Living on the Other Side of Nowhere

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

PART I

CHAPTER ONE - Unraveling Meanings of Community
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Context: The Fisheries Crisis
1.2 Theory and Methodology
1.3 A Reflexive Process
1.4 Overview

CHAPTER TWO - Towards a Definition of Community Within a Feminist Framework
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Definitions of community
2.2 Theories of Community
2.2.1 Theory of Community Lost
2.2.2 Folk Society Theory
2.2.3 Social Constructionist Theory
2.3 Newfoundland Community Research
2.4 Constructing a Definition of Community
2.5 Conclusion

PART II

CHAPTER THREE - Resilience and Resistance: Early Settlement by Europeans
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Local History: An Abundance of Connections
3.1.1 Connecting with the Past through the Fishery and the Ocean
3.1.2 Connections to the Early Settlers
3.1.3 A Living History
3.1.4 A Longing for the Old Country
3.1.5 Parallel Lives
3.1.6 A History of Resistance
3.1.7 Strong Women Then and Now
3.1.8 Knowledge and Skills of Early Settlers
3.2 History and Meanings of Community

CHAPTER FOUR - Changing Meanings of Community: The Church
4.0 Introduction
4.1 The Church and Meanings of Community
4.2 The Roman Catholic Church in Community History
4.3 The Roman Catholic Church and Emergent Consciousness
4.3.1 Priests and Power
4.3.2 Holy Powers
4.3.3 The Nuns and Power
4.3.4 The Church and Other Ruling Groups
4.4 The Church and Meanings of Community Today
4.5 Lines of Fault and Political Awareness

CHAPTER FIVE - Changing Meanings of Community: The Fishery
5.0 Introduction
5.1 Mapping the Influences of Fish Merchants
5.1.1 Oppression and Resistance: Contributions to Meanings of Community
5.1.2 Gender Difference and Meanings of Community
5.1.3 Economic Crisis and Community
5.1.4 Confederation with Canada: Struggle for Control of the Fisheries
5.2 Coping with Loss and Disaster in the Fishery
5.3 Conclusion

PART III

CHAPTER SIX - The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy as Ideology: A Textual Analysis of
TAGS Documents
6.0 Introduction
6.1 Government Response to the Cod Moratorium: Leading up to TAGS
6.2 Unravelling TAGS Policies
6.2.1 The Cod Crisis as a Labour Market Crisis
6.2.2 Male-Centred Assumptions in TAGS Programs
6.2.3 Labour Adjustment Programs: Resettlement by Another Name
6.3 Post-TAGS
6.4 Conclusion

CHAPTER SEVEN - Everyday Life Under TAGS: Charting Lines of Fault
7.0 Introduction
7.1 A Teenager’s Experience of Ruptures in Everyday Life
7.2 One Woman’s Experience of Ruptures in Everyday Life
7.3 One Man’s Experience of TAGS in Everyday Life
7.4 Lines of Fault
7.4.1 TAGS Ideology of Individualism
7.4.2 TAGS and the Social Regulation and Oppression of Women and Men
7.4.3 TAGS Neglect of Social Relations and Informal Support Systems
7.5 Lines of Fault and Resistance
7.6 Conclusion

CHAPTER EIGHT - Conclusions
8.0 Introduction
8.1 Unravelling Meanings in Scholarly Literature
8.2 Community as Belonging and Connections
8.3 TAGS and Meanings of Community
8.4 Implications for Research and Policy Development

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT

Much scholarly work has centered around community in Newfoundland and Labrador. However, comparatively little work has focused on meanings of community. This book compares meanings of community in everyday life for people living in a Southern Shore community on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, with the meanings found in scholarly literature and in government documents produced in association with The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS). TAGS was a federal adjustment program responding to the moratoria on groundfish fishing in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. I draw on Dorothy Smith's feminist theory, which starts from "lived experience" as well as the socioeconomic context of that lived experience as an entry point to illuminating the ideological nature of documents and their links to ruling relations. Smith's discussion of ideology and ruling relations are central to my gender-informed and mediated framework. I explore the contrast between meanings of community in TAGS documents and expert texts looking for lines of fault between these texts and meanings of community in everyday life in a fishing community in Newfoundland.

I use as well Smith's notions of resilience and emergent consciousness to demonstrate that the historical oppressive practices of the ruling group are re-mobilized in TAGS, reflecting society's patriarchal and capitalist ideology generally, and government ideology more specifically. I show the insight of ordinary social actors into the conditions of their existence. My argument is that these concepts are integrally related to community research and policy development.

The research shows that the meanings of community in one community is partly organized by history, geography and gender, and by religious, economic and political regimes. This book concludes by exploring the implications of these interpretations for community research and policy development.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I would like to extend my thanks to the people who participated in this research and shared their stories with me. Their generosity of spirit is evident throughout this book.

My thesis supervisors Barbara Neis, Peter Sinclair, and Joan Pennell provided excellent guidance for which I am truly thankful. I am also grateful for their patience and support throughout my PhD program.

I would like to thank the Institute of Social and Economic Research at MUN for the financial assistance I received which allowed me to complete the research.

Special thanks to the many people who provided support which included endless hours on listening to my soul searching. These people include: Jean Crane, Sagamaw Misel Joe, Janice Parsons, Doug and Clara Dunn, Leslie Bella, Robert Paine, Robert Kelland, Joan Scott, Cindy Harvey, David Philpott, Deanne and David Slater, Barbara Noel, Jed Blackmore and the Folk of the Sea.

I would not have been able to complete this without the loving support of my family. Special thanks to Tony Williamson, Hannah Taylor, Don Balsom, Ralph and Jean Balsom, Joan and Gerald Leamon, Pam and Gerald Guy and all my siblings – thank you for believing in me.

Finally, special thanks to my daughters Victoria and Zoe to whom this work is dedicated. You inspire me to be awake to my own life.

The honesty, wisdom, laughter and love all of you have so generously given have helped me to experience many meanings of community. In so doing, you help me to find the center of myself. Thank you.

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

illustration not visible in this excerpt

PART I

CHAPTER ONE Unraveling Meanings of Community

1.0 Introduction

During an interview for this project, one man described his experience of community life since the closure of Newfoundland’s northern cod fishery in 1992 as “living on the other side of nowhere.” A woman likened her experience to “being lost”. Don’t know where you are from one day to the next.” These descriptions conveyed a sense of loss and uncertainty about the future of their community that pervaded the interviews I conducted for this research – thus my reason for choosing the title.

This book unravels multiple meanings of community in the narratives of research participants from a single, Newfoundland fishing community (known in this book as Comorra). Comorra was chosen primarily because it is dependent on the inshore fishery and was severely affected, as were hundreds of other communities, by the fisheries crisis. Comorra’s population of nearly 1,000 is almost all of Irish Catholic ancestry and has been sustained for generations by the inshore fishery. I documented the narratives of thirty individuals in Comorra and participated in many community gatherings as well as everyday community life. The narrators were fifteen women and fifteen men of varying ages, income levels, and marital status. Three people, two females and a male, agreed to be interviewed at length in order to provide deeper profiles of experience. This allowed for intimate exploration of how the sudden closure of a key industry, the northern cod fishery, upon which Comorra had depended for centuries, influenced research participants’ sense of that community in the years following that closure. Their stories document their experience of community, their struggles and strengths, their insights and conflicts as well as revealing contradictory discourses and acts of resistance.

I juxtaposed the meanings of community in the narratives of the research participants with those which are explicit or implicit in academic community research and in documents associated with government programs introduced in response to the northern cod crisis. Thus, this book unravels meanings of community. It explores the meanings of community in the narratives of research participants from Comorra and the context that informed those meanings; compares and contrast the centrality of community and its multiple meanings for research participants, with its virtual absence from documents related to government adjustment programs introduced in response to the northern cod crisis; and explores the implications of this research for future community research and community development initiatives.

Community is seen here as socially constructed. This permits interpretation of meanings, symbols, ways of being and knowing and allows for examination of differences. This book is about the social construction of meanings of community. It looks at their origins and how the meanings interact with each other to shape people’s experiences within and expectations of their communities. The concept “community” is employed in everyday life, in the media, in academic work, in government documents and elsewhere. However, little research has focused on the social construction of meanings of community and the relationship between those meanings and the experience of community members (Wharf and McKenzie, 1998).

Fishing families in Comorra have a shared sense of community, but as would be expected with creative social actors with different life stories, their meanings of community also diverge somewhat. A central element of their shared meaning of community is a sense of history, and a key part of that history is a shared sense of past and present oppression. The construction of fishery people and their lives in the documents associated with the federal government adjustment program differs from their own constructions particularly as these relate to meanings of community. From the standpoints of fishery people these documents display a distinct ideology character. Local people were aware of the ideological character of these texts and policies and saw in them the continuation of the oppression which had always shaped their community. Their shared meanings of community also demonstrated continued resistance to what sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1987) refers to as “ruling groups” and included knowledge of ruling groups and their practices from the beginning of settlement. Local participants described such ‘key ruling groups’ as the English and the Protestant Churches in the distant past, the Catholic Church and the merchant class in the recent past, and fish processing companies and the federal and provincial governments since World War II. In this research, the Catholic Church, fish processing companies and federal government emerged as key ruling groups for participants in relation to the northern cod crisis and the experience of community in everyday life.

Consistent with Smith’s line of fault argument (1987: 49-60), my research begins with the lives of local people and their experiences of being told one thing but knowing another based on personal experience. The knowledge of local people situates them on one side of a line of fault separating them from the apparently neutral bureaucratic domain of a government, processing company or church where knowledge of the world is created with a view to administering it. Local people understand this line of fault and its implications for their daily life. Just prior to the research, the Catholic Church which had traditionally served as a bedrock of Comorra had undergone significant crisis including charges of child sexual abuse contributing to disjunctures in that community and many others. Research participants were struggling to make meaning out of the contradiction and conflict arising from these disjunctures. In addition, the narrators consistently revisited and linked the past and present fishery struggles in their stories. The narratives show that for them, the current fisheries crisis evolved partly from a historical struggle for management of the fisheries. While I sought to focus the study on the then current cod crisis, the narratives invariably brought me to see that the current situation was framed by the past and could not be sharply divided from it. The narratives insisted that the agenda of federal fisheries had not changed much since Confederation. The narratives show that the management of the fisheries crisis was informed by an ideology about the fishery that treated it as the domain of individuals separate from community and family life. This ideology allowed government to design programs for individuals rather than families and communities. The problems with this approach are clear to people from their experience. This gulf between policy and experience contributes to the formation of a line of fault between what people know based on their everyday experiences and fisheries policies. Smith (1990) says that for a line of fault to occur, people must be aware of its existence. This book will establish that the narrators use storytelling to link past and present lines of fault including those connecting the Roman Catholic Church and historical and current fisheries policies. My intent is to unravel the Comorra narratives to see how the narrator’s lives have been and are ordered to support interests other than their own. I also explore their awareness of such ordering.

1.1 Context: The Fisheries Crisis

For nearly two centuries, the fishery has been the lifeblood for hundreds of coastal settlements in Newfoundland. The recent decline and failure of the fish stocks has brought an economic and social crisis to many of these settlements.

Newfoundland’s fishing communities had been experiencing a crisis in the fishing industry for some time before the decline of the northern cod stocks. The federal government recognized the decline in groundfish stocks as early as the seventies (Canada, 1976). In the early 1980s, the Kirby Task Force on the Atlantic Fishery suggested that reducing the numbers of people involved in the industry would solve the problem of the fishery (Kirby, 1983). However, scholars such as Sinclair (1982) identified other contributing causes of the decline including the larger allocation of northern cod to the offshore fleet and the advancement of trawler technology. In spite of increased fishing, the total northern cod catch remained essentially static through most of the 1980s (Harris, 1990). Finlayson states that fishers began to suspect that the DFO cod stock numbers “were considerably less than accurate” (1994: 9). In his Review of the Northern Cod Stocks, Harris (1990) declared that the cod stocks were in serious decline throughout the 1980s and recommended a considerable decrease in the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for northern cod (1990). The crisis intensified due to continued over fishing. In 1992, a moratorium on fishing for northern cod was finally imposed along the Northeast coast of Newfoundland and Southern Labrador. In August 1993 other moratoria were declared on the south coast of Newfoundland and in Nova Scotia, followed by still more groundfish closures in 1994. These moratoria were an economic disaster for entire regions where groundfish was the economic mainstay of coastal communities.

The first government response to the moratorium, the Northern Cod Adjustment and Rehabilitation Program (CARP), introduced in 1992 was a two-tiered assistance program with higher funding for those who chose training outside the fishing industry. CARP also provided an Income Replacement Program for those who depended on the northern cod fishery. By August 1993, it was clear that the northern cod fishery would not reopen in the near future. CARP was terminated in May 1994 and replaced with The Atlantic Ground Fish Strategy (TAGS). TAGS was a labor market adjustment program for individuals experiencing economic distress from the fisheries crisis. The main purpose of TAGS was to encourage recipients to find careers outside the fisheries. Recipients were required to develop a career plan or retire. TAGS also included an income adjustment program which originally required some recipients to work for benefits. Discussion of its termination was ongoing in the media throughout the late 1990s (although TAGS had been originally scheduled to continue until 1999). The details of TAGS are discussed further in Chapter Seven.

1.2 Theory and Methodology

I employ Smith’s (1990) theory of meaning to explore the origins of meanings of community, exclusions from those meanings and perceptions related to changes in the meanings of community. Smith’s sociology of knowledge makes it conceptually possible to juxtapose the objective knowledge of the socio-economic and politico-administrative regime with the locally organized, reflexive knowledge of individuals in the everyday world. I will look at the implications of this juxtaposition for community research and policy development. As well, I will examine the meanings assigned to community in the lived experience of community members. In particular, I intend to explore, from a feminist perspective, the dimensions of power and gender as they relate to these meanings.

My research is guided by a number of theorists including Anthony Cohen (1982) and Patricia Collins (1990). They present the idea of community as relational, since it implies opposition of the group to others. This definition of community is political, in that it emphasizes the togetherness of members and the expression of difference from others. This separation from other groups denotes the boundary of community as the place where the community ends and others begin. Cohen says boundary is where the members of the community fix the line of belonging (1985: 12). Marianne Gullestad’s (1992: 50) exploration of the “new everyday,” and Sally Cole’s (1988, 1991) call for the integration of gender awareness with symbolic and materialist approaches to research also informed my work.

In keeping with a framework largely based on Smith, and with my own convictions as a feminist, I adopt a qualitative and participatory methodology which is reflexive. Based on the interviews with the people of Comorra, I identify a number of themes which are described and discussed at length later in this book.

The meanings of community experienced in everyday life by the research participants in this study are revealed to have been, at least in part, organized over time by religious, economic, political and administrative regimes. I use Smith’s analysis of language to juxtapose the “objective” knowledge of community within several of these regimes with the locally-organized, reflexive knowledge of individuals who say they are experiencing community in everyday life (Smith, 1990: 23-24).

My approach, therefore, relies on Smith’s critique of ideology and objectivity. She treats ideology as a form of social organization, dependent on “objective” texts that are organized to impose textually mediated, conceptual practices on a local setting in the interest of ruling it. Smith argues that this social organization of knowledge produces the epistemological line of fault between the “objective” knowledge of the regime and the reflexive, everyday knowledge of people (Smith, 1990:43-45).

1.3 A Reflexive Process

Feminist research often demands reflexivity and transparency because it is a political struggle with objectives of emancipation and social justice (Clough, 1992). As a feminist researcher, I seek to open influential aspects of my research framework and approach (motivations, assumptions, concepts, and methodologies) to scrutiny. Further, as a feminist researcher engaged in community research I am concerned with community research’s insertion in social relations of ruling and in uncovering ways in which I reproduce oppressive norms and values that limit women and men living in communities. The task of developing the definition of community for the research framework employed here is described in detail in chapter two because it reflects my search for more respectful and transparent ways of practicing research.

Unravelling was one of my favorite winter pastimes when I was a child growing up on the Southwest coast of Newfoundland. When a sweater became too worn, my grandmother would give it to me to unravel so that she could re-knit the wool into socks or mitts. Unravelling looks easy but in fact requires attention and skill. Finding the right strand of wool to begin the unravelling process took time; I often started with a strand only to find it ended abruptly, forcing me to begin all over again. Unravelling also becomes more complex as you go along. Starting out with one strand and forming it into a neat ball was manageable, but when I came to the patterns in the sweater where the knitter had integrated several different coloured strands it became more challenging. I then had to work with each strand separately, shaping it into its own ball. Unravelling several balls at once, and maintaining the neatness and tightness of each were challenges similar to those which confront me now as I attempt to identify the various, hidden meanings of community and the line or lines of fault between them. At the outset, of this book I anticipated that I would discover distinct meanings of community associated with each group studied. However, I found many colours; many different concepts of community both within and between each of the three groups studied – the research participants, federal government, and community sociologists.

As I worked to unravelling the concept “community” I began to see that the concept itself has a political history within academic literature and government policy. This book does not attempt to provide a definitive history of the concept “community”. However, the literature review of community in this book is significant because it demonstrates that the term is often poorly defined while employed as a common sense and neutral notion. The review shows that while the concept is often romanticized and poorly defined in academic literature and government policy, “community” is often assumed to convey substance, solidarity and strength. I discuss the complexities involved in defining community however I argue that the omission of clear definitions of the concept community in academic and professional discourse contributes to assumptions of apolitical understandings and analysis. These in turn allow for government interventions which are permeated with ideologies which reproduce oppressive norms.

The evolution of the definition of community underpinning this book began with my community research and development practice more than twenty years ago. The journey began in my community of origin on the South coast of Newfoundland as I looked for ways to bring about social justice. I grew up in a family that had survived for generations by fishing. The meaning of community I experienced during my youth involved both a sense of belonging and a sense of not belonging, similar to the sense of community described by Cohen (1982) (see Chapter Three). My father conveyed to me a sense of being outside; of living in one place and having a sense of belonging to another. He moved to our small community as a young man and experienced a different sense of community than I did growing up there. My father talked about himself as an outsider. My father’s experience became more real to me when I left my home community to go to university. As a young woman I believed I was escaping “community” (as I experienced it) by physically leaving the place and people I had belonged to. I was eager to escape a community controlled by a fish merchant. After leaving, I became aware of how much I belonged to the place I had left behind. I experienced a deep sense of loss, missing the place as well as the people.

I have since come to see that meanings of community are deeply personal for other people as well. My work in participatory community research made me aware of the complexities inherent in “community” generally (Taylor, 1995). As a social activist I became conscious of gender issues associated with meanings of community in fishing villages. My social justice concerns were strengthened as a result of these experiences. I tried to make sense of these experiences and find tools for social change through education and my work. With an undergraduate degree in political science I was hired as a research assistant by Memorial University’s Extension Service. A smorgasbord of opportunities were available to me through MUN’s field staff and researchers. I worked with field workers in communities throughout Newfoundland and Labrador heightening my appreciation of meanings hidden and dormant in community situations. With these workers I deciphered the lessons to be found in an encounter in a storeloft, an afternoon chat over a cup of tea, a community meeting, a phone call, the criticisms of others. I was constantly asked by the field workers: what does this mean to this person, that person, this family, this community, to yourself?
I was also challenged to interpret the messages in texts written by community members, field workers and government. What were the hidden meanings? Who would benefit or lose? The struggle for justice, I learned early, required being open to the flow of discussion and diversity of meanings in daily life.

I went back to school again seeking to become more effective as a social activist. There I became aware of my own internalized oppression and domination. My politicization involved analyzing the meanings of dynamics and emotions in my own life. My training as a feminist therapist in a graduate social work program taught me that my interpretation of interviews and texts was limited by what I was willing to hear and that only by recognizing and working through my own issues of internalized oppression, shame and responsibility could I address these issues in the lives of others. Initially, as a feminist therapist, I worked most often with women who had been abused, but also at times with their abusers. Over time, I came to see that many of the issues we were discussing in therapy led me back to broader issues, and, in particular, back to the processes through which people consciously and unconsciously create their communities. As a result of my Ph.D. studies and twenty years of working with people struggling to create community in their lives, I see community as a vital social process that is often contradictory, complex and sometimes painful. I question my role as researcher and how I may be reproducing dominant ways of thinking about meanings of community instead of broadening discourses to include the many meanings of community experienced by people. I realize that my need to understand the struggles and strengths in the experience of community also reflect my need to understand myself.

I now return to the unravelling analogy I used earlier. The process of exploring the lines of fault in meanings of community is similar to that of unravelling three woollen tapestries; the various colours and types of yarn are akin to the different perceptions, from the different standpoints of the three groups on which I base my study. On one side of the line of fault are two complex and neutral (as opposed to lived experience) meanings of community making two separate tapestries: (a) meanings of community inherent in a federal adjustment program (TAGS); (b) the objective knowledge of community as defined and identified in sociological literature. On the other side of the line of fault is the tapestry of reflexive and locally organized knowledge holding the meanings of community of people living it in everyday life. In this book, this third tapestry is made up of the interwoven voices of thirty participants in Comorra.

The methodology used in the analysis of those tapestries was developed by Smith (1990, 1983) and was based on the following premises. Smith’s methodology is anchored in women’s lived experiences including their socioeconomic contexts. Lived experience is an entry point for identifying the ideological frames of documents and their links to ruling relations. Smith argues that lived experience must be analyzed and interpreted to uncover how it is socially organized and the conditions which produced it (Smith, 1990, 1983). “Experience,” says Bannerji, “is the originating point of knowledge, an interpretation, a relational sense making, which incorporates social meaning . . . where but in ourselves and lives can we begin our explanatory and analytical activities” (1995: 86-88). The analysis of lived experience begins where people are socially located and explores how their worlds come into being. Thus, my inquiry begins in the actual lives of local people and moves out to the forces which shape their experiences and consciousness. This participatory approach required involvement in community events and activities over a two-year period as well as in-depth interviews with thirty individuals from Comorra who expressed an interest in participating in my research. These activities enabled me to develop the theoretical questions which shaped the framework of my study. The research began by examining everyday community life from the perspectives of research participants. These constructions were then contrasted with those found in official TAGS texts. The research design has five main components: (1) gaining entry and participant observation; (2) individual interviews; (3) individual profiles of experience; (4) textual analysis of government documents; (5) comparison of constructs of community by men and women in Comorra with the construction of community in official texts. Each of these components has been guided by the categories and concepts used by research participants.

1.4 Overview

This book is organized to introduce the reader to the methodological and theoretical framework which sets the context for understanding the data and its analysis. It is divided into three parts. Part One (Chapters One and Two) reviews social science literature on community and develops the analytical framework of the book. Part Two (Chapters Three, Four and Five) responds to Smith’s questions: “How does it happen to us as it does? How is this world in which we act and suffer together put together?” (Smith, 1987: 154). This leads to a discussion of the historical dimension that informs research participants’ contemporary meanings of community. Local people provided this starting point in their explications of the evolution of their current meanings of community. Their responses required that I investigate their history. Therefore, Chapter Three contains accounts of research participants and scholarly histories of early European settlement in Newfoundland. In Chapters Four and Five, the focus shifts to the local and scholarly histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I examine the practices and mechanisms of the Roman Catholic Church (Chapter Four) and the ruling groups controlling the fishery in the past (Chapter Five), exploring their influence on meanings of community today. Both local and scholarly histories map the persistent hierarchy of social privilege in Newfoundland outlining historical and material conditions contributing to current lines of fault in meanings of community.

Part Three (Chapters Six, Seven and Eight) shows how current lines of fault between experiences of community life and government policy are mediated by class and gender. Chapter Six sketches the events shaping the northern cod moratorium setting the context for the textual analysis of TAGS documents and life under TAGS. This chapter highlights the continued capacity of government to perpetuate the hierarchy of social privileges into and through the crisis, despite challenges. Chapter Six also shows that TAGS is part of a government regulated reorganization of fishing communities by the ruling group. Smith’s method of textual analysis and her line of fault theory are employed to explore meanings of community within TAGS documents, with particular attention to TAGS emphasis on individualism and patriarchal authority. Chapter Seven details experiences of contemporary community life. Three profiles of individual experiences of the moratorium explore contemporary ideas of community and the forces affecting perceptions. Chapter Eight synthesizes the meanings the study has revealed in literature , government policy, and lived experience. I conclude with the implications of this research for community research and social policy.

CHAPTER TWO Towards a Definition of Community Within a Feminist Framework

2.0 Introduction

My research arose as an inquiry into why and how meanings of community

emerged as a line of fault for both men and women living in a fishing village affected by TAGS. I examine the experiences which situate local people on one side of that line of fault (Smith, 1990) separating them from the bureaucratic domain (where knowledge of the world is objectified and created with a view to its administration) on the other side of the line. This chapter begins by presenting the history of the concept “community”in community research and explores its connections to that line of fault. I begin by exploring various definitions of community. I go on to outline three prominent theories which have influenced definitions of community in research. These are the “loss of community” thesis, the “folk society” thesis and “community as social construction.” I explore the strengths and limitations of these theories in Newfoundland community research and their connections to current lines of fault in Comorra.

The complexities I found in the narratives of Comorra necessitated a through and detailed analysis of my definition of community. In order to maintain transparency in all aspects of this project, I am required to explain the evolution of the definition of community employed here. I draw on multiple theories including social constructionists’ (such as Cohen, 1985) discussion of community. I explore the strengths and limitations of Cohen’s perception of community as a cultural field consisting of a complex set of symbols. I further develop my definition of community by drawing on additional theorists such as Cole (1991), Collins (1990) and Gullestad (1992). They provide key elements in the definition of community that informs this work. They validate people as meaning makers, the significance of lived experience in community, seeing it as socially constructed and dynamic. Finally, they avoid such dichotomies as rural-traditional/ urban-modern, work/ home and private/public. This is useful in a theoretical framework for studying Newfoundland fishing communities where work and home, and public and private overlap. In the final section of this chapter I outline the feminist theoretical framework that informs my definition of community as well as my analysis.

The framework allows me to examine and contrast definitions (abstract theoretical constructs) and meanings (implicit and explicit ways of thinking and being) related to the concept “community” in scholarly literature, government texts and daily life. In this approach community refers to belonging to and connecting with a social and geographic context. My framework is guided primarily by Dorothy Smith’s innovative sociology, particularly her theories of “line of fault,” (1987,1990) “standpoints” (Campbell and Manicom, 1995) and “ideological frame” (Smith, 1987,1990). I show that Smith’s sociology provides a framework to explore definitions and meanings of “community” — how the concept “community” is spoken about and employed in daily life, government texts and literature on community. The framework allows for an investigation of the link between ideological frames of the concept “community” in government documents related to TAGS and those in the daily life of research participants. Ideological frame, as used by Smith (1990) and as employed in this book, identifies ideologies as processes produced and constructed through human activity. Once in place, an ideological frame renders invisible the process of its own production, claiming the results as ‘common sense.’ The framework for this research provides access to and validates the knowledge and experience of local people, including the centrality of community to their sense of themselves. It also allows elements (history, gender, generation/age, class, boundaries, public and private spaces, ruling relations, diversity) of community to emerge.

2.1 Definitions of community

As the following sections on definitions and theories of community demonstrate, definitions of community have properties which provide ways of thinking about and working with people’s lives. While I do not intend to explore exhaustively the many definitions of community in the social science literature, ninety-four according to Hillery (1955), it is useful to present a range and variety of definitions.

Much of the literature on community uses the term without definition, implying neutrality and objectivity, and obscuring features such as gender, class and race (Walker, 1990). Early definitions of community emphasized locality. Geographic area and a sense of place set the boundaries for common living and provided a basis for solidarity (Hillery, 1955). Other characteristics were included in Harper and Dunham’s definition of community: “. . . physical, geographical and territoriality boundaries which indicate a certain uniqueness or separateness; and social or cultural homogeneity, consensus, self-help, or other forms of communal behaviour and interacting relationships” (1959: 23). Arensberg and Kimball (1965) expanded this definition by distinguishing between four types of community: the rural community; the “fringe” community, the town and the metropolis.

Early definitions such as Redfield’s (1947) for example, have also attributed to community the characteristics of distinctiveness and self-sufficiency, along with shared geography, smallness and homogeneity. Warren’s definition of community, which is often quoted in community literature, builds on Redfield’s and emphasizes the importance of community functions:

. . . that combination of social units and systems which perform the major social functions having locality relevance. This is another way of saying that by ‘community’ we mean the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to these broad areas of activity which are necessary in day to day living (Warren, 1963: 9).

For Warren, the “social functions with community relevance” are production, distribution, consumption, socialization, social control, social participation and mutual support. He goes on to say that “these functions are performed by a great variety of institutional auspices,” making it difficult both to identify communities and to generalize about them (1978: 9-13). Warren’s approach, which emphasizes the importance of structures of relationships rather than individual action, is still influential in North American sociological research. This approach looks for patterns and regularities in community life, and studies qualities that make for the competent functioning of community. It has been critiqued because of its definition of competent communities as being characterized by consensus, social cohesion, solidarity as well as shared values, beliefs and moral order (Frazer and Lacey, 1993).

Writing in the 1970s, Edwards and Jones further refined the definition to include some degree of autonomy:

The term community refers in this textbook to such settlements as the plantation, the farm village, the town and the city. What is common to all of these and what is considered essential to the definition of community used here is that in each case there is a grouping of people who reside in a specific locality and who exercise some degree of local autonomy in organizing their social life in such a way that they can, from that locality base, satisfy the full range of their daily needs (Edwards and Jones, 1976: 12).

Wharf (1992) argues that Edwards and Jones may overestimate both the degree of local autonomy in many communities, as well as the degree of commonality in communities. Repo argued that definitions which have been limited to geography and common ties “assume a classless society at the local level where people of all classes work toward a common goal” (1971: 61). Warren (1980) argued that the notion of common ties did not take into account divisions of class, race and gender within communities. His research showed that neighbourhoods differed along a number of dimensions, including identity and interaction, and did not necessarily share common ties.

More recently feminists contend that definitions of community as local space and common ties are limited and overlook differences such as gender. Dominelli, for example, points out that traditional definitions of community are based on the assumption that, “community is a local space which is small enough for people to interact with each other. These definitions have a further common characteristic. Until feminists redressed the balance they ignored gender. This is strange for women have always been present and active in the community” (1989: 2).

Contemporary scholars question the value of treating communities as entities with specifiable attributes (Wharf and Clague, 1997). Following the lead of Arensberg and Kimball, some prefer instead to regard community as a process or system: “The community should be viewed as a process involving social structure and cultural behavior . . . our own approach will start with the notion of community as a master system encompassing social forms and cultural behavior in interdependent subsidiary systems (institutions)” (1965:2-3).

Social constructionists such as Ng, Walker and Muller (1990) suggest that the “concept” community take account of the interconnection and diversity of everyday life. They point out that community is a product of people’s activities and activities of ruling also penetrate relations in community life. The community can no longer be equated with “the good and benevolent sphere of social life” (Ng, Walker and Muller, 1990: 316). They assume that communities reflect larger society which, in Canada, is patriarchal and where resources and power are distributed unequally. In communities, ruling arrangements are dominated by clusters of mostly male elites who rule in their own interests. Consequently, Ng, Walker and Muller (1990), Frazer and Lacey (1993), Wharf and Clague (1997) and others have argued that community cannot be employed in research and analysis without being clearly defined. They contend that failure to provide a definition is worrying since it allows slippage. Frazer and Lacey (1993) argue that this slippage gives rise to difficulty in political analysis, for example, allowing the exclusion of women and others, obscuring intolerance and oppression, and permitting ruling arrangements to remain vague. Further, inadequate definitions or failure to provide definitions lend support to the notion that “community” is a solution to social problems.

Definitions of communities are influenced by theories which have dominated the literature. I discuss three of these theories to demonstrate their contribution to definitions of community.

2.2 Theories of Community

2.2.1 Theory of Community Lost

The classical theory of community lost was developed by Tonnies in his formulation of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (1887) and strengthened by Simmel’s (Wolff, 1950) discussion of that formulation. Tonnies presents community (gemeinschaft) as a natural state of affairs where people live all their lives in the same area in which they were born. They carry on all their lifelong interactions (work, marriage, worship, play) with the same people (Tonnies, 1963: 40). Tonnies argues that intimacy and social cohesion develop through this multitude of social relations and familiarity with role patterns. In contrast, he describes gesellschaft as

. . . the artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the gemeinschaft in so far as individuals live and dwell together peacefully. However, in the gemeinschaft they remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors (1963: 42).

Simmel (Wolff, 1950) equated gemeinschaft and gesellschaft with the dichotomies of rurality‑urbanism and tradition‑modernity. The dichotomies which emerged from Simmel’s analysis include a moral critique of industrialized urban centres and urban lifestyles. This theory promotes a nostalgia for rural communities of the past which are believed to be harmonious and integrated, and the notion that urban lifestyles promote individualism and disharmony. These dichotomies were also found in the work of the Chicago School, particularly the work of Redfield (1947), who developed an ideal-type of folk society based on gemeinschaft and a model of urban society based on gesellschaft.

2.2.2 Folk Society Theory

Folk society theory developed from Redfield’s (1947) work which in turn evolved from Wirth’s (1938) causal model of the determinants of gemeinschaft and a model of urban society based on gesellschaft. Redfield’s determinants of gemeinschaft included organization around kinship ties, intimate face to face relations, minimal division of labour, sense of loyalty and obligation, and shared values and behaviours. In contrast, gesellschaft was identified by weak kinship ties, superficial relations, a high degree of specialization, limited cohesion and readiness to change values (Redfield, 1947). These models were challenged by Lewis (1949) who argued that Redfield’s model overlooked diversity and differences within small rural communities. Despite Lewis’ arguments, Redfield’s folk society model influenced community research in Canada until the 1960s (i.e. Guindon, 1964; Rioux, 1964). The definitions of “strong,” “good,” “healthy” and “competent” communities found in some literature from the seventies and eighties emerged from Redfield’s work. Scholars such as Cottrell (1977), Warren (1978) and Adler (1982) developed models to measure the functioning of communities or the ability of communities to be “strong” or “good” communities. Community strength is most often seen as social vitality, economic viability and political efficacy (Bowles, 1981). Social vitality refers to the process by which communities become mutually bonded in reciprocal relationships. Economic viability refers to the ability of a community to create and maintain its own locally initiated and controlled system of material production and consumption. Political efficacy refers to the process by which a community creates and maintains some commonly accepted basis of power mobilization and distribution (Bowles, 1981). Social vitality and economic viability parallel the distinctions between gemeinschaft (socially determined inter-personal reciprocity networks) and gesellschaft (economically determined inter-dependency contract relationships) (Blishen et al, 1979).

2.2.3 Social Constructionist Theory

Folk society theory relies on deterministic definitions of community. Social constructionist theory, in contrast, views community as a field of practice and its focus

is on the realm of meaning (Frazer and Lacey, 1993). Frazer and Lacey draw upon social construction to analyze the themes of communitarian discourse which emphasizes collective as opposed to individual rights. This is essentially a philosophical debate that is beyond the scope of this research which focusses on the social construction of community in everyday life. Social construction as it is employed here begins with the particular activities of people and explores how these practical activities are co-ordinated. Feminist and other critical discourses in this school have argued that traditional definitions of community tend to be structured in terms of binary oppositions such as public/private and industrial society versus home and community (Frazer and Lacey, 1993). A social constructionist stance transcends these dichotomies. The feminist framework, methodology and interpretative approach that I use in this research are anchored in social construction and are based on three elements in Dorothy Smith’s (1990) approach. First, lived experience is a rich source of knowledge about ideological and social processes. Second, social construction values and builds on everyday experience. It supports the notion that the personal is political and values the authority of experience in knowledge production and social change. Third, it assumes that experience must be analyzed and interpreted in order to uncover how it is socially organized and the ideological and material conditions that produce it (Smith, 1990). In section 2.4 of this chapter, I show that social construction provides the starting point for unravelling the ways in which meanings of community contain domination, contradictions and resistance. I will now briefly explore Newfoundland literature, first looking at definitions and then theories of community within it, in order to provide a background for my framework.

2.3 Newfoundland Community Research

Marilyn Silverman (1985) sees Newfoundland and Labrador as the site of some of the most intense investigations of community to date. She refers to the extensive work sponsored by the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Memorial University. Newfoundland may even be described as Canada’s “best documented society” (Cohen, 1980: 215). A wealth of published and unpublished works make up a distinctive Newfoundland and Labrador contribution to a growing archive of literature on community. This book is informed by that literature and contributes, in particular, to the emerging feminist literature on Newfoundland communities. In recent years, feminist research contributed to capturing the complexity of people’s experiences of community and challenged dominant forms of investigation into communities (McGrath, Neis and Porter, 1995).

The major form of investigation into Newfoundland communities was influenced by the Norwegian tradition of social research ethnography with an emphasis on both gemeinschaft and folk society. Within the early period of community research in Newfoundland, ethnographic monographs provided limited definitions of community which enshrined standardized representations of communities and their people (Philbrook, 1966; Firestone, 1967; Faris, 1972). Firestone’s definition includes a “social area” which is a “geographical area in which all inhabitants are all known to one another” (1967: 31). He described Savage Cove, the community he studied, as egalitarian and homogeneous. This is closely aligned with Tonnies’s image of gemeinschaft as well as with Redfield’s (1947) ideal model of folk society. Iverson and Matthews (1968) provided a geographic description for the Newfoundland communities they studied. Communities were often presented as isolated villages bounded on all sides by water and woods, or as natural communities (Philbrook, 1966; Iverson and Matthews, 1968). Faris expanded on these geographic definitions of community as “a functioning system; but it is a functioning system which is part of other systems, a historical past, and a broader present without which it cannot be understood” (1972:3).

More recent ethnographies show varied responses to the problem of defining community. Kennedy has criticized anthropological ethnography for “fossilizing” communities in an “ethnographic present” (1985: 34). However his concept of community is not clearly defined. Others such as Robinson (1995) do not provide any definitions of community.

Early research on fishing communities in Newfoundland consistently supported an approach to communities as ideal folk societies which were in danger of being lost. The dichotomies which emerge from early ethnographies imply a moral critique of industrialized urban centres and urban lifestyles (Stiles, 1972; Nemec, 1972; Andersen and Stiles, 1973). These dichotomies also influenced studies of fishing and fishing communities (Stiles, 1972; Nemec, 1972; Andersen and Stiles, 1973) and echo a Norwegian preoccupation with themes of “community lost” (due to modernization) and “revitalizing lost communities” (Gullestad, 1992: 46). Monographs by Brox (1969, 1972) and Wadel (1969) challenge “. . . the modernization approach that informed both previous research and government policy in relation to rural Newfoundland” (Neis, 1992: 325).

The notion of community lost has been prominent in Newfoundland literature partly because of government resettlement policies. Sociologists have argued against government policies which promoted urban development at the expense of rural Newfoundland (Matthews, 1993). Sociologists and anthropologists have consistently raised objections toward these policies of resettlement (Matthews, 1993: 225). Matthews reports that “. . . studies repeatedly showed that many of those who had resettled had no intentions of moving only a few months prior to doing so. They were essentially intimidated into moving by government reports that a large number of Newfoundland communities ‘would have to go’” (1993: 225). He adds that arguments “for and against resettlement have waged in Newfoundland for nearly a quarter century” (1993: 225). His discussion reflects the traditional dichotomy of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft with sociologists most often arguing against resettlement because they value the gemeinschaft characteristics of Newfoundland fishing communities. This was supported by the belief that “rural Newfoundlanders have different value systems than their urban counterparts” (Matthews, 1976: 226). However, Parzival Copes’ (1972) arguments supported gesellschaft by emphasizing that modern larger (both near and offshore) fishing vessels were more cost-effective than the traditional smaller inshore vessels of the labour-intensive inshore fishery. His work supported provincial and federal policies which promoted the modernization and resettlement of fishing villages in Newfoundland.

Pocius’ ethnography, like others (for example, Andersen and Stiles, 1973) in the Norwegian tradition, approaches community as space (1991: 3). He looks at the space of community membership and history, the space of production and the space of consumption. His approach to community, while valuing local knowledge, continues to reproduce the idea of homogeneity. For example, he reduces the discussion of gender to the traditional naturalized dichotomy of male/public and female/private.

Davis’ portrayal of her first (1983) experience in the community she studied draws on the idealized folk society model of Redfield. She says this community was “tightly bounded, basically egalitarian, cautiously cooperative and dominated in both its domestic and public (landbound) spheres by women both as individuals and as groups” (1995: 280). Her later experience of the same community reflects the theme of community lost: the “high self-esteem and egalitarian moral order, which had once pervaded the community and held it together had dissolved” (1995: 280).

Earlier ethnographic literature describes male and female labour in Newfoundland fishing villages as “complementary” (Davis, 1983), but also changing. The traditional, instrumental roles of Newfoundland fisher wives are seen as changed. Davis (1983) saw women as playing quasi-spiritual supportive roles (as well as instrumental roles). Women generated “a sense” that “we’re all in it together” and they were responsible for the work of worrying. She described a “general, passive worry as well as actual, direct participation, that reinforces a woman’s sense of belonging to the community fishery” (1988: 220). Women were emotionally involved in the fishery because they worried about their men on the sea. However, women also had instrumental roles to play maintaining families and communities and enabling men to be away at sea for long periods (Davis, 1983; 1988).

Traditional ethnographies may reproduce the alienation and objectification of their subjects. Wadel (1973), for example, investigated the unemployment system in one Newfoundland fishing community showing the social costs of that system to the individuals, family and community. Women are largely seen as ‘family’ in Wadel’s work. This supports the perspective of rural women of Newfoundland as passive victims of gender. They are portrayed in some early ethnography as passive, unfortunate recipients of oppression (Firestone, 1967; Faris, 1972; Wadel, 1973). Feminists point out that this overlooks their ability to bring about changes in their lives (Antler, 1977; Davis, 1983; Neis, 1993; Porter, 1993). Murray (1979) demonstrates that women were participants in the fishery, drying and salting cod, making sails and clothing for the fishers. Her description of women as giving ‘more than 50 percent’ included raising food for the family, overall household care and maintenance and generally providing care giving in the community. McGrath, Neis and Porter (1995) point out that Murray’s work was “. . . revolutionary because no one had previously written about such experiences” (1995: viii).

Murray (1979), Porter (1985), Nadel-Klein and Davis (1988), Cole (1991) and others have challenged the egalitarian folk society model of community of early ethnographies and simplifications of male dominance. For example, Cole challenges Faris’s interpretation of the relationship between husbands and wives in fishing families. She quotes Faris: “A man without a wife is like a man without a good boat or a good horse and a woman is, in the division of shares of a voyage, considered an item in her husband’s capital, just as a cod trap or an engine” (Faris, 1972: 75). “It is unlikely,” says Cole, “that Faris is presenting the Newfoundland woman’s perception of herself . . . . it is also unclear whether this is Faris’s interpretation of a husband’s perception of a wife or if Newfoundland fishermen themselves see the conjugal relationship in this way” (Cole, 1991: 159). Nadel-Klein and Davis point out the tendency in community research to overemphasize the similarities found in women’s lives in fishing communities in various settings, arguing “that to understand fishing communities and economies, the adaptive challenges of fishing must be placed within the specific context of history, political economy and gender ideology” (1988: 6).

McGrath, Neis and Porter (1995) describe feminist research on Newfoundland communities as evolving. They point out that early feminist work on communities (Murray, 1979) allowed women and women’s work to become visible and valued for its contribution to the economy. Feminists such as Antler, Porter and Neis moved the literature forward by analysing the sources of women’s subordination through study of economic conditions and structure and of women’s unpaid work. McGrath, Neis and Porter (1995) point out that new writers are drawing on scholars such as Smith to develop new analytical frameworks. This movement is consistent with feminist research elsewhere. Recent feminist work argues that studies which detail the differing roles of men and women in a community are inadequate (Frazer and Lacey, 1993). Some feminists want to see explicit analyses of male dominance and power as a step towards emancipatory action for women in both public and domestic spheres (Dominelli, 1995). Others, influenced by black feminists, third world feminists, critical and postmodern feminists and theorists, call for an integrative approach to the concept “community” which moves beyond a binary world view (Ristock and Pennell, 1996; Cole, 1991; Miles, 1991).

The final section of this chapter outlines the feminist framework for this book proposing a new and more integrated approach to researching community. This perspective sees categories such as “community,” “men” and “women” as actively constructed through the meanings and practices which invest them with significance in everyday social interchange. It centres on the recognition of social experiences such as gender and class as social divisions and identities as socially constructed, dynamic and interactive.

2.4 Constructing a Definition of Community

My discussion of traditional definitions and theories in scholarly literature suggests that they have restricted analysis of who rules and how in everyday community life. Feminists such as Ng, Walker and Muller have criticized traditional views of community as being at the very least, inadequate and, at worst, contributing to oppressive practices in the management of people’s lives. They argue that traditional views promote duality and allusions such as the notion that the state is “rigid and inflexible” while community is “good and benevolent” (1990: 318).

During my struggle to find a definition of community for this work, I went back to the journals I kept over the years as a community activist. I traced in my journals the same tensions discussed by Ng, Muller and Walker. I recalled how I had talked and written of communities as inherently good. However, those journals also showed my vacillations about everyday community life which perpetuated experiences of oppression for both women and men. On the one hand, I have had experiences of community which enhanced self-worth and promoted feelings of togetherness with others. On the other hand, I have also experienced community as an enclosure which has demeaned people and held them hostage to its past. I began to understand that the definition of community I used in my work had to include these incongruities and tensions. In order to accomplish this, the definition of community used in this work emerges from the deeply held beliefs and experiences of local people about what constitutes their community. It also builds on the efforts of feminists, social constructionists and others who work to incorporate the paradoxes and tensions of community into their definition.

My definition of community begins with Cohen (1985) who argues that belonging to a social context, be it to a local community or to an ethnic community, is the driving force behind the social construction of community. My research indicates that participants have connections to both a social and local context building on Cohen’s work. Participants persistently referred to the physical and social context of the community as well as its present and past connections with the fishery and ocean as sources of feelings of belonging to community.

Cohen defines community as a group in which the members have something in common: they see themselves as distinct from other recognized groups. His idea of community is relational, implying opposition of the group to others (1985: 107). This definition is also political, emphasizing the togetherness of members and their expression of difference from others. This separation from other groups denotes the boundary of community, where the members of the community fix the line of belonging. In his study of Whalsay, a community in the Shetland Islands, Cohen defines the sense of belonging as:

When people thus identify themselves as belonging to Whalsay, they merge the primacy of their immediate kinship and neighbouring associations with the community as a whole. They merge a tradition, a folk history, with the present. They thus make time and place a vocabulary for expressing their attachments and associations, a vocabulary that is so fluid that it can serve to mask the conflicting demands of the different sections to which they belong (Cohen, 1982: 29).

He argues that the definition of a community is contained in the perception and recognition of the boundary. For Cohen, community and its feelings of belonging together, and political unity are both constructed through the use of symbols (i.e. metaphors representing other things). They allow the user to supply some meaning. Cohen (1985) argues that a community shares symbols as it shares language or behaviour. However community members do not necessarily have the same interpretation of these symbols, or share their meaning in the same way. All have their own interpretation of the symbols. This approach provides for diversity within communities and supports the importance of exploring that diversity through uncovering individual meanings in community research (Cohen, 1985:16).

Another important contribution to togetherness pointed out by Cohen is that of a commonly accepted past. A commonly accepted past “is a selective construction of the past which resonates with contemporary influences” (Cohen, 1982: 13). Recalling the past, he says, raises emotions which enhance community unity. Interpreted selectively, this past becomes myth “acting as a charter for contemporary action” (Cohen, 1982: 14). This myth is open for interpretation, again giving an illusion of commonality. Cohen says that actions in the present are justified by linking them to a sacred past. Participants in my research also indicate that having a shared past is an important element of their experience of community. However, their stories also demonstrate that remembering the past has been a vehicle for people to become conscious of their ability to construct everyday community life differently. For example, participants’ stories reveal a critical remembering of the past which helps them make sense of their differences. It unmasks previous oppressions imposed from outside as well as within the boundaries of community. From this perspective past history is seen as usable as well as sacred. This critical remembering of a usable past allows the possibility for exposure of social reality, along with resistance and social change. For example, participants’ stories demonstrate that critical remembering allows the possibility of understanding power relations in everyday community, the material conditions that circumscribe everyday life, the ways in which particular social practices undermine or reproduce inequality and domination and the power of individual and collective agency in negotiating courses of action amid social constraints. This critical remembering can allow for dialogue and differences. From this perspective, having a shared past is seen as dynamic and empowering in everyday community life. A shared past can contribute to feelings of belonging, ownership, accountability and enhance the power to act.

Cohen argues that the essence of community, the feeling of togetherness, is in itself a symbol with varied meanings. He points out that this variability of interpretations means that this feeling of togetherness has to be maintained through manipulation of its symbols, which are effective because of their imprecision and the space for subjectivity in their interpretation. Individual interests and the common cause are integrated, giving the illusion of unity to the community.

The range of symbols within a community contributes to differences within it because the members may be able to recognize the different meanings of “community” of others. At the same time, these symbols provide mechanisms of expression, interpretation and containment (1982: 12). Symbols, then, transform the reality of difference into the illusion of similarity and unite the members of a community against the outside. In this way, Cohen argues, symbols construct the boundaries of community (1982: 12). If we perceive communities as those groups emphasizing their togetherness and their difference from other groups, then the outside may be perceived as the political enemy against which the group can perceive itself as unified.

While I agree with Cohen that symbols contribute to the construction of community, I have come to see that there are other aspects to it as well. People construct community through making sense of their daily life and, one part of this, is by consciously constructing symbols which at times provide the illusion of togetherness. However, at other times, people consciously participate in the construction of community and make connections between their experiences as individuals, family members, and as members of a community which can also permit acceptance of difference. This conscious participation in the making of community, in my experience, moves the construction of community beyond illusion. My research shows that people are agents with common sense understandings of everyday social practices. Their stories demonstrate varying degrees of understanding of and insights into their own construction of community. Their stories also show that people talk about what is significant and meaningful to them in their construction of community. Those stories demonstrate a construction of community which encompasses political and social, as well as subjective, spiritual and private aspects of struggle, uniting within its structure the public and private spheres of life. Their stories do not suggest that their community is constructed solely on an illusion of togetherness, nor, as I will show here, that community requires a non-contradictory unity.

My research demonstrates the usefulness of seeing community as socially constructed. It allows for interpreting meanings, symbols, ways of being and knowing. It establishes boundaries for the research and allows for examination of difference. Defining communities as social constructions also allows for a methodology that includes profiles of experience and life histories and lets different voices be heard. A life history must, necessarily, go back to the beginning of a life; my profiles of experience are segments from a life, described in detail . Meaning is explored; hence, the values, aspirations, experiences, and strategies of women and men can be heard. Cole (1991), Collins (1990) and (Gullestad, 1992) and Smith (1990) validate the significance of lived experience in community, seeing it as socially constructed and dynamic.

Smith’s notion of relations of ruling is central to my definition of community but not to Cohen’s. Smith defines the relations of ruling as “. . . something more general than the notion of government as political organization. She argues that, for the work of ruling, lived experience is transformed into objectified forms of knowledge, and is an entry point for understanding how ruling works. I refer rather to that total complex of activities, differentiated in many spheres, by which our kind of society is ruled, managed and administered” (1990:14). Lived experience is the place from which to begin an inquiry, as well as a place to return to. It provides a real-life context from which to reflect on discourse and textual practices and their effects on people’s lives ( Smith, 1990: 23). Smith’s concept of ruling includes the understanding that social organizations and the texts they produce work to create orderliness. She and others have noted “how pervasive in contemporary capitalist social life are these means of exercising power and authority” (Campbell and Manicom, 1995: 13).

Ruling relations are central to the construction of communities. The assumption that ordinary people do indeed have insight into the nature of ruling relations, and that their role is not merely passive and receptive, is central to my understanding of community. While research participants, policy makers and scholars may not share the same understandings, examining and respecting those understandings is a prerequisite to forging a shared critical consciousness of capitalism. Smith’s concept of ruling supports viewing people in community as interpretive and communicative actors. From Smith’s perspective, people develop language and symbols to critique the institutions which dominate them, providing them with “authority to speak” and permitting an awareness of a line of fault (Smith, 1987: 34). Smith argues that the dynamics of communities are influenced by ruling apparatuses working through official texts that are used to justify and implement policy. For this reason an examination of such texts from the point of view of people in communities can show us how they are ideological frames. They also point to ways that policies and practices pose a threat to communities and to people’s day to day lives.

The ‘line of fault’ is the “actual or potential disjuncture between experiences and the forms in which experiences are socially expressed” (Smith, 1987: 50). Smith (1987) argues that the women’s movement has given women the ability to see their place in society and to see that a line of fault exists because of men’s power over women. The forms of thought and the means of expression available to women were dominated and made by men. Smith says that the women’s movement helped women to see the construction of society in texts such as government documents. For a line of fault to occur, according to Smith, research participants must have awareness of its existence. As women become aware that their experiences and lives are different from those depicted through texts, and different from those of men, they become aware that their experiences are not seen as a form of knowledge nor as a source of authority by ruling groups. A line of fault emerges between what women have experienced, a valid form of knowledge, and the construction of their lives through texts and socially organized practices. Smith says that women’s exploration of their experience can give them “authority to speak,” leading to an awareness of this line of fault.

Thus, community as it is employed in this book refers to social connections which promote a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging is based on an identification with common elements such as place, shared history, the fisheries, the church and the ocean. This multifaceted definition of community is useful because it allows for building theories capable of accounting for the ways in which dominant identities are not only sustained but challenged.

Smith’s sociology provides the framework for this book because it allows for the exploration of “the status of knowledge as socially and materially organized, as produced by individuals in actual settings and as organized by and organizing definite social relations” (Smith, 1990: 62).

This framework views people as interpretive and communicative actors allowing researchers to work with people as subjects rather than objects of research. This approach can be shared outside of the walls of academe. Casting her work as “mapping social relations,” Dorothy Smith concludes: “. . . [T]hough some of the work of inquiry must be technical, as making a map is, its product would be ordinarily accessible and usable just as a map is. It’s possible also to pass on some of what we know as map makers, so that others can take over and do it for themselves” (1994: 20). Smith’s concept of standpoint is relevant to mapping social relations. For example, I have worked with participants in this research to map their experiences under TAGS. Some participants say this exercise has increased their awareness of TAGS’ impact on their relationships with each other.

Feminists have raised concerns about the binary nature of Smith’s initial approach to standpoint theory (Collins, 1990). Risks are inherent in the oppositional definition of women as what men are not, and creating the illusion of uniformity among women. Campbell and Manicom show that Smith, more recently, has moved away from the idea of a singular, gendered point of view and now refers to standpoint as a place from which to see, rather than the one best place from which to see (1995). Meanings of community which are complex and contradictory, require a qualitative approach to enquiry (Mishler, 1986). Smith’s method, a qualitative research method, was selected for this research precisely because it is useful for studying a problem which is complex and contradictory. Campbell and Manicom (1995) show that Smith takes no single standpoint from which to view the world. Smith’s method begins in the everyday, not to claim everyday experience as real but to “trace how everyday life is oriented to relevances beyond the particular settings” (Campbell and Manicom, 1995:8).

Standpoint provides the framework for this book with a methodological direction for exploring how ways of knowing work together in everyday experience. It allows for the emergence of components such as gender which contribute to meanings of community from diverse standpoints. This view supports women’s and men’s multifaceted experience of subordination. Dorothy Smith (1990) points out that “images, vocabularies, concepts, knowledges and methods of knowing” about the world are central to the practice of power. These methods of knowing enable individuals to identify themselves as members of a “community,” “culture,” or “group” (1987: 18). This process of identification activates specific identities, mediating and shaping gender experiences through verbal and nonverbal communication. Furthermore, they can provide and activate those verbal, nonverbal, visual and dramatic means through which men and women express their perceptions of themselves and their experiences of subordination.

As I have shown, Smith is central to my framework. However my application of her institutional theories and methodologies has not been without limitations. While her work allows for varied expressions and multifaceted experiences, it does not allow for local people’s analysis and theory building about their own experience. As this book shows, the participants in this research reveal themselves to be analysts and theory builders. Smith’s theories also maintain focus on ruling groups as clearly defined, identifiable and separate. As my work shows, the work of ruling in Comorra extends throughout many facets of community life.

2.5 Conclusion

The framework employed in this book draws on the work of Smith, Cole, Collins, Cohen and others who seek to be interpretive in valuing the experience and accounts of people. It incorporates the recognition that inequalities and oppressions exist within community and lends itself to critical or evaluative analysis. This framework seeks to overcome dichotomies such as gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, evident throughout traditional community research. These dichotomies account, to some extent, for the normalizing of the invisibility of women, and the privileging of male activities found in the early traditions of community research. .

PART II

CHAPTER THREE Resilience and Resistance: Early Settlement by Europeans

3.0 Introduction

In Part Two (Chapters Three, Four and Five), the research participants’ meanings of community are explored through their stories. Those stories show that such meanings are partly organized by history, geography and gender, and by religious, economic and political regimes.

In their stories and songs, research participants consistently referred to past and recent history as important to their sense of belonging to community. A further theme of examining ruling relations throughout history emerged as participants discussed the government response to the cod moratorium as part of a larger historical experience.

Smith describes the ruling group as typically, what the business world calls management, it includes the professions, it includes government and the activities of those who are selecting, training and indoctrinating those who will be its governors. The last includes those who provide and elaborate the procedures by which it is governed, and develop methods for accounting for how it is done – namely, the business schools, the sociologists, the economists. These are the institutions through which we are ruled and through which we, and I emphasize this we, participate in ruling (1990: 14).

Three major ruling groups emerge in Chapter Four as contributing to meanings of community: the church, the merchants, and the government. Membership in a ruling group is not carved in stone. A particular ruling group such as the Catholic Church might have more or less power at any particular moment, depending upon the political and social context of the time.

Resilience refers to the ruling group and their strategies to maintain management and control over long periods of time (Campbell and Manicom, 1995). One of the meanings of community which emerged consistently throughout participants’ stories and songs was the notion that their ancestors had traditionally fought against ruling groups; sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The actual recounting of these stories and songs can be seen as an act of resistance, as opposition to ruling. This differs somewhat from the use of the concept elsewhere in community literature. Woodrow, for example, refers to resistance as:

resistance is basically standing firm, not yielding and refusing to accept or comply with certain elements of change whether individual or societal. We all experience resistance to change in established patterns of behaviour. However, if the change can improve or facilitate our existence, we eventually accept the change. More traditional rural communities have greater resistance to change than urban communities (1996: 34).

My use of the concept “resistance” does not imply resistance to “change,” but resistance to ruling groups and their practices. This analysis of story and song as practices of resistance is in keeping with Smith’s methodology. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, the stories of research participants articulate the kinds of self-analytical questions put forward by Smith in her methodology as described earlier: “How does it happen to us as it does? How is the world in which we act and suffer put together?” (Smith, 1987: 154). Resistance appears in participants’ stories of early history, referring, for example, to the rebellion of the “masterless men” against the British. These participants also acknowledged others who sacrificed and persevered so that the Roman Catholic Church could be a legal part of their life. Participants told stories often reflective of the attributes of “courage,” “rebellion,” and “power.” These qualities of the characters of early settlers are seen as critical to the survival of Roman Catholicism which is most often identified by participants as the focal point of historical everyday life. Participants, particularly males, are struggling with the incongruency of being part of a community which celebrates and makes heroic a history of resistance, while experiencing powerlessness in relation to the current fisheries crisis. These experiences contribute to a line of fault which will become more apparent in Part Three of this book.

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