Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The State and Storytelling
In her ethnographic work on the Yukon, Julie Cruikshank observed that “insistent local story-telling subverts administrative ambition” (1998: xiii). In the course of our workshop we had multiple opportunities to consider the role of the state in the North’s past and present (when it failed to meet the public health needs at Arviat, sought to assert “soft sovereignty” through the Arctic Waters Pollution Act, or arbitrarily drew bounding lines in the Tlicho Land Claim Settlement). While local stories may subvert state objectives, do the stories that non-locals tell (such as the tales of harsh environments described by Karen Routledge, or the accounts of the Bloody Falls massacre) primarily serve to reinforce “administrative ambition”?
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My short answer to this is no, the stories that non-locals tell don't necessarily reinforce "administrative ambition." I think it's possible for outsiders to have interests that support local points-of-view. I also think that it's possible for outsiders to have perspectives that are different from those of insiders/locals AND the state. In other words, just because you're an outsider doesn't mean the stories you tell about a place support administrative ambition / the state.
ReplyDeleteI understand (I think) what Julie Cruikshank means, but I also think there's a real danger of collapsing the diversity of both the insider and outsider perspectives. The local isn't always oppositional and the outsider position isn't always equivalent to that of the state.
Non-locals can tell stories that subvert administrative ambition. For example, fisheries scientists (who worked for the state) often had points of view that opposed the hydroelectric development that was being proposed by another arm of the state. They found themselves silenced and, in some cases, their career prospects stifled because of the unpopular stories they told (i.e. "dams kill fish.")
My other thought is that what makes someone local or non-local?
Tina
Just piggybacking on Tina's comment, there is a growing literature in the field of human-geography that demonstrates the hybridity and heterogeneity of the "local."
ReplyDeleteWhile we are aiming to tell a complex story here--Tina's answer to Frank's "What do you do?" question--we should pay attention to the different stories locals tell, the different ways local-ness is defined, and the pro-state leanings they may sometimes have.
I think this discussion thread may be an endorsement for place-based environmental history--which, I think, is a suitable approach to foregrounding and analyzing the complexity of cultural and environmental history.