Imagined Communities

A chesterfield is a couch ...

Community

• A social structure?

• A cultural structure?– A structure of meaning?

Romantic Community

• Community romanticised

• Stable

• Supportive and warm

• Close

UK Soaps

• Coronation Street

• East Enders

• Celebrate working-class urban community– fictional but with a

strong hold on the British imagination

Imagined Golden Age

• In UK: Golden Age of stable working-class communities disrupted – by WW2– suburbanization– mass culture

Reality

• Working-class communities unstable– high rates of residential

turnover– harsh poverty and living

conditions– abusive gender relations– unhealthy, hard, short lives– malnutrition

UK First World War Recruitment

• Chronic malnutrition in late C19th, early C20th in working class urban areas

• Many recruits too short to be enlisted in the army in WW1– Create special “Bantam”

battalions

Imagined Communities

• Benedict Anderson (1983) Imagined Communities– The imagination is vital in

creating nations and other large social groupings

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

-- Sir Winston Churchill

UK 2001 Census

• Internet-based campaign to get people to list their religion as “Jedi knight”

• Sufficient participation that “Jedi knight” had to be added to the list of religions– an imagined community

Toronto’s Little Italy

• Located around Grace & College Sts– One of the historic reception areas for Italian

immigrants

• “Little Italy” on the street signs– Business Improvement Association

• Neighbourhood is now largely Portuguese

Dufferin & St Clair

• Another “Italian” area– Italian sports bars, restaurants, churches,

clothing stores

• Gathering place for Italian soccer fans

• Declining Italian population

The Portuguese

• The “Portuguese” community in Toronto is largely Azorean

Les Miserables

Les Miz

• Original book is a grim tale of inhumanity

• Musical made the grim life of the urban underclass entertaining– Poor people just love to

dance and sing

Poplar

Poplar 1920s

• London East-End working-class district

• Place of considerable poverty

• Remembered by old people in the 1980s as:– an urban village, socially warm– strong social networks– isolation of elderly, conflicts, petty territoriality

Poplar 1920s

• Poplar’s Labour Party councillors in solidarity: 1921 Rate Strike– A landmark in East End politics– 30 Councillors jailed in dispute over the

financing of poor relief– Council met 32 times in Brixton prison

• An imagined community: real implications

British Muslim Asians

• Young Asian women– see themselves as part of a local “Asian

community”– a distinct alternative to the majority culture

• protective

– required adherence to Muslim and Asian community values

• sometimes resented

The Myth of the West

Myth of Frontier Community

• Imagined as – a place of rugged individuals– a masculine territory– where White men “won” the west

Not just in Blazing

Saddles ...

Reality of Frontier Community

• Reality– multi-ethnic– women participated significantly– White manhood frequently unheroic

Don’t Mess with Texas

"English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for the children of Texas."

-- Miriam "Ma" Ferguson Texas Governor

• Texas as an imagined Anglo community

Scarlet Riders

• Mythological Canadian frontier community contains Mounties

• Who always get their man

Mounties Mythologised

• Key phase of myth-making in 1920s-1930s

• Mainly by American pulp fiction, movies

• Canadian Govenment helped finance the “Mountie” movies

1954 (Universal)

• Mountie and loyal Cree rescue Shelley Winters from the Sioux.

• Cameo role for Jay Silverheels (Tonto)

• Filmed in Banff

The Myth of the Canadian Frontier Community

• Mounties are heroic clean-living white men

• The bad guys – speak accented English– have non-Anglo names

Sgt Cameron of the Mounted 1920

Rose Marie (MGM 1962)

• 1941 publication intended to boost wartime US dollar earnings by promoting US tourism in Canada

• 1941

It’s a small world after all ...

Mounties in Reality

• Rough frontier men and social misfits– Included Charles Dickens’ son

• High rates of alcoholism, STDs

• Patchy reputation with First Nations, Metis

• Did they really get their man?– Wiretapped Farley Mowat

Making Community Take Place

• Sense of community aided by creation of place– emergence of informally-accepted community

territory• generally-recognized ethnic enclaves

– formally-designated community territory– community festivals

Calgary Stampede

“Where the world meets the West! July 9-18,1999 The Calgary Stampede is a ten day, city wide celebration of western hospitality and fun in the heart of the Canadian Rockies”

“greatest outdoor show on earth”

Cowboy hats

Prairie oysters

Calgary Stampede: Reality

• Rodeo not a C19th Alberta tradition– First promoted 1912 by Guy Weadick

• 1923 first chuckwagon races– regularly kill horses, riders

• 1932 Stampede merges with Calgary industrial exhibition

• Calgary boomed on oil, not cowboys

Calgary Stampede: Reality

• Comments from Patricia Wood:– Calgary’s Anglo establishment takes a strong

role in the organization– Tsuu-Tina First Nation also participates as a

significant partner• often brushed aside by the Calgary establishment in

other spheres

– Stampede celebrates an imagined community

Imagined Community

• Community may be imagined

• but this does not prevent it from being real

• Reality and imagination connected