Causing a Ruckus

This article is about the suicide of the chief of police of a small Canadian town, which - according to some - did not actually happen. While employed as a researcher and writer with a museum in Port Moody, British Columbia, the author heard this story as one of many told by the 'old-timers' who assisted with the writing of a history book. The controversy over the potential suicide provided the means by which this article reflects on issues of ethics, advocacy, and performance when doing public history. The main request of the old-timers was to 'put the good stories in' when writing the book. This expectation caused tension between the author and the museum, reflecting the divide between doing 'history' and 'heritage'. This article draws on Anthropological theories of 'complicity' and performance in storytelling to make sense of the author's role within the context of a museum working to record the stories of long-time residents. The stories of the old-timers were filtered through the lens of early 20th century ideas about gender, race, and class, and affected by a lingering frontier mentality. As such, they wished to see their town's history told in a very specific way. The story of the police chief's suicide betrayed this intent, allowing for an analysis of how these expectations can affect the way in which public history is done

Archaeology · Art · Complicity · Frontier · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Popular history · Public history · Sociology · Storytelling · Engineering · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

• Caught! The Predicaments of Ethnography in Collaboration

  Deepa S Reddy•Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be•2017

  Incluir item

• A shared authority

  Michael H Frisch•A shared authority•1990

  Incluir item

• Possessed by the past

  David Lowenthal•Possessed by the past•1996

  Incluir item

• Story, Performance, and Event

  Open Access•Richard Bauman•Story, Performance, and Event•1986

  Incluir item

• White resentment in settler society

  Carol Schick•Race Ethnicity and Education•2012

  Incluir item

• An Exploration of Redneck Whiteness in Multicultural Canada

  Amy E O’Connell, A O'Connell•Social Politics International…•2010

  Incluir item

• Who are ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh

  Open Access•Carrol Clarkson•Law and Critique•2007

  Incluir item

• Museums and Media

  Andrée Gendreau•The Public Historian•2009

  Incluir item

• Harry Miller's Vision of Arkansas, 1900–1910

  Jo Blatti•The Public Historian•2006

  Incluir item

• Canadians and Their Pasts

  Margaret Conrad, Jocelyn Létourneau et al.•The Public Historian•2009

  Incluir item

• So Far, So Good

  Sharon Babaian•The Public Historian•2006

  Incluir item

• When Community Comes Home to Roost

  L Fink•Journal of Social History•2006

  Incluir item

• When Is an Interview an Interview? Notes from Listening to Holocaust Survivors

  Henry Greenspan, Sidney M Bolkosky et al.•Poetics Today•2006

  Incluir item

• How I Learned To Quit Worrying And Love Community History

  Jeremy Brecher•Radical History Review•1984

  Incluir item

• Working-Class Public History in the Context of Deindustrialization

  Michael Frisch•Labour / Le Travail•2003

  Incluir item

• Real Black

  Open Access•Ingrid Banks•Contemporary Sociology A Journal…•2006

  Incluir item

• Fuzzy boundaries and hard rules

  Open Access•Daniel Bradburd•American Ethnologist•2006

  Incluir item

• The Rashomon Effect

  Open Access•Karl G Heider•American Anthropologist•1988

  Incluir item