to change it. But then at the same time it’s nice to be able to use that as if you were dancing back then and making dances up back then. I mean that’s what you would be doing, right?” (Jane, 90-21). Jane suggested here that since movement change would have been a natural process in Morris when

it was originally collected, then it must be a necessary part of what Forest City does as well. She also assumed — as did other members of the group — that the processes involved would be similar. “The creativity comes in when you’re a team and you decide, perhaps, to enhance a movement with something that you have invented that’s your own particular style. A lot of teams in Canada and the States have done this. It gives your team — even though they dance the same tradition as another team does ... a special, particular individuality, which is fine. I don’t think that’s

going away from the basic rule of keeping up the tradition. You’re only enhancing it ... Traditions change over the years” (Rebecca McClintock, 90-6). Yet there is limited leeway for changing the dances themselves, according to most dancers, except in terms of “stylistic” changes.

“I’m sure every group creates their own dance, maybe from scratch, or will take ... a certain dance and say, it’s just not working ... for us. We don’t feel comfortable with it. Even though it’s traditionally — that’s what’s written in the book, we’re going to

change it ... I don’t think anything’s wrong about doing that at all. I think it’s good. It gives us a flair, it gives us our own style. And yet we’re still sticking with the boundaries of traditionalism” (Lucy, 90-23). Most dancers’ general comments confined appro-

priate change and creativity, however, to aspects of Morris beyond the dancing itself: interaction with the audience, team membership, presentation, and costume. “How you express your-

self with your facial expressions and how much you ham it up when you do it, and what kinds of things you put in your costume ... Put pins on vests or hats or something like that just to spruce things up. I could see that as being a creative aspect” (Sharon, 90-17). Morris tradition for Forest City implies the personal involve-

ment of its participants in maintaining links with the past.

Morris 8 5 Thus the concern with origins becomes central but is also rendered problematic. Despite Tom’s attempts to suppress them, the team found notions of fertility and ritual origins compelling. “I guess it’s more of a pagan dance — very ritualistic. The bells symbolize — they warded off evil spirits. I suppose the hankies, too, scared them away. The challenge dances were to do with a clash between two groups of people, and so some of the dances represent that fighting between the two of them ... And dancing out in the springtime, of course, represents the changing of the season, good crops, good weather — all the good things that the village wants to have happen with them, and of course the fertility too, lots of children” (Lucy, 90-23). At least one member of Forest City perceived such origins as integral to her participation in Morris — symbolically meaningful with respect to her dancing and life. Janet commented that Morris as fertility ritual was personally significant because of “the idea of us being part of this ever-evolving circle of life, like the seasons ... Evolving from what appears to be death to a sort of resurrection with the coming of the spring” (Janet, 90-8). Allegiance to tradition, however, need not be associated with the notion of fertility rituals. “I like the

fact that it’s historical because I went through [university] in history. As far as fertility, I don’t think so. I mean, that’s part of all the controversy of what it actually represents, so I’m not dancing for the fertility because who’s to say it’s really fertility. I dance cause I enjoy it. I dance because I want to keep a tradition going” (Jane, 90-21). Even those who rejected fertility ritual explanations of Morris origins in terms of their personal experience were drawn, like the

others, to tradition. PAUL SIESS: It dates back to the fifteenth-, sixteenth-century, and it was

used as pagan rituals to wake up the ground and scare off the evil spirits. PAULINE: And is that significant to you personally?

PAUL: No, not really. I mean, other people say now that that’s a lot of hogwash and that actually it was mostly just done for fun and that’s what I get out of it; it’s for fun. But it is kind

of neat; it’s not something I think about all the time, but

86 Ethnicity in the Mainstream every once in a while I'll think about how long this has been going on and you do think, it’s kind of neat to think that your group is part of the reason that it’s still around. I mean, a small reason, but still part of the reason that it’s still going. (90-11)

Members of Forest City, then, perceived the traditionality of Morris as fundamentally important not only in abstract terms but also as part of their personal experience. They usually encountered tradition as manifested in a series of specific characteristics within the dance itself, such as steps, movements, and sequences, rather than as its practice. Morris’s historic place as a working' class men’s way of earning money was unrelated to the personal

experience of Forest City members; therefore it could not be incorporated into their notion of Morris tradition. The attraction

of the more remote assumed ritual origin was that it could be related to contemporary spirituality. However, if a participant

was uninterested in such meanings, ritual origin could be acknowledged yet seen as a part of the traditional process of traditions changing. Once it was so; now it is not. I argue, then, that the invention of tradition need not invariably be an alienated hegemonic process, employed by élites to influence the masses.’® Tradition is originally and continuously invented and reinvented; change and continuity alike are subject to individual and group activity. The processes are not rule-governed; Forest City members are neither dupes nor participants in the spurious because they manipulate according to context their ideas of the interplay of the maintenance of tradition and of creativity within Morris.

“GETTING A KICK OUT OF IT”: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE DANCE Anthropologists, folklorists, and dance ethnologists have been concerned almost exclusively with types of dance other than classical Western forms. Generally they assume some kind of distinc-

tive place or meaning for dance in the society in which it is located: cathartic, allowing dancers — and perhaps also audiences

| Morris 87 — to release pent-up emotion; or the opposite — a way of generating excitement. Dance has also been seen as a vehicle for trans-

mitting and maintaining appropriate sentiments, for marking locations and territories, or for indicating alternatives to structures (Spencer 1985).

Many studies imply distinctions between Western and nonWestern, or artistic and popular, forms. Anya Peterson Royce, for example, addresses sociocultural configurations. “Dance in complex societies is significant for different reasons than it is in nonliterate societies [where it] functions in many of the same ways that a written language would: to teach, to preserve knowledge, and so on” (1977, 154). Conversely, “dance provides one of the

few opportunities in the modern world for displaying the body that is accepted by society. It gives us an outlet for all the emotion constrained from not pointing, not laughing too loud, not leaping for joy, and not embracing in the streets” (ibid., 160). Royce suggests that dance now functions in Euro-American society expressively, whereas it was once (and may now elsewhere be) instrumental — as was the Morris originally collected by Sharp. Though

the obverse may predominate, modern instrumental dance and pre-literate expressive dance also exist.

But the fact that Morris is considered dance associates it with expressive culture.'” I have hitherto avoided calling Morris “dance” because the term’s use constructs practice and ideology

in a particular form. I do not suggest that Morris is not dance or must not be seen as dance; however, using that generic description carries a particular semantic load, different than that of “ceremonial” or “ritual,” for example. Morris being dance means, for example, that for Forest City, and for most scholarship, any connection of Morris performance with work must be carefully negotiated. Though the group did perform a quéte, collecting money after performances, its economic meaning was different to (middle-class) Forest City than it would be to the (working-class) Headington team described by Sharp or the unemployed quarrymen described by Gordon Ash-

man. Money and class are linked. Whether nineteenth-century English Morris expressed obligations between upper-class and working-class people — the moral economy (Bushaway 1982;

88 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Thompson 1971) — or was a simple money-making alternative or both, these are by no means play activities.® But for Forest City, money must be for team, dance-related activities — paying for the practice hall or travel to ales — not subsistence; disconnected from

the true reasons for performing. “I don’t mind doing it for free; money is nice, to get paid a little bit here and there. It helps us when we’re going on trips, like to Ottawa and Toronto, and if we need certain things in our group, Tom uses the money for that. And for the ale[s], especially for our London Ale. But that’s not the whole point, going out and dancing for money. It’s to let people know about the tradition ... But that’s what makes it interesting, to be able to tell people about us and have them see us and think, ‘Wow, what’s this?’” (Lucy, 90-23).

Considering that even the hint of work poisons the socioculturally influenced notion of “dance,” it is hardly surprising that most scholars’ and dancers’ explanations of Morris emphasize celebration — the carnival look — over subsistence. Never-

theless, dance may have political or ideological components; Theresa Buckland persuasively argues that in the nineteenth century “whether consciously or otherwise, creators and performers of morris dances in northwest England merged certain movement systems and codes of bodily behaviour whose effect was to underline an emergent perspective on the body ... Consideration must be given to why morris dancing was selected in an age when the body was increasingly subjected to a discipline which rendered it obedient and useful within a hierarchical capitalist structure”

(Buckland 1991, 2). Similarly, Elizabeth Dempster argues that “the dancing body is a cultural production, dynamically interacting with the sociocultural matrix of which it is a part” (1988, 50). Forest City instead saw Morris as expressive in Royce’s terms.

“It looks like such a fun thing to do. I mean, it looks like a real joie de vivre, spirit, and just like a lot of fun” (Janet, 90-8); and “I’d seen them on different times ... and I thought ... they look like they’re having a good time” (Lucy, 90-23). So essential

was the ethos of enjoyment that it seemed antithetical to per- } fection. “[The team decides] whether we want to be incredibly strong and incredibly precise, or whether we want to look good but have fun. And I think that’s where we are. We want to be

Morris 89

9O-II). .

good at it, but we want to have fun at it too. We don’t want to be knocking ourselves out, trying to be perfect, I don’t think” (Paul,

When members of Forest City talked about dance as enjoyment, they almost invariably referred to performance rather than to practice. And fun was not intended simply to be the feeling of the performer. “It makes a lot of difference to my mental attitude when I’m performing in front of people that I want them to see, hey, I’m really enjoying myself. This is great fun, and come out and do this with us. And it just becomes much more of a broadcast thing. So I think that when we get out and we’re doing it in front of people, people will really pick up and they’ll have much

more of an enthusiasm. You'll be able to see it more, because they'll be projecting it towards the people who are watching” (Sharon, 90-17). Some performances could be more fun than others, however. “In some ways, just ordinary dance-outs are more fun for the life

of the team, cause you just go out and you dance for ordinary folks and you’re among yourselves. You don’t have to worry about any other dancers ... it’s much more of a team, an internal kind of activity ... no pressure on, just going and dancing outside

of a pub or on somebody’s street, and the folks on the street. | get a big kick out of that. That’s great fun” (Tom, 90-14). In contrast: “Some of them have been situations where some group of

yuppies thinks that [Morris] would be a quaint thing to have at their garden party, so they invite you to come and you go because they’ll give you a couple hundred dollars ... and half the people

could care less that you were there ... Or you dance an afterdinner thing, and you’re the entertainment, and people like it, but the setting is often awful. You don’t have enough space, or the room is hot, or whatever ... We finally learned that what you do is you don’t entertain them, you entertain yourselves. And if you entertain yourselves, those who want to be entertained will enjoy it” (Tom, 90-14). When the dancing is no longer fun, it becomes work and counters notions of what dance should be, as Janet sug-

gests. “I think if we had a few more members it would maybe ease up. I think it’s becoming more like work now, as opposed to play” (Janet, 90-8).

90 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Being seen as “dance,” as defined in English and North American middle-class terms, has affected the actual movements

as well as the context of Morris. (Equally, it implicates how English ethnicity has been created and located in class terms, as discussed in the case study on Stratford in the next chapter.) For -example, John Forrest (1985) claims that the focus on uniformity within sides, the emphasis upon each dancer moving exactly as

the others do, considered by most North American groups as essential to good Morris, was not an original aesthetic element in Morris. Hog’s Back Morris squire Ian Robb made a similar observation. I went to see at the Sydmouth Festival, supposedly one of the only real traditional Cotswold teams left, one of the Bampton teams ... And they were great. I mean, I really enjoyed watching them. They danced much faster than any other team I’ve ever seen in my life. And there wasn’t that uniformity. They all had very individual styles. And they were all doing the same steps, but they were all doing them completely differently from each other. And partly because it was so fast, it didn’t matter. I think if they had been a slow dancing team, then it would have really stuck out like a sore thumb that they were all doing different things. But because it was all movement and almost faster than the eye could see, it didn’t matter, and the important thing was the groove and the

rhythm and the fact that they were moving together in terms of the track — you know how you move with your partner when you’re doing a hey, for example. Well, they were doing all those things right. You

know, if you forgot about their feet and their hands, their torsos and their heads were moving together. But it’s just that they had some very distinctive ways of lifting up their legs behind them and things like that, individually ... There’s everything from sixty-year-old men to fourteenyear-old boys on the team. I think there’s even an eleven-year-old on the

team. And so obviously uniformity is not something they aim at ... I mean watching them I had to throw out all my preconceived ideas of what Morris should be like and just sit back and enjoy them. (90-52)

These varying senses of Morris form suggest Pierre Bourdieu’s link between class and body sense or movement style. “Ever con-

Morris 9I cerned to impose the indisputable image of his own [sic] authority, his dignity or his distinction, the bourgeois treats his body as an end, makes his body a sign of its own ease. Style is thus foregrounded, and the most typically bourgeois deportment can be

recognized by a certain breadth of gesture, posture and gait, which manifests by the amount of physical space that is occupied, the place occupied in social space; and above all by a restrained,

measured, self-assured tempo” (Bourdieu 1984, 218). Bourdieu is certainly not the only observer of culture to posit a relationship between class, culture, use of space, and construction of the body (see, for example, Suleiman 1985). But Morris gives a particularly telling example, in which uniformity (the extent to which

the group of dancers do the same thing at the same time in the same way) has been imposed as a class-appropriate dance ideal. Paul Siess described a team he thought very good. “They’re strong, they’re uniform. That’s the main thing. They’re just bang on, every one of them, just so precise. Not precision to the point of boredom, just almost military precision that when the hands are up, their hands are all up at the same place in the same way.

That’s what I think makes a good Morris team, is strength and uniformity” (90-11). Though Forest City practised aspects of uniformity, such as forming straight, even lines during movements, the ideal could not be carried through physical similarity within the team, an advantage often cited for single-gender teams. Even the 1989-90 all-women team varied in age from late teens to mid-forties and in size from under five to over six feet. Perhaps as a consequence, members distinguished between uniformity and repetitiveness. Of

a team he did not personally admire, Paul stated: “The biggest problem I have with them is that everything they do is so calculated that, OK, it’s time to do this joke. OK, it’s time to do joke number two. It’s like they’ve scripted every last thing and everybody’s rehearsed and memorized their part. There’s absolutely nothing spontaneous about it all. I mean, the lines that they yell at each other, it’s like they had to pull the card out of their pocket and read the line so they’d remember what the line was. It’s not very exciting” (90-11).

92 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Yet uniformity was required beyond individual movement, entering into the domain of unspoken emotional, even intellectual, linkages between performers. “One thing I would like our team to do is stay the same team for a little while instead of switching

around. I think it strengthens our team. We know how to read each other’s minds practically. I think that’s one of the main things, is to know each others’ moves and give each other confidence, especially if we screw up in a dance, then we know how to

fix it properly without making it worse. We know — you know everybody’s moves, pretty well. I think that’s important that we know each other when we’re dancing, kind of cue each other sometimes. I’ve seen myself and Jane do that, sometimes” (Lucy, 90-24). These links between team members were seen ideally to

extend beyond what might enable uniformity of movement. “Hopefully the people would share this common activity that we do, even if it’s only on those times when we’re together as a team. That when we’re together as a team, we’re a team, we’re not six

or seven or eight folks who just happen to have practised together. We’re in this together, and there’s a commitment to one another, at least in this activity” (Tom, 90-14). Temporary social uniformity — communitas'? — was not always

achieved. “You have to dance as a team. You can’t dance for yourself ... When you see people enjoying a dance, you expect that there would be a camaraderie as well as a sort of esprit de corps. And I don’t know that our team has that. Maybe it’s because it has changed. It keeps evolving over the years, and maybe it’s because we’re all from different backgrounds and different beliefs” (Janet, 90-8). The essence of this social uniformity was commitment to the team, manifested both in dancing and in

behaviour outside it. “Trying to find someone who wants to spend all their long weekends dancing or coming out every week — that’s hard. Because people don’t understand what it is, or even though they may have seen it once, it’s really hard to get people to do something new like that, and commit themselves, anyway.

A lot of people, I find, are really interested. They’ve seen it, they really enjoy it. They think it’s really great — oh, it’d be so interesting to do that. But whether or not they could get up in front of a bunch of people and actually do that is another thing,

Morris 93 because people go, ‘Oh, what are they doing,’ and they get so self-conscious. You really have to overcome it” (Jane, 90-22).

As a relatively new member of the team, Sharon expressed commitment in terms of willingness to incorporate new dancers. “This team, people are so friendly anyhow, and willing to teach other people, that I don’t think anybody wouldn’t feel a member as soon as they started coming out ... I think it’s important, at least to Tom and to those people who come out really faithfully, that the person be there all the time, unless they’re really sick or just can’t possibly make it” (Sharon, 90-17). Commitment had a physical manifestation; its expression in attending practices was

assumed eventually to result in competent performances. “As soon as they can start getting through dances on their own, then I

consider them a member of the team. It’s when they know the dances enough, that whenever we’re practising they can jump in and they can get through a dance” (Jane, 90-21). But co-operation was another side of social and movement uniformity. “Id like to see us come away from a performance and look at each other and say, ‘Yeah, OK,” and to be able to do the thumbs up, without shaking their heads about individual performances or pointing fingers. And that’s part of doing anything in a team — recognizing the other people’s work” (Heather, 90-20). Despite these expressions of an ethos of Morris as incorporative in creating uniformity, competition was also essential to dances, though “sometimes it can get in the way, which I don’t agree with” (Lucy, 90-24). As Lucy indicated, (almost invariably positive) uniformity and commitment differed from competition, about which she was generally negative. “I don’t want to be in competition with anybody else. I don’t look at myself as being a great dancer. I think I’m a good dancer, but not a great dancer” (Lucy, 90-23). So was Janet. “To me, it would kind of blemish the team, knowing all these little petty things that go on. I mean, I go there to dance and enjoy the dancing, be part of the Morris

tradition. I’m not there for petty feuding and who can dance better than so and so, or so and so wants to run this. That’s the way I feel about it” (Janet, 90-8). Tom, in contrast with these two, saw competition both inside and outside Forest City as a stimulus to better dancing.

94 Ethnicity in the Mainstream I see ales as dancing for other dancers, I guess. In that sense, there’s more at stake, I think. If one of your goals is some kind of excellence, then that’s at the fore; you’ve got a critical audience. If you go dance down on the street corner somewhere, you could do a really crummy job, and a whole lot of people would think it was quite wonderful, because they’ve never seen anything like it before, and so they think that must be how the best in the world do it, cause they don’t know any different. You go to an ale, and there are some number of people who have seen really, really good dancers, so you’re putting yourself on that kind of yardstick. So it’s a challenge of showing off to other dancers. There’s the competitiveness, I guess, even though it’s not a formal competition. But there’s the element of trying to show other people who know something about this how good you can be. (90-14)

Ideals for good Morris were expressed in physical-symbolic, but also ideological, terms. The kind of dance Morris is, the way it is done, and the meaning it has for performers implicate its class location, as well as why people do it. For example, good Morris has height and lightness (the lift of the dancer from the earth or floor when stepping and capering). Thus when the group practised slow capers, Tom critiqued: They’re heavy. And I don’t think — none of us are strong enough to stay up very long, so I don’t expect that. I can’t do it. But there’s got to be bouncing between them. What’s happening is people are coming down and bomp ... and it’s very unattractive. It’s got to be more light ... Stay

on your toes on this, and use some spring in your knees. It’s not only your toes, but where people lose it, what makes it stiff, is [how you] came down ... And you can make it look like there’s a lot more happening if you come down and you sink down here and then come back up ... And make those jumps look light. Make it look like you’re enjoying

it, not “Oh shit, there we go again” ... If you can’t get much lift, I can understand that. But then compensate for the lack of lift by more action in the knees, springing up in the toes, loose ankles, so that you’re bouncing around ... That’s another trick that can help a lot: Don’t look down as you do it. Look up as you do it and get those hands up. And that’s to take people’s eyes off the ground, so they don’t see that there’s no light under your shoes. (practice 27/3/90, 90-4)

Morris 95 Strength (the extent to which effort appears to be easy) is also

important to good Morris and is often expressed in gendered terms. “When you get a women’s team together, we can’t look like

a bunch of ballerinas. We have to dance strong and we have to almost forget about our [femininity], especially with the clashing, stick dances, and that. I think we have to dance very strongly” (Lucy, 90-23). Such strength required physical effort, but in one practice Tom asserted: “Tony Barrand says his dream of an ideal practice is when somebody throws up. He feels he hasn’t been successful. I don’t have that objective” (practice 13/9/89, 89-54). Yet dancers found the actual movement more therapeutic than negatively stressful. “It’s a great outlet for stress, with the stick dances. I just whack the hell out of them, you know. You feel better and better after you’ve danced those stick dances for a while. You think, hey geez, I feel a lot better, when you go home” (Lucy, 90-23).

Movement was not retained solely in the domain of bodily sensation and raw experience; certain elements of Morris were invested with iconic meaning. For example, hitting sticks on the ground and other dancers’ sticks was taken as an icon for aggression. Sticks and white hankies were mutually exclusive; dances involved the use of either or neither — only exceptionally both. Yet hankies were not seen as icons for non-aggression but instead

as distractions. “Instead of these things hanging here, they are nice to wipe your face on, but they also play a part in the dance cause they’re part of the show. What they’re mainly for is to get people looking up here so they’re not looking at these ugly things that are hanging down from the bottom of your legs which

are not attractive to look at on most any of us” (Tom, practice 13/9/89, tape 89-53). Where they were symbolic, it was with respect to the origins of the dance and not to current meaning. For example: “I believe the hankies are there for a reason ... Some people have [equated] it with flames. My own theory is that they’re waking

up with the bells and the hitting of the sticks on the ground is [equated] to the waking of the earth ... But the hankies, | would feel, are a calling of good spirits and a waving away of bad ones, to help the earth to reap a good harvest, this sort of

96 Ethnicity in the Mainstream thing. People have [equated] it with flames, but I don’t see a connection with the earth, except the fire perhaps of the soul” (Rebecca, 90-6).

Entire dances were iconic. “London Triumph” was often described in public performance as aggressive, with rough handshakes, side-steps into a close face-to-face position, kicks, and

punches. However, side-stepping was not seen as particularly aggressive in other dances. Similarly, in “Trip to London” the varying corner crossings were seen to symbolize a trip, but in “Trunkles” they were not. Other dance movements were co-operative and symbolically sociable. They included the alternation of

partners and the entire group, and the alternation of iconically aggressive moves with symbolically incorporative ones. For example, “Saturday Night” had inherent sociability when the dancers did side-steps and capers with a series of different partners, competition when each dancer performed a solo, and finally integrated moves where everyone did identical actions. In “London Triumph,” dancers performed figures alternately with different partners, then aggressive chorus moves with their corner — so that at different points in the dance each was partnered with all three dancers — and finally in the hey, all performed a co-operative and co-ordinated move together.

The final hey, which ended every dance except “Shooting,” was an integrating, weaving move in which the dancers worked around one another. In the distinctive Kirtlington hey, dancers performed a circular, or spinning, motion. Since each had her own axis but also moved around that of the entire pattern, the hey emphasized both individuality and uniformity. In it, partners oriented to one another — each pair moved together but in opposition — in a consistent rearrangement of place. This contrasted with the other figures, which required dancers to stay in more or less the same position, or crossings/challenges, in which movement was done only with respect to a partner or corner.

Some teams, like Forest City, arrange a regular sequence of matching individual dancers with particular places. This practice

may serve different purposes. It is helpful in initiating inexperienced dancers so that they feel comfortable in the set. At one point Forest City used this strategy to capitalize on physical

Morris 97 differences in order to make the dances as interesting as possible

for the audience. Thus Anna and I, the two tallest members, danced at the end of the set so that we would be seen moving through the middle of the hey. Consistently dancing with the same partners and corners tended to promote bonding; it allowed dancers successfully to cue one another, as well as to communicate during the dance.

Further, many movements in Morris involved the closing of

“intimate space” (see Hall 1966) with partners and corners. Normally in Canadian society, one does not move into the space six to eighteen inches directly in front of another unless one is in an intimate relationship with that person. As Tom noted in one practice, “[this move is] called face-to-face for a reason. Keep as

close as your mouthwash allows you to” (practice 13/9/89, 89-54). Janet expressed her feeling about the interaction when dancing with one former member of the team in terms of qualities

discussed earlier as ideal Morris. “He would almost bring out what to me was the real Morris feeling. You’d be dancing opposite him, and first of all, he’d make you jump higher, just for some reason, I don’t know, cause he’d have this funny face on. But also you would be watching him and you’d be trying to keep up with him, but he would make all these sort of grimaces and faces and little remarks, say, if you were passing, that would just make you

laugh, which was part of the Morris tradition. So it looked like you were enjoying yourself rather than going through this rather painful exercise” (Janet, 90-8). Especially in dances involving crossings, performers must be

aware of those beside them, as well as opposite. Middles are within easy visual contact of every other dancer; end dancers are only separated in terms of their visual field from one other dancer — the one who is in the opposite position in the same line. There is also awareness and interaction with the musicians — and in performance with the fool, who moves in and out of the set of dancers — but this interaction and awareness is more sporadic,

as they will frequently be out of physical and visual contact. Thus the dance “Shooting” is almost always incorporated into performances; it explicitly includes the musicians. “I think the interaction between the two — in more ways than just the music is

98 Ethnicity in the Mainstream going and the dancers are dancing — I think that’s important. Like

the stick dance that we do where you actually shoot us and we fall down and the works, I think that kind of interaction is really

going to be useful and amusing when we start performing” (David Stoyles, 90-10).

When Forest City became an all-female dancing team in September 1989, the set size — the distances that dancers place themselves from one another — tended to decrease. At the same

time, the team became emotionally close; the camaraderie in practices and performances paralleled a reduction of the dancing space from personal to intimate. In fact, the dancers needed to reorient the set in order to have enough room to move. Given the parallel suggested between the social and physical aspects of Morris, it is particularly telling that membership in the group and physical ability to dance are seen as congruent. “We all have different personalities in our team ... I think we have a

mixed team; we have some stronger dancers and some weaker dancers, but I think we just have to balance it out as best we can” (Lucy, 90-24). Rebecca McClintock, who was seen by the other dancers as the most personally individualistic, was also perceived as dancing differently. “I think because of the personality she is, she dances differently from the rest of the team ... And it’s not — she’s a good dancer in some ways, but she dances differently ... So

for me that’s a real problem ... You don’t attract the kind of personalities that easily blend together in something like Morris dancing. It attracts people who are kind of individualists, for one reason or another, and so you always face some of that” (Tom, 90-15). Team members were hesitant to discuss this matter, but very aware of it. “I think there might be one person on the team

who feels like she might be being picked on a bit and I think that’s a shame because obviously she doesn’t enjoy herself when that happens ... You can tell when a person is not enjoying themselves when they’re doing something like this because that’s the

type of thing it is. If you’re not having a good time, it’s really really obvious. And it’s just a shame because that’s what it’s there for. And you just want to say, ‘Gee, have fun, don’t worry about it, don’t sweat it,” type of thing. But again, politics. What can you

do?” (Sharon, 90-17).

Morris 99 Thus the ideal Morris movements have congruence with per-

sonality, as they do with class, and with the idea that this is dance. Ideally, dancing is an enjoyable activity, involving circum-

scribed and limited, yet definite, responsibility to a group of others with whom one has a physically expressed emotional relationship. The association of Morris dancing with fun is experience as much as it is construction.

“GIRLS HAVE MORE FUN”: WOMEN AND MORRIS The construction of Morris gender is paradoxically related to its being perceived as dance. The body is seen as the primary vehicle for dance, to the extent that some suggest that dance is autographic*° — a different dancing body makes a different dance (Margolis 1984). The body is also perceived as a primary location for differences between men and women. The EuroAmerican dancing body is perceived as female. Ethnomusicologist Susan McClary comments, “The mind/body—masculine/feminine problem places dance decisively on the side of the ‘feminine’ body rather than with the objective ‘masculine’ intellect” (1991, 153).

Though this is not an invariant separation (see Turner 1984), it is sufficiently pervasive in mainstream Canadian culture to problematize male dance. At the very least, male dance must be explained; sometimes it approaches an oxymoron. Thus current Morris practice carefully constructs difference between male and female bodies in dance, privileging male dancing bodies. The ultimate aim is “homosocial,” “the seeking, enjoyment, and/or preference for the company of the same sex” (Lipman-Blumen 1976, 16; see also Sedgwick 1985). The concept of gender centres on the recognition that ideas of female or male are culturally and symbolically constructed and

coded (see, for example, MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Tiffany and Adams 1985). Genital and genetic differences between women and men are seen to provide the basis for sexual distinctions, but gender and the social distribution of role expectations often have little to do with who can and cannot bear children and who does and does not have a Y chromosome.” The gendered associations of Morris and dance

Kole) Ethnicity in the Mainstream are semantically charged; as making Morris “dance” effects how it is performed and perceived, so does making it “male.” I will argue that Morris people construct an idea of Morris as

male through its differentiation from female dance styles. The : binary oppositions created echo those created by gendered distinctions themselves and reflect a need to form agreed-upon differentiations despite actual activity and ability. That is, though dance abilities may vary from individual to individual, sex-based patterns are asserted. The underlying need is not simply to differentiate actions but to create a context in which men can legitimately interact meaningfully but homosocially. Again, power relations — in this case, between men and women — are obfuscated

in carnivalized play behaviour. An undisguised, unredressed wish to exclude women from any activity is generally not approved — nor is it legal — in Canadian society. Thus Morris, like sport, is constructed as male in “objective” physical terms. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the body is not only a physical manifestation but also a symbolic one. “Strictly biological differences are underlined and symbolically accentuated by differences in bearing, differences in gesture, posture and behaviour which express a whole relationship to the social world ... The sign-bearing, sign-wearing body is also a producer of signs which are phys-

ically marked by the relationship to the body ... The body, a social product which is the only tangible manifestation of the ‘person,’ is commonly perceived as the most natural expression of innermost nature” (1984, 192).** Hence the body, although superficially linked to “natural” sex difference, is also gendered and cultured — symbolically created and interpreted as male or female (West and Zimmerman 1991; Epstein and Straub 1991, and others). Recent studies from a variety of perspectives reflect on the body as a cultural, as well as a physical, entity (see, for example, Martin 1987; Suleiman 1985; Clover 1989; and Wolff 1990). Diet and exercise, as well as expectations of stance, move-

ment, and so on, influence how the physical body develops (see Glassner 1990). Or, “in taking gender to be a metaphor for

the conventional oppositions they impose upon the world, people establish forever these oppositions in their own bodies” (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976, 33).

Morris Io1 A physical expressive-communicative form such as dance, which has the body as its primary medium, is thus particularly susceptible to gendering — and to the tendency to be seen as sexed

not gendered. Judith Lynne Hanna (1988) observes that dance is a cultural, as well as a physical, representation; that it is gendered as well as sexed. As male and female bodies produce the physical movements of dance, they are seen metonymically to communicate ideas about men and women: what they (and their bodies) are like. Notions that “men are stronger” or “women are more graceful” are assumed to refer to sex because they refer to the

body; in fact, such ideas, and the construction of the body in dance, are gendered.

The surprise in Morris dance, then, is not that it is gendered but that it is gendered male. Cultural biases extending beyond Morris itself affect it strongly. “I think that sometimes it’s hard for Canadian men to understand about this dancing, cause they look at these men as a bunch of woosies. And I say no, this is originally a men’s dance. This is a very masculine thing to do. But you can’t tell that to a lot of guys these days. Women, of course,

are naturally maybe more attracted to the art form, perhaps a little more than the man would be” (Lucy, 90-23). Men, facing a pervasive cultural attitude that perceives dance as unmasculine, impose a symbolic ordering upon Morris. To make it acceptable as a practice for men, it must be not only masculine but exclusively male. Significantly, Forest City dancers who argue against this perspective do not deny its historic validity but suggest that

women dancing is a legitimate alteration of tradition. “A lot of men have been very snobbish toward women that have danced and it’s too bad because they shouldn’t be that way. I mean, we’re not talking about pagan times any more. We’re talking about just

having a good time and so who cares if women dance Morris dancing? So big deal, you know?” (Lucy, 90-24). Dance scholars have clearly been influenced by Sharp and his

contemporaries: “English Morris dances are for male dancers only” (Kealiinohomoku 1972, 383); “the English Morris dancers ... are exclusively male” (Royce 1977, 80); and so on. Morris’s

male gender is presented in two forms: the first, following the scholarship’s concern with origin, suggests that until recently only

102 Ethnicity in the Mainstream men performed it; the second asserts that only men should perform it. The first assertion is problematic; historical accounts indicate that women danced Morris (see, for example, Heaney 1985, 33; and Reynolds 1987). Theresa Buckland (1982, 12-13) notes a bias against mixed, female, and children’s teams in the scholarship; such groups were seen as unique and/or exceptional rather than traditional. The compilers of the ceremonial dance index in 1960, “like Sharp, ... regarded the existence of Morris dances performed by anything other than adult males as untraditional. Such ideas have extended into the twentieth-century Folk Dance Revival” (ibid., 13). The Morris revival has not been a passive receptacle of such ideas but has exacerbated gender bias. For example, “The Cambridge Morris was started about 1922 to combat the effect of so many women doing the morris” (Dommett 1982, 78). Women dancing Morris is cited as one of the effects of the revival, not as traditional. Ultimately, the paucity of scholarship on early women’s Morris probably results from previous scholars — mainly men — avoiding the search for documentation and ignoring or dis-

counting what they did find. And there remains controversy about whether some female figures described in Morris accounts were performed by women or by cross-dressed men (see Reynolds 1987). The strong emphasis on origin in Morris dance scholarship has reinforced the tendency of the first assertion — no early women’s

Morris — to lead to the second — no women should perform Morris now. Indeed, the work of Russell Wortley (1979), who linked the “fact” that Morris was a fertility dance to its performance entirely by males, “was used to justify the exclusion of women from participation in public performances of the Morris”

(Barrand 1988, 17). Recent works such as those by Barrand, Buckland, and Reynolds have deconstructed this notion. Paul Siess’s comments indicate that his explanation of the differences between male and female Morris relates more to physical, than to symbolic, issues. Pm not a Morris snob that says that women can’t dance and if they’re going to, they can’t dance with men, and there’s that real awful attitude

Morris 103 that goes around with some Morris teams. But I think that there’s a lot to be said for women dancing only with women, because of the way they dance — that men, in most cases, can move farther and will do things differently; will look stronger. That’s sounding wrong, but it doesn’t look the same. And when you get a group of women doing it, there’s a common thing, and they dance the same, just the same as a group of men will dance roughly the same. I think [Forest City becoming all female dancers] has been a really good move because it’s all of a sudden starting to look like something again instead of a sloppy mess, which is what I really think that last couple of years have been — kind of crappy looking — and then this year it’s really come together, really come

along. (Paul, 90-11)

Sociologist Bryan Turner locates a pervasive link between the

body and the political. “The body lies at the centre of political struggles. While it can be argued unambiguously that the physiology of men and women represents a major difference (in reproductive functions), gender identity and gender personality have to be inserted into physiology by socialization into specific roles and identities” (Turner 1984, 39). I did not know I was making

a political statement when I joined Forest City, then a “co-ed” team; or, for that matter, that joining an all-female team would - bea political statement. In fact, no one of either sex can join any team without making some sort of political comment as to how they perceive Morris and gender. Any man or woman who joins a

mixed team certainly indicates support for the idea that women can and/or should perform Morris, and she/he implies at least

some reservations about the strict gendering of the dance. Similarly, a woman who joins an all-female team clearly supports

the idea that women can/should do Morris but may also be expressing opposition to mixed Morris. Men on all-male teams can be expressing either a choice to dance with people of the

same sex, a deliberate statement that women should not do Morris, or an impression that even though women may Morris, they should not do so in mixed groups.

Thus while it is impossible to join a Morris team without making — even inadvertently — an often inchoate political statement about what the gender of teams should be, it may not

104 Ethnicity in the Mainstream always be easy to determine the actual content of that statement. Even assuming that women can — even should — do Morris does

not preclude asserting fundamental differences between their dance styles and those of men, and an ideological rejection of mixed Morris. Hence Dan Stone, squire of the male Winnipeg team, commented: “With the probable exception of the Marlborough Women, whom I saw perform only one dance on one occasion, I have never seen a group of women dance with anything like ‘male’ styling. I also did a couple of dances at an Ale with some women from Ann Arbor who danced delightfully vigorously, largely to prove a point. They did not dance with the same gusto with their own side. The next generation of women Morris dancers is likely to be stylistically more ‘male’ as a result of great increase in women’s athletics. In almost all cases, today’s male and female Morris dancers mix about as well as women and men athletes — that is to say, not very well” (personal

communication, 1991). Forest City was thus a valuable group with which to work, particularly because, dictated primarily by the sex of available dancers, it moved from mixed to all female to

a team with separate female and male sides during the time I danced with it. It is difficult in a post-structuralist academic world to discuss any issue in structuralist terms. However, such a perspective helps

to explain how the gender of Morris is expressed and presented by Forest City. Anthropologists Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead comment, “In the majority of cultural cases ... the differ-

ences between men and women are in fact conceptualized in terms of sets of metaphorically associated binary oppositions” (1981, 7). Two main symbolic processes take place, sometimes simultaneously, in the differentiation of gendered Morris styles: opposition and intensification. For aggressiveness, a quality most dancers agreed is valued in Morris, both the following operations are used: female (Morris) is passive (serious); male (Morris) is aggressive (non-serious), and female (Morris) is aggressive; male (Morris) is more aggressive. Thus: “When we did ‘London Triumph’ before, I didn’t like it, because I always looked at it as such a masculine dance with the punching, and the different types of steps that we did. It was a

Morris 105 different way that we did it. I just didn’t feel comfortable. And |

always kind of whined a bit to Tom when he made me do it, cause I just didn’t feel masculine enough. Maybe now I’ve changed a bit. I like the style now that we’re doing it, even though we’re punching ... I think we’re loosening up. I love a team that just fools around” (Lucy, 90-23). Lucy suggests that she reinterpreted this dance from aggressive (serious) — which she did not feel she was able to do — to aggressive (just fooling around). And terms such as grace and delicacy (female) versus strength and aggression (male) communicated differences as metaphorical gender (and perhaps also sex) variations. “I hesitate to use gender language, but there’s an element of male-

ness to it. That doesn’t mean it’s restricted to men. I’ve never gotten terribly caught up in that argument, although for some it becomes very important. Maleness in the sense that the dances should be strong and aggressive, and are not intended to be beau-

tiful. That doesn’t mean they should be unattractive, but you think of ballet. You work hard at grace and delicacy of movement as well as strength. But Morris is a much more raw, sort of ageressive tradition. And a lot of people would attach the word ‘masculine’ to that” (Tom, 90-14). This brief quotation contains a multitude of symbolic judgments. For Tom, Morris dance, which is masculine, is to other forms of dance, which are implicitly feminine such as ballet, as strength is to (less strength); aggression is to (non-aggression); non-beautiful is to (beautiful); and raw is to (less raw, or cooked) *3 (see Lévi-Strauss 1969). Here the intensification is, selectively, of female rather than male traits; that is, Morris is implicitly less graceful and delicate than female dance, such as ballet. Since the male form of behaviour in Morris is seen as the original, it is usually the standard. Therefore to say that Morris is less graceful and delicate, rather than more strong and forceful, when men do it is unusual.

Beyond consciously iconic steps and elements — kicks, strikes, and so on — it is difficult to see how “aggression” can be expressed in steps, leaps, and hand gestures. Yet there are differences of opinion about the “grace” element in the dance;

while Tom thinks it is necessary, Sharon thinks it is absent. “Traditionally, being a dance that was done a lot by males, it’s

106 Ethnicity in the Mainstream not particularly graceful for females, but then that’s no big deal, no big deal at all” (Sharon, 90-17).

Interestingly, the idea that Morris style and traditional performers alike are male was not questioned by Forest City members, including the female dancers. Since their information comes primarily from fellow dancers who have been strongly influenced

by pervasive revival ideas, their attitude is not surprising. For example: “It was, in the beginnings, originally a men’s dance, and the men were the ones that went out and danced” (Lucy, 90-23).

And: “What little I know of the tradition, it was originally performed by men. And the diehards say that’s how it should be done, or that it should not be a mixed group in terms of sexes” (Heather, 90-19). Most Morris people I met saw the male/female differences in performance as sexed — physical — rather than as gendered — sym-

bolic and interactional. Forest City members did not question dance as a physical presentation of sex; as discussed earlier, they perceived its symbolism almost exclusively in the conventional

terms of fertility, growth, and season. For many on this team, and for most others, Morris is a male dance form that is in some way altered, if not made spurious, when performed by women. Women may dance Morris, but it is a different dance — perhaps non-traditional — when they do. Yet Forest City members feel that

women can and should dance Morris: “In Britain there are those who say that Morris dancing really is for men, you know, this whole idea that it’s coming out of the high priestly tradition of the pagans and what have you, and it’s the men who did this, and it’s the men who made the sacrifices and what have you. Again, there’s just — there’s no real good historic basis for that” (Tom, practice 13/9/89, 89-55). Some of the ideas expressed by the team indicate why — other than its purported male performative origins — and how Forest City members see Morris as a male tradition. In these discussions,

though it is doubtful that the team members would see their comments as tropic, physical aspects of the body metaphorically

represent the dance as male and less often as female, though “sender and its attributes are not pure biology. The meanings attributed to male and female are as arbitrary as are the meanings

Morris 107 attributed to nature and culture” (MacCormack 1980, 18). Like gender itself, Morris is a cultural construction that communicates ideas about what it means to be male or female. Forest City mem-

bers express its gendered aspect in physical, rather than in cultural, terms. They comment on differences between female and male Morris in vague, but clearly physiologically oriented, terminology. When they say that men and women dance differently, they refer to actual physical movements, yet such variations can be attributed as much to attitudes as to physiology. By some world-views, dance is to Morris as female is to male, yet Morris is a form of dance. That is, most people would see

Morris as a form of dance or a part of the larger category of dance; Morris is a synecdoche of dance. Hence, insiders who feel

that Morris is male frequently try to remove the term “dance” from their discussion of Morris. (My own study has avoided the term because I see it as a construction in other domains as well.) The “dance” aspect of Morris, while clearly significant to how it is perceived, is often manipulated through symbolic negation. Morris is dance but Morris is also not dance, because dance is female and Morris is male. Interestingly, teams often refer to themselves as Morris men — or women — and to the dance as “Morris” less often than as “Morris dance.” Though the gender of Morris is culturally constructed and distinctions between male and female dancing expressed in terms of the physical body, most members of Forest City experienced difficulty in communicating the specifics of such differences. “I think

it’s good to have a team of the same sex. I think it just doesn’t work when you have a mixed team, because men dance differently from women, especially in Morris. It’s just a different style

completely. They have a different way about them, as I’ve observed” (Rebecca, 90-6). Ideas about the gender of Morris were often expressed in the context of discussions about changes in the team. Feelings among current members about becoming an all-female team for the first time in the history of Forest City were somewhat ambivalent, but generally positive. “I don’t know that it has anything specifically to do with gender, but it’s just been my experience that teams that are men’s teams or women’s teams are better teams. And I don’t

108 Ethnicity in the Mainstream know if it’s the social dynamics of people being attracted to a unisex team, or what it is. And I think we’re better now than when we were a mixed team, and particularly now we simply would be a very odd mixed team, having one or two men among mostly women. And I’m a fair bit older than the other members of the team, and so you get all the age, size, and gender differences all mixed up together and it just doesn’t make something that looks unified, and I think a team should look unified” (Tom, 90-14). Jane, who had danced for a couple of years with Forest

City when it was mixed, suggested that the social dynamics as much as the actual dancing were problematic: I found that with that co-ed team, sometimes you get the male-female conflict because if there was a female who was just having a rough, rough time, the men would get very intolerant very quickly. And the women would try and coax the woman, “Now come on, we can do it.” And it was like this little challenge between the sexes sometimes, it was hard fleeting comments. You kind of go well, ”Do we need to do this, like do you need to say things like that?” I would get really upset. But I was the youngest, so I couldn’t say anything, but I would sit there and go, “I don’t care who you are, we’re all here for the same reason. We’re all on the same team and we don’t need comments like that.” But sometimes the men felt like they were kept back, I’m sure, by some of the women. I found it frustrating, but they tried, and that’s what’s most important ... I like being able to come to practice and not being wor-

ried because the other team members are going to go, “Oh, get it together,” or “I have no tolerance for this any more.” It’s not as if they’re yelling us out, but it’s definitely there. I think the girls have more

fun. It’s sort of like a little clique in a way, and it’s neat. I like that so much. (Jane, 90-22)

However, most who had danced on the mixed team saw advantages to working with male dancers, especially in terms of the challenges they presented. “I remember when I first joined, they

were saying that this is a men’s dance, but it’s nice to have a mixed team. A little bit of my feminism came out and I thought well, “That’s good. Let’s show these all male dancers in the groups

that we can do all right too, we females can blend in too.’ And I

Morris 109 feel that way now, with it being an all-women’s team. I’ve seen some women’s teams dance, and J think practically all of them

have just been exceptionally good, and they’ve looked really together, and I’ve really admire that. It has nothing to do with — I think it’s just nice to have the same sex, it can look uniform, and

I think it’s fine. But it wouldn’t bother me if we had some men

join in our group ... it doesn’t bother me either way” (Lucy, 90-24). Despite their difficulties in articulating differences between male and female Morris, Forest City members were clear and forthcoming about the effects of changing from a mixed to an all-

female dancing team. Several commented on its affects on the way the group interacted (see also Broad 1991). Notions about changes were often expressed in by-now familiar physiological terms, particularly “uniformity.” Despite the fact that the range of body type and height among the dancers did not decrease markedly with the move to all female dancers, the supposition

was that women would be approximately the same size and would move in similar ways. “I never minded dancing with men, having a mixed team. I thought it was interesting. It’s kind of nice to have an all-women’s team. I don’t know why that is; maybe because we look more uniform, even though [some are] a little tall and [others are] short, like myself” (Lucy, 90-23).

Generally, though, members saw the change from mixed to female as a positive one, though not without some regret at losing the dancing interactions — if not the social interactions. It’s getting a lot better, especially with us all women. I don’t think [Tom] really wanted to go with an all-women’s team. It’s probably a curiosity to him, but I think he’d rather be dancing and have other guys dancing, because that’s what they’ve always done. But I think he’s finding it really interesting because we are dancing better because we’re all women. We blend a lot better. And he’s not killing himself either, but he still gets to dance and he’s still totally involved, and it’s total control ...

I miss the guys, I really miss them, because they were fun. They would always break the tension, if things got really tense or scary, they would always make a joke about it. I miss that. And I miss being

IIo Ethnicity in the Mainstream able to see them dance, because they dance differently, a little bit, different styles, and they would push you. If you danced across from

a guy, you jumped higher, you moved faster, you had to keep up with them, right? You don’t want to be this little mouse beside this great big monster, right? I think because I joined on a co-ed team, I dance harder than I might have had I started on a women’s team. I would have been a mousier dancer, I’m sure. But because dancing with the big guys, I learned how to jump higher. I just got in the habit of doing that. Now, I find I pull back a lot. I don’t run as fast, my distance is shorter. My heights, it depends. But I miss that, actually. I like the way we blend, I like the way we keep together, but I don’t like the fact that we don’t really push it, and really motor. We could do so much more with it. But there’s room to do that later, I’m sure. (Jane, 90-21)

All-female teams often try to feminize the dance in other modes than presentation styles. For example, they may wear dresses instead of trousers. “Oh I’ve looked at Goats Head and thought, ‘Gee, their dresses are pretty.” You know, naturally, the women’s team, they wear these lovely frocks and their clogging looks interesting. But I guess I’m very loyal, and I’m happy” (Lucy, 90-23). Some female team members discussed with me the

difficulty of trying to find a “kit” (costume) that was feminine

looking yet allowed such moves as slow capers, in which the dancer jumps while doing the splits, without endangering the dancer or her modesty. Most Cotswold teams — note that Goats Head does clog dances, which do not have leaping moves —

give up and return to wearing more practical, less “feminine” clothing.

The most serious objection to Forest City remaining an allfemale team came from Jane, who pointed out that if the membership remained critically low, eliminating men as possible new dancers would be problematic. “I’ve spent the last two years hitting everybody I know who could be a potential dancer. You find yourself screening, which you don’t know whether you can afford

to do, because you need members so badly. At least we do, I think, because we’re all women, we’ve eliminated potential men that would have been on the team” (Jane, 90-22).

Morris III Having all female dancers also affected non-dancing male members of the team: the musicians and the foreman. Many dancers’ comments referred to changes in interaction with the foreman, and Tom himself often said in practices that he felt an outsider when our discussions turned to gynaecology or rela-

tionships. “It’s a tricky role for me because I feel like a bit of an outsider in a women’s group. I mean the bonding between single-sex groups is reality. I think something does happen in unisex groups that’s different than happens in mixed-sex groups.

It’s not always constructive — certainly some of the bonding among men isn’t — so I struggle a bit with that, particularly in today’s society when there are those issues about androgyny and all of that kind of stuff. So I’m finding that interesting. I’m not finding it at all unpleasant, but at times tense. I’m conscious of that separation, and it’s something you’ve got to play carefully” (Tom, 90-15). Some saw a male authority figure, even a disciplinarian, as necessary to the success of an all female team. “I like the fact that we have Tom coaching us, because obviously he’s the authority, he’s pretty strict, or he can be. And he can always keep us from gossiping or whatever we do, you know, giggle giggle, all this. He can stop that if need be and just straighten us around and keep us moving. Actually, without him we’d probably spend more time having fun than we would actually dancing. But it’s nice, I like that very much” (Jane, 90-22). Tom was not the only male member of the team. Even when all the dancers were women, the group had male musicians, and

at least one dancer commented on how the women interacted differently with them. “When they first dance out in May, like Sharon did with us, and we all congratulated her, we said, ‘You did great, you’re really good.’ And the same with Dave Stoyles when he was drumming. I never did say anything to Dave about his drumming, and I should have. I forgot because I’m looking, I’m concentrating with the dancers more so than the musicians, which is kind of selfish. Even for musicians, for the first time playing out, it’s a lot of pressure” (Lucy, 90-24).

In fact, I do not think Dave felt completely a member of the team. In the interview, he often referred to the team as “you”

112 Ethnicity in the Mainstream or “they”, not as “us.” “You’re tied to Kirtlington and they did certain things, and so you want to do a certain number of them to tie yourself with that tradition. But I think you can do other things as well ... Any time of involvement that the team can have together is going to draw them closer together” (David, 90-10). This could have been the result of his relatively short period — some three months — as drummer or of the formality of the interview. However, Dave suffered extensive teasing, and was treated more or less as a mascot. He left after the summer of 1990.

When I conducted interviews in spring and early summer 1990, there was some question as to whether or not the change to an all-female dancing team was permanent, though evidently Tom thought it should be. “Even though right now we have a women’s

team, if a couple of guys wanted to join us, I think that would

be fine ... We always had more women than men. It always seemed that way. And now, we just have an all-women’s team, which is fine; it’s working out well and I feel good about it this year” (Lucy, 90- 24). The addition of new male dancers to Forest City almost a year afterward led to some controversy about how they would participate and perform. At the June London 1991 Ale, I suggested that we do “Shepherd’s Hey” with a mixed side, and Sharon com-

mented, “We don’t do that.” Thus the decision to become a mixed team was not a move toward “unisex” Morris, but instead

“apartheid” Morris, where men and women dance separately, never together in the same set. This reinforces the gendered quality of the dance. Morris moves, I contend, are not necessarily or essentially male or female; defining the form as male is an attempt to maintain its homosocial connections. As all-male organizations become more rare and as the exclusion of women on intrinsic grounds becomes more difficult, the sites for homosociality are increasingly located in the area of physical difference. Not only in Morris but also in most sports, it is still considered legitimate to separate men and

women. The arguments for this separation are becoming less compelling as female athletes demonstrate their powers, but the impetus remains for male Morris dancers to exclude women on

physical grounds. |

Morris 113 While the point of view on Morris gender as male is clearly hegemonic, there are alternatives. In the U.S. there are gay, lesbian, and bisexual Morris teams. Many Morris participants with whom I have discussed this work reject sexist Morris. And as a Morris dancer myself and thus part of the culture, I do not subscribe to these ideas. Assertions of the masculinity of Morris, then, are ideological expressions of male power. Several recent

works (e.g., Mosse 1985 and Parker et al. 1992) show how gender and sexuality are linked to nationalism. Patriarchy and ethnic power are linked in English cultural forms; Morris as male harmonizes well with its symbolic construction as an “English” practice. As I will argue in the study of Stratford, English culture is construed as masculine; correspondingly, its masculinity supports the Englishness of Morris.

“YOU WOULDN’T FIND IT IN LONDON”: MORRIS AS ENGLISH Some folklorists have argued that folklore is gesunkenes Kultur-

gut: élite culture appropriated by the common people (Dundes 1969). In contrast, Morris was collected from the working class and appropriated in the early twentieth century by the middle class as fodder for romantic nationalism and as a buttress for colonial difference and power. Cecil Sharp and his fellow scholars

perceived in the music and dance they collected fundamentally, incontrovertibly English sources from which they could build a national culture.”4

They have proven to be successful in linking Morris with English culture; one member of Forest City suggested, “It seemed

to be so much a very natural part of English life” (Janet, 90-8).

The connection between Morris and England — as between Morris and maleness — is seen as innate. Thus Morris as practised

by Forest City — and probably elsewhere in the province and country — implicates what is English and what that might mean. Yet like other concepts central to the way Morris is viewed, its Englishness is difficult for performers to specify; they can assert that Morris is English, but they cannot say why — other than in terms of its origin — this is so.

114 Ethnicity in the Mainstream I will argue that it is no coincidence to Morris Englishness that one explanation of the practice’s origin — not often discussed by the generally liberal Forest City members — calls it a survival of

“Moorish” dances, brought from “exotic” non-white peoples (see, for example, Buckland 1990). Nor is it accidental that whiteness plays such an important role in Morris costume, that the vast majority of Morris people are white, or that some Morris dances are traditionally performed in blackface — although I have never seen them so performed in Canada. Morris has achieved what many might feel is an extraordinary level of popularity. There are four Morris teams in London, one each in Guelph, Peterborough, and Ottawa, and until recently at least five in Toronto. The attraction of Morris for urban Ontarians such as the members of Forest City cannot be totally unre-

lated to to the difficulty which that region’s inhabitants face in determining their own culture, their need to discover and/or to invent one that they might find suitable, and for some, their ambivalence towards their actual English roots. Dance traditions are often identity markers for ethnic culture (Royce 1977, 154-74).

Because Morris is seen as English, it can be attractive to those who want to participate in English — origin and mainstream — ethnic culture. Of course, these attitudes are not manifested only in Morris. But what is important to those who practise it in London, Ontario, and to much of their audience, is that it exemplifies an idealized, carnivalesque notion of English ethnic culture. The idea that Canadian Morris is incontrovertibly English is

questionable. Indeed, despite the slipperiness of the content of English ethnicity, examining a tradition like Morris, which is not claimed by any ethnic group other than the English, can give indirect access to the ways in which English ethnicity is perceived. As a key or index to Englishness, it is rather oblique: via tradition, dance, and maleness. Even in England, as I have sug-

gested earlier, Morris dancing is as reinvented as it is traditional. Accordingly, the practice sheds some light on how an English tradition is conceived, in that it shows what a form (re)created specifically to be English looks like. And so, in his narrative of the original formation of Forest City Morris, Tom links it to English people and English culture.

Morris II5 There were several of us who, for several years by that time, had been running a folk club, which had a fairly heavy emphasis on British traditional folk music ... A number of the people were from Britain. And a group of Morris dancers had gotten started in Toronto and one of the

people who was involved in running the folk club here was partly involved with that group ... I and one other person [from London] went to the inaugural get-together of Green Fiddle Morris. I decided I wasn’t interested enough to commute to Toronto to go to Morris practices, but

the other person did, off and on anyway. Not long after that ... the Toronto team had by then become established and they were dancing in the Eaton Centre, and they were approached by a gentleman who said, “Gee, I’m really intrigued to see Morris dancing here. I danced Morris as an adolescent in Britain, but never expected to see Morris dancing here. And I certainly wouldn’t expect to find any where I live, which is London, Ontario.” And the Green Fiddle people said well, “As a matter of fact you might find some interest there,” and they put him in touch with us and we in touch with him, and that became the start of Forest City. (Tom, 90-13)

For at least some of the members, the fact that Morris is an English custom, especially since the whole notion of Englishness and folklore are for some people antithetical, becomes significant. Jane particularly likes to make English people aware of Morris, since they as much as other Canadians often dissociate traditional culture and English culture. “Go to ales like Toronto, and they’ll have little old ladies come up and say, ‘Oh, that was so wonderful, what was that, Ukrainian dancing?’ And I say, ‘No, actually it’s English.’ Well, ‘?'m from England’ they say, ‘and I’ve never seen this before.’ And you get a kick out of it, because you just expect that English people knew, because so many people who did come over, especially older generations, say, ‘Oh, I used to do that as a kid when I was in school.’ So you hear this and you just assume everybody’s at least aware of it. But I guess not. So

it’s really fun to introduce it to somebody who’s actually from England and say well, ‘Go home and check it out. This is your history’” (Jane, 90-21). The issue of entitlement, which helps to distinguish ethnic expression for English immigrants, here becomes significant for Jane. She has an opportunity to demon-

116 Ethnicity in the Mainstream strate greater knowledge and understanding than English people who would superficially seem more entitled to do so. The fact that historically Morris was a geographically limited tradition increases the chances of this type of interaction taking place. There are, however, significant and recognizable differences between Morris in England and Morris in Canada for team mem-

bers. Some have already been discussed earlier, but there are others. “One of the best parts of Morris dancing is all the different costumes. And it’s a team thing, because every team is different from the next as far as what they wear and what they dance.

I think that’s the best part about North America ... because it didn’t originate here, I mean we’re so lucky because we basically

get to look at all of England and choose what we like the best and learn that tradition, and then learn another one and another one” (Jane, 90-21). For some members, Morris is part of learning about English culture in Canada; recall that English culture is not commonly perceived in terms of a strong, unified, or even recognizable content. “I’m interested in tradition in general from different places, British tradition more so because it’s something that I’ve always been exposed to, having been born in Canada and lived in Canada. I’m not of any British, Irish, or Scottish descent ... And what’s nice, you can see all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds doing this one thing. OK, it’s mainly a British tradition, but people have a right to choose what tradition they would do, no matter what ethnic background they come from” (Rebecca, 90-6). For Sharon, while the ethnic association of Morris was an interesting sidelight, it was not central to her participation in Forest City. “I’m from the background of people who came over from the Cotswolds of England. I mean that’s where it comes from, right? But that wouldn’t have been a primary consideration for joining the team at all. It’s interesting once you’re there, but not something that would draw me” (90-17). Some Forest City members did not see Morris as a search for the culture of personal roots; others did. “With my joining this group, I’ve almost gotten back to — it’s helped me get back to a bit of my roots, so to speak, over in the British Isles, being Irish

Morris 117 and Scottish descent. It’s made me appreciate the music more, especially Irish for some reason” (Lucy, 90-24). And: “From what I understand, it stems from the British Isles, from England itself ... I guess it’s a way to get in touch with a little bit of my heritage. I know that my ancestors were originally from England

and Scotland, but I am only a third-generation Canadian, so that’s not really knowing a lot of my culture other than general senses. It’s a way just to be involved in something that’s been around for, what, two hundred, almost three hundred years, as far as I know” (Heather, 90-19). Ironically, until January 1991 there was only one Englishaccented, immigrant team member, who was Anglo-Irish. She commented, “I do think of myself as British, let’s put it that way, rather than English” (Janet, 90-9). Janet sees Morris as English but does not see herself as English, so it cannot be an expression of identity for her. No one ever spontaneously discussed Morris with me — at a practice or dance-out, for instance — as an expres-

, sion of personal ethnic culture. However, some members of Forest City, as I have indicated, link themselves with English culture and family origins in Britain. Equally, others do not. Because Forest City lacked English immigrant members, it was

a poor example of a general rule in Morris culture, that male English dancers are part of the élite. It is invaluable to a Morris dancer to be born in England — even more so to have an obvious English accent — whether or not that dancer came from a com-

munity where Morris was performed or even did Morris in England. Being English cannot make up for poor dancing ability,

but all other things being equal, I suspect that a good Englishaccented dancer would be considered a better dancer than an equally skilled North American—accented dancer.

Note, however, that the position of an English-accented non-white dancer would probably be perceived by most Morris insiders as anomalous. The same is clearly not true of Englishaccented former colonials: one Toronto team, for example, has

a (white) English-accented élite member who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong. English culture is thus personalized and privileged in Morris, as other ethnic cultures privilege national traditions; they have the right to determine correctness.’5

118 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Evidently most Morris scholars take the Englishness of the form so much for granted that they rarely even discuss it; similarly, Forest City members and other Morris participants verbalize the Englishness of Morris only minimally, and then solely in terms of its having come from England. As suggested throughout this study, English culture is perceived in restricted, often inchoate, terms. Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary idea of the chronotope — “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed” (1981, 84) —is a useful organizing concept for expressing the inexpressible: the Englishness of Morris.

Morris links time and space in impressions of Englishness in Canada formed by Morris performers’ costume, music, speech, and movement, as well as by their personal identities. As with the

literary chronotope, Morris unfolds and is acted out in such a way as to make implicit, rather than explicit, most of its ideology. Unlike the literary chronotope, however, its narrative is also implicit — only hinted at by some moves in the dances or some

aspects of costume and interaction. It cannot be expressed in terms of completion; nor does any individual carry all of the information with which to understand the chronotope, myself included. By this process of chronotopic description, “time, as it were,

thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time,

plot and history” (ibid.). The characterization that follows is stereotypical, even exaggerated, but it speaks what is not said, yet is to a great extent understood, by participants and audiences. Most, myself included, will be uncomfortable with much of its

content and with its contradictions; it is an attempt to distil a process of creation and re-creation into concrete, unmoving elements. In it I alternately mix insiders’ and outsiders’ views; hence this portrayal is frankly my own creation, but it is one that I hope will resonate for at least some members of my audience. Morris unfolds as an English past-time pastime. It is linked with a nostalgic earlier England characterized by rurality, nature, and simplicity in pre-industrial, pre-Victorian, pre-colonial time.

Morris 119 In Ontario, Morris is often performed on barren city streets, but its bucolic paradise location is a fertile countryside characterized by plenty. Class issues are submerged; the implied participants are happy peasants rather than members of the working classes. Its time and place are also symbolically clean and pure; the quintessential Morris dancer wears white clothing and waves white handkerchiefs, which should never be soiled. If dancing results in dirt, it must be removed behind the scenes; each new dancing day or event brings performers wearing clean, white clothing and brandishing clean, white handkerchiefs. On a symbolic level — as well as, too often, on a literal one — cleaning re-

peatedly soiled white clothing, and other repeatedly soiled objects, is part of women’s expected and unpaid labour. The endless

supply of clean, white clothing echoes the continuous reproduction of agricultural produce, fertility, and women’s labour relations. Undoubtedly many Morris men wash their own clothing, yet the practice of washing itself implies women’s work. Whiteness is an important trope in Morris dancing. People of colour are very rare among North American Morris teams. The few who join uncomfortably mark the difficulty of imagining a straightforward location for black, aboriginal, or oriental Morris

dancers. The chronotope addresses a time before colonized peoples began to relocate to imperial countries. The manifest disinterest or reluctance of people of colour to participate in Morris

now may refer to its profound irrelevance to their own sociocultural values and/or to the obvious necessity of interrogating by their mere presence the whiteness of the practice (see bell hooks 19924 and b). That related English practices, such as those of the Bacup Coconut Dancers, are performed in blackface (see Buckland 1990) only underscores the colonial complicity of Morris, particularly for non-English, non-white audiences. The practice is often explained away as a representation of miners’ blackened visages, not of the faces of black people, yet the everyday black faces of miners and the play black faces of dancers potentially have radically different readings.** Note that the working-class reading — these are miners — equally problematizes the rural chronotope by

120 Ethnicity in the Mainstream contradicting the idea of such practices’ relation to agricultural and/or peasant life. But, in addition, it seems unlikely that audiences not familiar with such localized and historicized explanations of Morris tradition would see in blackface dances anything other than a representation by white people of black culture. They might historically contextualize such a representation in terms of entertainment forms such as vaudeville and/or view it in light of the overtly or covertly racist ideas associated with these practices. In any case, I have not seen any Canadian team perform a dance in black-face; it is too uncomfortable a reminder of difference for liberal sensibilities. The chronotope privileges communal activity, such as Morris itself, accomplished through the harmonious collective action of a

homogeneous, homosocial group of dancers and/or a musician or musicians. Where there is conflict between men, it is mitigated

by the symbolic activity within the dances; actual war and blood- | shed are thus unnecessary. Men’s behaviour, as expressed in Morris, is not simplistically macho but unself-conscious. The Morris man’s dance shows him as strong, energetic, and physically, as well as symbolically, potent. He is interested in cultivating the society of other men; women are non-essential. Morris also expresses a hierarchical society of male meritocracy. To be a good dancer means more than just ability to execute the steps. Morris values the dancer’s ability to convey his difference from the audience, to parade some esoteric knowledge, yet to recognize and interact with fellow Morris aristocrats without appearing snobbish. Evidently, the Morris chronotope does not reflect an actual historic period. It incorporates implied, understood, and/or assumed aspects of historic periods (such as the medieval celebration), but inconsistently. Morris expresses a kind of English utopia that submerges the problems I have identified with class, gender, and race exclusion; hence, I think, its ability to dominate the lives of those

who choose fully to participate in it. Hence, also, participants’ own ability to recreate and represent Morris in terms acceptable and necessary to them, despite the formulaic nod to tradition.

Morris I21 Periodically, the everyday intrudes into the chronotope, and vice versa. Tolerance for the carnivalesque — even the English

carnivalesque — outside strictly regulated boundaries is limited. I have seen Morris dancers “ignored” by passersby on the street who walked directly through a dancing set as if it were not there. At one Toronto Ale, dancers were ejected from the Eaton Centre;

at an Ottawa Ale, they were told, on the sidewalk and corner outdoor space at Place Laurier, that they would be tolerated this time but that next time they must get a permit. The expression of ethnicity must be regulated and controlled; it is appropriate to the set-apart, special time of the ethnic celebration festival but should not — even in carnivalesque form, even briefly — intrude into the domains of business, commerce, and government. These

domains must control the carnivalesque — such practices as Morris — in order to consolidate their power and maintain the hegemony of the serious. Few Morris dancers seem to understand their own behaviour

as disorderly or contestative; in fact, their arguments against being kicked out of shopping malls refer to their practice’s benign nature, as well as to their citizenship rights. There are numerous

examples of wild contestative forms appropriated for tame uses (see Buckland 1991) or of state attempts to assert control over,

and to regulate, traditional practice (see Story 1969). Extensive literature also suggests that the carnivalesque is used in social

protest (e.g., Davis 1971, 1973, 1978; Hobsbawm 1959; Lawrence 1987; Rude 1952). In some ways, carnival is in itself a social protest. An “English” carnivalesque tradition has a particularly great potential to be subversive because it explicitly links what should not be linked: the carnivalesque, ethnicity, and power. I do not suggest that Ukrainian dancers would be allowed

to dance without a permit on the city streets. However, they would probably know that they needed one; they know to restrict and regulate their own activities. The subversive quality of play in a working context is powerful. Thus though Morris is certainly characterized by internal power struggles and has exclusionary

aspects, it retains a contestative and subversive quality. It has potential to subvert hegemony, not just to reproduce it.

122 Ethnicity in the Mainstream RE-EVALUATING MORRIS MEANING Morris provides for its most committed participants a utopian society. It answers the search for integration and co-operation that contradict the fragmentation of postmodernity. Similarly, ethnicity gives those who so ascribe themselves an opportunity to be distinctive yet also to experience togetherness with a group. In Morris, the feeling of being apart from the audience yet at one with the rest of the participants is clearly marked in the (modern) unified, uniform physical movements, in each team’s common kit, and in events such as ales, which create a cohort and a feeling of sharing one’s distinctiveness — in practising Morris — with others.

Sometimes, however, the ideal is not met. In discussing group bonding, Janet said: “Maybe it’s just that we’re too busy. I always

feel that’s very much a part of Canadian life, that the Puritan work ethic seems to dominate everything. I find it just seems to overwhelm a lot of people, the work, and you don’t have time for that after work camaraderie” (Janet, 90-8). She has not danced with the team since the fall of 1990. Morris in North America has also been around long enough to be the subject of its own nostalgia. John Mayberry and Jamie Beaton, of the Toronto Morris Men, composed the following song to be sung at Morris gatherings: Good friends gather round and I’[l sadly relate The misfortunes that Morris has suffered of late. These gimmicks and dances in styles newly grown Have diminished a dance that once stood on its own. Oh, what has become of the simple half-rounds? The foot-up, the whole hey that old Cecil wrote down? For bells, sticks, and hankies and a pint of good beer Were once reckoned enough to bring pleasure and cheer. Oh, where are the dances we all used to know? When a team would do Trunkles to start off a show? Then the Rose, and crown it with Idbury Hill, Not the Ox Dance, Mr Softie, and Jamaica Farewell. (Chorus)

Morris 123 There’ll soon come a day when they’ll dance to the tune Of Jumping Jack Flash played on bones and bassoon, Six cowboys on tricycles roaring around, Numbers two, four, and six being whirled upside-down. (Chorus) But the worst of it all’s what they’ve done to the ales, Where the flash made-up show dance is the rule that prevails And the drinking and singing, carousing all night Give way to concern that the baby’s all right. (Chorus) So all you good people, come raise up your glass. Let us hope that these bold innovations will pass. Here’s health to the Morris, of all dances the best. Those who find it too hard can sink to Northwest. (Chorus)

This text parodies a nostalgic song about pubs by Ian Robb of the mixed, Ottawa-based Northwest team, Hog’s Back. While it may not reflect the personal views of its composers — and Jamie

Beaton differs strongly with my own reading of the text — its acceptance and popularity at Morris gatherings indicates that its views are by no means bizarre, and it certainly underlines many of my points about the symbolic construction of Morris. It discusses deviations from the Morris chronotope, such as the novelty dance “Mr Softee,” non-traditional paraphernalia, the bassoon player — whom I and probably many other Morris people would immediately identify as an African-Canadian man who belongs to one of the Toronto teams — and the newly created styles. There is also a clear commentary on the transformation of

Morris from those days within living memory, which for some listeners may have been a simple male-bonding experience, to one in which women are involved, and perhaps also on the concomitant social transformation in which babies are not solely a female

responsibility. I can read the final comment on Northwest as a possible oblique reference to the tendency for Northwest teams to be all-female,?”? and thus to be debased (“sinking”) from the “purity” of the chronotope. Jamie Beaton (personal communication 1993) says that the song was named “You Bastard” immediately after its first performance, “with the first two words Ian

124 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Robb spoke once it was finished (directed at myself),” perhaps because it parodies Ian’s own nostalgic song and perhaps because it refers to his own team’s style as “sinking” (implicitly from Cotswold).?°

Even this critical statement on aspects of Morris maintains its rhetorical call for adherence to the collective, though it does so by creating sub-groups — innovators, women, Northwest dancers, and so on — from which “we” distinguish ourselves. As long as Morris retains its discourse on power internally — different groups

within Morris culture dispute the territory — rather than externally — Morris groups dispute hegemony — it will remain perfor-

matively carnivalesque. I point out these problematic aspects of Morris in hope that its radical potential may be realized, as well as to mark my own complicity as a Morris dancer in avoiding or submerging such potential. As an ethnographer of a literate society, I have the pleasure of taking as my material not only actual practices and activities but also what has been written about them. Clearly, all the parties in the dialogues here — dancers, scholars, and ethnographer —

perceive Morris as having antiquity, continuity, and sequence (Lowenthal 1985); it is associated both with the past and with the values and norms of the present. Nostalgia is not the only force that impels dancers and scholars to uphold the authentic-

ity of Morris; participating in “tradition” is also an attempt to accrue the benefits of the past: familiarity, reaffirmation, vali-

dation, identity, guidance, enrichment, and alternatives to the present (ibid.). The significance of the enterprise — its potential as a critique of current society — makes it all the more important to

realize how interpretations of “dance,” “tradition,” “English,” and “male” inform everyday ideology in such a way as to limit, and thus to control, Morris meaning. Recent re-evaluations of custom in England suggest that rather

than being purely expressive, calendar events, harvest rituals, and their ilk helped to maintain what E.P. Thompson (1971) calls the moral economy. That is, they asserted and maintained fundamental rights and privileges of the working class vis-a-vis the bourgeois and upper classes (Bushaway 1982). “Revival” Morris, so long alternatively castigated and defended in terms of

Morris 125 its “authenticity,” may not be a simple expression of archaic culture but a natural development in the residual. That most schol-

ars and dancers see Morris as an English male dance tradition reflects the carnivalization of a power group’s ethnicity rather than what Morris actually is, or was. To say that Morris could mean something different from what most dancers and scholars think is not to suggest that they are dense or misguided. (I would reserve that judgment for those who explicitly try to “prove” the spurious assumption that Morris was a male tradition so they can “prove” the equally spurious assumption that only males should dance it now.) But much Morris scholarship has done the practice a disservice by effectively separating its carnivalesque from its power qualities.

I have argued that Morris is created and manipulated as an ideological, sometimes dialogical, cultural statement about tradi-

tion, gender, race/ethnicity, and dance — and ultimately about power and carnival. A significant component of its discourse is its association with English culture; another is its expression, like other ethnic traditions, of difference in the context of origin and cultural content. Though Morris and English immigrants’ narratives have additional functions and meanings, I have discussed

their carnivalesque qualities, their direct or indirect links with

English culture, and their implications for power. Stratford, Ontario, the subject of the next chapter, adds another case study to this examination, particularly telling because the communication of difference and the discourse of English culture are even more clearly created and symbolic, and the creators’ and audience’s motivations explicitly commercial as well as expressive. Some conflicts that were muted or obscured in English immigrants’ narratives and in Morris dance are consciously displayed; participants realize that power is a central issue.

CHAPTER FOUR

Selling Stratford as an English Place

“Shakespeare lives! at Stratford Ont.,” says a T-shirt I bought in the summer of 1990 at the Festival Bookshop, a tourist and gift store across from the Festival Theatre in that small Canadian city. While the motto alludes to the production of Shakespearean

plays at the Stratford Festival, the visual representation is of Shakespeare himself living iz Stratford. He — the exotic other from an English past — is depicted in the foreground, dressed appropriately to his century rather than to ours, lounging in a chair,

his beer, as well as a couple of manuscripts and an inkwell, on the lawn, as he writes on his lap with a quill pen. Shakespeare is clearly the text, the subject. The fenced yard where he sits has behind it a modern townhouse, and in the background casually dressed Stratfordites — in the local, banal present — frolic with a beach-ball beside a pool and tend a barbecue. In a perspective recalling medieval symbolism, as well as bespeaking his local significance, Shakespeare is at least twice the size of his neighbours. We can readily note the anachronism of a living Shakespeare in this modern context, but we should also see the representation’s construction of current culture. This juxtaposition of the Shake-

spearean anachronistic and the Stratfordite contemporary is not found only on T-shirts but is recalled and reworked in a variety of

expressive forms, from the talk of people in the community to the writing of local histories to the depictions on advertising brochures. And it is not a “mere” expression but is instead part of the ideological construction of Stratford as a tourist site. The city is a particularly telling location for a discussion of the creation of English culture in Ontario, because it cogently links

Stratford as an English Place 127 the power with the carnival aspects of Englishness. Stratford’s theatrical festival, often rhetorically invoked as “national” (see Groome 1987), receiving extensive corporate funding, and with ticket prices that place it out of the range of those below middle income, is entertainment combined with big business. Discourse about the Stratford Festival indicates that it is at once symbolically “good to think with” and a site for political/economic struggle between groups who consider they have a right to dictate its form and context. That is, as works on cultural politics suggest (most relevant in this area is Graham Holderness’s consideration [1988] of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, as a tourist site and cul-

tural construction), conflicting economic interests often couch their contests over hegemony in cultural and symbolic terms. Following the discussions in this work of English immigrants’ narratives and Morris participants’ disputes for cultural territory,

readers should not be surprised that such conflict occurs in Stratford, Ontario, as well. Nor should they be surprised that the disputed (“English”) territory often involves concepts of masculinity, difference from indigenous culture, and tradition.’ What sets this particular discussion apart from the others is my borrowing of the terminology of postmodernism — veneer and vignette particularly — to describe the processes used in this loca-

tion. I suggest here that two more or less distinctive - and more or less opposed — constructions of Stratford vie for the right to say what Stratford is and that the disputed territory is important not only for symbolic reasons but for economic ones as well. The ideas of long-term, mainly middle-class residents of the city — that Stratford culture is legitimately Canadian, female, indigenous, economic, and ethnographic — contrast with the Festival view — that Stratford culture is legitimately English, male, exogenous, aesthetic, and fine.* I argue that these oppositions are evident, though often submerged or obscured.

CONSTRUCTING THE FESTIVAL The establishment of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in 1953

was a local initiative. It stemmed from an interest in the arts on the part of residents such as founder and original cultural broker

128 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Tom Patterson, as well as from common concerns for diversifying the industrial and rural-centre economy of the city (then 19,000, currently 27,000 population). Selling élite Culture (with a capital

C) in the form of production of Shakespeare’s plays was the initial idea. But as Stratfordites came to depend more and more upon the tourist dollars brought in during the Festival season (May to November) — one Festival brochure estimates “the total

revenue for all goods and services generated within the community as a result of the Festival [at] $55,000,000 annually” (Stratford Story, c1990)3 — the identification and marketing of local culture (with a small c) became essential. Many businesses,

mainly locally owned, that struggle to get through the fall and winter, see indigenous culture as having the potential to lengthen tourist visits and the overall tourist season. Unlike tourist sites such as Cavendish, Prince Edward Island,

once the home of internationally celebrated Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (see Tye forthcoming), the businesses in Stratford are almost entirely locally owned. As resident Norma Taylor said: Most of the people that I’m in contact with on a daily basis that run the downtown shops and the malls and the people that would manage the chains in the malls, they’re all local people and live here. We don’t have this mass exodus of business people on a seasonal basis. The businesses that are here are here during the tourist season, but they’re also here during the shoulder and the off-season and have to depend on the local clientele, unlike what happens to a Grand Bend or a Wasaga Beach

[seasonal summer-holiday resorts on nearby Lake Huron]: summer comes and not only the visitors but the owners and the shopkeepers come in, and then when the first cold breeze blows off the lake, they shut it all down and board it up, and away they go. And that’s not the case here. (90-54)

Much ongoing tension between outsider (Festival workers and

tourists) and Stratfordite ideologies is grounded in their contrasting perceptions of Stratford. Many outsiders see the city as nothing more than a context for the Festival. This was particularly true of some of the large group of British theatre people

Stratford as an English Place 129 involved in the Festival in its earliest days. Founding director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, for example, was quite clear in his assessment: “A Festival should offer ... opportunities to absorb great works

of art in an appropriate atmosphere ... For this reason small, countrified towns, where life is comparatively calm, make the best Festival Cities” (Guthrie, Davies, and Macdonald 1953, 32). In contrast, people who live there and work in tourist-related

industries must maintain the essential textuality of Stratford. Sometimes the struggle for control has been overt, as when former director Robin Phillips established a policy of noninvolvement between the Festival and the city. “Phillips was the first [artistic director] to order the Festival people not to take part

in Stratford activities. When we had architectural battles, he ordered them off the front lines” (John Waters, 90-36).

Earlier there had been an attempt to move the Festival to Toronto: “In the sixties ... they were virtually ready to lift the Festival out of Stratford and put it in Toronto, so people wouldn’t have to drive so far to see it. And they would have killed it there. And this is when Stratford rose up in great anger — this is when Tom Patterson was virtually kicked out of his own festival, and

the general manager, who was a Stratford person, was just thrown out — and that’s when they insisted that the board had to have a certain percentage of Stratford people on it, whether they liked it or not. That’s the way it was going to be, and it saved the day. And so they get this man-on-the-street point of view in the Festival Board of Governors, whether they want to listen to it or not” (ibid.). But most often the struggle remains discursive and ideological; Stratfordites manipulate tourists’ and theatre people’s

notions of what their city is like and demand the autonomy to create their own definitions of it. Neither point of view is usually

expressed overtly; conflicts are most often constructed in discourses that foreground other issues. Further, there is conflict within Stratford culture itself between those who support the idea of the city as a touristic location and those who see its primary value in being a small manufacturing

town making parts for the automotive industry and an agricultural service centre. For example, as a former resident com-

mented, “Mind you, as the mayor pointed out, that dreadful

130 Ethnicity in the Mainstream [name], you know, ‘You keep saying we should give more money to the Festival, but oh, let’s put it this way. They make a million dollars for us every year, right? The factories make three million’ ... Lhey’ve still got around their neck like an albatross a redneck

kind of alderman or mayor that always screws things up” (John Robertson, 90-44).

A resident who did not support the idea of a festival was quoted as asking, “Why would we want ten thousand people tramping around on our grass? This park was built for the people

of Stratford” (ibid.). The notion that the city and its amenities should be reserved for residents is less pervasive currently; the greater part of anti-tourist sentiment is based upon xenophobia or simple dislike, combined with a concern for excessive traffic in the centre of town during the summer. Festival- and touristconcerned Stratfordites perceive their neighbours as non-supporters, rather than as opponents. Neither has much to do with the other, and their spheres of influence rarely bring them into direct conflict. Effectively, this means that working-class voices — of women and men alike — are absent from this discussion.* While there is great potential for contention over land use — the tourist

industries would discourage the growth of both subdivisions and manufacturing areas as contrary to a commodity appropriate for the touristic gaze (see Urry 1990) — the current period of economic recession precludes this possibility. The anti-development attitude is not entirely an economically related issue though. Mayor [name] tried to get a freeway that came whizzing over from New Hamburg through thirty-eight farms in order to get our manufactures out faster and get the tourists here faster. He ruined the Embro road — cut down all the trees and got it widened — and then he was going to do that, but we stopped him. There was a meeting in the Shakespeare Sprucedale School, in which I spoke and various other people spoke. Five hundred people showed up and the government backed down ...

It used to be that everyone in Stratford said, “Johnny, you can’t stop progress,” as I screamed about the various things that were happening, and that completely stopped. I’ve noticed that they want to stop it; they don’t want just another mindless mess. (John Robertson, 90-45)

Stratford as an English Place ] 131 Stratfordites do not speak with a common voice. In addition to varying attitudes toward development, there are class variations. “Personally, I was your average kid that grew up ina

blue-collar family on what was then called ‘the other side of the tracks.’ Stratford was territorialized, as you either lived on ‘the other side of the tracks’ or ‘over the river’” (Norma Taylor,

90-55). Many discourses result, with different interests and perspectives on how Stratford was, is, and should be constructed, and each individual exercises symbolic rights with some degree

of alacrity and awareness. Most of the material I discuss here comes from those who are directly or indirectly involved with the Festival, particularly as it affects their livelihood. Their Stratford — the one they sell to tourists — I will argue, is a pretty

selective one. Whatever Stratford may be, it does not easily fit the academic models of tourism; it presents a combination of historic, ethnic, and environmental-recreational forms (see Graburn 1989). Its advertised attractions centre on the Festival but include the river and parks, shopping, restaurants, and a kind of small-town living experience epitomized by bed-and-breakfast accomodation. SHAKESPEAREAN STRATFORD Stratford typifies the “de-centred condition of postmodernity in general” (Dorst 1989, 3). There is no compelling intrinsic reason

why it, more than any other small Ontario city, should have become a tourist site focusing on a Shakespearean festival. An informational brochure implies as much, calling Stratford “a community which, save for its vision and perseverance, might well have remained simply another small town in Ontario” (Stratford Story, c1990). One former resident commented, “I’m

sure Stratford had the same culture that Goderich or London or Kitchener-Waterloo had” (Hugh McCaul, 90-38). Nearby resident Stafford Johnston, who wrote for the Stratford Beacon Herald, told me: The argument for having a Shakespearean festival at Stratford, Ontario, simply because it happened to have the same name as several towns in

132 Ethnicity in the Mainstream England named Stratford — and there are many Stratfords in England — was about as sensible as trying to recreate the Abbey Theatre in Dublin,

Ontario, and I remember writing a paragraph or a short editorial to that effect, sometime in the great debate of the early 1950s ... There was no other justification. Stratford was known as being a railway centre.

It had been known, many years ago, for its brass band. It had been known at one time for its hockey team. But never, to my knowledge, had it had any fame beyond its own city limits as a theatre centre. The accident of the name was the only thing. (90-46)

To make his rhetorical point, Johnston deliberately ignores the fact that it was not Stratford’s sharing a name with any Stratford but its sharing a name with Shakespeare’s birthplace that motivated the organizers. Nor, according to most accounts, was the naming accident or happenstance; Stratford was named after that Stratford, not any other. Yet Johnston’s suggestion con-

firms that the established connection approaches what Dean MacCannell calls “spurious structure”: “information, memories, images, and other representations which become detached from genuine cultural elements” (1976, 147; see also 145-60). At the

time, though, the connection was seen as an appropriate one. “TOne resident’s] job and livelihood was milk delivery, and so when the idea of a Festival came, he didn’t know what to make of this. He thought it was pretty good, so he took a poll of the people he delivered the milk to. And they put two and two together — Shakespeare and the park and theatre. All made sense,

as long as it’s not our money. So that they were basically in favour of it right from day one as long as it didn’t use tax money” (John Waters, 90-36).

Now local historical materials trace the development of the Festival so that it appears an inevitable, Durkheimian mechanical

outgrowth, not the product of serendipity and chance. A local hero is nevertheless pivotal. The rescuer of Stratford from oblivion or anonymity was the cultural broker Tom Patterson; before the Festival, he wrote, “Stratford, Ontario, was synonymous with hockey” (1987, 15). Calling the Festival “Tom Patterson’s Dream,” theatre critic Herbert Whittaker commented, “That

Stratford as an English Place 133 dream had taken its shape during a boyhood spent in the small

Ontario town, surrounded by names conjuring up the great Elizabethan dramatist” (1958, ix).

The discourse and images of Shakespeare in Stratford are used to construct authenticity based on the fact that most predate the Festival. The city was renamed in the nineteenth century.

“In its early years, both the river and the fledgling settlement were called Little Thames. No one knows just when the name of the settlement was changed to Stratford and the river became the Avon, but it is thought the modern names were in common use by 1840” (Morrison 1982a). Later the community adopted a practice of designating its schools and streets after fictional and historical Shakespearean characters: thus Hamlet, Falstaff, Romeo, Juliet, Shakespeare, and Anne Hathaway schools (Patterson 1987, 51) and Romeo and Juliet streets. Of course, some naming has come after the Festival, such as the Birnham Wood Arboretum on the north bank of the Avon River. Naming is central in the local construction of the Shakespearean

sign in Stratford, and the employment of naming as a way to establish a connection is not questioned or deconstructed. It is presented not only as enduring but also as pervasive and motivating.

The establishment of Shakespearean naming as Stratford’s theatrical link suggests the postmodern concept of “veneer”: “those sorts of surfaces, literal or metaphorical, that do not just hide some underlying substance, but that completely dissolve or dematerialise that substance. This is not to say, of course, that the substance is physically demolished. Rather it becomes framed as an image in an endless chain of automatic reproduction, so that it ceases to make sense to distinguish between substance and simulacrum, original and copy, depth and surface ... the lamination onto one substance of the image or simulacrum or idea of itself”

(Dorst 1989, 110). Thus Tom Patterson commented, “It just seemed an absolute natural; the city by the name of Stratford, on

the river by the name of Avon, with the lovely park system. What’s more natural than a Shakespearean Festival?” (Shaw 1977, 45). In repeatedly invoking the “natural” connection, he obfuscates — even denies — its created quality.

134 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Naming is extended to physical/natural representation: “Today, every flower mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare — monkshood to sneeze worse, bee balm to bachelor’s button — blooms in Orr’s

formal English garden” (Patterson 1987, 18). In 1949 the Parks Board commissioned a bust of Shakespeare by Cleeve Horne, supported by donations from the Sons of England Benefit Society (Leitch 1980, 146). Finally, perhaps inevitably, there comes comparison, and asserted resemblance, to Stratford’s namesake in England. One former resident commented, “The stone bridge, that’s very important in people’s minds. That’s an imitation [of the] stone bridge of Stratford-on-Avon. It’s just got two arches though, whereas the one in England has six” (James Reaney, 90-44). One resident, an immigrant from London, England, told me that she preferred this Stratford to the original (fieldnotes, 19 June 1988). A tourist with whom I spoke suggested that the best way Stratford could extend its Shakespearean connection was to contend that Shakespeare was buried there (fieldnotes, 5 August 1990). It is telling, then, that an article appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, the daily newspaper in the largest nearby city, asserting, in reference to the hamlet of Shakespeare just down the road from Stratford, “Shakespeare is buried here” (Roe 1991). The story goes on to describe how a foundling baby, left outside the hotel in Shakespeare in 1868, received good care from the local people — “Most women in Shakespeare helped care for the infant

and took turns donating milk” (ibid.) — but died shortly afterward. One local resident “donated a section of his family plot in

the local cemetery and villagers took up a collection for the simple headstone. Then they realized the child had no name. ‘Some of the local men gathered to decide on a name’ ... They chose Charles for the hotel owner and Shakespeare for the recently named village” (ibid.).

The Record report maintains that there are two stories about Charles Shakespeare and Shakespeare. “More than a few people ... conclude the village was named after the Charles Shakespeare

buried in South Easthope Cemetery. Yet it was the other way around, and a foundling infant named for the community that showed him the only love he ever knew ... In fact, the commu-

Stratford as an English Place 135 nity of Bell’s Corners was renamed Shakespeare in 1849 by people who, aware Stratford and the Avon River were nearby, wanted to push the connection with the great writer” (ibid.). Clearly, either version works semantically; Shakespeare is buried there.

Yet Stratfordites have worked hard to ensure, in effect, that their city remain selectively, rather than representationally, postmodern. They have resisted the elaboration of veneer advocated in a tourism marketing study by Parson Associates commissioned by Stratford City Council in 1987. The report focused extensively on image and representation, as in the comment “The Swan, as a symbol of the Festival, of the beautiful setting of the community, and of the Victorian romance of England, is widely recognized” (Parson 1987, 39). Several people involved in service industries commented that Stratfordites had been less than enthusiastic about suggestions in the Parson report that the city develop “ ‘British style’ activities, ranging from English madrigals to jousting, soccer ... musical boat trips up the Avon ... a Maypole dance festival” (ibid., 29), and so on. Similarly, the report advocated, “The image of Christmas and the charm of old world Christmas traditions are

themes that can readily be developed. The downtown core can be transformed into a traditional Christmas village ... coordinating the selection of decorations and festive touches ... and mounting ... all the trimmings. Restaurants could serve everything from eggnog

to cider and mulled wine and sales staff could don appropriate period costumes ... The transformation of the parklands along the

Avon River into a winter wonderland would be the crowning glory of A ‘Festive’ Stratford Christmas ... Trees along the river could be lighted ... and would create a lovely evening setting for cross country skiing, as well as for sleigh rides that could be orga-

nized and even, depending on ice conditions, skating parties on the river” (ibid., 28). The emphasis on an English culture was one of the central points of the Parson report. The past-time chronotopic (Bakhtin 1981) associations linking the “Victorian,” the “English,” the “old world,” the “British,” and so on — most often those aspects associated with the bourgeoisie and upper classes — are advocated.

Stratford “cannot come to look like every other City on the con-

136 Ethnicity in the Mainstream tinent if it hopes to continue to attract major tourist dollars. Clearly, a City that characterizes the warmth of old world charm, replete with Victorian and British overtones, certainly has something different to offer in the Modern North American market. From our point of view, Stratford’s Victorian Facade must be preserved, encouraged and emphasized, simply because it is highly marketable. Along with the Festival and the parks, it is a vital component of the Stratford ‘product’” (Parson 1987,

II). The report focuses on the maintenance of the surface but not of the function — an English or British veneer. It advocates the continuation and/or extension of special events. Some “exam-

ples” include “Shakespeare’s Birthday: fits in perfectly with the Shakespearean theme of this City and reinforces the British connections we feel should be emphasized wherever possible ...

Scottish Country Dancing Pageant: carries through on both the ‘British’ and ‘Festive’ themes that we feel are of major importance

in providing a ‘different’ cultural experience and setting” (ibid., 16-18).

Most Stratfordites do not object to periodic expressions of English culture, particularly when they are spontaneous or performed by outsiders. When a group of Morris dancers makes a stop at Stratford part of their annual ale, for example, there is a euphonious linking of symbolic meanings. But as one resident suggested, “We don’t have King Henry’s Mini-Golf in the middle

or downtown, or Hamlet’s Hot Dogs” (Norma Taylor, 90-54). Though most Stratfordites resist the idea that their city looks or is

trying to look British, tourists so perceive it, and this is hardly surprising. Many business proprietors have established a kind of

ur-English culture, through naming (Scarborough Fair, The Elizabethan Restaurant, Windermere Guest House, Stratford Knights, Watson’s Chelsea Bazaar, The Pickwick Restaurant, Stratford’s Olde English Parlour, Hamlet Greenhouses, the Penny Farthing, Frocks) or through iconography (lions, Unions Jacks). There is even a double-decker bus tour. The Shakespearean Gift

Shop provides a handy inventory of the English/Shakepeare semantic links:

Stratford as an English Place 137 In our store you will find: Shakespeare Books: Complete Works, Outlines of Plays, Drama, Comedy and History, Poetry, Books on Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Birds, Flowers, and Gardens ... Books on Acting ... Books on Writing ... Books on Theatre ... Contemporary Authors ... Books on Current Plays ... History Books: Kings and Queens

of England, Royalty, Old England and Medieval Times ... Children’s Books ... T-Shirts: Regular and onesize, with quotations from plays e.g. “The first thing we’ll do let’s kill all the lawyers,” Shirts with Tragedy/Comedy and Festival Theatre Prints ... Souvenirs: Stratford Mugs, Glasses, Bookmarks, Plates, Spoonrests, Emblems, Pins, Spoons, Bells, Canada Pins, Flags, etc. Shakespeare: Playing Cards, Fine Ceramic

Shakespeare Character Toby Mugs, Busts, Posters on Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I, Chart of England’s Kings and Queens, Historic

Wall Plaques, Swords, Brass Rubbing Prints, Jig-Saw Puzzles. Pub Paraphernalia: Pub Towels, Pub Signs, Bar Mats and Coasters. Cards ... Gifts: Unicorns, Swans, Jesters, Sterling Silver Tragedy/Comedy Necklaces, Brooches and Earrings, Pewter Jewellery and Picture Frames,

Ceramic Unicorns, Wall Masks, Melamine Placemats and Coasters, Spoon Racks, Brass and Ceramic Figurines and Bells, plus many other gift items.

The connections with British culture, however, remain ve- , neered. The original settlers were predominantly Irish, and as in

the surrounding area, the population is now largely German. Scarborough Fair is run by a local woman of German origin, who chose to underline thematically the English connection in naming

her store, and the Elizabethan Restaurant is run by a Japanese couple, among the very few non-white residents of the city. Even founder Tom Patterson mentioned that he had been presented as an English immigrant, which he was not — his ancestors on both sides were mainly Scottish emigrants who came in the first half of the nineteenth century (1987, 20-2). And the English culture being evoked in Stratford is highly class-conscious, as is evident in

the brochures for Birmingham Manor, “a bed and breakfast in the finest of English tradition ... Surrounded by stately trees and rich in local history, Birmingham Manor is a charming turn-ofthe-century home ... Constructed as his personal residence by

138 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Colonel John L. Youngs, a master carpenter, contractor and one-

time Mayor of Stratford, the home boasts of well proportioned principal rooms enhanced by quarter-cut oak woodwork with fine detailing in the fireplaces, a grand entry hall and a magnificent staircase with a Juliet balcony.” Stratfordites involved in creating the Festival and many of their present-day successors have continued to emphasize aspects of

Stratford valued by outsiders. These include the male (few, if any, plays by women have been produced there), the English (even the Canadian actors are notorious for attempting English accents), and the external (James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark was the first Canadian play to be produced at Stratford [in 1967],

and Canadian plays are still scarce there).’ These efforts were undoubtedly part of an attempt to valorize and appropriate the Stratford Festival as a worthy Cultural form. But Stratfordites did not respond exclusively by trying to control a positive image of its culture in others’ terms. Much of the city’s self-ethnography

has to do with recognizing and valuing its local qualities (see Bouquet and Winter 1987). RURAL STRATFORD Founding director Tyrone Guthrie presented Stratford’s culture as an absence, not a presence, of English culture. For example, he maintained that Tom Patterson “compared [London classical theatre and Italian opera] to the musical and dramatic expressions in his home town, and in his opinion, the comparison was not favourable to Stratford” (Guthrie, Davies and Macdonald 1953, 4). Patterson’s motivation is constructed in a non-complex way, emphasizing the lack of Culture in Stratford, a lack which was “liquidated” ® with the Festival. If Guthrie is right, of course, Stratford’s position is precarious;

the Festival could go elsewhere. So local people must, and do, debunk such ideas. Resident John Waters commented that “a stu-

dent of James Reaney’s came to the conclusion that there was more Shakespeare performed here, in this town, per capita, than anywhere else in Canada up till 1950” (90-35). As Reaney himself described this work, the student, Mary McIntyre “found out

Stratford as an English Place 139 the Normal School put on the first presentation of a Shakespeare

play in 1919 in the park behind the post office ... And there were regular presentations in the park of Shakespeare plays — by the Normal School usually - or in the town hall” (go-44). Another resident commented: “To characterize [Stratford] as totally rube-like before 1953 and then somehow becoming just so sophisticated would be a little bit of a comic-strip version of what really took place. I think there were always elements of élitism in the Stratford Collegiate and other things ... genuinely good places to be educated and to get a sense of a larger life” (Steve Jones, 90-42). Yet the local downtown merchants’ Festival City Days, which runs at the end of May — during previews, but not the regular Festival season — contains nothing in its schedule to suggest an English or Shakespearean connection. It appears similar to any other rural Ontario community festival, with fireworks, a carnival, church barbecue, dances, a parade, tug-of-war competitions, horseshoe, “slo-pitch,” and darts tournaments, concerts, a modelboat regatta, gymnastics and kick-karate demonstrations, a soapbox derby, children’s entertainment, and a pet show. The closest thing to a British-style event is a reference to “Festival City Days Pub.” However, there is considerable support for the Festival from merchants who seem minimally connected to it, if the adver-

tisements of congratulations in the Beacon Herald Festival Edition are any indication. They include grocery stores, automobile dealerships, carpet stores, travel agencies, industrial-supply companies, insurance companies, trust companies, plumbing and electrical companies, banks, and department stores. Guthrie and the English outsiders who first came to Stratford are not the only ones to see the city as merely the context for the Festival, as opposed to part of the total text. Later participants

and tourists also maintain this image. Stratford discourse that links the city with Shakespearean theatre often downplays local culture, but it is often, nevertheless, evident. Outsiders have tended to see Stratford only as the context for the Festival, rather

than as part of the total text. Even when Stratford is metonymically represented in non-local texts, it may not be identified.

A history of the Festival names actors and directors but not

140 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Stratfordites, as in a picture that includes a woman from the community captioned, “Jean Gascon and a member of the staff of ‘The Green Room,’ the Actor’s Lounge” (Shaw 1977, 124). The contextual community representative is female, and as feminist anthropologists have observed, “many axes of gender distinctions are not in fact unique to the domain of gender, but are shared with (both derived from and exported to) other important domains of social life” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981, 9).

Constructing culture in this way links a multitude of ideas: invisibility, powerlessness, and so on. “Gender conceptions in any society are to be understood as functioning aspects of a cultural system through which actors manipulate, interpret, legitimize, and reproduce the patterns of co-operation and con-

flict that order their social world. In other words, we view gender conceptions not as simply reflections of biological or social reality but as aspects of wider conceptual systems that arise

from, and contribute to, social action” (Collier and Rosaldo 1981, 311). Some of the clearest statements of these notions come from Tyrone Guthrie. He describes what he anticipated when he was invited in 1952 to give advice on starting a Shakespearean festival in the city. I expected that this [organizing committee] would consist mainly of artistic and excitable elderly ladies of both sexes, with a sprinkling of Business Men to restrain the Artistic People from spending money. There would also be an Anxious Nonentity from the Town Hall briefed

to see that no municipal funds were promised, but also to see that, if any success were achieved, the municipality would get plenty of credit.

The point about this sort of committee is that the artistic ones have extremely definite views, but so conflicting that it is easy for a tiny minority of Business Men to divide and conquer ...

My first surprise at Stratford, therefore, was to find that most members of the Committee were quite young. I was almost the oldest person present. The second surprise was to find that the males outnumbered females by about five to one. The women spoke seldom, but when they did so their remarks were usually briefer and more practical than those of the men. (Guthrie, Davies, and Macdonald 1953, 4-5)

Stratford as an English Place I4I Few people, I suspect, would now publicly in speech or in writing express themselves in such misogynist and homophobic terms,

yet clearly Guthrie sets up a contrast between Culture and culture in male and female terms. “In connection with Stratford, there are just two things I dread. First, that the Festival may be abused by profiteers. Even last year there was a tendency for bed and breakfast to cost substantially more at the end of the Festival than at its start. Second, a refinement of the same thing, that there will be an outbreak of Ye Olde. I heard a rumour that two ladies

had bought land and proposed to erect an imitation of Anne Hathaway’s cottage in which they would brew Daintye Teas” (ibid., 33). Guthrie describes the potential economic benefits to Stratford in negative terms and associates them with women’s activities. Similarly, in a re-enactment of Guthrie’s first encounter with the Festival committee in the film The Stratford Adventure (1954), made by the (Canadian) National Film Board, the director stern-

ly warns the townspeople that Shakespeare should be avoided if they’re out to make money; if that’s what they’re after, they should hire dancing girls and call the show “Voila les girls” or “Bottoms up.” For Guthrie, anyway, the feminine is economic, local, and negative; aesthetics are male, English, and positive. This is a telling inversion of contemporary economic discourse, which dissociates women’s work from the economic sphere (critiqued by Waring 1988). But several attempts to construct an appropriate past for Stratford have, in contrast to Guthrie’s ideas, drawn upon significant

female contributions. I place them in the area of postmodern “vignette,” primarily because of their play between ongoing everyday life in Stratford and commoditized representation. John Dorst describes vignette as engaging “the hierarchy of represen-

tation contained entirely within the two dimensions of the surface, the hierarchy of image and medium. Vignettes problematize this relationship, set it in motion so to speak, by demonstrating simultaneously the materiality of the image as it merges with the

material surface, and the signifying properties of that surface, which can be perceived as gradually drawing itself up to become the inscribed image ... the vignette foregrounds [its own] materi-

142 Ethnicity in the Mainstream ality and locks one into the hermetic, self-sustaining play of its levels” (1989, 119). Vignettes in the area of “history” include stories of Rose McQueen, a teacher who inculcated young Stratfordites — including Tom Patterson — with a love of great literature before the Festival began. “Rose McQueen ... was a famous high school English teacher, and she would have been in the long tradition of genuine Stratfordites who represented a kind of élite or literary culture of some kind that had nothing to do with pro-

moting Shakespeare but was distinct from what working-class people might have found to be really exciting and stimulating” (Steve Jones, 90-42). Noting the contributions of women such as Rose McQueen valorizes the female and empowers it, at the same time associating it with the aesthetic and fine; the oppositions are mixed and mediated. Similarly, in the area of rehabilitating outsiders’ notions, we find stories of local church women making food for theatre-goers before the new restaurants attracted by the Festival opened. “And then the Knox Church ladies just simply opened up and fed them,

all the visitors, because there weren’t any restaurants around” (John Waters, 90-35). Or, there are the accounts of “people” opening their homes — which meant, of course, women performing domestic labour — to the tourists who came in. Of course the people opened up their houses. [I have seen a diary in the Stratford City Archives] ... but here is this man describing how they’re

running around town to see who can see the most American licence plates. And I did the same thing when I came back home that summer. They were amazed at finding thirty-five different licence plates from the

States. And there were all these people coming here, so they decided, well, they’d better fix up their bathrooms and take some of them in. So there were plumbers ... getting the bathrooms in Stratford all fixed up and getting extra bedrooms put in place. And then they had this whole art of how to deal with visitors, who casually come in whenever they want to, not when they said they would, and want to sit up and talk half the night, and they’re too tired to go to work the next day, and they

had to learn how to deal with these people. And that’s all in these diaries. It’s wonderful and it’s the spirit of the time, just what I remembered. (John Waters, 90~3 5)

Stratford as an English Place 143 For many visitors, this indigenous experience has become an essential part of coming to Stratford: they stay at a bed and breakfast, rather than a hotel or motel, by choice; it is part of the text of a Stratford Festival visit. The outsiders now becoming involved in the tourist industry continue to reproduce the association of women’s domestic labour with Stratford’s hospitality, as John Waters suggests. “Every year there are escapees from Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto who settle here for the ‘rest of their lives’ and having left places with high real estate, are buying up the old residences which the dullest of local

landlords have long since chopped up for apartments. They restore them as single residences again which many operate as B and Bs. They are usually women” (personal communication,

, 1993). Even the semantic movement involved in referring to visitors not as “tourists” but as “festival guests” (Hugh McCaul, 90-38) echoes the feminization and control of the economic in

Stratford. It suggests that the transactions which take place between Stratfordites and tourists pertain more to gifts and informal, friendly visiting than to exchange value and even to use value.

The main aspect of feminized, indigenous tourism in Stratford is the kind of vignette evident in the recommendation of the Parson report that Stratford link up with the Ontario Farm Vacation Association, “a selected group of farms throughout Ontario [which] have opened their doors to visitors from around the world. These farms offer urban families wonderful opportunities to experience a different lifestyle and explore the background of the foods we eat in a friendly, participatory setting ... Early spring preparations on the farm and late fall harvesting experiences for the unaccustomed visitor can provide the unique and educational vacation families are searching for” (1987, 32-3). While the local rejection of the report’s recommendation that Shakespearean veneer be encouraged is practically ubiquitous, this suggestion is quite consistent with Stratfordites’ concepts of their own tourist potential. Thus many bed-and-breakfast guesthouses that advertise in the Stratford Tourism Kiosk, such as Glenalby Farms, offer:

144 Ethnicity in the Mainstream “Down on the Farm” Hospitality. Stay on our fifth generation Dairy Farm ... You will find us nestled in the hills down a quiet country road, on the edge of the woods ... Our fifteen room home built in 1861 ... is at

the top of our tree lined country lane. You’ll awaken to the songs of birds, and the aroma of homemade bread drifts on the fresh morning air. Watch the sunrise, hike the woodland trails with a Collie guide. Pick

some wild berries. Spot a deer, drink at the spring. See a calf born or just relax amid the English style flower gardens. Watch the sunset behind the hills and on cool evenings sip a glass of apple cider around the fieldstone fireplace ... In the morning you will pull up to our large farm kitchen table ... No doubt you will be tempted to stay for a meal. The fare, all you can eat, is served farm style and produced right here on

the farm ... We have handmade quilts and homemade jams and jellies for sale.

Other bed-and-breakfast establishments emphasize in their names the rural ambiance they sell: The Maples, Three Gables, Woods Villa, Shady Nook, Summer’s Contentment, Avonview, Shady Maple, Cedar Springs, and Blue Shutter.

Stratford’s élite tourist Culture is established and invented according to naming links between the city and Shakespeare’s birthplace, life, and works. But its indigenous tourist culture is equally created, particularly in its silence about much of the economy not based upon the Festival; it selectively presents the place as the centre of a rural area but not as a small manufacturing city. What is downplayed or ignored in this construction — Stratford’s industrial present — is not necessarily more real or basic than other aspects of its culture; however, focusing on its rural heritage masks the complexity of reality. Though Stratford

is one of the more thoroughly industrialized small cities in Ontario, with a large working-class component in its population,

its presentation to tourists is as a small country town, a rural, pastoral, and bucolic location; both Festival and industry are downplayed. As one resident said, “We still have that small town

feel” (Norma Taylor, 90-54). And an article in the sesquicentennial edition of the Stratford Beacon Herald suggests, “The major ingredient in Stratford’s prominence as a tourist attraction

Stratford as an English Place T45 is, of course, the Festival. But the contribution of the Avon River

and its parks is incalculable and, indeed, they have become almost as famous as the Festival itself. They provided the perfect setting for such a cultural venture and it seems reasonable to sug-

gest that, had the Festival originated in some grimy industrial town, it would not have enjoyed such longstanding success” (Morrison 19824). In fact, the Festival did originate in an industrial town, which was probably, in at least some locations, grimy. But in order to be an appropriate tourist site, Stratford has been constructed as a non-industrial location, despite the plethora of factories making automotive parts which line the main access road to the city from Highway 401 and Toronto. Stratford’s pastoral aspect is emphasized for good economic reasons; it is a better way of attracting

tourists than focusing on manufacturing. The notion of a contemporary industrial tourist site seems oxymoronic. An industrial heritage is quite different in terms of (historical) tourism than an industrial present: “The appearance of a mythology of work consigns it to a remote and formative period and marks the end of the industrial age” (MacCannell 1976, 57). So Stratford’s industrial background is not completely absent. One of the first stories I heard about the coming of the Festival was that it “replaced” the Canadian National Railway (cnr) yards, which were closing just at the time the Festival was started. This image successfully constructs industry as heritage; as past, not present. In fact, the theatre served primarily to diversify Stratford’s economy; the city never relied solely upon one industry. But industrial heritage is downplayed in most tourist literature, perhaps because it uncomfortably echoes the city’s economic present. Those brochures that deviate from the pattern have the hallmarks of local composition and interest. Though ostensibly

directed to outsider tourists, they contain information that requires extensive local knowledge to be understood. The historical actors identified are unfamiliar, the facts are problematically terse, and the connotations obscure. These examples from A Short Walk through Early Stratford (c1990) are quoted in their entirety:

146 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Millstone This marks the site of the first sawmill (1833) and the first grist mill (1834) beside it, built by John Sebring for the Canada Company, at the south end of a new dam. A huge waterwheel supplied the power.

The Dam This was first constructed of logs to create the Mill Pond for water power, and has been rebuilt many times since. A private group, The Dam Syndicate, once owned the dam and the pond (renamed Victoria Lake). The Avon River flows into the Thames River downstream several miles.

Stone Bridge For its construction in 1885, the mayor, a Scot, chose stone. It was designed by Alex Hepburn, a Scot, and built by A. Corrie. The three of them had one continuous row during the erection. The architect (called inspector) won most of the chewing matches. Close by the Nw end stood the first permanent stone from earliest days.

The “Stratford Architecture” walking-tour brochure produced by the Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (LACAC) is rather differently selective. It represents Stratford’s cul-

ture as linking implicitly, yet distinctively, with Shakespearean Culture through a discrete group of class and occupational sites. Highlighting buildings that are public (such as the Court House and the City Hall) or service-commercial (such as the Queen’s Hotel and Market Place), it ignores the industrial and domestic architecture and, more tellingly, examples belonging to an inappropriate period (such as Prout and Lamont’s store sign from the 1950s) or clearly still in active use (such as Budd’s Feed and Seed). This view of Stratford’s heritage underlines the idea that it provides a kind of backdrop for the modern shops on the main street — one section of the Lacac brochure is devoted to stores in the city that open for Sunday shopping — rather than an essential component of contemporary life. Veneer predominates. The economic construction of Stratford involves more than just an obfuscation of its industrial base. The brochures available at the central tourist booth imply that many retail stores choosing to locate in Stratford are selective about the kinds of materials they sell. There is considerable emphasis upon the handmade —

Stratford as an English Place 147 “hand-crocheted tablecloths” (specifically listed in a twentytwo-word description), quilts, “Eskimo Carvings,” silk and dried flower arrangements, “locally made crafts,” “handknotted Oriental rugs,” “fine pieces of jewellery, all made by hand,” or in one of the most complete examples: “Studio Pottery Made in full view on the premises. Individually thrown or handbuilt porcelain and raku. Many one of a kind pieces ... Handweaving ... Silk Original designs handpainted on 100% silk scarves ... Jewellery Hand crafted drop earrings.” John Waters suggests that

this association with significant aspects of culture predates the Festival. “The people who worked in the shops ... were creative people ... We’ve had an extremely active horticultural society here

since 1878. These people didn’t just go home and watch the TV of the day. They got out in their gardens and they put on pantomimes and their social life was very, very different from anything in the counties, townships around here ... Every church had a choir. The music was marvellous in this town ... The culture was here. It was home-grown culture; it was done in their own way, but it was here, and it was rich” (90-36). Stratford is clearly interested in constructing an appropriate present, as well as an appropriate past. “Well, just in the past year with our city council, for example, there’s been a by-law against street vending. And we’ve had a young fellow who wanted to run a hot dog stand and received a lot of press here‘in Stratford ... [He] went to council and fought his case and won the right on a trial basis for a season to have his hot dog stand ... It’s control in the positive sense that we don’t want to become another — well, for want of a better word, we don’t want it to become tacky in any sense” (Norma Taylor, 90-54). This construction does not only involve working with a definition of Stratford that controls touristic productive activity; it also means controlling those aspects of its economic life that more clearly recall the urban, than the rural, experience, such as video arcades. “This particular building that we’re in was an arcade with the video games and that, that, and the other, and became

quite a hangout, and in quite a state of disrepair and a lot of problems — you know, scuffles in the street and all this type of thing. The city bought this building and hence the then-tenants

148 Ethnicity in the Mainstream vacated and were going to set up elsewhere, and they’re looking at, right now, in council, dealing with arcades. You know, not

anybody saying that an arcade isn’t perfectly fine, [but] when it deteriorated to the type of establishment that was here, it was a definite problem” (ibid.). The arcade was replaced by the Chamber of Commerce, in a rebuilt facade. “The front of this building is a prime example of returning the facade to something that fits in with the architecture. There’s been a lot of concern to that end, and again, it’s been a good end, because it lends to the quaintness and the unification of our core area” (ibid.). While this appears to be veneer in Dorst’s sense, it also has the qualities of vignette, in being a selective chosen portion of “reality” presented in a context that slants its original meaning. LINKS

Stratford is not all postmodern simulacrum. Stratford-born, nationally reputed poet-artist-playwright James Reaney’s poem

“Shakespearean Gardens” in his “Twelve Letters to a Small Town” compellingly asserts the existence of non-veneered, non-

vignetted cultural analogues to Shakespeare connected with Stratford in the form of “local” associations for play names, characters, activities, and versions of Shakespearean plots.

The Tempest The violet lightning of a March thunderstorm glaring the patches of ice still stuck to the streets ...

Romeo @& Juliet Romeo & Juliet Streets ...

Julius Caesar Antony wore a wrist watch in the Normal

: School production although he never looked at it during the oration ...

Macbeth Principal Burdoch’s often expressed opinion was that a great many people would kill a great many other people if they knew for certain they could get away with it.

Hamlet A girl at the bakery took out a boat on the river, tied candlesticks to her wrists and drowned herself ...

Stratford as an English Place 149 The Merchant of Venice When my cousin worked for the Silversteins she had her own private roll of baloney kept

aside in the refrigerator for her ... (Reaney 1976)

In this representation, Shakespearean images and characters are not remote and touristic but pervasive and essential. Ironically, local writer Reaney is less familiar and celebrated in Stratford than Shakespeare. But he is not alone in employing the strategy of maintaining a popular, common link between the “real” Stratford and Shakespearean Culture. Tom Patterson (re-)presents the notion of the theatrical crowd of Shakespeare’s own time and indicates Stratford’s appropriateness to it. For example, of the opening night of the Festival, he wrote: “This was no high-brow or arty crowd. Shakespeare himself would have been happy to see what a representative cross-section of people he was attracting. Here was the real Shakespearean audience of the Elizabethan day — the iron mongers of the CNR shops, the craftsmen from the furniture factories, the butchers, the bakers, the seamstresses, all standing in line with the patrons of the arts” (Patterson 1987, 207). The representation of Shakespearean connections in class terms — Shakespeare as a playwright for a working-class audience — is an obvious strategy to appropriate an authentic link between

the culture and the Culture.

The assertion of connection does not always imply that Stratford symbolically exhibits Shakespearean qualities. One strategy is to locate the links in persons. A Beacon Herald Festival

Edition included an article entitled “Festival Now Part of Stratford Community.” It opens: “William Dunlop considers himself

a Stratford actor. That doesn’t just mean he is an actor who works at the Stratford Festival, but also that he is an actor who

lives in Stratford ... The once clear distinction between the Stratford community and the Stratford Festival has become blurred. The Festival boasts that 500 of its 800 staff, including actors, designers, directors, musicians, administrators, stagehands, and those working in props and wardrobe, make their year-round

homes in Stratford and its surrounding area” (De Bono 1990, 30).

150 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Similarly, the 1991 Festive Stratford Visitors’ Guide links Stratford’s culture and the Festival Culture in its photographs of the company’s actors in daily activity in the city and its surrounding countryside: browsing through a bookstore, walking a dog in the park, choosing a pumpkin, shopping for antiques, having lunch, rowing on the Avon, and so on. Ironically, these people look so run-of-the-mill and ordinary that it is difficult to identify them as actors, and the Tourist Bureau director told me that many who examined the brochure failed to do so. Of course, it is not only Stratfordites who represent and appropriate theatre people; theatre people sometimes expressively perform the same transformation on the city’s residents. For example, some cast members of the Festival’s production of the Pirates of Penzance in 1985 concocted a mock wedding. Traditional forms of this folk dramatic production in other locales (see Greenhill 1988 and Taft 1989) focus on the ceremony itself.

The players’ version was more extensive, involving the entire event from the morning of the wedding to the couple’s departure on a honeymoon. Atypically — with reference to the traditional form — this mock wedding was unrelated to any actual rite of passage; it reflected as much as anything else the company’s need to entertain itself on days off during the summer months. The “bride,” who organized it, suggested that the mock wedding was not intended as a negative commentary on any group.

However, it did seem to refer more to local, than to theatrical, culture. It involved lawn art, women walking around in public with curlers in their hair, “Because,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” polkas, polyester wedding outfits, Kool Aid punch, celery with Cheez Whiz, Asti Spumante rosé, and more. Rather than entertaining others by acting a selective English culture, the company entertained themselves by enacting a selective local culture.

As is the case with the English ethnicity narratives, areas of conflict between English and other perspectives are, for the most

part, on the table; they are not covert, as they are for Morris dance. But unlike the English ethnicity narratives, there is dialogue — representation is not entirely in one direction and by one group of another. However, there are parallels with Morris too; carnival-type aspects of ethnicity are foregrounded. In some ways,

Stratford as an English Place 151 then, Stratford is an ideal example of the representation of English ethnicity in a Canadian context; it is at once political, economic, and carnivalesque and the mutual interactions are evident — political/economic aspects of culture impact upon the carnivalesque and vice versa, as I have argued earlier. And everyone I have talked to, as well as the books, advertising, and so on, in whatever medium, that I have examined, seems to demonstrate to a great extent an awareness of these links, though they might not state them in the same terms as I have.

The fact that the same kinds of issues are found in Stratford as in the discourses of English immigrants and in Morris as an English male dance tradition does not suggest an “essential” content to English ethnicity but rather a common disputed territory (see, for example, Anderson 1983; Mosse 1985; and Parker et al. 1992). Whose views of Stratford prevail varies with the historical

currents of hegemony, and for all the “hype” involved in the summer promotion of local culture, the city remains small and pleasant. Attempts to extend the tourist season have been thwarted by the same processes that constrain Stratford’s growth: the severe winter weather from mid-November to mid-April and the distance from the main highway to Toronto. So far Stratford has escaped the quaintification that has disfigured Niagara-on-

the-Lake, the absentee-landlord tackification that has marred Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, and the suburbification that has blighted nearly every rural community within an hour and a half’s drive of Toronto. I would like to think it is at least partly because hegemony is so publicly and enthusiastically contested.

CHAPTER FIVE

Anthropology and I: Participating in the Creation of Culture

My final comments, like the rest of the book, are intended to raise issues rather than to resolve them. They focus upon the position of anthropology and folklore and of Englishness in Canada as extensively parallel — as well as extensively problematic — locations. In a trenchant examination of English missionary stories, Catherine Hall comments: “English national identity is a subject which has received relatively little attention. In England the recognition that Englishness is an ethnicity, just like any other, demands a decentring of the English imagination. For ethnicities have been constructed as belonging to ‘others,’ not to the norm which is English. A recognition that Englishness is an ethnicity, just like any other, necessitates, therefore, its own relativization

of the West” (1992, 240). Hall goes on to point out that the right to articulate national identity is appropriated by a select group, and she discusses the power relations thus suggested. Her work on English historical examples echoes mine on the current situation in Canada. However, though English ethnicity is “just

like any other” in the sense that, contrary to popular wisdom, it maintains carnival components, I argue here that English ethnicity is significantly different from others in terms of access to power. Just because actual English immigrants — that is, white English immigrants — do not apparently enjoy a great deal more

power than other white Canadians who identify themselves as English — or as cultureless or non-ethnic — does not mean that the

concept Englishness is not differentially, and hierarchically, valued.

Anthropology and I 153 My own experience in analysing this material exemplifies why

I feel this is so. As is always the case in writing a book, this work | went through several stages, drafts, and readings by colleagues and friends. A critical focus emerged and was elaborated upon during that period, which concerned how race, gender, and class were obscured in power discourses controlled by various groups who could be defined as English. Embarrassingly, it was not until the final draft that I noticed one of the most flagrant examples of such practice, in which I myself was a participant. The fact that I

had almost managed to overlook the whiteness of Morris was particularly galling for me because the other studies I had written for this book looked explicitly at race and because it was in looking at Morris that my focus upon gender and class most readily emerged. Once I saw Morris’s implications for race issues, the pieces came together resoundingly. My difficulty in recognizing

its salience is a fulcrum around which to understand in greater depth and with increasing acuity the discourse of which I am

a part as an anthropologist and folklorist and as an English Canadian." Anthropologists and folklorists cannot avoid being influenced by their own society; I find that my privilege as a white academ-

ic blinds me to a great deal. But anthropology’s and folklore’s associations with others and with difference are part of an élite obfuscation of their own hegemony. Clearly, English ethnicity’s most salient characteristics are submerged by a variety of forces that make its hegemonic status obscure. Similarly, anthropology and folklore, historically associated with studying others and difference — non-white groups, non-Euro-American culture — operate with a cachet dissociating them from their élite status. But in practice, as English people in Canada construct themselves and — crucially — reinforce their power by construing others as

“ethnics,” so do anthropologists and folklorists construct themselves and reinforce their power by studying “exotics.” Those

trained in the fields must no longer ignore this complicity in establishing and bolstering colonial power. Richard Handler’s work (1988), discussed briefly in the first chapter, suggests other directions. His analysis of Quebec indicates how “culture” is objectified, reified, and manipulated not

154 Ethnicity in the Mainstream only by politicians but also by social scientists. The ideas of culture held by folklorists and anthropologists, themselves construc-

tions, are all too often fed back to the people with whom they ostensibly originated, who in turn accept the pronouncements of academics with “expertise” as more truthful and authentic than their own. But as Peter H. Stephenson (1989) points out, those aspects of “culture” that are selected by anthropologists as representations of the “emic” view are chosen because they implicate “difference” from “our” culture rather than because they simply bespeak the experiences of “others.” Anthropologists and folklorists are too often constructed — by themselves as well as by their colleagues and the public — as the “experts” on the cultures of others, even as they rhetorically defer to indigenous expertise. Further, as anthropologists in particular turn to examinations of their own writing as cultural construction, there is a concomitant turn to an examination of anthropology’s and anthropologists’ relations to the usually Western, usually imperialist societies

in which they originated and with which their practice is most associated. As Marcus and Fischer (4986) point out, the critique of culture can be turned as much upon ourselves as it is upon others. They ask for that critical element to be made more explicit in ethnographic writing. I ask that Euro—North Americans devel-

op techniques and ideological constructs which will assist us in examining ourselves not as a comparative group who are fundamentally comprehensible, and thus need no explanation, but as the focus of our own studies. Dominated groups increasingly express their dissatisfaction with anthropologists’ role as appropriators and with anthropolo-

gists’ practice as interpreters to white culture of that group’s

| ways. The scholarly responses have often come in the form of expressions of academic freedom — “It’s my right to study whatever I want” — or (to my mind, preferable) of service — “I will try

to ensure that my work is useful to the peoples with whom I work.” But these rejoinders may not be sufficient for long. Aboriginals in Canada, for example, are developing their own systems of cultural studies as members of that group become anthropologists; equally, academics from colonized groups, such

as Edward Said, have turned their focus on imperial powers.

Anthropology and I 155 What has not happened much in anthropology — and a clear alternative — is for Euro—North American anthropologists to turn their critical and analytic aim upon themselves. As Marcus and Fischer discuss, there are traditions of indigenous cultural critique in Euro—North American society — the Frankfurt School, Surrealism, and Documentary Criticism (ibid., 117-28) — as well as techniques of “defamiliarization” (ibid., 137) in anthropology itself. Having worked primarily within proximate groups — “my own culture” or ones that are substantially familiar — I do not have the materials for “cross cul-

tural juxtaposition” (ibid., 157-63); yet my critique of Englishness is not fundamentally based in epistemological issues (ibid., 141-57) but instead upon field research. All too often anthropologists and folklorists assume that they can intuitively and experientially know “us” without doing the kind of talking and participating they do in less familiar societies. I am asking that they use their own methodologies when looking at their own groups; Euro—North Americans cannot, must not, be viewed as an exceptional case, recalcitrant to anthropological investigation, any more than Englishness should be constructed by Canadians as a state of “culturelessness.” My training in anthropology and folklore and their theories, developed to understand the cultural configurations of others,

was not particularly helpful in assisting me to discover the screaming silences and obvious invisibilities within my own cultural expressions. Feminist perspectives were probably more useful. Methodologically, feminism may look as much as does anthropology at “differences” — female-male — but many feminist

perspectives also assume that (male) power is deployed so as to obscure and obfuscate (female) experience and practice. The process of making difference and then covering it up is, I think, central to what both English ethnicity and anthropology can do. Recognizing from the outset the probability that such processes will be at work is helpful. I am not arguing for a complete abandonment of historic anthropological viewpoints; difference issues are fundamental to anthropological work and ultimately are the focus of these studies. Just as anthropologists and folklorists need not simply accept

156 Ethnicity in the Mainstream and present uncritically what people say about themselves, they need to engage critically with the theory, as well as the culture, of anthropology. Works that focus upon colonialism as a pivotal relation may give clues to alternatives which at this point elude me. Thus we might find that social-scientific collaboration with the idea that the English are not ethnics — discussed in the first chapter — helps to obscure the racist, sexist, and classist underpinnings of our society, just as it helps the media — and individuals — choose a repertoire of safe, conservative, but fundamentally problematic, ideas about ethnicity. As I have reiterated and as Handler’s work on Quebec suggests, the “emic” point of view is not necessarily more valid, truthful, or respectable; it is a selective construction of anthropologists themselves, which is all too often employed for explicitly or implicitly political purposes, for example, to defend “cultural practices” such as the infibulation of women. Any discourse that constructs academic writing as the discovered truth raises serious problems. Yet in critiquing ourselves and our work, we run the risk of being viewed as “unscientific,” an outcome that amounts to disengaging ourselves from our Own power. But is that, after all, such an untenable position? I argue here that the analysis I present is my own view, my own representation; its value will be insofar as others see it reflecting their concerns and ideas. That it opposes views presented to me by people I have worked with, danced with, interviewed, and been friends with is problematic for my own relationship to them. However, overvaluing the interior viewpoint that we have constructed as anthropologists — even if our epistemology privileges it —- can be

as problematic as undervaluing it. I try to write persuasively and authoritatively, not because I believe in the irrefutable truth of what I have to say but because I believe in the value of the society that anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-classism demand. Anthropological ethics may vary when one no longer assumes

that the researcher is working with a subjected or colonized group. The American Anthropological Association’s “Principles of Professional Responsibility,” to my mind, assume just such a relationship. “Anthropologists must respect, protect and promote

Anthropology and I 157 the rights and the welfare of all those affected by their work. Anthropologists’ first responsibility is to those whose lives and cultures they study.”3 These statements make sense when the power difference between anthropologists and their subjects of study is in the anthropologists’ favour. Over-valuation of these subjects make sense, because it counters the existing power struc-

tures, which are already balanced against the oppressed. But when one studies a group such as the English in Canada or men in patriarchal society, it makes more sense to look at privilege — and the privileged — in a way that may appear disrespectful at best and contrary to their existing rights and welfare at worst.

Yet even the privileged can be controlled by their own power structures, of which they may be unconscious, and it may in the long term be against their interests to remain unconscious of aspects of power and control they deploy in their own lives.

In the opening paragraphs of this work, I suggested that my topic was how ethnicity has involved the obfuscation of power issues in the discourse of carnival. I have tried to allow the workings of carnival and ethnicity to emerge as they do in the more or less everyday experience and action discussed here. The power I allude to in these discussions is related more to force, legitimacy, and authority than it is to the explicitly political; dominated groups, whether they are disempowered on the basis of gender, ethnicity, class, or another social distinction, “have the vote ...

but they lack any real authority in the exercise of that power” (Moore 1988, 134). Englishness in Canada is based extensively on the disempowerment of other groups. Much of our popular culture indicates how exclusive are our notions of ethnicity. Terry Fox’s near-national acclaim must be related to the fact that he was an attractive, white, middle-class, Canadian-born young man (see Greenhill 1989a), and jokes about Ben Johnson after the Seoul Olympics indicate that his rejection was inextricably connected with the fact that he was a black Jamaican immigrant (see Greenhill forthcoming). There is a danger that a valorized English ethnicity will be linked with power in such a way as to make it even more hegemonic, a culture to which all others must aspire. But invisibility is also problematic; subversive parodies and travesties of power are impossible

158 Ethnicity in the Mainstream when its workings are unrecognized. Should Canadians continue, then, to acknowledge and encourage carnivalesque ethnic expression? If cultural pluralism is an aim, if we are as committed to it

as national political constructions suggest, if we include all groups, and if we recognize power dynamics, I do not see carnival

, ethnicity as problematic in itself. The English as a group do not generally lack access to the varying forms of power. Instead they lack access to a sense of themselves. The question of a distinct Canadian identity is only a problem in mainstream English perspectives. Regional/provincial groups — Québécois or Newfoundlanders, for example — or ethnic/ racial groups — such as aboriginal peoples or Ukrainians — among

many other configurations, have frequently recognized and asserted a sense of their individuality. They use carnival ethnicity

as a discourse to manipulate power in the general absence of access to its more privileged forms (see, for example, Konrad 1983). But in the contest between power and carnival in the context of English ethnic expression — both mainstream and origin — power, as must by now be obvious, generally wins. When ethnicity and carnival are linked, I suggest, they emerge as a form of symbolic power, exercised by groups with relation

to other groups. The Ukrainian woman at the Royal Ontario Museum, described in the opening paragraph of this book, who challenged my right to say what Ukrainian culture is, or was, acted to re-establish a power differential that should have been balanced in her favour, not in mine. Ethnicity appears as a discourse of rights, not only as the discourse of distinctiveness in which it is contested. That is, the right of non-English ethnic groups is often limited to the right to say what they, as a group, are — the right to defend a definition of themselves. For the English, on the other hand, the right to dictate what is proper language, who can participate in economic and political systems, and what groups will be accorded locations of privilege in a hierarchically ordered world means the right to define not only themselves but also others. :

The common assertion that there is no English culture in Canada is itself a power-charged statement, echoing those pronouncements associated with the position of white people in the

Anthropology and I 159 United States vis-a-vis black people. “In a white supremacist society, white people can ‘safely’ imagine that they are invisible to black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over black people accorded them

the right to control the black gaze” (bell hooks 19924, 340). By gazing, as I have in these studies, upon the carnival aspects of English ethnicity, I want to highlight the mystification of Eng-

lishness necessary to the maintenance of a power differential. | Contrary to what I expected when I first began work on this project, I find myself concluding that English ethnicity is a far from nebulous concept, though its articulations are not always clear. English culture is recognizable, if often inchoate. And it is not surprising that the discourse of power in ethnicity is expressed in concert with other power discourses: between women and men, between racial groups, between use value and exchange value, between gifts and obligations, and so forth. From exam-

ining immigrants’ narratives, Morris dancing, and Stratford, Ontario — surely a diverse collection of subjects — I have concluded that, while people express English ethnicity in quite predictable ways, they tend to avoid the kind of conscious, explicit representations often associated with other ethnic groups. Thus, while Ukrainians and outsiders alike can identify such things as pysanky (decorated Easter eggs) and certain kinds of embroidered dance costumes as distinctly Ukrainian (though of course they are

shared with other cultural groups), people are not so quick to identify what is perceived to be English, though they often rec-

/ ognize its manifestations. What primarily makes the English similar to other ethnic groups, however, is the extent to which their culture is selective, emergent, and invented. Authenticity has become an inauthentic term, and truth is problematic. If all culture is merely representation, where is the stable anchor, the root, the essence? Part of my attempt in publicly describing and acknowledging carnival English ethnicity is in fact to reify it, as other ethnicities are reified. It should be noted that I do not see the activity of creating

and controlling culture as spurious or inauthentic. I think that English immigrants should know that the differences they perceive between their culture and that of other Canadians are more

160 Ethnicity in the Mainstream stereotyped than objective; that Morris dancers should be aware of the political economy, and of the misogyny, of the tradition they perform; and that Stratfordites should remain circumspect

about the connection between the names in their city and its major tourist attraction. But I would defend their right to continue practising a control over the culture they produce. I also maintain, however, that exercising control over cultural processes should be the prerogative of every group, not solely of those who

have the greatest degree of hegemony. And powerful groups should not be surprised if their presentation of cultural self engenders parodic responses that question and subvert. Yet the process remains fundamentally problematic. My work shows the concept of ethnicity to be essentially volatile. The rei-

fication of tradition, culture, and ethnicity can be used by élites in Quebec to accrue power; the reification of non-tradition, nonculture, and non-ethnicity is used in Ontario for the same ends. Reification and power are the common elements here, not ideas of culture, ethnicity, or tradition. Perhaps even those are unstable when viewed from alternative perspectives. Agendas that can con-

struct culture in one case as authentically central and in another as fully irrelevant are clearly inconsistent, yet this paradox is obscured just as the power issues themselves are. As an anthropologist and folklorist, I cannot fail to participate in the re-creation of culture and hegemony, however much I may wish to be free of it. There are probably glaringly obvious aspects of Englishness I was unable to see; success in making invisible its

own ideology is an indication of its considerable power. And anthropology itself creates culture — a contested concept, though useful in describing the something that Englishness has and is.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE t I use “culture” here —- and most commonly in this book — in its anthropological/sociological sense: as learned behaviour and expression. I do not intend it to be understood as invariant, bounded, or an object; I use the term to describe what is produced in discourse when issues of common, shared identity are at stake. Like Benedict Anderson’s nation, culture and the cultural are “imagined communities” (1983, 14-16). In popular usage, of course, culture can also refer to a particular élite element of aesthetic expression. In those parts of this study where both of these concepts are used, and must be distinguished, I refer to the first (ethnographic) as “culture” and the second (fine) as “Culture.” I consider the latter an aspect of culture as a whole, which I study using the tools of the academic areas that take society and culture as their subject. This work is ethnographic; it is cultural description. 2 Folklore is a recognized academic discipline in Canada and elsewhere. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada makes specific provision for folklore in its funding of research and scholarly societies. There are two Ph.D.—granting departments of folklore in Canada — at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Université Laval — and at least three scholarly folklore journals. See also Carpenter 1979 and Fowke and Carpenter 1985. 3 A paradigm, as discussed by historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1970), is an assumption about epistemology that is often so basic as to be inchoate.

162 Notes to pages 7-16 4 The highly problematic term “informant” is commonly used by anthropologists and folklorists to refer to the individuals from whom they receive first-hand information (see Jackson 1987 for a discussion of the term and some alternatives). 5 Britannia magazine, published in Ontario, is devoted to describing current culture in Britain. Aimed at immigrants and subtitled Keeping in Touch with the British Way of Life, it presents a nostalgic (see Stewart 1988) view of life back home. Only very rarely does it publish material on immigrant Britons’ experience. An exception 1s Peggy O’Hara’s (1990) memoir “The War Brides’ First Canadian Christmas.” 6 This expression would refer to a male of Jewish extraction from Birmingham. I was not the only folklorist to encounter — and be disturbed by — such material from English people. Rachelle Saltzman, an American folklorist doing fieldwork in England,

commented, “A London cab driver told me with regard to the West Indians now living in London: ‘They may be British, but they’ll never be English.’ While I'd certainly had numerous fieldwork experiences in the United States with informants who freely and unbidden by me spoke of prejudices of all varieties, I had certainly not expected those from an entirely different culture to be so certain that my beliefs were in accord with theirs — or so unconcerned that they were not” (Saltzman 1991, 6-7). 7 See, for example, Stahl 1985 on the personal-experience narrative as a folkloric genre. 8 I will provide one additional example of such attitudes, though I could provide many. Lindor Reynolds, in the Winnipeg Free Press, composed a reflection on Folklorama in which she regretted her lack of culture and ethnicity. Referring to herself as “culturally disadvantaged” (sic), she asserted, “What we need is a Melting Pot Pavilion, a place for people not ashamed to be bereft of any ethnic traditions of their own” (1992). 9 The fact that indigenous peoples preceded these groups does not make them non-ethnic; they are instead placed in an anomalous position with respect to this non-inclusive categorization. The system affirms aboriginal peoples’ marginality in the consciousness of those who created it. ro It is important to note, however, that ccrcs has participated in

Notes to pages 16-19 163 or sponsored studies of French (including Dupont 1972; Boily-Blanchette 1976; Carpentier 1981; and Bégin 1981 and 1983), Scottish (including Doucette 1980), and Newfoundland (including Pocius 1979; Cox 1980; Taylor 1982; and Robertson 1983) culture in Canada. The reasons for the centre to study groups other than those within its mandate have to do with the additional designation of ccrcs as the Folklore division. Accordingly, it has looked at groups within the traditional purview of that academic field. This means that regions such as the Atlantic provinces, the West, and Quebec are strongly favoured over Ontario and that research on British groups has virtually excluded the English. There are, in addition, a number of unpublished collections and acquisitions representing these regional cultures, as well as on the Scottish, the Welsh, and the Irish. My own research conducted for ccFcs, which included field studies with English Ontarians, is to my knowledge the only collection to cover central Canadian English culture. 11 The classic work in this area is of course Porter 1965. For further discussion of these issues from a folklorist’s perspective, see Carpenter 1979. 12 Valuable work on the creation and invention of cultural traditions has been stimulated by Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, including McKay 1986. 13 Apart from Sollors 1989, work on the invention of ethnicity includes Conzen et al. 1990 and Sarna 1978. 14 I speak here from the experience of five years’ teaching at the University of Waterloo in the Canadian Studies program, including a course on Canadian Traditional and Popular Culture, with younger students, mature students, on campus, off campus live, and by correspondence. I have noted a consistent opposition among my students — and for some, it even survives courses intended to break down this resistance — to seeing folklore as anything more than the anachronistic distinctive traits of Canadians other than themselves. The resistance to seeing traditional culture in broader and self-inclusive terms is so strong that they frequently misread arguments intended to deconstruct such a notion (e.g., Handler 1988) as straightforward description rather than critique. For example, former student Cheryl

164 Notes to pages 19-29 MacDonald compiled and published a collection of folk poetry from Haldimand and Norfolk counties, commenting, “I suspect the heyday of local poetry was prior to 1930 — before radios became widespread in rural Ontario. That is not to say folk poetry is no longer being created” (1990, 5—6). Even in the face of manifest evidence that folk poetry is still enthusiastically being created and disseminated (Greenhill 1989a), considering such material folkloric makes it anachronistic. 15 This and all subsequent quotations come from my field research interviews or other taped sources. Each is identified by the name of the individual, the last two digits of the year in which the interview was conducted, and the number of the interview. Thus (Sharon Sutherland, 90-17) refers to the seventeenth interview, which I conducted in 1990 with Sharon Sutherland. 16 Reaction to Handler’s work demonstrates how anthropological perspectives can sometimes reflect a group’s ideas back to them in a way that may seem radically different, even distorted. Of four reviews examined, the two most positive ones came from an anthropologist — “Handler provides so many points to ponder that if scholars in Quebec and elsewhere find his work controversial or incomplete, their debates will only add to its heuristic value” (Molohon 1989, 796) — and an Anglo nationalist historian — “[Handler] has written an important book, one which will repay reading by students of social science, of nationalism, and of Quebec. Even Quebec nationalists could benefit from this lucid account of their Sisyphean work” (Cook 1989, 542). Reviews from the perspective of political science either misread it as documentation rather than interpretation — “The book represents a form of naiveté, greeting the obvious as if it were a discovery. On this subject there is a clutch of half a dozen books already in print” (Waite 1988, 1726) — or objected more to Handler’s attitude than to the factual inaccuracies noted by almost every reviewer — “Interpretive anthropology is about openness and dialogue. I am not sure I see any of these qualities in Richard Handler’s attempt to make an epistemological point while deconstructing Quebec’s nationalism and culture” (Laforest 1988, 843).

Notes to pages 33-58 165 CHAPTER TWO 1 Inthe environs of Kitchener-Waterloo (an area better known for its Germanic, than for its English population), both the United Kingdom Club of Cambridge and the Royal City Guild of the Great Britain Social Club appear to be flourishing. 2 Discourse in linguistic studies usually refers to aspects of language structures longer than a sentence. I use the term here to include all aspects of language from accent (phonology) to context (pragmatics). 3 Readers should note that in this chapter, unless otherwise specified, I use the term “English” to refer to English immigrants to Canada and the term “Canadians” to refer to other groups in this country. 4 The most extensive attention to this genre has come from Sandra Stahl (1985), but works such as Butler 1991 and Johnstone 1990 also look at personal experience. 5 Genre refers to a recognized form or style of expression. Often a genre also has a name that helps to distinguish it. For example, jokes and sermons are both forms of speech, but as quite different genres, they have varying purposes, contexts, contents, and so on. 6 Anthropologists distinguish the insider’s point of view, the “emic,” from that of an outsider, the “etic.” 7 In my research in rural Ontario, I also noted “lunch” as having different use — any snack-type meal of small sandwiches, cakes, and tea, without reference to the time it is served — from that with which I, as an urban Ontarian, was accustomed — any noontime meal. 8 There is an extensive literature on the differences between male and female language; see, for example, Fried 1979; Lakoff 1975;

and Spender 1980. 9 For further discussion of this distinction and its relation to folklore, see Jansen 1959. to For further discussion of this issue, see Labov 1972 and O’Neil 1972. 11 I am grateful to my colleague Stephanie Kane for pointing out the relevance of Sander Gilman’s work (e.g., 1985) here.

166 Notes to page 65 CHAPTER THREE 1 The descriptions are as follows: You are watching a performance of something which has been in existence in England for many centuries. The Morris is an ancient tradition of English dance and music passed down from father to son (mother to daughter?) for generations. Though the origins are lost in ancient time, it is believed to have originated in rural communities as part of ritual celebrations of the good earth which were intended to hasten the resurrection of life in the Spring. The Morris dances of the Cotswolds are springtime dances. The ringing of bells, the waving of handkerchiefs and the tuneful music are all intended to celebrate and encourage new growth. Some of these dances symbolize mock battles between Winter and Spring, good and evil, life and death. They are traditionally accompanied by the music of concertina or pipe and tabor, and more recently, by the button accordion and fiddle. The age old custom of passing the hat allows the audience to help maintain the tradition as well as to receive a good helping of Morris Luck! (Tiddley Cove Morris brochure, Vancouver, B.C., ca. 1990)

And: You are watching the Hog’s Back Morris dancers performing

/ processional clog morris dances, as they were danced in the British Isles in centuries past. The term “processional” stems from the period when dancers used to be part of the annual harvest processions to churches at the end of the summer. However, the roots of morris dancing go

| further back in history and the dances were originally magical in nature — the noise created by the clogs, bells and clashing of sticks was thought to frighten off evil spirits. The Morris dancer was an important part of English social life and many towns and villages had their own teams, each with a distinctive costume and dance style. The clog morris that you are watching was danced mainly in the north west of England. Gradually, the dances have come to be performed at other festivals and today, teams from both Britain and North America perform at all times of the year and at many different events ... We thank you for your interest and wish you the “luck of the Morris.” (Hog’s Back Morris brochure, Ottawa, Ont., ca. 1990)

Notes to pages 65-73 167 Each account closes by offering information from group members, with contact telephone numbers, and inviting people to join the team. These excerpts describe two visibly distinct Morris styles: the processional “clog” (northwest England) and “Cotswold” (English Midlands). The latter is performed in normal shoes by groups of six dancers, who usually face one another and gesture with large handkerchiefs or sticks while executing steps and leaps. The former is executed by performers who wear clogs, do march or rant steps, gesture with tied handkerchiefs or beribboned sticks, and usually form in two parallel rows facing in the same direction. Note also the differences between the time of year suggested in the two accounts — spring versus late summer (harvest). 2 A quéte custom involves collecting money from spectators after a performance. 3 The most detailed description of Kirtlington dances I have seen is by Roy Dommett (1984). 4 The first Morris team in Canada is dated to 1974 in Winnipeg (see “Morris in Canada” 1987), but there may have been earlier activity in the Maritimes, as suggested in “From One of Our Canadian Readers” (1974). 5 TFMM members explain that the F is silent. Barrand and Reynolds suggest that “the team’s full name is the Toronto Fucking Morris Men” (1991, 98). 6 Iam not the only anthropologist-folklorist to be placed in this position. Ranald Thurgood, who works with revival storytellers in Toronto, discussed some of his experiences pertaining to the need to educate his fellow storytellers. Many of his concerns in this area are directly related to the problem of the participantobserver folklorist who can be a full participant (Thurgood 1990). 7 Parody is an indication of centrality (Narvaez 1977); as

ethnographer I am socially and culturally part of the team. Of | course, it is not only in the revival that specialist analysts of a phenomenon are part of the cultural scene. Victor Turner’s work (1969) on ritual suggests that in any ritual or ceremonial event, individuals represent different roles, depending on whether they are specialists, presenters, audience, and so on. Their concerns in any ritual event will be different, depending on their varying interests in the event and its outcomes.

168 Notes to pages 75-87 8 Some idea of the range of attitudes, but with a focus upon the more obsessed teams, is indicated in Barrand and Reynolds 1991. 9 In “Trip to Norwich,” for example, the middle dancers in the set had no room to do a sufficiently impressive “challenge.” Tom suggested that we try a “gather and jump,” but that felt uncomfortable and the other middle dancer and I did not like doing it. Instead, I suggested that we step out then step in. Now that routine is part of the dance. ro An exception is Buckland’s work on the Bacup Coconut Dancers (e.g., 1990), a related practice. tr One Forest City dancer left the team to move with her new husband, also a Morris dancer, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “They’ve got a Morris side in Saudi Arabia. It’s a mixed side again, but it’s in a different place. It’s in a country where Westerners are trying to get together to maintain a sense of feeling that they’re not too strange. There’s a different philosophy there. Westerners over there will do what they can to feel they have their place as well” (Rebecca, 90-6). 12 Dance ethnologists take an anthropological perspective on dance. 13 This kind of disparity is evident in other traditions as well. For example, when I began working with shivaree traditions in rural Ontario (see Greenhill 1989b) and was discussing my research with another academic — not a folklorist — he commented, “That’s not folklore; that’s just people being obnoxious.” “Firstexistence” shivarees are such an integral part of life that they are seen as quotidian, mundane, and hence profoundly dismissable.

14 Other examples of traditions changing function without substantially altering their form are in Pocius 1988 compared with Halpert and Story 1969 and in Handler and Linnekin 1984 on the manipulation of traditional culture for political ends. 15 Hugh Trevor-Roper (1983) discusses how the kilt and tartan came to represent ancient Scottish society, despite their being essentially modern forms. 16 Theresa Buckland (personal communication) concurs that the invention of tradition is not always a hegemonic practice, as described by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). 17 Professional arts groups, such as dance companies, and individuals often find that economic aspects are problematic. The extremely

Notes to pages 87-117 169 physically demanding performances should look effortless, not like work. And funding is always a concern because artists are supposed to do their art voluntarily, for the love of the artistic genre not as work to be remunerated. 18 Even notions of “serious” play usually preclude overt economic elements. 19 Communitas, as defined by Victor Turner, involves the removal of barriers related to structure and participation in an ongoing flow; “society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively unstructured comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals” (1969, 96). 20 Nelson Goodman distinguishes between autographic art, in which “the distinction between original and forgery ... is significant,” and allographic art, where “all correct performances are equally genuine instances of the work” (1968, 113). 21 It is noteworthy that pervasive sociocultural aspects such as language are divided along gender lines. Some linguists assert that gender in language carries no semantic value; that in English, for example, a ship being referred to as “she” does not give it a female persona. Others have recently begun to explore the extent to which gender in language has sexist connotations (e.g., Spender 1980). 22 Bourdieu (1984, 192) also discusses the gendering of food. 23 Signifiers in parentheses are implicit opposites, which are never explicitly discussed by the speaker. Unmarked signifiers are explicit. 24 The work of art music composers such as George Butterworth, Percy Grainger, Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), and Ralph Vaughan Williams exemplify this pattern. See Abraham 1974, Karpeles 1967, Sharp 1907, and Vaughan Williams 1963 for further discussion and examples of English romantic nationalism. 25 Note that discomfort with racial difference is not limited to Morris. Folklorist Michael Taft (personal communication) often raises the “problem” of a champion Scottish dancer on the prairies who was Chinese. As a grant referee for the Ontario Arts Council’s folk-arts funding, I read several proposals from ethnic organizations who wanted to sponsor someone “from home” to come to Ontario and teach the “right way” to do dances, crafts, and so on.

170 Notes to pages 119-27 26 I know many Morris people will be horrified by this assertion. I expect to return to the issue in later work. 27 Ian Robb suggested to me that in England, wives and girlfriends of male Morris dancers, excluded from Cotswold, began working with Northwest traditions since they had not been exclusively appropriated as male domain. 28 I have heard some Northwest team members so chorus after the offending final line.

CHAPTER FOUR 1 Some traditions in Stratford are manifestly “invented” in Hobsbawm’s (1983) class-sensitive terminology. The Festival presents itself and its elements as tradition, as when theatre-goers look forward to the brass fanfare which announces that the play is about to begin and also the end of the interval. Tradition is also asserted in the area of the choice of plays, with the suggestion of a simple, direct connection between the Stratford Festival and the plays of Shakespeare. The controversy about Stratford straying from its “tradition” of doing Shakespeare exclusively — the biggest money-makers at the Festival Theatre are the modern American musicals (such as Guys and Dolls, Carousel, and Cabaret) and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas — masks an assent to the idea that Shakespeare and Stratford have something to do with each other. Some Festival goers do not even consider that they have attended the Festival unless they have seen a play by Shakespeare (fieldnotes, 5 August 1990). Former resident Hugh McCaul said, “T don’t go to the Festival very often ... The last two times I’ve been were both for musicals. The last time I was at something serious was at Romeo and Juliet, | don’t know, seven or eight years ago, anyway” (90-38). His implication is that attending nonShakespearean works has a spurious, or at least a different, quality. 2 I appreciate an anonymous reader of the manuscript of this book, who noted a similar gender dichotomization of high culture and local culture discussed in the work of Carol Kammen. Local history became feminized, and national history by implication masculinized, when the discipline split between amateur (local women) and professional (national male) practitioners.

Notes to pages 128-57 I7I : 3 Brochures have usually been identified by the place or service they advertise. Most are from the 1990 Stratford Festival season. 4 As one of the anonymous readers of the manuscript pointed out, these voices are also absent from my own discussion. Analysis of their place must await further research. 5 James Reaney commented that “the one disappointing thing [about the Festival] has been the failure to produce a local director with a way of doing Shakespeare that is of us — but the present director is excellent” (personal communication, 1991). 6 “Lack; lack liquidated” was identified by Alan Dundes (1964) as a narrative structure in native oral tradition. The concept also applies to symbolic contexts.

CHAPTER FIVE t Much of the rest of this chapter results from suggestions made by one of the anonymous readers of the manuscript. I am indebted to him for pushing me to extend this analysis. I have taken the liberty of drawing very thoroughly on his comments; I hope I have extended them as well. Once I had incorporated the ideas suggested by the reader, Stephanie Kane read another draft and pushed me yet further. I have also drawn considerably upon her comments and ideas. 2 If, for example, David Schneider did field research before writing about American kinship, it is by no means foregrounded in his account. And, of course, Margaret Mead’s work in Samoa has been criticized for, among other aspects, lacking a base of participant observation. 3 These principles are quoted in “The Ethics of Fieldwork,” Anthropology Newsletter 34, no.4 (April 1993): 1.

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BLANK PAGE | ,

Index

Aldwin, Jane, 37, 39, 41-4, 46, Brooks, Heather, 74-5, 93, 106,

49, 51-3, 59 117

Anderson, Benedict, 23 Buckland, Theresa, 88, 102 anthropological ethics, 156-7 Burton, Isobel, 39, 45, 54-5,

archaic practices, 80 60-1 Ashman, Gordon, 68, 87

author, 31, 153, 156, 160; carnival, 4-5, 157-8; and

convictions of, 8; as Canadian ethnic events, 4, 31; ethnographer-team member, English ethnic culture and, 71-7; ethnography of, 5-8, 114, 121; political dimension

71-7; methods of field of, 4; and power, 3-5

research, 3 5; parents of, 6, 9, Carpenter, Carole, 5 2.4; research perspective, 64 class: and Morris dance, 68-9, 87-8; and movement style,

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 14, 118 90-1; and Stratford, Ontario, Barrand, Anthony G., 79, 95 127, 130, 131 Bart, Florence Margaret, 54 Coates, Maura, 47-8, 50, 52 Barth, Fredrik, 12, 16, 18 Coates, Norman, 34, 45-7, 51 Bartholomew, Brian, 42-4, 50, country of origin, 22-3

55 cultural relativity, 58

Bartholomew, Phillipa, 44, 55 culture, 25, 128, 153-4, I61 n.1I;

Bauman, Richard, 12 creation of, 153-4, 159-60; Beamish, Andrew, 42, 45, 53 culture shock, 54; culture vs

Beaton, Jamie, 122-3 Culture, 141; and political Bourdieu, Pierre, 90-1, 100 power, 27 Britannia magazine, 9, 34,

1620.5 dance, 87, 114; first existence,

British: as an ethnic group, 80; meaning of, 86-99;

22-3 second existence, 80

190 Index Dempster, Elizabeth, 88 language differences, 36;

Dommett, Roy, 79 power relationships, 19;

Dorst, John, 141, 148 traditions, 17; vs mainstream, 17

Einarsson, Magnus, 5 ethnicity, 24-5, 30, 56, 152, English: carnivalesque aspects, 157, 160; ascriptive quality

114, 121, 125, 127, 151, of, 17; Canadian concept of, 158-9; coinage of terms, 53; 3, 16; carnival aspects of, 3, culture, 116, 13 5-6; economic 150; carnival vs power in, 10, aspects, 151, 158; entitlement, 20; construction of, 62; as

46, §5, 115; ethnicity, 152, culturally created, 11; as 156; hierarchical aspects, 152; cultural traits, 26; defined, 15; immigrants, 23-4; language, as difference, 54-9; gender 44, 59, 61; language, contexts and, 14, 113; notions of, of, 44; language, correctness I 5-16; perspectives on, 18;

of, 38, 41, 43, 545 573 and place, 14; and power, 13, language, entitlement to 158-9; as sociocultural

determine, 41; perception of creation, 18. See also carnival divergence with other groups, ethnocentrism, 58 62; personal experience and ethnographer, 30-1 generalization, 33-7; political ethnography of self, 5-8, 71-7 aspects of, 151, 158; power, Evans, Jane, 64-5, 73-4, 76, 82,

127, 152-3; sense of 84-5, 92-3, 108, IIO-II,

superiority, 54, 61 II 5-16 English Canadian, 97, 157;

culture, 21, 158-9; culture, Fiddlers’ Green Folk club, 70 external influence on, 21; Fischer, Michael M.J., 154-5 culture, traits, 24; ethnicity, folklore, 19, 113;

4-5, 9, 12, 13, 15-20, 90, characterization of, 28;

150, 159; ethnicity, ethnic, 57; exoteric vs

contradictory aims of, 20; esoteric, 57 ethnicity, denial of, 31; folkloric, 18-19

ethnicity, linguistic aspects folklorist-anthropologist, 28-32,

of, 38; mainstream and 153-5

origin culture, 20-8; neglect Forrest, John, 78, 90

as a Canadian culturel Fox, Terry, 157 group, 5

entitlement, 60-1; of Canadian gender, 140-1, 155; and power,

English vs English 103

immigrants, 54; as defining Gorer, Geoffrey, 21

| others, 62 Grimes, Ronald L., 15

ethnic: activities, 13; boundaries, Guthrie, Sir Tyrone, 129,

16; clubs, 47; culture, 14, 56; 138-41

Index I9I Hall, Catherine, 152 McCannell, Dean, 132 Handler, Richard, 29-30, 153, McCaul, Hugh, 131, 143

156, 164 n.16 McClary, Susan, 99

Hanna, Judith Lynne, ror McClintock, Rebecca, 84, 96,

Hannah, Jean, 37 98, 107, 116

Herberg, Edward, 17-18, 25, 56; | McIntyre, Mary, 138

“birth” as ethnicity, 22 McQueen, Rose, 142 Hobsbawn, Eric, 25, 81 Making of English-Canadian

Hoerburger, Felix, 80 Culture, 1900-1939, 21 Marcus, George E., 154-5

iconography, 136 Mayberry, John, 122

informant, 162 n.4 Montgomery, Lucy, 74-6, 84-5, invented tradition, 81 88, 92-3, 95, 98, IOI, 105-6, 109-12, II7

Jansen, William Hugh, 17 Moore, Gerald, 38, 40

Johnson, Ben, 157 Morris: background, 63-7,

Johnston, Janet, 81, 85, 88-9, 95-6; Cambridge Morris

92-3, 97, 113, I17, 122 team, 102; Canadian vs

Johnston, Stafford, 13 1-2 English, 116; as carnival, 88,

jokes, ethnic, 57 100; ceremonial, 69; and

Jones, Steve, 139, 142 class, 11, 68, 87, 91, 94, 99, 113; Commitment to, 93;

Kealiinohomoku, Joann, 79 as dance, 86-99; dancer-

Kimber, William, 67 researchers, 73; economics of, Klymasz, Robert, 12, 57 68, 78, 87-8, 160; elementary, 67~-71; as English, 66-7, 82,

language, 22, 33, 36, 158; 113-22; English immigrant accent, 33, 36-40, 44, 5 5-8; dancers, 22; fertility and, 85, accent, change in, 40; class 102, 106; Forest City Morris

difference and, 46-7, 50; team, II, 21, 30, 64-118; connotation, 49-54; context, forms of, 69-70, 82-3, 96,

44; divergence of, 45, 56; I10, 112, 124; function entitlement, 59-63; gender and, 81; gender and, 11, 95, difference, 46; humour in, 51, 99-103, 107, 112; Goats

56; interpretation, 50; Head team, 75, 110; Green

misunderstanding, 39, 42-3, Fiddle Morris team, 70, 115; 56; and power, 59-63; use of, Headington Quarry Morris 56; variations in forms of team, 67, 87; “hey,” 69, 96-7;

English, 37; words and Hog’s Back Morris team, 65,

expressions, 40-4, 53 90, 123; interaction in, 97-8,

Limon, José, 12 107-8; maleness of, 19, 66-7, linguistic ethnocentrism, 49 IOI, 104-5, 113, 117, 120;

Luchak’s Easter, 3-4 meaning of, 81, 122-5;

192 Index membership in, 68-9; racism, 26—7 misogyny of, 160; origin, 65, Reaney, James, 138, 148-9 114; performance, 81; politics research chronology, 8-12

of, 98, 103; and power, 100, residual practices, 80 | I21, 125; ritual origins, 85, Robb, Ian, 90, 123-4 95; social uniformity, 92; Roberts, Paul, 58 Shropshire Morris team, 68; Robertson, John, 130

and strength, 95, 105; Royal City Guild of the Great Thames Valley team, 75; Britain Social Club, 13, 34 Toronto Morris Men, 72; Royce, Anya Peterson, 16, 87-8 Tiddley Cove Morris team,

65; traditional, 66-7, 77-86; Said, Edward, 25, 154 traditional vs revival, 78-80, Sharp, Cecil, 65-9, 78, 87,

83, 124-5; whiteness of, I1, IOI-2, 113 114, 117, 119, 153; women Siess, Paul, 69, 85, 89, 91, 102

and, 99-113 Siess, Tom, 69-70, 72-7, 81, 83, 85, 88-9, 92-5, 97-8, 105-6,

narratives: generalization, 10, 108-9, III-I2, L14-15 34-6, 46; of discourse Sollors, Werner, 18, 59 confusion, 37-54; personal Stanley, Sandra, 23, 43, 55 experience, 10, 34-6; used to Stephenson, Peter H., 154 construct ethnic identity, ro stereotyping, 6, IO-II, 21, 27,

Nationalism and the Politics of 36, 55, 61, 118, 159-60;

Culture in Quebec, 29 cultural, 11

Stone, Dan, 104

Oloman, Robert, 38 Stoyles, David, 77, 98, 111-12

Oring, Elliott, 28 Stratford, Ontario: aspects Ortner, Sherry, 104 valued by outsiders, 138;

class consciousness, 131, 137;

paradigm: anthropological, comparison to England, 134,

161 N.33 positivist, 9 144, 160; Culture vs culture, Parson report, 13 5-6, 143 I41, 144, 146, 149; English Patterson, Tom, 128-9, 132-3, culture in, 136-7; as English

137-8, 142, 149 place, 138, 141; gender and, Phillips, Robin, 129 140-3; as industrial town,

Podmore, Peggy, 48-9 144-5; maleness of, 13 8;

Porter, John, 19 perception of, 128-30; as

power, 18-20, 60, 125, 1573 rural, 138-48; Shakespearean,

bias of, 59; and carnival, 131-8

3-5 Stratford Festival, 127-31;

construction of, 127-31;

Queer Culture Canada, 4 economic benefits, 141;

Index 193 justification of, 138-9; United Kingdom Club of links between outsiders’ Cambridge, 13, 48, 55 and insiders’ views, 148-51

Sutherland, Sharon, 21, 84, 89, veneer: concept of, 133

93, 98, 105-6, III-I2, 116 Vertical Mosaic, 19 vignette: concept of, 141-2 Taylor, Norma, 128, 131, 136,

144, 147 Waters, John, 129, 132, 138, Thompson, E.P., 124 142-3

Tippett, Maria, 21 Whitehead, Harriet, 104 Toronto Star, 26 Whittaker, Herbert, 132-3 tourism, 126-31, 135-8, 142-8 Williams, Raymond, 80

tradition, 86, 114 Wortley, Russell, 102 Trudgill, Peter, 37 Turner, Bryan, 103 xenophobia, 27, 130

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