Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland

By Gerald Sider

The first edition of this work, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge University Press, 1986), published before the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing, focused on the inshore, small-boat, village-based cod fishery that flourished from the early 19th century to the mid-20th, when it increasingly gave way to a factory-based, open ocean, deep-sea trawler fishery. The purpose of the first edition was to use the village fishery as a doorway into the logic of merchant capital. In its general features, merchant capital was both the fundamental form of economic, political, and social organization in Newfoundland and more--it was the predominant political-economic form for much of the world.

Since the moratorium, the situation in rural Newfoundland has become so stark, and the multiple and discordant histories that are being shaped so divergent, pulling people apart from one another even within families, that it provides a chance to see history happening: to people, to communities, and to capital. The spaces that are developing between those who are and those who are not "making it" since the demise of the cod fishery are vast, and the struggles of people to survive and to succeed in the new situation are meeting with highly diverse outcomes. They enable us to see how both difference and inequality are made, how they are transformed, how they are used, and how people living within, and necessarily also against, these new inequalities reshape the world more profoundly than they seem to have first intended. To introduce the conceptual framework for that task is the special purpose of this second edition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551115174
• ISBN13: 9781551115177
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Making and Breaking Everyday Life

Gerald Sider focuses on the critique, elaboration, and explication of key concepts such as culture and class and their implications for peoples' everyday life struggles. Linking field research with political activism and theorizing, Sider challenges anthropologists to conceptualize their commitments to those studied in ways that engenders a creative antagonism between those who `just want to get on with it' and solve the world's problems and others who remain locked in the ethereal worlds of text, theory, and reflection. Sider is able to span both domains and sidestep a binary either/or thereby creating a new way forward for anthropology. Sider's work is notable for the way he picks up a concept, elaborates upon it via close ethnographic description, and ultimately stretches it beyond its normal configuration. Whether he is critiquing the notion of resistance, the everyday, or exploring the implications of hegemony for fisherfolk in Newfoundland, his underlying concern revolves around issues of power within a capitalist social formation. In Becoming History the concept of hegemony is a central link between production and of culture and appropriation of labour. Here hegemony is taken up and twisted in a way that reveals the ways in which a people actively participate in their own oppression while simultaneously creating a space of resistance. In doing this Sider avoids the pitfalls of a mechanical materialism. He carefully explicates the interconnections between the production of culture, the making of class, and the historical movements of appropriation that have resulted in the Newfoundland we know today. Updated and revised with significant new materials this book is one that every person interested in the reason why our world is as it is should read (by Charles Menzies www.anso.ubc.ca/menzies).