| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Leslie A. Robertson, Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town (Vancouver: UBC Press 2005)

THIS IS A COMPLEX BOOK. It is built on two foundations: eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Fernie, British Columbia, most of it between 1997 and 1999, and a strong emphasis on the importance of discourses ("imaginative resources") in shaping the ways that people understand human differences.

"What appears in this book," writes Leslie Robertson, "is documentation of popular and official discourses now 'traditionalized' in European repertoires of human difference." Her scholarly goal is "to contribute to the project of analyzing the European production of social knowledge about human difference." Therefore, while the City of Fernie's history and its residents of different generations provide much of the content for Imagining Difference, the book is not ultimately about Fernie. Rather, the city is simply a convenient site for the author's exploration of "how essentialized ideas of difference are expressed through discourses of regionalism, nationalism, class, sexuality, and ethnicity." (xxxviii) Indeed, although "Canadian Mining Town" appears in the subtitle of the book, a study with similar goals could have been undertaken in a town with a different economic base and/or located in another European settler country.

Part of the complexity of Imagining Difference comes from Robertson's relentless invocation of theoretical concepts and ideas. But a great deal of the complexity is due to the creative way the book is organized: each of the seven substantive chapters begins with a different version of a "popular local legend about a curse cast on Fernie by indigenous people." (xvii) The curse legend is the "main thread" of the book, (xxx) "a doorway to different historical contexts" (xlv) "and a kind of barometer to trace the way that a story flows through a community." (xxix) At the analytical level, cursing is treated as "an expression through which power is negotiated, contested, or claimed. It evokes the force of ideas cast into circulation, deeply affecting the ways that people imagine others and themselves." (250)

The first version of the curse legend is taken from a book by an old-timer published by the Fernie and District Historical Society in 1973. The story is presented in four parts and interpreted in light of a postcolonial reading of the 19th-century relations between the Ktunaxa Band who lived in and near the Elk Valley and the European explorers/settlers. Leslie Robertson concludes that "cursing — the climax of the narrative — successfully incorporated the complex of colonial belief: normalized enmity between indigenous people and Europeans, erasure of indigenous economic interests, the essentialized mystical nature of the indigenous peoples, and the ever-present threat of rebellion." (23) In the context of colonialism, the curse legend is far from benign: Robertson presents it as "a powerful political tool."

The second chapter begins with a report on a conversation with a couple in their seventies; their grandparents had emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Fernie. The report shows how the couple tell the original "story of Fernie" in a way that encompasses tragic events (major fires and mine disasters) of the early 20th century. The curse legend disappears from the rest of the chapter wherein Robertson interpretively reads archival and interview materials to identify the "taken-for-granted assumptions of difference" (37) that result in non-Anglo Europeans being categorized as "foreign" in the period up to 1920.

Another Fernie resident's version of the curse legend opens Chapter 3. The author then situates the legend in relation to a wide variety of popular knowledge such as the evil eye complex, superstition, and miners' folklore. Leslie Robertson is true to her word of taking "seriously the idea of cursing." (75) However the materials presented in this chapter are scattered and do not fit very tightly with the conclusions drawn in the first two chapters.

Part Two of the book encompasses the next four chapters and is given the same title as the book. Robertson states that her "intention is to highlight structures and discourses of power that take different shapes in different places, but operate in similar ways to assert a commonsense view of the world." (103) This statement indicates that Robertson's theoretical map of the causal efficacy of discourse is more structuralist than poststructuralist.

Chapter 4 begins with interview material from a woman in her sixties who knew nothing about the curse legend. It introduces for the first time how the curse legend is melded, in many people's minds, with the "Ghostrider" shadow that appears and then disappears on the face of Hosmer Mountain as the sun goes down. The bulk of the chapter interprets how the experience of nationalism and war shaped the understanding of human difference of the eldest participants in the study, (114) even when that experience was their parents'. "I heard many people essentialize other nationalities," writes Robertson, "based on parents' accounts of transgression in their homelands." (124) This is a long, rambling chapter that weakly concludes with Robertson's "hope that I have shown the complex categories of difference employed by these people, and their connections to scholarly and political discourses." (146)

Chapter 5 begins with a version of the curse legend that includes mention of the ceremony in 1964 meant to lift the curse. It analyses this event as a "cross-cultural spectacle" and asserts that the ceremony, like other ceremonies of reconciliation that have followed, was "symbolically staged to get rid of the story of colonialism." (159) In Robertson's view, the special rights discourse that has emerged on the Right of the political spectrum in recent years is merely "the latest incarnation of colonial discourse." (180)

The next version of the curse legend was published in a free weekly newspaper in 1998. It sets the stage for an assessment of notions of human difference at the time when Fernie was changing from a coal mining town to a second-tier destination ski resort. In a section titled "Locals and Granolas," Robertson reports two postings on an electronic chat line that humourously show disrespect for each group. For example, the posting on granolas starts off: "Just a message to granolas: 1) Soap is a good thing. 2) Shampoo and conditioner are your friends." The author treats these postings with dead seriousness as new examples of "essentialized views" and denigrations. (201–202) I suspect she might offer the same formulaic reading of Trailer Park Boys. Robertson misses the point that certain types of trash talk and exaggerated depictions of an outgroup actually celebrate the humanity of the 'other' and therefore serve to undermine stereotypical understandings. The chapter also touches on a local controversy over Gay Pride Day and a weak attempt to use humour to make palatable an ultra-conservative column in the Fernie Free Press. Overall, the empirical materials are interesting but probably do not fit the author's model of essentialized social divisions as neatly as she purports.

Chapter 7 begins with the responses of a group of three teenage women to Leslie Robertson's question, "Do you know the story of the curse?," during an interview in a fast-food restaurant. The chapter investigates the social worlds of young people in order to demonstrate the continuing force of essentialized ideas of human difference. It includes a report of a travelling hypnotist's performance at a school gymnasium in Fernie, a short critique of the social content of the video game Pokémon, and analyses of three graffiti sites. The chapter has a potpourri sense to it, and is unduly reliant on the limited insights from the aforementioned group interview. Robertson's conclusion — "ideas about human difference remain intact across generations" (246) — is overly general and not given much substance by the empirical materials in the chapter.

In the end I was intrigued by Imagining Difference but I was irritated by its faults. The fieldwork is surprisingly thin in places; citations from the literature are treated as authoritative rather than as a starting point for a dialogue between theory and findings; generalizations to subpopulations are sometimes offered when the research was not designed to make such generalizations; and the presentation is disjointed in many places, following what I suspect is a self-consciously non-linear, postmodern style. I was particularly disappointed that the book presented such a sketchy picture of the history of coal mining in Fernie and all but ignored how ideas of difference were articulated and transformed by the historic, counter-hegemonic workers' movement in the Crowsnest Pass/Elk Valley.


Tom Langford University of Calgary

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