My request for help finding an ethnography to teach in a First Nations of British Columbia anthropology class has generated more than a dozen comments on the blog, via email and through facebook. Since I wasn’t entirely clear that I was looking for an ethnography of an indigenous group or community — but the list that was generated turns out to be exclusively about indigenous peoples — Charles Menzies raised the following question (which I’ve edited only slightly):
Can you suggest ethnographies about British Columbia (or Canada) that focus on non-aboriginal peoples? The works should be clearly anthropological as there are certainly books by sociologists, historians, geographers, about non-aboriginal peoples. Where are the ethnographies written by anthropologists set in BC, the Yukon, or Alaska that are not about aboriginal people?
What can you recommend?
(And thank you to all for the very useful suggestions of BC ethnographies. The list keeps growing.)
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My own slightly larger version of this question is found on my Forests and Oceans for the Future blog: http://blogs.ubc.ca/ecoknow/
One suggestion, via Facebook: “In the Shadow of the AntiChrist: The Old Believers of Alberta by David Scheffel (Thompson Rivers U), based on his Ph.D dissertation.
For the non-aboriginal ethnography, how about Leslie Robertson’s
Imagining Difference:
Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town
http://www.ubcpress.ubc.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=4147
Which I understand is mainly about European settlers in and around Fernie. I have no idea if it is any good or useful for your class, but it does seem to be an ethnography by an Anthropologist of a non-indigenous, [and non-fishing] community.
Thanks Quentin. I don’t know the book, but, judging from the title and UBC Press description it sounds quite worthwhile. -Tad
She is now at UBC in the women’s studies dept. It centers around a discursive analysis of a ‘myth’ about an indian princess and the settler miners (among other things. I did read it as a dissertation in our dept., but haven’t read the book to see how different it is or not. She also worked with Dara Culhane on a project with women in the downtown eastside of Vancouver
Just saw the “or Canada” qualifier.
The Hutterian people: ritual and rebirth in the evolution of communal life
Peter H. Stephenson
http://books.google.com/books?id=WM9yQgAACAAJ
I don’t know it for a fact, but as Charles suggests, there has been an awful lot of “applied ethnographic” work done around the HIV/AIDS issue, at needle exchanges, etc.
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