Exactly one year ago today, I returned to Ottawa from a research trip in Hong Kong.
Those two-and-a-half weeks were spent lugging camera equipment around the crowded city to interview participants who had something to say about migration, diaspora, and traditional Chinese medicine. That is casting a wide net, as most Hong Kongers have like had experiences and memories–personal or intergenerational–about all three.
On this one year anniversary, I thought I would share some snapshots I took on the trip.
Ornate window in one of the the centuries old walled villages of Yuen Long District in Hong Kong. Jenn Ko, 2017.Waiting for the ferry to Lamma Island. Jenn Ko, 2017.Hardware shops in Hong Kong are nothing like the giant Home Depots here in Canada. They’re cramped, packed full, and bursting with textures and colours. Jenn Ko, 2017.Inside one of the iconic taxis. Jenn Ko, 2017.Pok Fu Lam village of 2018 looks a lot like it did before the islands of Hong Kong were ceded to the British empire over 150 years ago. It is one of the oldest in the city and is designated on the World Monuments Fund’s Watch List of places to be preserved. Parts of the village are considered squatter settlements. It even lacks a modern sewage system. Efforts to conserve its architectural heritage face pushes for land development in the crowded and growing metropolis. Jenn Ko, 2017.Blake Pier, the ever-popular tourist destination of Stanley Bay. The pier was named after Sir Henry Arthur Blake, the twelfth governor of Hong Kong. Jenn Ko, 2017.
During my defence, someone on my examination board asked me an interesting question.
What is an an authentic TCM?
The wonderful thing about the defence is the freedom and space to reexamine and reconsider issues you yourself may not have considered yourself. Answering the examiner’s question led me to put together an important part of my final conclusion.
The question of authenticity in TCM is recurring throughout this thesis. On a practical level, governments (wanted) to legislate and regulate TCM to assure safety and authenticity for public health. On a personal level, TCM users questioned the authenticity and efficacy of the herbal medicines they were purchasing and consuming. An authentic TCM in a greater global, historical context, however, is a more delicate matter and therefore problematic to define. Considering Schechner’s concept of “twice-behaved” behaviour, each reiteration of an act is a novel original; authentic from the first. This begs the question—what was the first “behaved” iteration of traditional Chinese medicine? Perhaps one could credit the 2,000 year old Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon or Huángdì Nèijīng (黃帝內經) as the first authentic record of TCM, but the book itself is based on nearly 4,500 years of practice.
Perhaps Nora would recognize this set of ancient, communal practices on which the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is basedas acceptably authentic milieux. Scholars and TCMPs have termed the practice of TCM in pre-Cultural Revolution in China and preserved elsewhere in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese diasporas “Classic” Chinese medicine. However, this claim would negate the authenticity of translocal reiterations of TCM, which have morphed and adapted to regional environments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Toronto, for example. In the same vein, my participants expressed a belief that TCM preserved in the peripheries is measured as more authentic than TCM in modern China, which has been systematically blended with Western medicine. Nevertheless, such comments disregard the periphery’s own disparate pathways to the westernization of TCM. Thus, this thesis argues that there is a singular ‘authentic’ TCM does not exist, as each iteration of the practice is as validly genuine as the other.
Debates about authenticity have implications for belonging and otherness in cultural identity and the construction of Chineseness. Claims to authenticity have been used by power-wielding entities to position TCM practitioners and users between legitimate and illegitimate, us and them. In early twentieth century China, various governments attempted to regulate practice and practitioners to carve and sculpt the populace into their vision of a modern China. Towards the end of the twentieth century in Ontario, the Ontario government regulated TCM in an effort to gently fit practice and practitioners cohesively into the larger Canadian medical system. Therefore, accepting that authenticity in TCM is amorphous, uneven, and in constant renegotiation, one could also postulate that Chineseness is similarly resistant to clear definition.
This post is Part Three of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
This post is adapted from my Master’s thesis, entitled “Negotiating Chineseness in Diaspora: Traditional Chinese Medicine and Memory in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area, 1960-2018”. This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis. Part One: Introduction
Migrant memories of traditional Chinese medicine
Imagine this. A small child with a head of thick, raven hair gets an annoying cough and a drippy nose. At five or six years old, they are a little over a metre in height—barely tall enough to see over an imposing object in the kitchen. If the child stands on the tips of their toes they might be able to make out the image of someone very dear to them labouring over an odorous pot of boiling herbs and water.
Source: Jenn Ko
Only a few hours ago, they were in a similarly pungent space with jars packed full of dried herbs, fruits, seafood, insects and more. Imagine this small child was sat down in a chair, or if they are particularly small, in their dear someone’s lap, and made to face a doctor. The doctor took their pulse. The doctor looked at their tongue. Then, the doctor weighed out what looked like a cacophony of dried things and gave it to the child’s dear someone. They instruct the child to take it to return to harmony.
Now, imagine the kitchen again. The child’s dear someone pours the dark liquid into a bowl. The child takes a sip. It is bitter, but their dear someone might have placed some sweet, round, pinkish thin crisps on the table to eat with the bitter liquid. Haw Flakes 山楂餅 (sahn jah bang). The child is told to drink it all, and so they do.Every participant in my study shared a version of this narrative about being a child and being sick.
It is a memory so ubiquitous, so obvious, as common as the common flu.
Source: Jenn Ko
From fall 2016 to fall 2018, I studied the construction of cultural identity through the microcosmic perspective of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as culture for Chinese Canadians between two localities, Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for my Master’s research.I was interested in subjective questions of culture and identity. The main questions guiding my research were: what role(s) does traditional Chinese medicine play in cultural identity formation in trans-Pacific Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Toronto? How is the notion of Chineseness perceived, experienced, negotiated, and narrated by TCM practitioners and users? How do their perceptions, experiences, negotiations and narrations of TCM relate to family, caregiving, and community? I conducted 11 in-depth, face-to-face, oral history interviews conducted in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), 8 of which I analyzed in my actual thesis. I argue that Chineseness is found in the liminal spaces of their narrative identifications of self, their performances and transmission of knowledge in family, and their negotiation of Otherness in the TCM community in the GTA.
Traditional Chinese medicine is a liminal space where Chinese diasporic communities practice and express hybrid narrative cultural identities. The history of TCM is religious, socioeconomic, political, and deeply personal. TCM is an ancient form of healing built on a foundation of over thousands of years of practice. Sources range in the age of TCM knowledge and practice — it is likely 2,500 years old, but some say it could be 4,500 years old. It is comprised of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, cupping, moxibustion, exercise (eg. tai chi), and dietary therapy. At its most fundamental, the concept of TCM aims to balance two opposing principles in nature—feminine and negative 陰 (yin) and masculine and positive 陽 (yang)—to maintain the flow of vital life energy or 氣 (qi). TCM is not a monolithic canon of medicine as much as it is a “multi-sited, multidirectional, and sociohistorically contingent” set of practices and processes.
TCM is a system of knowledge of healing “made through—rather than prior to—various translocal encounters and from discrepant locations” (Zhan, 2009).
TCM arrived first in Canada with the immigration of Chinese workers in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Concubines Children, Denise Chong’s award-winning memoir about her grandmother May-ying’s struggle as an early immigrant in a Vancouver Chinatown, TCM was a consistent thread of daily life: “A line of pickle jars was her medicine cabinet […] For everyday use, to promote circulation, energy and vitality, were […] yuk choy, dong guai, ginseng and various grasses and tree barks” (Chong, 1996). In 1921, of the thirteen families among 2,035 documented Chinese in Toronto, three were herbalists (Chan, 2011). These early Chinese immigrants brought TCM with them in their suitcases, minds, and bodies in the form of texts, dried goods, seeds and more importantly—their rituals, practices, and memories. In Canada, herbal medicine and acupuncture are the most commonly practiced components of TCM.
Source: Jenn Ko
Today, TCM is no longer restricted to immigrants and a few rare believers—70% of the Canadian population has tried TCM at least once. In the GTA, dozens of TCM colleges and clinics serve Chinese and non-Chinese populations. The usage of TCM is also modernizing; consumers take capsules, tablets, and tinctures in lieu of the traditional process of brewing and drinking herbal tea.
Throughout its history, TCM has been used across socioeconomic identifications and demarcations. The rural poor of 1960s Hong Kong practiced TCM in daily life as affordable and accessible healthcare. The educated and more prosperous Chinese immigrants in present day GTA practice TCM as a part of their culture as they can optimize their health with the combined usage of Western medicine. The participants in my study use TCM as ritual health care in daily life and as medicine to address acute illness. In the GTA, immigrants connect to Chineseness through daily life performances of TCM for self and for family.
Source: Jenn Ko
The history of TCM in the GTA is intensely political. The evolution of TCM from those early ancient practices and texts has been affected by the geopolitical events in China in the early 20th century, from the conception of Chinese Western integrated medicine in the 1950s, to the abolition and persecution of TCM in the Cultural Revolution, to the modern system of combined traditional Chinese and Western medicine. It has been influenced by the politics surrounding the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, which would bring a ‘classic’ iteration of TCM to the GTA. It was influenced by Ontario regulation and the uneven negotiations of Chineseness within Chinese individuals and communities in the GTA. TCM has a translocal history influenced by capitalism, communism, movement and diaspora.
Traditional Chinese medicine is fiercely personal. It is a set of embodied practices rich with the subjective narratives of family and community, of personhood and identity.
TCM is embodied memory, affective practice, and transmitted knowledge—a basic part of Chinese diasporic life.
The heuristic examination of narratives of TCM practice in Chinese individuals in Hong Kong and the GTA opens a discursive space to explore diaspora, affect, and performance in their lived experiences. Hong Kong Chinese Canadian individuals living between Asia and Canada use their memories of TCM to perform, negotiate and transmit cultural capital. Chineseness is narrated in individuals, performed in familial roles, and negotiated in TCM communities.
People and practice are rooted in specific historical narratives influenced by real political, social, and economic events. They adapt as they traverse spatiotemporal routes. Both have the potential for healing and harm, flow multi-directionally, and are inscribed by generational memory. Like the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora in Toronto and Chinese Canadian diaspora in Hong Kong, traditional Chinese medicine also straddles constructed narratives of East and West. Placing these two elements—Chinese diaspora and traditional Chinese medicine—on either side of an imagined, conceptual mirror may coax out the interesting and meaningful differences and similarities in the myriad of reflections which comprise cultural identity.
This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
References
Chan, Arlene. The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From outside to inside the circle. Toronto, Dundurn: 2011.
Chong, Denise. The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Zhan, Mei. Other-worldly: Making Chinese medicine through transnational frames. Durham, Duke University Press, 2009.
“Slaves, once sold as chattel, can become gradually humanized, personified, and reenchanted by the investiture of humanity.” – Arjun Appadurai
Appadurai first introduced the idea that the distinctions between persons and things oscillate and undulate throughout various temporal spaces in 1986 in a collection of essays titled The Social Life of Things. This idea, mentioned in passing in my previous blog post, dissolves the perceived binaries between commodity and singularity; person or thing.
Take for instance, the ethnographic museum’s relationship with indigenous peoples. Over time, the social trajectory of these peoples has shifted from being ethnographic material to source communities, as we call them today.
However, this discourse is not on the question of whether indigenous persons and human remains should be objects of entertainment or education in a museum. That question has already been answered with a clear and resounding “NO.” This discourse is on whether animals should be objects of entertainment or education in a natural history museum. This question tries to look for a similar negative affirmation that society can work towards for a distant temporal future.
As a caveat: this argument is in no way attempting to reduce indigenous peoples to the cheap commodity level society currently attributes to animals. Rather, my argument attempts to raise animals to the level of singularity enjoyed by humans. Obviously and most importantly, colonial institutions needs to first engage every available mind and dollar to foster reconciliation with Inuit, First Nations, and Metis peoples living on the land our settler society today calls Canada.
Observing the Museum of Nature in Ottawa as a critical museum visitor, as described and theorized by Lindauer, I found myself repeatedly examining the relationship between human curator, human visitor, and animal body and comparing it to the relationships of recent past between white curator, white visitor, and minority body or image.
The taxidermied and live animal displays, or as the museum calls them, live specimens are presented and received as indisputable fact. There were no obvious counterpoint discussions that explained the supposed ‘welfare’ or ‘ideal treatment’ of the encased animals.
A director of content for the museum discussed the evolving relationship between human and nature as one of the key focal points to integrate into the visitor experience, in accordance to evolving museum theory and societal norms. Humans as nature, she said. Nature as value — and not the sense of economic value, but that nature in itself has value. From my perspective this statement was a stark contradiction of the blissfully ignorant museum displays.
Lindauer, Margaret. “The critical museum visitor.” New museum theory and practice: An introduction (2006): 201-225.
“Artists, like curators, work on their own, grappling with their attempt to make a world in which to survive…. We are lonely people, faced with superficial politicians, with donors, sponsors…. I think it is here where the artist finds a way to form his own world and live his obsessions. For me, this is the real society.”
This summer, I was lucky to be working with the Canadian Tulip Festival as a curatorial assistant to create a small exhibition for the World Tulip Summit in October 2017 and the next Canadian Tulip Festival in May 2018. It was my job to research the history, search for artifacts, and write the exhibit text. The contract was only nine weeks long. If I’m being honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water. Off the stove and into the oven? I’m not great with idioms.
Most of the time, my student job looked like this:
There were few historical materials available to me at the beginning of my contract, as The Festival had recently moved into a small office space at in the Horticulture Building at Lansdowne. I spent the first week reading through a previous archive student’s notes and emailing local museums in hopes they may have some tulip-related artifacts in their collection. There was a noticeable void of material. In desperation, I decided to think out of the box and put out a call on Reddit Ottawa…
“To all tulip festival goers past and present: Do you have any old knick knacks, posters, pictures, or artifacts from past Tulip Festivals that I can use for a project? I’d give you full credit for your items. Putting together an exhibit of sorts.”
Redditor and local historian Dave Allston replied with a clue that would lead me on a journey to the Reid Farmhouse on Sherbrooke and Reid, just off of Carling Avenue, and to some difficult curatorial decisions. The Farmhouse is a dusty, forgotten-in-time structure slated for demolition built in 1865, and at one point, it was the only three-story home in Kitchissippi. This makes the farmhouse one of the oldest buildings in the Ottawa region. Astonishingly, it also happens to be the storage space of a decade’s worth of Canadian Tulip Festival materials!
The Reid Farmhouse has been renovated and reconstructed so many times, it was unable to attain a heritage designation.
One room of materials. An historian’s wildest dream/nightmare!
Unfortunately, because the building has been modified at various times, the structure could not attain a heritage building designation. The Reid farmhouse will maintain a small portion of its first floor and be revamped to better fit the needs of the Kitchisippi community. Moreover, because the Canadian Tulip Festival experiences a high staff turnover, the artifacts in storage were almost entirely forgotten about.
On two separate occasions, I swallowed my vehicular fears and got behind the wheel of a coworker’s old pick up truck that has neither air condition nor interior car lights. Together, we sifted through dusty photo albums, financial reports, posters, objects and rat-droppings; selected the most important materials; and hauled boxes and boxes of them to back to headquarters. Today, our little Horticulture Building office is pressed for elbow room.
I was also faced with (what I think is) the classic curatorial dilemma. My original problem of not having enough materials was now the inverse — I had an enormous excess. How to go through it all?
After consultation we decided to write a story about the tulip as a symbol of international friendship, using images and objects that were shared between Canada and our friendship countries around the world. My favourite object is a wooden Japanese flower vase, a gift from the Japanese delegation in 1997. The vase will be shown with a fresh ikebana flower arrangement, created in collaboration with the Ottawa Ikebana Chapter.
UPDATE:
Here’s a sneak peak of a couple of interesting finds. See the finished exhibit at the World Tulip Summit at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa October 4-7, 2017.
I can hardly thank the Canadian Tulip Festival enough for giving me the space to learn independently and trusting me to take on this project. After these short nine weeks, I have a renewed appreciation for the tulip, and the kind people who take their time to ask people to stop and smell the flowers.
Promotional posters from the 80s when the festival was called “Festival of Spring”.
A carved sculpture from Skagit Valley in the United States. 1999.
There are moments when there can be no objective divorce between the politics of the present and the study of the past. This is one such moment in the political present where the world we live in cannot be removed from the politics of the past, nor the graduate-level public history assignment.
For Canadians who woke up on November 9th, 2016 to a world they no longer comprehend, it is important, now more than ever, to understand the public historian’s role in civil society, consider our responsibilities by virtue of it, and work to assure the Canadian public does not succumb to demagogic narratives of isolationism, fear, and hate.
Our Role
Public history serves the public — a collection of peoples cohabiting spaces with memory and history. Public historians aspire to honest, context and evidence-based truth-telling. This can be achieved by employing diligent historical analysis, championing multiple manifestations of remembering and using evidence-based storytelling to maintain accountability. Done right, public history can engender learning, healing, and individual and collective development. Done wrong, it can contribute to misinformation, suffering, and painful reminders of our shared colonial pasts.
Our Challenges
There are several stories in Canadian public history professionals need to thoughtfully consider before pursuing future projects. Historicization of public history shows the discipline has authored its own uncomfortable chapters in the ongoing colonial narrative. The field needs to adopt a generous and unflinching reflexivity to see it’s own power in shaping public discourses. Andersen puts it eloquently: “spaces of cultural representation— like museums and national historic sites—can be spaces of mutual recognition rather than mere manifestations of colonial power.” Here are some suggestions on how to do that.
What Not To Do
Do not confine identities in history, as it is in the Batoche National Historic Site in Batoche, Saskachewan. Chris Andersen points to telling “three-dimensional,” high “density” stories of that champion both the Metis’ peoples modern complexities and and historical celebrations as a way to move forward instead.
Do not work in insolation, as the infamous failure of an exhibit, Into the Heart of Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum, mistakenly did. The curators did not fully consider their audiences and the way they might receive the exhibit. Eva Mackey discourages the use of universal claims to truth, especially in such a “powerful agent in defining public culture.”
Do not sanitize violent histories, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper inadvertently does in a speech during the 2009 G20 meeting in Pittsburg by saying “We have no history of colonialism”. We should not be exempt from remembering traumas 1 year, 1 decade, or 1 century after the highly orchestrated public apology for Canada’s role in residential schools. Healing from traumatic pasts requires remembering with as much deference to truth as possible.
What To Do
Share authority. As Andersen writes, public historians should strive for a “history in between.” Narratives should be situated in between structure and agency; local, regional and global; indigenous and white, commemorative, scholarly and community based remembering. Public historians can look to the c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city exhibitat the Museum of Vancouver as a step forward into shared authority and respectfully indigenized history. This in-betweeness also exists between times. Public historians need to recognize what Sharon Macdonald calls the multi-temporal nature of public remembering, that “wrong done in a time marked is recognized as such” but also exists in a present orientated to future. One of the greatest challenges is deciding what to choose
Recognize power and poverty. Museums and monuments hold significant social capital as institutions. Public historians need to recognize the privilege and responsibility that come with storytelling for publics, which inadvertently creates spaces of belonging and exclusion.
Listen. Researches and practitioners in Canada need to adopt the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls To Action as much as it is feasible. Canadians need to read the TRC adopt it into schools, museums, books and popular culture. In the history of public history, certain narratives were told over the silences of others. To move forward towards reconciliation, we need to hear the quieted truths from quieted voices.
“From a piece of the Wright brother’s plane to a child’s sugar egg, today: Things! Important things, little things, personal things, things you can hold and things that can take hold of you. This hour, we investigate the objects around us, their power to move us, and whether it’s better to look back or move on, hold on tight or just let go.”
Gift yourself 1 hour and 1 minute and let hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich from the WNYC podcast Radiolab weave you through 3 stories of what Appadurai calls “the social life of things.” Give it a try! There is no storytelling quite like Radiolab storytelling. If you don’t have the full hour, you can pick and choose which story you want to listen to here. My favourite is: The Seed Jar.
Listen to “Things” by clicking on the image above.
“Narratives of the traditional simply being replaced by the modern don’t work when we need to take into account not only possible tradition invention but also self-aware nostalgia, retro-fashioning, alternative traditionalities, memory work, and multiple ways of being modern, some of which involve being traditional in new, or even old, ways.” – Sharon Macdonald
Introduction
Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm was borne in circumstances not dissimilar to the beginnings of the Public History discipline — as a result of Victorian era interest and advancement in the natural sciences.The national historic site has welcomed visitors since its establishment in 1886, and continues to touch, influence and affect people’s memoryscapes.Although the site’s 427 hectares contains all agricultural and research facility, working farm, botanical gardens, arboretum, and interactive learning museum and more, I will herein refer to it as the Farm.
Bessies lined up in the cow barn at the Central Experimental Farm.
The Farm’s size and scope allow for a multiplicity of directions for historical investigation, but this research will explore how people who visited the Farm as children remember the site as adults, especially at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum. Building from Andrew Irving’s experimental methodology “staged fieldwork” as outlined by Macdonald, this research will ask persons who encountered the Farm as children to revisit and relive their experiences in conversation with each other in place.
Research Questions
This research will seek to answer these questions: How do people presently remember and engage with their past childhood experiences at the farm? How have their experiences affected their lives? Which temporality is most prominently represented in events of past-presencing – the past or the present, and why? Do children remember authenticity or an “alternative traditionality” at the Farm?
These questions aspire to unlock “possible modes of experience and telling” that exist when persons act in past-presencing in a unique, socially constructed place such as the Farm. The research hopes to highlight the “creative, not fictive” stories people internalize and relive with others as they interact in place.
Theoretical Evidence
Sharon Macdonald’s idea of past-presencing will be influential in this research. Since the farm’s establishment in 1886 as an agricultural innovation facility for the betterment of national health and prosperity, a modern city has erected and enveloped the surrounding land (and today threatens to encroach deeper). The farm exists not only between times, but belongs in a fascinating multitemporality, where the directions of time intermingle in a negotiated reality.
Memory Park stands sober in the centre of the Museum, the site of the 1996 fire of the barn housing 59 animals and “friends.” How does the naming change the landscape?
Science, technology, experimentation and agricultural innovation are very much of the present and for the future. However, heritage buildings, an idyllic arboretum, and the paradoxical existence of a farm within the City of Ottawa suggest the Farm may act as a multitemporal heritagescape, as Walsh described socially constructed places with produced social meaning. Is it possible to separate the modern food science museum exhibit from the cows and calves sitting behind a picket-white fence? Memory Park stands at the centre of the Museum, where a barn housing 59 animals was lost in the 1996 fire, memorializing the past and naming the site as a place of sensitivity.
Other buildings destroyed in previous fires were rebuilt in their heritage style. Is memory “stickier” at sites of trauma such as these? How do memories collide at this site? Do these adults see the Farm differently decades later? What memories remain? Perhaps the answer will never be fully complete, because as Opp and Walsh write, “the production of place is always unfinished and uneven.”
Considering Pierre Nora’s idea of lieux de memoire, this research will investigate how modernity and authenticity at the farm may coexist in a place between times. Nora deserves some explaination: a lieux can be understood as the manifestation of the break between what Nora understands “traditional” or “authentic” memory work and history, the hollow product of the memory crisis in modernity. The controversial theory offers historians interesting ways to conceptualize memory negotiations and past-presencing at the Farm. The Farm is a cleaner, decorated, meticulously crafted place of learning and reminiscing, but it is not a real farm. Therefore the reimagined, synthetic farm can be understood as a lieux de memoire or an alternative traditionality, a picture of pastoral rural times in a technologically innovative, urban setting. Today, the Museum exhibits a modified retelling of past agricultural understandings to nostalgic visitors, young and adult, who yearn for more authentic understanding of the world beyond the food on their plates.
Methodology
This research will employ a version on Andrew Irving’s experimental methodology in his research on HIV/AIDS he calls “staged fieldworld,” as outlined in Macdonald’s chapter on differential ethnographic research methods.
Participants will be briefed on general ideas of the research and asked to reflect on memories, past and present, and place. Participants who visited the Farm as children will voice record their oral histories with a partner without the presence of a researcher as they walk through the site. Participants will supplement their storytelling with pictures with a camera whenever they feel a need to document the image. These performative memories will explore the ways persons interact with the past in the present, how they remember events from their past, and understand the layers of memory and emotion in a place between times.
During my preliminary research I was lucky to come across a woman in a bright red wool sweater who has been working at the Museum for 12 years. She was between appointments giving lessons on pumpkin varieties in a small classroom connected to the cow barn. In an impromptu interview, she spoke wondrously of first encountering the big sheep as a small girl. She noted how the barn has remained exactly the same, but the sheep no longer seemed like giants when she returned to work at the site decades later. She offered her own opinions and perspectives on reality at the farm without prompting, signalling this research may be welcome among the community.
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Ethical concerns and resulting methodological restrictions often “mute” the voices of children in traditional histories. This research aims to understand childhood stories, memories, and understandings in the structure of adult retellings. Few events can resurface childhood remembering like the company of an old friend or a new but fellow nostalgic companion. This past-presencing through conversations at the Farm could open up a version of the world as people once saw it and proffer some insight into the ways persons push and pull on individual and collective narratives to come to an understood reality.
In avoiding the scripted questionnaire with researcher vis-à-vis subject, this methodology intends to repudiate unidirectional historical narratives and bridge the gap between Nora’s bifurcation of memory and history by urging participants to practice in a form of multitemporal memory work.
Dissemination of Research
The research will be disseminated to the wider community in podcasts, gathered from the audio recordings during research, edited by the researcher. It is understood the finished audio documentaries will not be what Nora considers a “raw” or “authentic” form of memory — but in the murky negotiations of reality and identify in past-presencing, when is it ever?
Works Cited
Lyle Dick, “Public History in Canada: An Introduction,” The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009): 7-14
Sharon Macdonald, “Telling the Past: The multitemporal challenge,” in Memorylands (2013), 52-78.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations (1989), 26: 7-24.
James Opp and John C. Walsh, “Introduction: Local Acts of Placing and Remembering,” from Opp and Walsh, eds., Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (UBC Press, 2010), 3-21
John C. Walsh, “Becoming a Centre: Public History, Assembly, and State Formation in Canada’s Capital City, 1880-1939,” forthcoming in David Dean, ed., A Companion to Public History (Blackwell, 2017).
Jenn Leah Ko 