Begging to differ in a small place
A few years back, I asked an exceptionally able undergraduate seminar to read Gerald Sider’s “Between Silences and Culture.” Here, Sider recounts being struck during fieldwork in post-moratorium Newfoundland by an increasingly romanticized view of the pre-1960s inshore fishery. “Life was hard, bye, but we did it,” people told him.2 In contrast, when Sider started visiting the region in 1972 people who had worked in that fishery, the parents and grandparents of his later interlocutors, talked explicitly about hardship and vulnerability. Sider wonders if the late twentieth-century narrative — he calls it a “tourist” version — reflects people’s desire to shield their children from expropriation and humiliation. But, he adds, such silences must be understood as political. They give culture its simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary character, marking the boundary between continuity and chaos. Or, we might say, such silences underpin the ability to speak as the “we” that “did it,” even as they hide the specifics of what “we did” and the conditions that compelled the doing. To the extent that these conditions extend into the present and its intensified inequalities, such silences also frustrate attempts to make the future different.
While my students were intrigued by this essay, some were also discomfited by it. After all, it unsettled a version of their history that at least partly informed who they understood themselves to be. Was that the business of anthropologists? Besides, if the narrative Sider targets reflects a tourist industry version of Newfoundland heritage, it is inseparable from public discourses of collective pride and grievance against an arch-other: mainland contempt for a place “derided for decades as the fish-dependent fiscal laughingstock of Canada,” as the National Post put it in 2012.
When I pushed the class on where they thought “our” history was comfortably free of politically salient silences about who and what were at stake, several suggested the seal hunt. They meant the commercial hunt that became the international target of animal rights activists in the 1970s and, by extension, a platform for populist nationalism, to be defended in the name of Newfoundland culture. As the popularity of sealskin apparel among local politicians suggests, it also provides a handily wearable badge of Newfoundland patriotism. (Labrador patriotism too — another story, and one that points to just how much “our” identity as “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians” is hedged by especially consequential silences.)
And yet, Ray Guy reminds us that, prior to the early 1970s: “In the communal consciousness, sealing was relegated to folk song and story of a bleak and tragic cast . . . . E.J. Pratt’s . . . doleful lines on sealing tragedy — ‘ring out the toll for a hundred dead, who tried to lower the price of bread’— were to be memorized [by schoolchildren]. . . . The only virtue salvaged from a couple of centuries of seal killing was stoicism in the face of misery and calamity.”
If my students’ sense of the seal hunt as a marker of cultural identity was largely silent on its exploitative history, the example points to another way that silences mark political culture here. In a small place, where “everyone knows everyone,” saying nothing can be the price both of acceptance and acceptability. Such counselkeeping often reflects a desire to keep the peace, to avoid insulting people who may be your neighbours, friends, even family. But that doesn’t mitigate the anti-democratic effect. Laura Nader names this “coercive harmony,” where good
“In a small place, where ‘everyone knows everyone,’ saying nothing can be the price both of acceptance and acceptability. Such counsel-keeping often reflects a desire to keep the peace, to avoid insulting people who may be your neighbours, friends, even family. But that doesn’t mitigate the anti-democratic effect. Laura Nader names this ‘coercive harmony,’ where good manners and civility dampen outrage against injustice.”
manners and civility dampen outrage against injustice.
Thus, even as I pushed my students on whether the seal hunt was really so straightforward, I reassured them: I am not opposed; I have been known to consume seal products. Similarly, the odd politician who wonders in public about sealing’s commercial viability is liable to be seen about town in a sealskin vest inside of a week.
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston argue that all democracies are “disjunctive” insofar as democratic political institutions coexist with significant gaps in the social conditions required for fully democratic citizenship. When democratic engagement is blocked by inadequate education or health services or a corrupt legal system, remedies are easy to identify if not to achieve. It is much harder to get to grips with political culture, partly because the best way to get at the problems is to get caught up in them.
The “deep background” to my contribution to this project on “fixing” local democracy lies in my own attempts to negotiate silences edging our political culture: silences central to the twin crises of environment and capitalism. At least these seem most urgent to me; observations by David Cochrane suggest that “patriotic correctness” works to mute dissent from substantively different positions too. But Cochrane and I occupy positions of privilege — press and academic freedom, relative financial security — so the direct risks are small. The real question, for which there is no obvious answer, is how citizens can be empowered to take on the public silences that encircle lives much more vulnerable to chaos. For that, there is no revenue-neutral policy remedy. Suggestions from other contributors in this book may help. Perhaps the matter requires deeper academic research, drawing insights from other small polities. But ultimately, the challenge is less to fix what passes for democratic discourse here than to break it open, to unfix it. And that is a matter of unsettling politics, not policy.
Robin Whitaker (Anthropology, Memorial University of Newfoundland) has published on democracy, citizenship, human rights, and gender politics in post-conflict Northern Ireland, most recently in a chapter entitled “Abortion Governance in the New Northern Ireland,” co-authored with Goretti Horgan, in Silvia de Zordo, Joanna Mishtal, and Lorena Anton, eds., A Fragmented Landscape: Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe (2017). She is currently conducting new research on household debt in Newfoundland. She also contributes an irregular column (“Gadfly”) to the Independent.ca and is a known troublemaker.