Reports from Visiting Scholars

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1 October 1988, Page 102

Reports from Visiting Scholars

ROBIN A. FISHER

ROBERT S. ELLWOOD

Summaries of lectures to the Library’s staff given by Robin Fisher, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, on ‘Recent Developments and New Sources in Canadian Historical Writing’; and by Robert Ellwood of the University of Southern California, the Fulbright Research Scholar at the Turnbull during 1988. In Canada, as is presumably the case in New Zealand, most archival users are genealogists and local historians. While recognizing that academic historians are a minority group in reading rooms, the following comments are about their writing and the implications of their work for archival collecting. Many of these developments may have already happened in New Zealand, a few may be indications of things to come. In the early 1970 s many Canadian historians abandoned the search for a national synthesis based largely on the study of federal politics, and turned instead to the study of what one historian has called Canada’s ‘limited identities’. This proliferation into many new areas of history has had a profound effect on archives and archival collecting. The papers of political leaders in Ottawa no longer provide the staple for historical writing.

The phrase ‘limited identities’ was first used in the context of a call for the writing of regional rather than national history, and many historians have followed that advice. The upsurge in regional and local history has been accompanied by the development of regional and local archives, institutions that do not merely replicate the National Archives of Canada at the regional level. Census records, for example, particularly for Ontario and Quebec where they are available for longer periods of time, have become a major source for detailed local studies. The census abstracts provide very specific information that enables historians to reconstruct the ebb and flow of population and economic development in, say, a single county. Census material is only made available after one hundred years and so it has had less impact on the history

of western Canada where settlement is more recent. But, in contrast to New Zealand where such records are destroyed, eventually they will be available to historians across Canada. The writing of urban history as an aspect of regional history has been accompanied by the development of city archives. In Montreal notary records have been used to examine the nature of small business in the city. In the Vancouver City Archives fire insurance maps have yielded a great deal of information about patterns of growth in the early years of the city’s development. In each case the intent is to get down to a detailed, local level.

As well as looking at different geographical areas, Canadian historians have also studied other social groups besides politicians. Doing social history has meant writing about people who are less articulate: who do not always leave letters, diaries and memoirs. Their lives must be understood through other sources. The history of the working class, and particularly the development of cultural as opposed to labour history, has meant moving beyond the political papers of organized labour to the use of records that describe working conditions on the shop floor, working class organizations, clubs, sporting activities, and family life. The debate over the question of whether industrialisation led to an improved standard of living for workers and their families has produced detailed statistical work on wages and prices. Other historians have approached the problem in less obvious ways. One, for example, has used birth weights to measure changes in the standard of living, an approach which requires good runs of records from maternity hospitals. Feminist historians have looked at women in the workplace, and in the domestic sphere. Personal diaries may speak of daily life, the business of running a home, and life cycle experiences, but women who worked in the home often left few written records. The problem can be partially solved for the recent past through oral history. Non-documentary, material sources have also been used to describe changing domestic patterns under, for example, the impact of labour-saving devices. Or folk art, the iconography of quilting for instance, may provide insights into women’s interests and concerns.

Writing the history of Canada’s native people is a comparatively recent development, and it might be said that Canada has little to teach New Zealand in this area. Indian history in Canada has focussed on the early contact and fur trading period. It has been based on old sources such as the massive records of the Hudson’s Bay Company which, among other things, have made possible an examination of fur trade economics through the computer analysis of company account books. The technique of ethnohistory, combining archaeological, ethnological, and documentary sources, has produced new insights. And, here again, oral history is being used extensively.

In a small space one can only provide a few examples, but even these suggest some generalizations. Historians have moved away from a total reliance on impressionistic, documentary sources and this development has important implications for archivists. Statistical analysis, or ‘number crunching’ as it is affectionately called, has become a common technique and it demands the preservation of a whole range of new documents. Oral history has raised as yet unsolved methodological issues for historians, particularly the question of scholars creating their own documents, but many archives have established oral history divisions devoted to the acquisition and preservation of audio

tape rather than paper. The use of artefacts, on the other hand, means that historians are using sources that are usually within the province of museums which, at very least, implies the need for close liaison between archives and museums. Most importantly, of course, these developments underline the need for continued communciation between archivists and historians.

I spent the first six months of 1988 at the Turnbull Library on a Fulbright research grant. My work was on the history of alternative spiritual movements, particularly Spiritualism and Theosophy, that originated in the nineteenth century. New Zealand has proven exceptionally receptive to movements of this sort. On a per capita basis, for example, New Zealand has some twentyfive times as many Theosophists as the United States. Spiritualism, though more difficult to define statistically, has also been influential, as have derivatives of both movements. This receptivity is found in other nineteenth century settler societies, including Australia and the west Coast of America. In such societies the provision of conventional religion was often inadequate, while the romantic and utopian mood with its exaltation of feeling, and implication that a new order with perhaps a new spiritual foundation could be built in a new land, was pervasive. No less important was the fact that both these movements gave women much greater opportunity for spiritual leadership than the conventional churches of the day; gender equality tends to be even more a significant issue in pioneer than established societies. It is certainly no accident it was in New Zealand, and certain western United States and Australian states, that women first received the franchise.

The experience of immigration itself often effects a ‘sea-change’, giving the immigrant a sense that, with the change of setting, new ways of living and believing can be essayed. Not a few New Zealand immigrants who became active in nineteenth century Spiritualism or Theosophy reported a ‘strict’ religious upbringing in the old country. This was often followed by a time of religious indifference or even atheism as the adventure of resettlement became the all-consuming event of their life, finally replaced by curiosity about the controversial Spiritualist seances or Theosophical lectures available in many New Zealand towns. In some immigrant situations, such as among the large ‘nationality’ groups —ltalian, Greek, Jewish, Polish —who came to the United States, the importance of traditional religion as a centre of identity and mutual support in a strange land has counterbalanced the ‘sea-change’ effect, fostering staunch adherence to church or temple. Most early New Zealand settlers, however, were of British origin, and for them this new Britain in the Antipodes was not sufficiently ‘different’ to create tensions calling for American-style ethno-religious solidarity. The spiritually liberating-for-experimentation capacity of immigration was instead permitted full play.

The presence of indigenous religion, whether Maori or native American or other, also presents a challenge to a settler society often with interesting results. Early Spiritualism in North America and New Zealand alike had some interaction in both conceptual and personal respects with native shamanism, for example the importance of ‘lndian Guides’ in the seance room. Early reports tell us that Maori were impressed to find among Pakeha Spiritualists

a faith similar to their own, and a tohunga was listed among the first Theosophists in New Zealand, in the Wellington lodge of 1888. A sympathetic interest in indigenous spirituality is evident in Theosophical and Spiritualist literature over many decades. As I prepare my research findings for publication, I invite other scholars to test the hypothesis that nineteenth century settler societies, especially British, have been particularly receptive to alternative religious movements, whether sectarian Christian or, like those I have studied, of a different character. In these places, of which New Zealand is perhaps the purest example, conventional church life is relatively weak. There is a pioneering spirit and sometimes a sense of utopian vision, confrontation'with indigenous and at times immigrant Asian spirituality presents a challenge, and the issue of gender equality is significant. Much remains to be done, however, to deepen our understanding of the spiritually exploratory side of these societies.