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Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World

5 | 2017 The Cultures and Politics of Leisure

Laurent Châtel and Thibaut Clément (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1109 DOI: 10.4000/angles.1109 ISSN: 2274-2042

Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur

Electronic reference Laurent Châtel and Thibaut Clément (dir.), Angles, 5 | 2017, « The Cultures and Politics of Leisure » [Online], Online since 01 November 2017, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/1109 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.1109

This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.

Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Video introduction to issue 5 Laurent Châtel and Thibaut Clément

Leisure, Public Engagement and Shared Communities

“A particularly desirable exercise for girls and women”: Swimming and Modern Female Bodies in the United States, 1900s–1930s Olaf Stieglitz

We Are the One: Subcultural Politics and Leisure in Early San Francisco Punk Michael Stewart Foley

“Making the Art of Fun Freely Accessible”: Community Arts Practices and the Politics of Leisure in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s Mathilde Bertrand

Outdoor Leisure Activities in Simon Roberts’s We English Photographic Project: Re-writing landscape and nation Karine Chambefort

Politically Engaged Leisure: The Political Participation of Young People in Contemporary Britain beyond the Serious Leisure Model Sarah Pickard

The Work/Leisure Frontier Tourism, Gambling, Gardening, and Surfing the Web as Objects of Control, Discipline and Legislation

Graphic Interlude The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles and the United States Tim Knowles

Early Tourism in New Mexico: A Primitivist Pastime or a Tool of Integration? Susanne Berthier-Foglar

“Tote Clubs”, Dog Tracks and Irish Sweepstake: Controversy and Compromise Over Popular Gambling in Interwar Britain Emmanuel Roudaut

Meaningful Plots: Leisure, ‘Rational Recreation’ and the Politics of Gardening in British Allotments (Mid 19th -mid 20th Centuries) Arnaud Page

The Relation Between Production, Labor Regimes and Leisure Forms: From slavery to digital capitalism Olivier Frayssé

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Varia

Fighting Colonial Violence in “Indian Country”: Deconstructing racist sexual stereotypes of Native American Women in American popular culture and history Sophie Croisy

Translating Polysyndeton: A new approach to “Idiomaticism” Joachim Zemmour

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Video introduction to issue 5

Laurent Châtel and Thibaut Clément

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/1119

Transcript:

1 Welcome to this Angles issue on “The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles and the United States.”

2 How do you pin down leisure? You could think of water, for instance. Leisure could be watching the flow of water and indulge in daydreaming, or it could be about swimming, or sailing: that’s fun all right. But there’s more to leisure than meets the eye: there’s class, there’s identity, and there’s politics. This issue’s central assumption is that leisure raises central issues about culture and politics.

3 Indeed, the divide between leisure and “productive work”—to which it is traditionally opposed—has never been an impassable wall, but rather a porous boundary involving dynamics of control, negotiation, and hybridization. Far from a mere holiday or retreat from society, leisure represents a specific domain of activities in which core social and cultural values and structures are expressed, reified, transmitted, learned, manipulated, and resisted. Cultural historian Johan Huizinga found play to be “productive of a culture,” while sociologist Erving Goffman viewed games as “world- building activities.” Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott referred to play as the locus of the “cultural experience,” and anthropologist Clifford Geertz borrowed Jeremy Bentham’s concept of “deep play” to convey the high stakes that certain leisure activities can hold for their participants. Leisure and play have throughout history intersected with issues of cultural identity, gender norms, political engagement, or labor regimes both in Britain and the United States.

4 We have divided the articles into two groups: A. “Leisure, Public Engagement and Shared Communities” B. “The Work/Leisure Frontier: Tourism, Gambling, Gardening, and Surfing the Web as Objects of Control, Discipline and Legislation”

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5 Group A brings together five contributions. First, we take a plunge in the wonders of leisure and sports with Olaf Stieglitz’s ‘Swimming and Modern Female Bodies in the United States, 1900s–1930s’. Stieglitz analyzes the role of the illustrated press in promoting swimming as a physical activity for women and the development of a new swimming style, the crawl. Then, in ‘We Are the One: Subcultural Politics and Leisure in Early San Francisco Punk’, Michael Stewart Foley and Marijn Rombouts examine the role of “fun” as a form of political engagement in the punk subculture of late 1970s San Francisco: punks carved out an ever-expanding space for participation, promoting an alternative lifestyle that escaped the grip of commercial capitalism while reserving ample time for leisure and political engagement. In her ‘Making the art of fun freely accessible’, Mathilde Bertrand argues that the British community arts movement in the 1970s and 1980s took on a decidedly collective dimension with imaginative activities channelling energies in order to trigger collective action on issues affecting people’s lives. Equally collective is Simon Roberts’s endeavour as demonstrated by Karine Chambefort in her ‘Outdoor Leisure Activities’. She shows how traditional leisure such as hiking, paragliding, angling, bathing and sea-bathing are processed into pictures of English life not just because these activities themselves are quintessentially English (which they are not, in fact) but because of the way Roberts has premised his work on a public consultation taking into account the public’s suggestions and feedback as he was making his We English. Contemporary British leisure is further widened by Sarah Pickard with her ‘Serious Leisure’ as she examines the legitimacy of considering young people’s political activism as leisure per se. With a theoretical framework of serious leisure, she establishes that involvement in collective action does count as leisure and revokes the assumption that leisure is all hedonism.

6 Group B starts with an article discussing the moral cost of tourism. In ‘Early tourism in New Mexico: A Primitivist Pastime or a Tool of Integration?’, Suzanne Berthier-Foglar explores how Natives were quick to capitalize on tourists’ perceptions of Native culture as a rejuvenating antidote to modernity: she belies, at least in part, traditional takes on the necessarily exploitative and colonial dimension of cultural tourism. At about the same time in Britain, betting became the focus of attention of the British government in an effort to curb illegal practices: in ‘Controversy and Compromise over Popular Gambling in Interwar Britain’, Emmanuel Roudaut explores the limits of political legislation on an age-old practice which served very lucrative commercial ventures. In ‘Meaningful Plots’, Arnaud Page provides an historiographical review of the study of allotment gardening in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century: he shows how “allotment gardening” as a form of leisure had always served a political, social and cultural purpose in the light of governmental policies to frame and channel allotment gardening, considered an ideal leisure for the poor to balance off their weight of labour. In ‘Stages of American Capitalism, Labor Regimes and Leisure Forms: From Slavery to Digital Capitalism’, Olivier Frayssé highlights the rise of prosumerism – namely when users’ leisure time activities are used as a source of profit for corporations, effectively making users co- producers of goods and services. While corporations have long sought to profit from their workers’ leisure time and provided them with activities especially compatible with their professional life, American corporations have harnessed new technologies and media platforms that not only blur the distinction between work and leisure by accommodating them both, but now allow them to rely on the work of amateurs.

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7 We hope you enjoy this issue.

ABSTRACTS

This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles and the United States’.

La vidéo présente les contributions thématiques sur “Les cultures et politiques de loisirs dans les Îles britanniques et les États-Unis”.

INDEX

Keywords: video, literature, history, language, leisure, politics, United Kingdom, Ireland, Great- Britain, United States Mots-clés: vidéo, langue, littérature, histoire, politique, Royaume-Uni, Irlande, Grande- Bretagne, États-Unis, loisirs

AUTHORS

LAURENT CHÂTEL Co-Guest editor of Issue 5. Professor at the Université Lille 3.

THIBAUT CLÉMENT Co-Guest editor of Issue 5. Associate Professor at the Université Paris Sorbonne.

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Leisure, Public Engagement and Shared Communities

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“A particularly desirable exercise for girls and women”: Swimming and Modern Female Bodies in the United States, 1900s–1930s

Olaf Stieglitz

1 “Up with you, girls! Into the water, one and all!” In 1927, when humorist Corey Ford published this enthusiastic plea in Vanity Fair, he was strongly arguing for a more supportive attitude towards female swimming than before. Rightly so, he stated, the “sport of swimming for ladies is justly increasing in popularity year after year; for women of today are beginning to realize that, in moderation, it is a highly beneficial form of exercise, and may someday be a means of saving life”. And although the article also contained elements of irony typical of Ford’s style, it nevertheless addressed the practice of swimming (as distinguished from mere bathing) as useful, exciting and — when it came to the still troublesome question of clothing — even as liberating for women: “Surely the healthy girl need never be ashamed of exposing the glorious body which God has given her” (Ford 1927: 49).

2 Ford’s essay underlines a remarkable change in attitude towards female swimming in the United States between the world wars, both as a spare time activity as well as a form of competitive sport. Not only white, urban lifestyle magazines like Vanity Fair now featured essays and photo stories on swimming in general and women’s increasing opportunities practicing that sport. Likewise, many other periodicals, from daily newspapers to rather inexpensive special interest magazines such as Physical Culture, regularly discussed the benefits of swimming, the new landscape of recently built pools, the fast changing trends in bathing fashion, or the many records set and medals won by U.S. athletes at international championships. Moreover, parallel to this strong increase in press coverage, a market of advice literature developed, specialized in the different needs of men and women, beginners and experts, and ever more coaches advertised their services to eager customers (Wiltse 2007; Bier 2011).

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3 For many reasons, swimming boomed in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. First, it played a significant role in the fitness and wholesome lifestyle discourses that appealed to many white urban middle-class Americans during the Progressive Era and after (Green 1986). “Doctors recommend swimming as the best all-round exercise. It is especially beneficial to nervous people. Swimming reduces corpulency, improves the figure, expands the lungs, improves the circulation of blood, builds up general health, increases vitality, gives self-confidence in case of danger, and exercises all the muscles in the body at the same time,” reads the preface of a How-to- Swim manual published in the United States in 1912 (Dalton 1912: 15-16). After 1900, knowing how to swim and practicing it was integral for those middle-class Americans who believed in the possibilities of sports in promoting health and individual betterment.

4 A second reason for the popularity of swimming was that, although it was certainly an attractive competitive sport with championships and records, one could rather easily practice it as a pastime, in rivers, lakes, on the seashore or in one of the many newly built public and private pools (or tanks, as they were usually called at that time). In a way, many contemporaries regarded swimming as an activity linking a rural American past to its now urban present (Sprawson 1992: chap VII). And bringing swimming from the countryside into ‘modern’ towns and cities, almost all texts argued, was ever more necessary for safety reasons. Lifesaving had been considered a crucial practical knowledge for the many occasions when rural Americans were confronted with the dangers of water, and the now growing urban populations were generally thought to be much more ignorant when it came to water’s harms. Learning to swim, many authors made perfectly clear, was a fundamental practical knowledge to master the many risks of an urban environment near riversides, canals, or harbors, and often they added statistics to validate their point: The numbers varied, but most authors figured that only about 20 to 25 percent of the American population knew how to swim, and the ‘new immigrants’ now populating the urban centers were not considered an active part in making that number rise.

5 Moreover, as a third reason for its rising popularity, many considered swimming as a particularly democratic physical activity for it seemed to be open to old and young, men and women, the well-to-do as well as the working classes (Dulles 1965: 356). Authors of older textbooks stressed the role of swimming in teaching leadership qualities for future military officers, but later texts broadened the civic usefulness of the sport. “The best ideals may be inculcated” by swimming, wrote Lyba and Nita Sheffield in 1927, “such as courage, self-confidence, leadership, a democratic spirit, good sportsmanship, self-sacrifice and heroic service. These ideals form a vital part of one's training for citizenship" (Sheffield and Sheffield 1927: xii).

6 That this vision of inclusion had many discriminating limits was largely eclipsed from contemporary debates. As were most sports and leisure activities, swimming and bathing were highly segregated practices at the beginning of the 20th century. Race was one obvious obstacle inhibiting people from swimming, not only in the South but in other parts of the United States as well. Still, as Jeff Wiltse argued in his social history of American swimming pools, at that time cities also strictly segregated pools along gender lines, and people from different classes likewise almost never swam together (Wiltse 2007). Around World War I, barriers along gender lines eased somewhat with the introduction and dissemination of commercialized leisure and

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recreation facilities that explicitly favored the mingling of men and women, but class and most of all race continued to make a difference regarding who could swim when and where (Wolcott 2012). Although the overall number of swimming facilities increased largely since the 1890s, they were clearly erected at different locations serving different clienteles. Many cities set up municipal pools, mostly in inner-city areas and with Progressive reform ideas in mind; these places centered more around hygiene than they were about sport. Other pools were built as parts of the sporting facilities operated by private clubs. Next to athletic organizations, the most prominent among them were those created by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), or by ethnic organizations like the Hebrew Association (Henne 2015). These facilities were serving also inner city but somewhat more middle-class patrons. A third group of pools was created on campuses of universities, underlining the expansion of physical education at academic institutions for both male and female students (Verbrugge 2012). The differences among these establishments indicate that, despite rising numbers, the American swimming pool remained an institution of discrimination along lines of race, class, and gender.

7 In this essay, I am going to stress a different yet related characteristic contributing to that swimming boom. I am going to scrutinize swimming’s role in charging the human body and its movements as explicitly ‘modern,’ as being part of an understanding that linked notions of modern life and its requirements and challenges to certain norms and ideals of physical appearance, ability, performance, and achievements (Stieglitz 2013). Placed in the center of that discourse was the emergence of a new swimming style, the crawl. The practice of swimming in general, and especially the motions of the crawl style became increasingly identified in terms of modernity strongly related to notions of gender, race, and age. For young white women, in particular, crawling offered opportunities to practice, to do modernity in public, to underline their active participation in a changing understanding of American urban life.

1. Swimming and Modernity in the United States after 1900

8 If swimming had already been quite popular in the U.S. around 1900, the appearance of the crawl style produced a swimming craze. Crawling had been ‘imported’ into America from Australia, and it fascinated many because of its speed and its ‘naturalness;’ this was — or so the narrative went — how swimming was practiced by South Pacific natives, corporeal movements that white Australians adopted and transformed into the fastest way to move a human body through water (Osmond and Phillips 2004). American Olympic swimmers like Charles Daniels or Louis Handley closely studied and ‘refined’ the style after the turn of the century, used it successfully at championships and grew into popular experts who explained this ‘new science of swimming’ to newspaper and magazine readers. When describing the style used by the ‘human fish,’ as Daniels was often called, journalists linked his natural talent to machine-age attributes: “His arms working with the rhythms of a perfect machine, pulled him steadily in the lead […] He used the crawl stroke, and the ease with which he glided through the water would have given the impression of no great speed had it not been forced to the notice through the great lead over the other fast men” (New York Times,

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December 13, 1908: 43). And Louis Handley summarized the importance of the crawl, deploying the vocabularies of modernity and Taylorism: "[The new stroke] must enable the swimmers to so reduce the effort that they can develop greater speed and endurance than was possible [before] on the same output of energy. It would be illogical to believe […] that methods which allow the contestant to travel faster and farther without increasing strain, will not render equal service to the man or woman who swims for pleasure, exercise or necessity" (Handley 1927: 20). The quotation nicely summarizes the aspects of speed and efficiency that many commentators distinctly linked to the new stroke and that they strongly related to the necessities of modern, urban life.

9 Over the course of a few years, these swimmers substituted what had been known as the ‘Australian crawl’ with an ‘American’ variant of that style, further pushing forward the process of whitening a certain corporeal motion that started in the South Pacific. During the 1910s, Duke Kahanamoku, the famous athlete from the annexed islands of Hawai’i, should signify and visualize this effort. In his process of becoming an American star, Kahanamoku brought along ‘natural’ abilities with potential that white experts could refine for some national success on the Olympic stage — the Hawaiian won six medals at four Olympic Games. He served as a kind of ‘missing link’ that explained the Americanness of a new swimming style (Willard 2002; Davis 2015). Kahanamoku as “a native Hawaiian, with a natural inclination toward the water, and a boyhood passed largely in that matter, has a marked advantage” remarked the Los Angeles Times for instance in 1914, and the New York Sun commented two years later that “nature has endowed him with such tremendous natural strength and surrounded him with so many encouragements to swim that he simply can’t help himself” (Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1914: 36; New York Sun, February 21, 1916, o.p.).

10 But not only these successful competitive athletes stimulated the popularization of the crawl. The performances of Australian-born swim artist Annette Kellermann were also immensely influential.1 She came to the U.S. in 1907 and started out to become the first true female sports star not because she won medals but due to her exhibitions at amusement parks and vaudeville theaters. Such facilities were significant in transmitting the spectacle of moving bodies to large crowds of socially heterogeneous visitors (Rabinovitz 2004). But initially, her performances were scandalized (and as such advertised) when she was arrested in Boston charged with indecency because she was wearing one of her self-created, one-piece swimsuits exposing too much skin at arms and legs. It was this incident plus her necessity to earn money with her sport that closed the doors to the amateur world of competitive swimming and instead made her the most prominent performer in aquatic shows. Today, she is mostly remembered for her innovations in swimming/bathing fashion as well as for her career as a water ballet dancer that paved her way to Hollywood, the even more ‘modern’ transmitter for body images. Both aspects were crucial for the fact that she became a transnational reference for discussing the modern white female body, the body of the new woman, its proper appearance and scientific development, its capabilities and limits (Capatano 2008). Her textbook How to Swim (Kellermann 1918) was one of the first of its kind written by a woman for a female readership.

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2. No Longer Against the Current: Swimming and the ‘New Woman’

11 Also in 1918, Physical Culture magazine, one of the main outlets of fitness entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden’s empire of advice publications, printed a long article on learning to swim. Its author, George Corsan, served as the national head coach of the YMCA’s swimming courses, and he had also been responsible for coordinating the training of American soldiers before they went over to Europe. In his article, Corsan used a combination of text and photography to underscore exactly those aspects that would dominate talking about swimming in the years to come: Crawling is easy, crawling is natural, crawling should be separated in the three different motions of the arm stroke, the leg kick, and breathing. And although Corsan addressed his article to men and women, choosing a female model for the images sent a decidedly gendered message (Corsan 1918). The essay is representative of the ambivalent process during which women became integrated into the American “sporting republic,” to use an expression coined by sport historian Mark Dyreson: “As women’s sports boomed during the 1920s, American culture transformed female athletes into icons of liberty. At the same time, American culture also transformed female athletes into objects of desire” (Dyreson 2003: 438; Welky 2008: 48-49).

Figure 1: Cover of Physical culture, Vol. 57 (6), 1927

12 In her survey narrative, historian Lisa Bier described the development of women’s swimming in the United States as a long fight against the current of public opinion (Bier 2011). The image underlines nicely, how many obstacles confronted athletic

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women inside as well as outside swimming pools over a long time. Nevertheless, conditions became more complex and nuanced after 1900, for sports and fitness culture became increasingly important aspects at least for young, white, middle-class girls and women (Cahn 1994; Brumberg 1997: 99-107). And while many sports considered too exhaustive were still not appropriate for them, the seemingly ‘graceful’ and ‘effortless’ swimming was. Moreover, medical discourse slowly started to change as well. The notorious debate that had linked sport to a weakening of female reproductive organs acquired a different tone vis-à-vis the emerging eugenic emphasis on strong, white bodies being able to sustain the ‘white race’s survival’ (Vertinsky 1990; Stanley 1996; Park 2007). And the growing acceptance of public entertainment in towns and cities shared by men and women eased concerns about decency and ‘appropriate’ female behavior in public, although the question of clothing remained important for years to come (Kidwell 1968; Warner 2006; Schultz 2014; Wright 2015). Along with the increasing appropriation of public space by young white ‘new women,’ swimming became more and more visible, it grew into a symbol of modern American womanhood (Figure 1).

13 As Dyreson’s remark underscores, this development lead to ambiguous results. Many swimming books and magazine articles on swimming topics maneuvered along that fine line that separated celebrating women’s emancipation and their empowerment from the many new sexualizing demands of the postwar era. Images of athletic female bodies were particularly relevant in these negotiations. Reproducing photos in magazines and books had become both easy and inexpensive by now, and many publications did so with the twin purpose of depicting motions in close detail and charging them with sex appeal at the same time. The widely distributed publications of the Albert G. Spalding sports goods company might serve as a well-known example. In one of these booklets, Swimming for Women (Handley 1928), one could analyze the crawl style in numerous close-ups depicting young women in exactly those swimsuits that were advertised on the final pages of the very same publication. Ranging from $ 5 — $ 9, they were affordable for the potentially targeted group of costumers — white, urban, middle-class, well-educated and most likely wage-earning young women. Wearing short, bobbed hair and garments that expose bare arms, shoulders, and legs, the women depicted in these photographs added sports apparel to the contemporary Flapper outfit. These and similar commercials filled the pages of numerous magazines, and swimsuits became one important marker for the modern woman and the athletic, trained body she was now supposed to present in public (Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Eleanor Holm on the cover of Time, Aug. 21, 1939

14 Next to aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and tennis champion Helen Wills, portraits of young U.S.-swimmers such as Ethelda Bleibtrey, Gertrude Ederle, Ethel Lackie, Georgia Coleman, or Eleanor Holm appeared on the covers and in the pictorial sections of magazines like Vanity Fair, Vogue, or Collier’s, their athletic bodies wearing tight swimsuits suggesting a strong relationship between athleticism, beauty and being a successful ‘new woman’ in public (Wiltse 2007: 97). “One of the weirdest of the many phenomena attendant upon the American sport scene is the worship … accorded to lady swimmers,” observed sports columnist Paul Gallico who noted that female swimmer “have been photographed, biographed, feted, pursued by millionaires, popped into the movies, lionized, and … glorified, beyond all bounds of sanity and reason” (Gallico 1936: 49). When “Business Girls Should Swim for Better Posture,” as another Physical Culture article explained, then they should do so as potential dates, wearing the newest fashion (Macfadden 1937).

15 Many considered swimming the crawl as especially suitable for women because it was attributed with ‘feminine’ characteristics like elegance, grace, and ‘pleasantness;’ the style seemed to combine ‘modern’ notions of speed and efficiency with the display of an athletic, ‘healthy’ female body. Louis Handley, now an influential trainer who mentored several successful women swimmers, described this nexus as such: Crawling “requires very little effort to hold an efficient, well mastered stroke, and this is one of the things which makes swimming a particularly desirable exercise for girls and women, as it permits them to practice at length without feeling any ill effects … [The style] will enable girls and women to utilize more adequately their natural resources and either cover a given course faster, or last longer in an unlimited swim, than earlier styles” (Handley 1928: 10-11).

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16 One individual athlete moved into the core of this debate, Gertrude Ederle. After participating at the Paris Olympic Games of 1924, Ederle turned professional and became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. She used the crawl and swam faster than any man before her — for many commentators demonstrating how much the new stroke enabled women to make use of their physical strength (Vertinsky & Job 2005; Dahlberg 2009). When watching the still existing newsreels of that event,2 terms like ‘grace’ or ‘effortlessness’ seem utterly inappropriate, but nevertheless, commentators explained Ederle’s triumph mostly as based on the superiority of the crawl style: The “American crawl, when properly executed, is no more tiring than brisk walking. Gertrude Ederle used the stroke for over fourteen hours in the English Channel. During this time, she kept up a steady stroke of thirty beats a minute, breathed naturally and went through the water with amazing speed, lowering the record by nearly two hours" (Sullivan 1934: 14-15). This remained the hegemonic reading of Ederle’s record-breaking undertaking, even though some commentators interpreted it as challenging or even crossing the boundaries of acceptable female participation in sports. At times, these critics referred to photos that were published by the tabloid New York Daily News, the main sponsor of the event. One of them showed the swimmer all greased up just before entering the water. For critics, this and other photographs signified the opposite of all that women’s sport should stand for. They reminded the American audience that athletic competitiveness and success, on the one hand, might easily come into conflict with standards of female public appearance and beauty on the other hand (Grahame 1926). But such voices remained marginal opposed to the general sense of pride that dominated coverage both nationally and internationally. Ederle’s broad shoulders now no longer signified unwanted masculinity in a woman but a strong American, ‘modern’ notion of femininity. Some commentators linked that idea to the newly acquired political rights for women and to the streamlined body of the flapper; others, more conservative in tone, chose to underline the willpower of second-generation immigrants that Ederle supposedly displayed. But all these ‘feminist’ appreciations remained bound to swimming. Sports writer Paul Gallico for example, a noted skeptic of women’s sport, explained why Ederle and other swimmers were exceptional: “The whole business may lie only in the imagination of a fastidious commentator [himself, O.S.] who doesn’t like hippy or muscly lady athletes, and none of these swimmers is that, because swimming is practically the only sport that develops long, flat, graceful muscles” (Gallico 1936: 58).

3. New Women, New Men: Swimming as Science

17 The debate over Gertrude Ederle’s achievements also referred to another aspect important for the linkage between swimming and modern bodies in the U.S. between the world wars. In 1930, the author of one popular swim manual declared that “what Miss Ederle does with her feet has no significance. She has such powerful arms and shoulders that she gets practically ninety-nine per cent of her propelling progress out of them. She swims more with her arms and less with her feet than any other swimmer I know, man or woman.” While notions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘effortlessness’ marked one important thread of the discussion, another one was strictly biomechanical in nature and it stressed competencies which were considered more masculine in character. Even the ‘greatest authorities’ became part of that dialogue, as we can see in this very quotation on Ederle’s style, which was authored by none less than Johnny Weissmuller

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in his half textbook, half autobiography Swimming the American Crawl (Weissmuller 1930: 47). Without any doubt, Weissmuller was the embodiment of American swimming during the 1920s. His fame as a five-time Olympic champion was just the base for his body being highly visible in magazines, advertisements, and newsreels during a ‘Golden Age of Sports’ era of time that produced and consumed sport stars in unprecedented ways. When he became an actor and started to portray Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan in twelve motion pictures from 1932 onward, the public visibility of a crawl swimmer within U.S. popular culture peaked.

18 Talking about the crawl style in scientific terms started as soon as it surfaced in American pools; charging the crawl as a science helped in branding the ‘American’ variant as superior in comparison to the ‘original Australian’ one (Daniels 1922). Along with advancing photo and film technologies, the biomechanical analysis of the style reached ever new levels after the First World War. At first, much of this new knowledge circulated only among experts and coaches, but chiefly Weissmuller and his coach, William Bachrach, were responsible for pushing that material into the public realm (Bachrach 1924). The athlete and his physical motions became charged with the attributes of modernity. Weissmuller’s body appeared to be a surface onto which American accomplishments could be inscribed, and it moreover signified a new, ‘modern’ masculinity that paired technical competence with looks and personality (Pendergast 2000). In countless advertisements and later in his adventure films, he combined his swimming excellence with the ‘spectacle’ of bare arms and a bare chest — seemingly ‘natural’ traits that were, in fact, the results of hard and scientifically guided training. With Weissmuller and his Tarzan movies of the 1930s, the processes of Americanizing the crawl and labeling it as specifically ‘modern’ came almost full circle. Showing the masculine physique and actions of Tarzan in Hollywood movies starring the most famous swimmer of his times literally crawling through the African jungle underscores the entangled genealogy of the American Crawl and its close relation to discourses of modernity. And he did that as the embodiment of the modern American man, superior both physically and morally — Hollywood could not have created a more convincing icon for selling its products abroad (Kirkham/Thumim 1993; Dyreson 2008).

19 During the 1920s, Weissmuller’s success triggered a debate about how to ‘refine’ the ‘naturally superior’ style of the crawl by analyzing it as separated into three distinct motions — arms pull, leg kick, and breathing. Such observations had been common about older forms of swimming as well, as can be easily realized by the prominent practice of mimicking different motions in on-land exercises, and images of these parlor practices had a long tradition in How-to-Swim manuals. They marked a compromise between visual perception on the one hand, and limited photographic options on the other hand that did not allow for focused, truly educational depictions of fast motions, especially in or even under water. Inspired by the supposed easiness of the crawl, some experts declared parlor practices and images of them unnecessary, but those who held that opinion fought a fruitless battle. On-land practices and their representations remained indispensable for many authors, for two reasons: First, they remained important for teaching an analytical perspective on the style’s individual motions: “In order to obtain the full benefit of the text the reader should know how to study or visualize the body in movement (that is, to think in a motor way), so as to apply each lesson most effectively" (Sheffield & Sheffield 1927: xii). Moreover, these images allowed the depiction of male and female stars and their bodies in motion; a

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valuable tool in linking the motions of the crawl to modernity, physical capability, beauty, and success.

4. Grace and Empowerment: Swimming from the perspective of young white women

20 In 1934, the National Recreation Association published a report about the leisure activities of 5,000 representative American men and women. Like in many other surveys and studies of the early 1930s, this report was mostly motivated by the guiding question of change in American lives since the beginning of the Great Depression. In pursuit of this aim, The Leisure Hours of 5,000 People did not actively differentiate neither between men and women nor between different races or ethnicities; the report was tacitly concerned with the white middle class. Nevertheless, it revealed interesting insights into changing patterns of every day, spare time behaviors. Expensive outdoor activities were immensely declining in popularity; a first result of the report that could easily be expected. More surprisingly though, it also made clear that no sport was ranked among the top ten leisure activities in the U.S. — except for swimming that came in seventh, trailing behind reading, going to the movies, or cruising in an automobile (National Recreation Association 1934: 10). Further down, the report dealt more closely with this outcome, explaining that even swimming was suffering from declining popularity although it still excelled when compared to costlier and more socially marked sports such as tennis or golf (National Recreation Association 1934: 18).

21 This study and many others published during the interwar years offer opportunities for discussing the leisure time activities of ordinary Americans beyond the normative texts of advice manuals. Still, they also remain rather distant when it comes to actual bodies practicing sports or other physical culture exertions; they remain mute when asking how swimming, for instance, had been charged with racialized or gendered meaning. Other sources, although problematic in themselves too, may be of more help in this regard. Letters and somewhat longer narratives written by readers of Physical Culture magazine, for example, can be used to come up with more interesting results. Macfadden’s magazine started circulation in 1899 and reached its peaks in popularity as well as influence in the interwar years after it struggled with censorship issues regarding its supposedly indecent or even pornographic content before (Adams 2009: 117-118; Ernst 1991). Other characteristics of that periodical also demand scholarly caution: Physical Culture propagated an unmistakable and unchanging message — that healthy bodies are productive and beautiful bodies, and that taking care of one’s body is the ultimate responsibility of every citizen. All the features printed in Physical Culture must be evaluated against this backdrop; and the letters to editors and the reports submitted by ordinary readers of the magazine usually also argued along that line of thinking. These are important limitations, but from the perspective of a history of the body, these letters and narratives form a valuable group of sources. Read carefully, they offer a perspective from usually white, (lower) middle-class Americans sharing information about their physical culture exercises; and the proportion of women speaking out increased especially after the World War.

22 Swimming played a significant role on these pages of Physical Culture; next to bodybuilding and calisthenics — the cornerstones of Macfadden’s fitness ideology — swimming was the sport most often discussed in the magazine. Swimming, the editors

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and hired authors in their articles as well as the readers underscored ever again, should be considered a highly recommendable sport supporting all the health, efficiency, and beauty concerns that Macfadden himself pushed in his own publications. Trunks and swimsuits were maybe to most often depicted clothes in a magazine that still carried a reputation of indecency and doubtful morality. Hinting at one’s swimming competence often served a double purpose for contributing readers: It demonstrated the ‘right’ knowledge about how to live up to the magazine’s ideals and moreover offered a chance to present one’s body in an aesthetic or even erotic photograph.

23 But the relevance of readers’ textual and photographic contributions extended beyond affirming Bernarr Macfadden’s fitness ideology and its ideal of a healthy and beautiful body. Many letters and longer reports broadened the narrative of swimming’s usefulness and added aspects such as joy, fascination, and self-esteem, and especially women were remarkably frank in stressing these points. Some examples can highlight this emotional treatment of swimming. In September 1929, Physical Culture published a page-long letter from Florence, Italy. The young Italian woman swimmer had gotten hold to a copy of the magazine and now wanted to share her sporting experiences with American readers. She presented herself as a European who had ‘learned’ about her own corporeal capabilities from American role models and had now become eager to promote them: “The modern girl is really beginning to rival men in sports nowadays. And I am so glad, because the health and figure of the girl of today certainly is improving […] [We girls here] are happy physical culture girls” (Physical Culture, September 1929: 74). If here expressing joy and optimism still remains (as usual) bound to imperatives of health and beauty, other sources hint at different aspects. A year later, a 29-year old woman from California emphasized how swimming helped her in achieving self-assertion when confronted with men: “It not only makes her independent, but it gives her a power to cope with men that a non-athletic woman misses. The old idea that an athletic woman is masculine is ridiculous. A woman can be as sweetly feminine and as athletically capable and healthy as a man can be gentlemanly and also athletic” (Physical Culture, September 1930: 60). Here, the author picked up the contemporary debate about so called ‘muscle molls,’ athletic women considered ‘mannish’ and often confronted with strong skepticism concerning their gender and sexuality (Cahn 2010). For many athletic women, swimming provided an excellent opportunity to evade such accusations or even oppose them openly. The many questions and comments dealing with swimming during menstruation, for instance, often served a purpose of (self-)asserting (e.g. Physical Culture, January 1939: 59; Mosher 1923). Another strategy is apparent in those images printed in the magazines that depicted women while performing water sport activities closely attributed to male characteristics such as grand speed or taking risks, water-skiing or aqua-gliding for example. Here, women were self-consciously crossing boundaries into ‘men’s territory,’ they went swimming and while simultaneously “having a thrill,” as one photo story called it (Physical Culture, August 1937: 35).

24 Two water sport motions were both quantitatively and qualitatively outstanding in their gendered dimension. One of them was platform diving, which entered the standard repertoire of what a ‘modern girl’ should be capable doing since Annette Kellermann had made it the apex of her shows. The other was crawl swimming. Sometimes, the style triggered many concerned questions, particularly regarding its breathing technique that many men and women found confusing. “[B]reath as normally as possible,” one woman advised other readers of the magazine, “relax and keep your

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prone body position“ (Physical Culture, July 1930: 106; emphasis in original). Accompanying another report, the editorial staff added an image alongside the text depicting how to train correct crawl style breathing by using a wash bowl (Physical Culture, June 1930: 60). But beyond such doubts and concerns, most women first of all articulated expressions of physical competence when writing about their crawling experiences, and they especially stressed notions of speed and of a streamlined body progressing through water, attributes that many considered helpful beyond the pools as well: “[The swimmer] does not miss his strokes because of waves, and the person who would be healthy in the ordinary rounds of daily life cannot afford to miss strokes because of disappointments or minor difficulties […]. which creep into the work of every day” (Physical Culture, October 1930: 77). And another female reader pointed out that she considered swimming and dancing not only the two most graceful and elegant sports for women, but also those that most strongly promoted the woman’s cause in society (Physical Culture, January 1933: 77).

5. Conclusion

25 In the summer of 1928, readers of The Hilltop, the student magazine of Howard University in Washington, DC, found a remarkable article in that paper. It announced and celebrated the opening of the Francis Municipal Swimming Pool, and a large illustration shows university officials and male members of the swimming team standing next to the newly built facility. Howard University was (and still is) a traditionally black institution, and that fact makes the article and the image published in a small periodical mostly read by university members and alumni indeed remarkable. They remind us that swimming in the United States and the narratives revolving around the American crawl as a ‘modern’ practice constituted a predominantly white sphere during the first decades of the twentieth century, a realm of corporeal practice and knowledge characterized to a large degree by making African American men and especially women more or less invisible (Chambers 1986: 14-15). The result of this process of whitening the sport of swimming was the eclipse a long tradition of black swimmers in North America, a tradition that dated back to slavery and that contained at the same time aspects of exploitation as well as empowerment (Dawson 2006).

26 Moreover, and this has been the focus of this essay, the motions of swimming were also and more clearly coded along lines of gender. Swimming in the U.S. not only mirrored gender relations, it took an active part in negotiating and developing notions of masculinity and femininity within an intersectional social structure that related aspects of race, ethnicity, age, and capability to these categories. And in doing so, the actual motions of swimming were meaningful as well. During the early twentieth century, the new crawl style, fast, efficient, streamlined, and ‘modern,’ became increasingly intertwined with gendered norms and attributions, and it also offered an opportunity to perform such gendered notions in public and at times in unexpected ways. For a growing number of young white American women, swimming offered valuable opportunities for new, exciting corporeal experiences that many felt to have liberating consequences. But as this essay also demonstrated, the gendered assumptions bound to swimming in general and the crawl motions, in particular, were part of a more commercialized and sexualized world of American modernity that at the

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same time set severe limits to experiencing sport as just a progressive opportunity. The “sporting republic” of the interwar period embraced its new female citizens, but it certainly demanded a high price for inclusion.

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Ford, Corey. “Swimming for Ladies.” Vanity Fair, May 1927: 49 and 94.

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Green, Harvey. Fit for America. Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Handley, Louis de Breda. Swimming for Women. Preliminary and Advanced Instruction. Competitive Swimming, Fancy Diving and Life Saving. New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1928.

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Kellermann, Annette. How to Swim. New York: George H. Doran, 1918.

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Macfadden, Helen. “Business Girls Should Swim for Better Posture.” Physical Culture, July 1937: 46-47.

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Wright, Ellen. “Spectacular Bodies. The Swimsuit, Sexuality, and Hollywood.” Sport in History 35(3) 2015: 441–463. DOI: 10.1080/17460263.2015.1072578

NOTES

1. The spelling of Annette Kellermann’s last name varies in sources and literature; I am using the one that she used when publishing her book How to Swim in 1918. 2. The newsreels are available among the Universal Newsreels on the Associated Press Archive website, http://www.aparchive.com. Moreover, Universal also features a channel containing their material on youtube.com.

ABSTRACTS

Swimming in the USA was booming during the early 20th century. It held an important part in ongoing health and fitness debates, it was popular as a spare time activity, and many considered it as a particularly democratic sport. Moreover, and this marks the key argument of this essay,

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was swimming at that point charged with marking human bodies as explicitly ‘modern,’ as a practice that made normative notions and ideals of ability, competence and beauty especially visible. These attributions were closely linked to both gendered and racialized codes. Swimming, this essay argues, was supposed to create idealized male and female bodies. The development of the new crawl style stood at the center of that process. The article offers a close reading of the style’s genealogy within the American context. Next to photographs, it analyses swimming textbooks but also letters and reports written by young women swimmers that allow for a closer look at the actual practice of swimming and how it was part of negotiating modernity in the US.

La nage aux Etats-Unis était une activié florissante au début du XXe siècle. Elle jouait un rôle important dans les débats de l’époque sur la santé et l’exercice physique ; c’était une activité de loisirs populaire et beaucoup la considéraient comme un sport particulièrement démocratique. La nage à ce moment-là marquait les corps humains comme explicitement « modernes », une pratique qui rendait particulièrement visibles les notions normatives et les idéaux de capacité, de compétence et de beauté. Ces qualités étaient étroitement liées aux codes genrés et racialisés. Cet article cherche à montrer comment natation était censée créer des corps masculins et féminins idéalisés. Le développement du crawl était au centre de ce processus. L'article propose une lecture précise de la généalogie du style dans le contexte américain. En plus des photographies, il analyse les manuels de natation, mais aussi les lettres et les rapports rédigés par de jeunes nageuses qui permettent d'examiner de plus près la pratique réelle de la natation et la façon dont elle s'inscrivait dans le cadre des négociations sur la modernité aux États-Unis.

INDEX

Mots-clés: États-Unis, natation, modernité, corps, genre Keywords: United States, swimming, modernity, bodies, gender

AUTHOR

OLAF STIEGLITZ Dr. phil., University of Cologne, History Department / Institute for North American History. Main areas of research: Gender History and the History of the Body; Sport History as Cultural History; History and Visual Sources. Contact: olaf.stieglitz1[at]uni-koeln.de

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We Are the One: Subcultural Politics and Leisure in Early San Francisco Punk

Michael Stewart Foley

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author is grateful for the valuable research assistance of Marijn Rombouts, who provided critical help at various stages in advancing this paper toward publication.

1 In 1977, the year that punk became a global sensation, Penelope Houston, lead singer of the Avengers, wrote the lyrics to what became the singular anthem of the San Francisco punk scene. In the first verse to “We Are the One,” she captured both the power and exhilaration of the city’s youthful rebel culture: We are the leaders of tomorrow We are the ones to have the fun We want control, we want the power Not going to stop until it’s done! (The Avengers 1977)

2 With its aggressive drum attack and slashing guitar riffs, “We Are the One” seemed capable of sparking not only frenzied pogo dancing, but also a rush to the barricades. As soon as punks at the Mabuhay Gardens, the city’s counterpart to New York’s CBGB’s, heard the opening guitar lines, they broke into shouting these lyrics which cathartically gave voice and physical expression to themes of both leisure and politics. Although the song could, in fact, be seen as a tongue-in-cheek comment on political anthems — shouting everything they were not (messiahs, fascists, capitalists, communists, etc.) and saying, cryptically, that they are “the one” — it is representative of the power punks believed they possessed to tear down the old (whether in San Francisco or the wider United States) and build the new — all while having “the fun.” (The Avengers 1977)

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3 San Francisco’s enduring association with the counterculture of the 1960s has obscured its history as one of the United States’ essential 1970s punk cities. Instead, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington get all the attention as epicenters of American punk. But San Francisco was home to the most deliberately political punk scene in the country, if not the world. At the same time, as the lyrics to “We Are the One” suggest, San Francisco punks — like punks everywhere — experienced their scene as deliriously fun. This is not to say that punks thought about their lives in more traditional, bourgeois terms of leisure; they would have rejected, in knee-jerk fashion, the very idea of mainstream leisure as a salve for the soul, created and commodified to help alienated Americans swallow the mind-killing experience of the workaday world. Still, if slam- dancing to thunderous music was not the same as taking a cruise or lounging at the country club, there is no denying the fun and even escapism that punk offered.

4 This mix of politics and fun is not, of course, unique to San Francisco punk. Subcultures scholars have long written about participants choosing the “subterranean world of play” in response to the predictability and boredom of mainstream life, as a way to assert “creative, skillful, self-determining action.” (Young 877) Specifically writing about the meaning of punk, Dick Hebdige famously described its style as “an oblique challenge to hegemony.” (Hebdige 17) But others, such as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, have argued that sub-cultural leisure actually undermines political change: “Having fun is not subversive, and it doesn’t undermine any system” they write. In fact, Heath and Potter suggest, fun makes organizing social movements and effecting political change more difficult (Heath and Potter 2004).1

5 This article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the intersection of politics and fun in punk. In San Francisco, punk politics went beyond oblique challenges to hegemony and, rather, confronted neoliberal elites and the forces of inequality and injustice directly. At the same time, punks acted deliberately to not only intertwine fun and politics, but to make fun and play vehicles for political struggle, if not revolution. At least in this one major American city, punk was equal parts political engagement and diversion, equally confrontational and escapist. Social movement theorists who have investigated the role of emotion in political mobilization would not be surprised by this; it makes sense that emotion — particularly anger and joy — would mobilize punks politically. More importantly, the leisure and fun elements contributed to the building of a prefigurative community as a micro-model of what punks hoped could be achieved on a larger scale. In that way, fun and politics contributed to a fundamentally utopian vision in a subculture marked not by nihilism — as punk is so often cast — but by possibility.2

6 Historical context on a national, state, and urban level is essential in order to understand the power and potential of San Francisco’s punk scene. For example, by the late 1970s, few would deny that the United States was in decline. American confidence suffered not only from defeat in Vietnam, political corruption and paranoia as a result of Watergate and related scandals of government spying on its own citizens, and challenges from two major oil crises and a series of environmental disasters; most important, the national economy that had, for decades, sustained the great expansion of the American middle class, finally saw a major correction. Although historians now see that period of mid-century economic power and liberal progress as “the great exception,” the vast majority of Americans suffering from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression grew exasperated at the nation’s inability to

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return to greatness — to a level of prosperity to which they had grown accustomed and perceived as the norm (Cowie 2016). When President Jimmy Carter gave an honest appraisal of the national malaise, and pointed to the country’s “crisis of confidence,” the electorate voted him out of office (Mattson 2009). A variety of factors reinforced this sense of national decline in what one historian has called “a decade of nightmares” — a seeming epidemic of child abductions, serial killings, cult activity, drug abuse — underscored for many an American culture that had gone over the edge (Jenkins 2006). Meanwhile, anxieties about the supposed bedrock of American society — the nuclear family, faced with rising divorce rates and unsupervised latch-key children, seemingly in decline — paralleled anxieties about the nation as a whole (Zaretsky 2007). It was no surprise that, in the mid-1970s, Americans eagerly embraced the signature line of the Academy Award-winning film Network: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”3

7 American punks were mad as hell, too, but unlike their mainstream counterparts in the electorate, they felt not betrayed by the government — in which they had had little faith, anyway — so much as by the counterculture and New Left, both of which seemed to promise radical change when punks were kids. Instead, punks found that those cultural and political radicals had, by the late 1970s, given up the revolution before it could be won and instead, echoing Christopher Lasch’s critique of the American “culture of narcissism,” retreated to their hot tubs and new age lifestyles (Foley 19, 33).

8 In San Francisco, where the counterculture and New Left once flourished, that abdication of political engagement resulted, many punks thought, in a city being rapidly gifted to real estate developers who quickly marginalized - with help from a landlord mayor and aggressive police enforcement - the minority, immigrant and poor populations that were central to the city’s identity. It was a common pattern. As American cities deindustrialized and lost much of their tax base, policy makers sought to make up the shortfall by bringing in new investments to gentrify old neighborhoods. The resulting dispossession of San Francisco from long-term residents has turned out to be the dominant theme of the city’s history in the last forty years, as it has in other cities, but in San Francisco, punks led the resistance to what the band The Mutants called “The New Dark Ages.”4

9 Since punk functioned in San Francisco more as a rebel culture than as a social movement — though the terms “movement” and “scene” are today used by punk veterans almost interchangeably — it produced no clear manifesto. Rather, punks engaged politics at multiple levels, standing on the one hand in joyful defiance of mainstream culture while, on the other hand, deliberately engaging specific political concerns of the nation, state, and city. That engagement manifested itself in multiple, interwoven ways — through utopian critiques of the mainstream culture, by engaging specific national issues of the moment, and primarily by claiming and fighting for particular urban spaces in San Francisco. These political stands were central not only to much of the music produced by the city’s bands, but they were at the heart of what the community considered both its work and its play: imagining and enacting a better city and country.

10 Among core punk writers and thinkers, the power of punk lay in its potential to build a community that would stand in opposition to mainstream American culture and that would challenge the complacent to join them. For V. Vale, the editor of Search & Destroy, San Francisco’s most influential zine, punk gave everyone in the scene an opportunity

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to make art, to be creative, but the key was to ensure that whatever one made it had to be “against the status quo (which is always changing).” In Search & Destroy, Vale tried to provide an enduring document of “an entire social revolution, as it was happening.” (Vale 2013) In a typical Search & Destroy interview, Danny Furious, drummer for The Avengers, criticized mainstream politics as well as the indifference among young people. “I think that putting total conviction into what we’re doing is the statement — that’s the politics,” he told Vale. “Getting up and smacking some of those assholes that have just come [to a show] to boogie in the face — [because] it’s not just entertainment!!!” (“The Avengers” 4)

11 By the end of 1979, punks were already worried about being co-opted and found themselves repeating the need to resist mainstream values. In response to music corporations courting some San Francisco punk bands, Brad Lapin, the editor of Damage (a kind of successor to Search & Destroy) reasserted what he saw, still, as punks’ essential mission: “What we should want and what we should make clear by our attitudes, our songs, our music, our venues, our publications, our lives,” Lapin wrote, “is that this scene represents one thing if nothing else: A COMPLETE, A TOTAL REJECTION OF THE MINDLESSNESS OF CONFORMITY AND MASS CULTURE.” (Lapin 30) As we will see, there was a utopian quality to this call for building an alternative society in which Americans (not only punks) could live their lives on their own terms. But their vision did not look only inward; indeed, punks consistently critiqued the mainstream and especially the mainstream media for failing to understand the essence of punk. The media did not want to “accept punk as what it is or what it should be,” Tony Kinman of the Dils, perhaps the most obviously ideological band in San Francisco, told Search & Destroy. “They wanna accept it as another little entertainment — they’d like a punk cartoon show on Saturday morning!,” Kinman said, when, in fact, he argued, punk should be seen “as a force, like to WRECK THINGS! TO TRANSFORM!” (“Avengers & Dils ” 12-3) No doubt, some punks would have perceived the earnest anger of Lapin and Kinman as amusing or perhaps as punks taking themselves too seriously, but they were representative of the way most punks saw themselves resisting straight society.

12 One side of V. Vale’s call for everyone to do something creative emphasized conducting and sharing research, almost as amateur pathologists examining a diseased American body politic. For example, they took seriously the re-intensifying Cold War and explicitly tied their concerns about foreign policy to questions of class and inequality in the city. Defeat and deceit in Vietnam did a lot to shape their cynicism and produce their critique of American society, with Cold War references running through their music, zines, fashion and art. Johnny Genocide (née Hugh Patterson) of the band No Alternative remembers a kind of punk salon, with punks meeting up nearly every night and the best informed among them sharing what they knew. Punks like Peter Urban, manager of the Dils’, and others served as a “clearinghouse” for information on global political events. As a result, songs like “The Amerikan in Me,” by the Avengers, resonated with punks precisely because so few trusted the federal government. “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country’s been doing to you,” Penelope Houston sang in the chorus. Similarly, bands and zines emphasized working- class Americans being sacrificed by the military even before draft registration returned in 1980, while others anticipated the next Vietnam War and future use of the neutron bomb — both of which, some punks argued, could be used in a class war to wipe out the poor (Vale 2013; Patterson 2014).5

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13 At other times, punks organized around specific issues of injustice, even if somewhat distant from San Francisco. They held benefit concerts for an enormous range of political issues — on behalf of striking Kentucky miners, striking railway workers, wrongfully imprisoned Black Panthers, and Dessie Woods (a woman who had been convicted of killing her rapist with his own gun). They brought “Rock Against Racism” concerts to San Francisco, organized a festival for Amnesty International, and played anti-draft rallies, protested against nuclear power, and played “Rock Against Work” on two consecutive International Labor Days. At the Mabuhay Gardens, punks enlisted gay city supervisor Harvey Milk to MC a benefit for a campaign to defeat a California ballot initiative that would ban homosexuals from teaching in the public schools, and, closer to home, raised money to keep open the Gay Community Center at 330 Grove Street.

14 In these ways, punk’s independent researchers fulfilled the role of teachers while other punks were students. Michael Reid, a Londoner who moved to San Francisco in 1979 and organized shows at the Mabuhay Gardens said that rank and file audiences “were not that politically knowledgeable” and that “they were dependent on what they read in these fanzines.” Band interviews in zines and statements from the stage often introduced readers to important issues. “If a kid wants to go see The Zeros or The Dils,” Reid remarked, “he’s going to go to that gig and he’s going to learn who [Black Panther] Geronimo Pratt is, and that’s how they got a lot of their political education, because you’re not going to get that from the mainstream news or Channel 5 because they’re going to call that person a criminal.” In effect, artists replaced traditional news sources (Reid 2013).

15 For some punks, it seemed appropriate that punk politics overran punk escapism. Peter Urban, who managed both The Dils and The Zeros used to introduce The Dils at shows by saying: “It’s 1977. There is no time for fun! Here’s the Dils!” When Urban was interviewed with Malcolm McLaren for Slash, and the interviewers asked him to sum up, he said “take less drugs, wear more clothes, and overthrow the bourgeoisie”. Even Urban admits today that he was very dour, particularly in his public persona, and so were The Dils. “We were tired of people saying things they didn’t mean,” he recalled years later. “This is the world we were born into, and we recognize it. Our eyes are open. It looks like this, and it smells like shit and especially we’re sick of your lies… There’s lots of shit in the world, and we’ve got to talk about it.” (Urban 2013)

16 Most important, San Francisco punks focused their protest on the forces they saw destroying their city: real estate developers, the police, and a City Hall that emboldened both. They fought police in sidewalk defenses as tenants were evicted from residential hotels — such as the International Hotel in Manilatown — and other low-income housing to make way for the gentrification wrecking ball. When former city supervisor and cop, Dan White, was convicted only of manslaughter, despite confessing to the murders of Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, punks led the riot at City Hall, pelting the building with bricks and stones, and setting fire to a dozen police cars (an image of which is used as the cover to Dead Kennedys’ first LP). Steven Brown of Tuxedomoon earnestly read testimony from the trial when the band would play its cover of the Rolling Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and the band later headlined one of several benefit concerts held for the riot defense fund. When Moscone’s successor, Dianne Feinstein, ran for election in her own right, in 1979, she was challenged by Dead Kennedys lead singer, Jello Biafra, who focused his critique on Feinstein being a landlord, cozy with real estate interests and promised, instead,

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legalized squatting, rent control, and for neighborhoods to hold periodic yes and no confidence votes on the police who patrolled them.6

17 Benefit concerts and a punk prankster mayoral challenge are perhaps more obviously fun than confrontations with police in the streets (though more than a couple of people have described the White Night riot as “fun”) but the point is that the zines, song lyrics, gigs — both routine performances and benefit concerts — as well as participation in street protests demonstrated a significant degree of political engagement within a scene that could still be considered, because it had music and performance at its center, a zone of leisure. Of course, this is true for most subcultures — from skateboarding to parkour, northern soul to hip-hop, much of the attraction to a subcultural life lies in the fun, the diversion, the escape from mass society. In late-1970s San Francisco, disentangling the fun from the work of punk, political or otherwise, was impossible. As Penelope Houston later described it, punk leisure was not like bourgeois leisure. “In America, when most people think of leisure, they think of monied leisure,” Houston argues. “We had our unstructured days and varying levels of drive.” Playing in bands, writing songs, and going to other bands’ shows “was kind of our job - but it wasn’t work. It was fun.” The research culture and emphasis on creativity encouraged punks to pursue their interests, to turn them into avocations if not occupations, in ways that could be both politically intentional and creatively exhilarating. In this way, San Francisco is a model subculture, one in which, as Dick Hebdige argued in 1983, “‘politics’ and ‘pleasure,’ crime and resistance, transgression and carnival are meshed and confounded.” Ruby Ray, who shot photographs for Search & Destroy and became one of the scene’s most prominent artists, said that even as punks were having so much fun, they still felt like they were doing something important, something historic. It was so exciting, she said, that she could get her work published so quickly and that everyone influenced each other stylistically, aesthetically, politically — sharing “the stuff that was cool.” Ray’s artistic experimentation showed diverse artistic influences ranging from Russian constructivism, Dadaism, existentialism, to revolutionary Maoist magazines found in Chinatown — all art forms that circulated in the thrilling salon culture of the scene (Dick 1988; Ray 2014).

18 One way in which punk politics and punk fun were entwined could be seen in an affinity for mischief. Just as Biafra ran for mayor as a prank — as the rascal antagonist of the sitting mayor — Dead Kennedys especially made their name as a band known for promoting mischief. In “Stealing People’s Mail,” a song on the band’s first LP, the narrators in the song sound like a group of joyriding teens, but with a more menacing edge. It is an example of what Biafra called “creative crime.” The song’s narrators ride around on a Friday night, swiping everything from mailboxes, filling grocery bags with money, wedding gifts, tax returns, and, tellingly, checks written to politicians by realtors. The impression is that they are terrorizing everyone, that the public thinks they are crazy, yet when the narrators “read your letters,” they wind up “rolling on the floor,” laughing (Dead Kennedys 1980). The band’s penchant for mischief reached legendary levels when it played the Bay Area Music Awards (the “Bammies”) in 1980. When the band began playing its single, “California Über Alles,” some in the crowd cheered, but soon the band changed gears. They dropped the black raincoats they had been wearing to reveal that each was wearing a white shirt with an ‘S’ painted on it; their black neckties turned the ‘S’ into dollar signs as they began playing “Pull My Strings,” a song, written just for the occasion, about the kind of artists sitting in the audience: rock and rollers prepared to sell their souls to record executives in exchange

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for fame and fortune (Foley: 101-3). As an exercise in political mischief, it rivaled the Yippies bringing trading on the New York Stock Exchange to a halt by dropping dollar bills all over the trading floor.

19 The combination of fun and political purpose both grew out of and reinforced a utopian ethos not usually associated with punk. If punk is typically seen as nihilist, San Francisco punks expressed and enacted ideals that were, in fact, idealistic and emphasized possibility. They did not have a set program nor did they produce, à la the Port Huron Statement, an agenda for their generation, but the scene created space for what cultural studies scholar Lauren Berlant calls an “intimate public,” bound by a shared affect to a notion that punks were part of something bigger than themselves.7 “It was beautiful and poetic and wonderful and dreamy — in the surrealistic sense of dreamy — it was all of those things,” Brad Lapin said years later. “But ultimately it was great fun. It was so much fun.” Most important for Lapin and many others, punks created an environment “in which anything and everything is possible, creatively and politically.” (Lapin 2014) In short, San Francisco punks engaged politics within a context that was fun, and had fun within a context that was fundamentally political.

20 The musical performances at the center of San Francisco’s punk rebel culture most obviously generated this affective, utopian experience. “Everything we do is a glimpse of possibilities,” Will Shatter of Negative Trend (and later Flipper), told Search & Destroy. “What we do on stage isn’t an act. It’s real life. The point is to break all the rules and limits. When people leave after seeing us I hope it’s that much harder for them to go back to their job or class.” (“Negative Trend” 1978) Punks gathered, as theater scholar Jill Dolan has suggested in a different context, to see and hear bands, “hoping, perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside.” That desire to be “part of the intense present” of a throbbing, pulsating, sweaty crowd at the Mabuhay Gardens or the Deaf Club, offered the audience “if not expressly political then usefully emotional, expressions of what utopia might feel like.” Dolan calls these lashes of experience that performance provides the “utopian performative.” In making her case, Dolan finds Roland Schaer’s definition of utopia most compelling: “Utopia, one might say, is the measure of how far a society can retreat from itself when it wants to feign what it would like to become.” It is the other side of what the Israeli anarchist and Straightedge punk Jonathan Pollak has described as “the need to extract oneself from society” being “fueled by the desire to see and live in a different reality.” As Dolan notes, “to enact an ideal future, a culture has to move farther and farther from the real into a kind of performative.” (Dolan 2001) In this way, punk in San Francisco functioned prefiguratively, much as Sixties social movements had. That is, the scene embodied and provided a model, on a small scale, of what the broader society could or should become.8

21 One key to the public intimacy and prefigurative politics of San Francisco punk was the deployment of black humor in their music, art, and repartee. Even with the occasionally serious outburst on the part of a Peter Urban or Tony Kinman, the experience of the vast majority of punks was defined by both serious political engagement and enjoyment; as part of both, black humor — a kind of warped, sarcastic, off-beat humor — became central to the San Francisco punk experience. Vale of Search & Destroy was (and still is) the most outspoken proponent of black humor as essential to punk, and not just in San Francisco. “Without black humor,” Vale later remarked, “all is lost because people start taking themselves too seriously and believing the hype about

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themselves” as politically or culturally potent. Black humor, by that calculation, was about maintaining a detachment and a certain modesty. The Dead Kennedys, the most prominent band to come out of San Francisco punk — as a punk version of the Yippies — were especially deft at pointing out the absurdity of various political issues via black humor and pranks. Jello Biafra, the band’s political mastermind and onetime mayoral candidate, noted in a later interview that “historically, the ‘Merry Prankster’ has had a lot more to look forward to than the humorless politico who sits around moaning about the ‘struggle.’” (Vale 2013; Biafra 2013).

22 For punks living in San Francisco, even in a time of economic precariousness for the nation and the city, a low-cost lifestyle provided a degree of freedom that made participation in politics and leisure possible. As social movement theorist Alberto Melucci might characterize it, punks functioned like many “submerged networks,” in which “experiments in life are carried on, new experiences created, and collective identities forged in everyday life.” (Melucci 208) But such experiments are difficult to carry out if one works forty hours a week. “In order to have any kind of youth rebellion,” Vale has noted, “you have to have some free time and a meeting place.” Punks led the kind of lives that required little money. “It cost only 15 cents to take a bus and just $25 to buy a guitar,” Vale recalled years later. “There were Xerox machines available for copying, one could easily get on the guest list for shows that cost only $3 to begin with, people had rent parties where bands played to raise money to pay the rent, or just lived in cheap SRO hotels in the tenderloin.” As it was, Vale’s rent was only $37.50 a month, and he covered that and all of his other expenses by working two six- hour shifts at City Lights Bookstore each week. Penelope Houston agreed: “We shared flats (about $225 for a 3 bedroom flat at 1926 Folsom Street) and ate Top Ramen (ten for a dollar), and had friends who worked at Just Desserts Bakery who gave us endless amounts of pastries (leftovers, or by theft, unpaid gift certificates)… People gave us free studio time.” That meant punks had the time, almost every day, to plot their rebellion at their leisure.9

23 It’s surprising how, in explaining their unstructured days, so many of San Francisco punks will now talk about how affordable they found the city to be, as if it was not victimized by the deep and prolonged recession of the 1970s — when, by any objective measure, it was. But as Tuxedomoon bass player Peter Principle has remarked, San Francisco was full of “large Victorian rambling structures” which had “gone out of fashion” in the 1950s and 1960s when city dwellers moved to the suburbs or preferred high rises. As a result, even as the elderly were being cleared out of residential hotels to make way for condominium conversions, punks could double, triple, and quadruple up in sprawling flats like the ones where Principle, Houston, and Vale lived with others. At times, a whole house functioned as a kind of punk commune where people lived, created, performed, and recorded.10

24 Punks partly embraced life on the margins as a fun alternative to straight American life, of course, and many lived in much more unconventional sites than old Victorian homes. Many younger punks, including a number of runaways, called The Broadway Hotel, a run-down old welfare hotel, their home in the early years of San Francisco punk. The hotel was located close to Polk Street, where many of them gathered during the day, and they could walk through the tunnel down Broadway to the Mabuhay Gardens, too. Further downtown, most of the band called The Mutants lived in a loft above the Fun Terminal arcade on 1st Street, near the bus station. It was an enormous

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space, big enough to host parties — rent parties were a regular occurrence — that could accommodate nearly everyone who went to shows.11 Similarly, Joe Rees, the videographer and driving force behind Target Video (which shot concert videos of nearly every band that played the city’s punk clubs) rented most of an industrial building on South Van Ness. Inside, he built a studio and performance space (which frequently functioned as a party space), sublet another floor to Damage magazine, while he and others from Target and Damage built mini-apartments there, too. Later, a large number of punks squatted at “the Vats,” the old Hamm’s Brewery, using the actual vats as individual dwellings, as well as at the abandoned Polytechnic High School and the vacant Hotel Owners Laundry Company.

25 These living arrangements sprang, of course, from punk’s Do-It-Yourself ethos, which also drove the establishment of venues and other creative spaces that aimed to circumvent the grip of commercial capitalism. Whereas a venue like the Mabuhay Gardens functioned in many ways like a mainstream business, even as it catered to punks (many of whom the promoter Dirk Dirksen let in for free), punks themselves started alternative venues in community centers, a club for the deaf, a Mexican restaurant, a bakery, and any number of other seemingly random places all over the city. Most notably, a group of young punks who thought that both bands and the audience were getting gouged at the Mabuhay formed an organization called New Youth with the primary aim of raising money for a punk performance and recording venue, its own kind of community center (the organization did not raise enough money, but it channeled its funds to various benefit concerts and into building a national directory of DIY venues, radio shows, and record labels) (“New Youth is Everybody” 1979).

26 As scholars of other subcultural spaces have found, the carving out of such spaces — which to outsiders would seem to be purely escapist — are fundamental to building a culture of resistance. They may have been hollows of refuge within a larger society that punks perceived as repressive, but they were sites where love, friendship, and solidarity were built, too.12 As Cindy Katz has argued, "young people's growth and development depends upon environments that provide stimulation, allow autonomy, offer possibilities for exploration, and promote independent learning and peer group socializing.” (Katz 1998: 141) The geography of punk in San Francisco made such growth and development possible in the spaces where punks lived and went to shows, but also in countless other places — in broadcast radio studios, independent record labels, and television.

27 Radio, especially, staked a claim for punk in the Bay Area’s airwaves and helped hold together the intimate public of punk in northern California. It started in 1976 with a Friday night (Saturday morning) shift from midnight to 2.00 a.m. on KSAN, with DJs Howie Klein and Chris Knabb spinning the latest punk records from the US and UK on a show they first called The Outcastes and, later, The Heretics. When new management took over KSAN and changed its format to all country music, KUSF, the station based at the University of San Francisco, with an incredible 30,000 watts of broadcast power, filled the gap and slowly expanded its punk and new wave programming. Suddenly, the information on bands, gigs, venues, exhibits and punks themselves — also available in the many zines and fliers produced all over the city — was being distributed via radio, directly to punks’ bedrooms every day. As one punk DJ later said, reflecting on radio’s role in the scene, “it was an incredible time!” (Sullivan 2015)

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28 For the DJs broadcasting these radio shows, it was so much fun, it hardly felt like work, but most of all, as with zines, radio opened up possibilities for punks to participate. It is not insignificant that many of the most prominent punk radio voices belonged to women. “The best of punk rock, to me, is that it offered space to anyone who felt different,” Denise Sullivan, who DJ’d at KUSF, later remembered. “Free space to just be who you were.” Sullivan came to KUSF in 1979, when the city’s punk scene was already two years old. “To be welcomed in, to be given opportunities, these tools — like a radio station to operate with a very powerful signal and no limits to speak of — that’s, I mean, when is that ever going to happen?” Similarly, Ruth Schwartz, who worked at KUSF as well as on KPFA’s “Maximum Rock N’Roll” show, among others, recalls that “independence” was the “driving value” behind the scene, but also there existed a sense that one could mix fun and revolution. The city’s punk radio shows, Schwartz said, aimed “first and foremost” to “protest the entertainment industry,” but also, more generally, provided a place where one could be “independent from the media, right wing politics, mundane politics, bad art… whatever, you fill in the blank.” At the same time, “a lot of people were there because it was loud, nasty rock and roll music that really spoke volumes to them and irritated other people.” (Schwartz 2015)13

29 As with the larger scene, the fun and politics of punk radio were inseparable. “The fun aspect for me was very much doing it myself, doing what I want to do,” says Sullivan. “That’s what it opened the door to.” For young women, who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, with resistance to women’s liberation still widespread, finding their way to a place where they could determine for themselves what they wanted to do amounted to a fundamentally political act. “Being a DJ, that was wild fun,” Sullivan recalls. “Writing for fan-zines: fun. Going to clubs every single night of the week, fun: So I was engaged in my life.” From punk she and others “somehow got this directive of ‘go out and do what you’re interested in.’” (Sullivan 2015)

30 By the end of the decade, San Francisco punks had built an impressive infrastructure of places to live and places to play, all of which served as both prefigurative retreats from established systems of oppression and as staging areas for rebellion. The two editions of the Western Front Festival, held all over the Bay Area, epitomized the culmination of the community’s capacity to join leisure and politics. In 1979, Dirk Dirksen of the Mabuhay Gardens and Robert Hanrahan of the Deaf Club came up with the idea to showcase the energy of the Bay Area punk scene on a large scale. The first year this resulted in a ten-day festival with over 60 concerts spread out over the City at “their” venues like the Mab, The Deaf Club, the Geary Theatre and the Savoy Tivoli. When the clubs closed at 2:00 a.m., punks gathered at the Target Video loft for after parties. Target also documented “all phases of the festival” on video and screened excerpts during the late-night parties. Between gigs, bands played live at KUSF and on Maximum Rock n’Roll, while Damage produced a special issue that functioned as a Western Front program.14

31 In 1980, bands played at even more venues and the festival expanded to beyond playing only music to the visual arts as well. In addition to the Mab and the Savoy, Club Generic, Tool & Die, the I-Beam, 10th Street Hall, Berkeley Square, the Keystone bars in Berkeley and Palo Alto, as well as the venerated hall The Old Waldorf hosted shows. And instead of printing only 5,000 special issues, Damage printed 25,000 copies for the 1980 festival (“Western Front: Not so Quiet…” 1980). In a city in which concert promoter Bill Graham possessed almost monopoly power, the Western Front festivals

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marked a grassroots punk uprising. Damage later described Western Front irreverently as “Nine nights and days of music, film, video, poster art, performance art, dance, new work, nuclear war, drinking, losing, winning, having fun, being bored, and shrinking brainpans.” (Mr. Me 1980a) But Deaf Club promoter Robert Hanrahan argued for the festival as a declaration of independence. “What the Western Front and the Deaf Club and the Geary and Testing Ground and The Pit and the Roosevelt and the Mabuhay, ad infinitum, have proven,” Hanrahan wrote, “is that rock’n’roll is no longer dependent on the moguls, the monster promoters, the moneybags and their pretenders, hirelings and sycophants. The more venues and promotions that fly by the seat of their pants, the less this music will be vulnerable to those who could try to dominate it.” (Hanrahan 1980)

32 Even at the dawn of neoliberal urban policy, as real estate developers, corporations, and their friends in city government began the process of dispossessing the city from its long term residents, punks not only kept their art out of the hands of commercial capitalists but they claimed back parts of the city for themselves. These were mostly capitalist- and conformist-free zones. They established their own venues, made their own music, planted flags with their radio shows and record labels, films and festivals, all documented by their own photographers and cameramen and women. In short, they had built their own small-scale model of a society that they hoped could be achieved nationally.

33 The Port Huron Statement produced by Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 famously declared that New Leftists would “replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance” with “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.” Although San Francisco punks did not reference the Port Huron Statement at all a decade and a half later, that line pretty well sums up the utopian quality of the city’s punk community. It may not have been an organized social movement, but punks resisted and fought injustice perpetrated by landlords, developers, City Hall, and the police, not only in lyrics, but in the streets. To borrow from former SDS president Paul Potter, they “named the System[s]” responsible for the marginalization of so many citizens (and not just punks). They engaged with political issues both local and national, from homelessness and gay rights to the miner’s strike to the return of draft registration. At the same time, they built a community from the ground up that devoted itself creativity, solidarity, and fun.

34 Plenty of punks had, perhaps, too much fun, and there were no small number of drug casualties, but that did not mean that they were unaware of political stakes and the long odds of overcoming the forces of repression. “We live in a highly repressive society which is getting worse instead of better,” one punk wrote in CREEP in 1980. “We may well live to see full-blown fascism in our time. We live on poisoned food and drink contaminated water. Atomic particles threaten to totally distort our gene pool [...] But we are dancing on the bloody, smoldering mess, dancing with our damaged bodies and souls. We are laughing. We are alive. We are indestructible…” (Kolb 22) That measure of fatalism was common, even as punks tried to create a prefigurative community, even if it would not last. “For the people I hung out with at the Mabuhay, it was like we’re gonna make this ours, have our last minute, have fun,” Flipper’s Bruce Loose told Damage. “It felt like this is it, not that the bomb was going to be dropped, but that corporations were going to turn everybody into mindless robots, so this was out last attempt, last strike at freedom, last chance to express yourself.” (Mr. Me 1980b) That

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pairing of total commitment to resistance, even in the face of overwhelming odds against forces far more powerful, somehow added up to a kind of halcyon experience for many young people in the Bay Area. “We were living in our own utopia, without even realizing it,” Search & Destroy’s V. Vale recalled years later. It was a utopia where fun and revolution could not be disentangled (Vale 2013). It is an object lesson for scholars who study punk scenes and, more generally, music and politics. For if the fun of punk became, effectively, a discursive tool in San Francisco, used by punks with purpose and in specific circumstances, to effect political ends, it follows that the fun central to other music and art scenes must have possessed the same political potency.

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Schulman, Bruce, and Julian Zelizer. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.

Stark, James. Punk ’77: An Inside Look at the San Francisco Rock N’ Roll Scene 1977. San Francisco: RE/ Search, 2006.

Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Young, Jock. The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use. London: Paladin, 1971.

Zaretsky, Natasha. No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2007.

NOTES

1. Along similar lines, Michel Maffesoli worried (in a book published before his reputation suffered as a result of a number of controversies) that the “festive dimension” of neo-tribal resistance is aimed “less at changing the world than getting used to and tinkering with it” (Maffesoli 51). 2. On the role of emotion in social movement theory, see Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta (2001); and Gould (2009). 3. A great many histories of the United States in the 1970s build from the premise that the American public, fed up with the excesses of the Sixties, swung to the right politically, most obviously Sandbrook (2011). See also, Schulman (2001); Schulman and Zelizer (2008); Wilentz (2008); Perlstein (2014); Patterson (2005). 4. The Mutants, “New Dark Ages,” 45 RPM single, 415 Records 34859, 1980. 5. Numerous songs discussed the betrayal of American draftees and servicemen, including No Alternative’s “Johnny Got His Gun,” Flipper’s “Sacrifice,” the Avengers’ “The Amerikan in Me,” Dead Kennedys’ “When Ya Get Drafted,” and “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now,” the Dils’ “Class War” and “National Guard,” etc. In addition, the renewal of draft registration garnered widespread coverage in area zines (Eddie K. 1980; “What Will Happen if You do Not Register for the Draft?” 8; “Resist the Draft…” 5; McCarthee 1979; “Register Now, Die Later” 1980). Finally, the prospects of using the neutron bomb as a slum clearing device show up in Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor.” 6. On tenant eviction battles, see Foley (2015: 66-7); On White Night riot, see Happy Geek (1979), McCarthy (1979); Klein (2015); Coyote (1979). Other bands that played benefit concerts for the May 2st Riot Defense Fund included The Blowdryers, The Contractions, and No Alternative, (“San Francisco Summer 1979” 1979); Reininger and Principle (2016); on mayoral campaign, see “Running for Mayor,” Jello Biafra, I Blow Minds for a Living LP, Alternative Tentacles, 1988. 7. As Berlant notes, in a line that could be applied directly to San Francisco punk: “A certain circularity structures an intimate public, therefore: its consumer participants are perceived to be marked by a commonly lived history; its narratives and things are deemed expressive of that history while also shaping its conventions of belonging; and, expressing the sensational, embodied experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world, it promises also to provide a better experience of social belonging — partly through participation in the relevant commodity culture, and partly because of its revelations about how people can live.” (Berlant viii). 8. On prefigurative politics, see Breines (1989). 9. Vale 2013; Vale qtd in Stark: 26-27, 28; Penelope Houston, email to Foley, 7 October 2015. 10. Principle quoted in Corbisier (2008: 33). 11. The Mutants’ only LP is called Fun Terminal the cover image for which is a photo of the actual Fun Terminal.

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12. I borrow here from Brigit Richard and Heinz Hermann Kruger, who wrote of the 1990s German rave scene’s “ability to deliver a political message lies in its power to influence patterns of love and friendship.” (Richard and Kruger 1998) 13. In another interview, Schwartz said that punk was all about “makin’ noise and bein’ crazy and changing the world every day. Without letting corporate culture have its way on us”; Boulware and Tudor (2009: 186-7). 14. For brief history see: “Contents” (1979). On Target video, see: “Target Video” (1979). On the venues, see: “Local Venues” (1979). For brief overview and photos, see: centrefold, and “The Western Front” (1980).

ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the ways in which politics and leisure were entangled in early San Francisco punk. Although San Francisco is perhaps uniquely associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the city was, by the late 1970s, also home to a punk scene largely defined by its fierce engagement with political issues. At the same time, punks experienced this scene — which existed at a time of sustained national, state, and local crisis — as deliriously fun. Their idea of fun was vastly different than mainstream ideas of American leisure, but there is no denying that punk, like most subcultures, was experienced at least in part as a leisure activity. I argue that punks acted deliberately to not only intertwine fun and politics, but to make fun and play vehicles for political struggle, if not revolution. At least in this one major American city, punk was equal parts political engagement and diversion, equally confrontational and escapist. More importantly, the leisure and fun elements contributed to the building of a prefigurative community as a micro-model of what punks hoped could be achieved on a larger scale. In that way, fun and politics contributed to a fundamentally utopian vision in a subculture marked not by nihilism — as punk is so often cast — but by possibility.

Cet article examine les modalités des rapports complexes entre politique et loisir aux débuts du mouvement punk à San Francisco. Bien que la ville soit sans doute associée de la manière la plus marquante à la contre-culture des années 60, San Francisco est aussi, à la fin des années 70, le foyer d’une scène punk définie en grande partie par son engagement politique farouche. En même temps, les punks vivent cette expérience — à un moment de crise soutenue au niveau national, régional et local — sur le mode du divertissement exacerbé. Leur idée du divertissement est radicalement différente de celle des idées dominantes en la matière aux États-Unis, mais il est indéniable que le punk, comme la plupart des subcultures, est vécu en partie comme une activité de loisir. Je défends l’hypothèse selon laquelle les punks ont délibérément cherché non seulement à mélanger loisir et politique, mais à faire du loisir et du jeu un vecteur de lutte politique, sinon révolutionnaire. Au moins à l’échelle de cette ville américaine importante, le punk est tout autant engagement politique et divertissement, antagoniste et récréatif. Surtout, la présence d’éléments de loisir et de divertissement contribue à la formation d’une communauté qui préfigure, sous forme de micro-modèle, ce que les punks espèrent pouvoir réaliser à plus grande échelle. En ce sens, loisir et politique contribuent à une vision fondamentalement utopique d’une subculture marquée non par le nihilisme — comme dans les représentations courantes du punk — mais par les possibles.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: punk, loisirs, divertissement, culture politique, subcultures, San Francisco, Californie, États-Unis Keywords: punk, leisure, fun, political culture, subculture, San Francisco, California, United States

AUTHOR

MICHAEL STEWART FOLEY Professor of American Civilization, Université Grenoble Alpes. Michael Stewart Foley is author of Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the 33 1/3 book on Dead Kennedys’ first LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. He is currently writing a book about the political culture of early San Francisco punk. Contact: Michael.Foley[at]univ- grenoble-alpes.fr, foleymichaels[at]gmail.com

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“Making the Art of Fun Freely Accessible”: Community Arts Practices and the Politics of Leisure in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s

Mathilde Bertrand

1 In the summer of 1969, residents of Kentish Town and Chalk Farm (North London) were invited to come on board a converted double-decker, the “Fun Art Bus”, to enjoy an out-of-the-ordinary ride. Depending on the day, they would be entertained to a theatre performance, a poetry reading or a puppet show. The initiative was one among many other activities proposed by Inter-Action, a theatre and arts collective founded in London by American Ed Berman in April 1968. Literally and symbolically, the bus was a vehicle which allowed the opening up of spaces for creative expression, in boroughs where cultural venues were scarce or non-existent. The group's intention, suggested in its name, was to facilitate local residents’ engagement with the arts, as spectators and/ or as participants in inclusive projects. Yet by developing people’s access to artistic activities, community arts groups such as Inter-Action hoped to encourage people to become more involved in the life of the community, therefore using the arts as a catalyst: One of [Inter-Action’s] main aims is to make the arts, especially drama and the media, useful and relevant to local community life, young people and the educational process. Another primary aim is to experiment with the arts and the media to develop new socially-rooted or educational applications for the purpose of an improved and more responsible community life (Inter-Action Trust 1).

2 Across the UK, on council estates in inner cities, in new towns or, more rarely, in rural villages, similar initiatives appeared, whether inspired by art collectives or generated by residents themselves (Arts Council Community Arts Evaluation Working Group 1977; Arts Council Community Arts Working Party 1974; Association of Community Artists 1980; Braden 1978; Nigg and Wade 1980; Kelly 1984; Crummy 2004). The flourishing of community arts projects from the late 1960s through the 1970s reflected debates in the art world on the social role of art and on the elitist distinction between “high” and

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“low” art (Clark 1973; Cork 1978; Whitechapel Art Gallery 1978; Cork 1979). In 1968, art students occupied the Hornsey School of Art and called for a redefinition of the role of the artist in society, in rejection of the figure of the studio artist isolated from social life. (Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art 1969; Tickner 2008) Such challenges inspired community artists, many of whom had gone to art school (Crehan 2013). By starting projects in areas cut off from the dominant artistic institutions, they sought to confront the distinction between amateur and professional and break the elitism associated with the appreciation and practice of art. They agitated for the right for all to experience art, to practice and approach it from different perspectives.1 By making artistic practices accessible, community arts projects addressed inequalities in cultural provision across the country and combatted the marginalisation of working-class cultural expressions.

3 This article contends that community arts practices raised fundamental questions on the social role of the arts. They highlighted the need for artistic expression in community life and development, in very close connection with debates also happening in art schools and art history departments, but also in the emerging disciplinary field of cultural studies. These non-institutional practices embraced the aims of making leisure, culture and the arts accessible. They challenged the boundaries between high and low forms of creative expression, with questions such as what is art and who can be an artist? Does artistic production need to be sanctioned by an authority to be recognised as art? Why not consider leisure activities as conducive to potentially empowering forms of artistic expression and invest them as such? Couldn’t leisure time — defined as freedom from economically-rewarding work — be considered as a legitimate context for the production of art works, where such artwork was not meant for a market but for the cultural development of the community?

4 The research for this article was done on archives from several organisations: Inter- Action in London, (founded in 1968), Westminster Endeavour for Liaison and Development (WELD), in Handsworth, (Birmingham, founded in 1968), Trinity Arts in Small Heath (Birmingham, founded in 1972), Jubilee Arts in Sandwell (West Midlands, founded in 1974), Tower Hamlets Arts Project (London, founded in 1975). The documents used include correspondence, grant applications, annual reports, press cuttings, photographs, posters, leaflets. Interviews were conducted with photographers Brendan Jackson, from Jubilee Arts, and David Hoffman, who worked with Tower Hamlets Arts Project, as well as Graham Peete, a printer who was a member of Telford Arts. In 2015, Brendan Jackson launched a website which makes hundreds of photographs produced by members of Jubilee Arts accessible in digital format, as well as videos made from old film footage.

Leisure or arts? Does the distinction matter?

5 When going through the archives of community arts groups, studying documents such as annual reports for instance, one is struck by the sheer variety of activities offered by the different organisations in theatre, film-making and video, photography, dance, mural painting, handicrafts, printing and publishing, poster-making, community bookshops, poetry or music. The organisation of summer activities for children and teenagers, known as “play schemes” in the jargon of community artists, was a crucial moment in the calendar, and an important part of the work of community arts projects.

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Street carnivals were often the highlight of the summer weeks, culminating in coloured processions, games and performances involving local residents and impressive numbers of children. The boundary between art and leisure was never a problem in community arts projects, who used the term “arts” in a very elastic way, in reference to creative practices in the visual, the musical, the literary or the dramatic fields. It is part of what constitutes community arts to have deliberately avoided to distinguish art from leisure, instead subsuming these two modes — artistic expression and play — into a common aim, that of opening up channels for creativity. What mattered was “to expand the creative expression of people” by creating the contexts for these processes to happen (Association of Community Artists 1977). This perspective in itself undermined bourgeois conceptions of the status of the artist and established community arts firmly in a radical tradition of defence of working-class art and culture (Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove 1985).

6 Leisure, with its rich associations with play, “fun” and recreation, with its dimension of pleasure and emphasis on imagination, was therefore given pride of place in community arts projects, and access to leisure activities was a priority. Leisure, a breach in the everyday occupations and concerns of school, paid work, home keeping, or unemployment, was exploited in community arts practices as a path towards a free exploration of creative forms of expression. “Making the art of fun freely accessible”, to quote Ed Berman, spelt out a provocative political aim: that of opening alternative spaces for the sharing of cultural forms and of harnessing the dynamic and subversive dimension of creative expression, in areas lacking the specific resources and amenities. Also, the emphasis on “fun” was a way of signifying that leisure should be preserved as a quality of time that should be dedicated to personal development, to the free discovery of individual skills and the exploration of talents. This position contrasted with utilitarian conceptions of leisure which recuperate it as the possible context for controlling and disciplining deviance. Rather, community arts exploited the rich versatility of the word “play” in liberating ways: “as drama students we […] knew the role of play in make believe and imagination, drawing on the possibilities of placing children in roles that could give them a voice and a window onto other worlds.”2

7 Leisure and artistic activities were (pleasurable) means to an end, that of enabling people who were seldom given the chance to be heard to authorise themselves to take part and express themselves through the means they chose. In the words of Jubilee Arts member Kate Organ: Jubilee is a community arts project, what that means is that we aren't community workers in Smethwick nor are we trying to teach the people here how to be Laurence Oliviers in their own back rooms. What we're trying to do is to get the people to express something about the way they live, about their own area, in fact to make changes in their area and take control of some aspects within their own area through the arts. We’re artists so we do it through the arts but anyone can do it in any area. (Jubilee Arts Archive 1977)

8 The intention was close to the contemporary efforts of French cultural “animateurs”, which the British community artists knew of. “Animation culturelle” sought to elicit forms of agency among socially disadvantaged social groups, by making participation in leisure activities one of the levers of social action and popular education (Meister; Augustin; Moser et al). In a similar way, community artists worked primarily with children, teenagers, school drop-outs, unemployed people, pensioners, women,

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members of ethnic minorities, in an effort to create the conditions for expression, through the learning and sharing of creative skills outside of formal contexts.3

9 Community arts projects appeared in areas where artists, community workers, or residents themselves identified a lack of means, venues and facilities for the development of leisure and creative activities. Therefore, making leisure accessible became a political demand, a demand which had the capacity to federate people and catalyse energies.

“Wanted: a place to play”: From access to leisure to cultural development in the community

10 A photograph from the Jubilee Arts Archive taken around 1974 shows Steve Trow, dressed up as “Mr. No-All” (sic), wearing a large white coat and a top hat, acting as a kind of clownish Pied Piper and followed by a group of children. They form a miniature street demonstration, and one of the banners reads “Wanted: a place to play”. The event was one of the first activities taken on by the young members of Jubilee Arts in the summer, and the aim was to gather as many children as possible in Sandwell to show them where to find the local play centre which Jubilee had helped set up. The slogan on the banner encapsulated the concerns of early community arts projects regarding the dearth of cultural facilities in the concrete environment of new council estates. They chose to intervene precisely in these places: Sandwell is a large metropolitan borough in the West Midlands. 300 000 people live in it. It's a very heavily industrialised area and used to be a lot of small towns which have now been formed into a large metropolitan borough. It doesn't have a city centre, the borough has no professional arts group and as far as provision for play for children goes, it has only twelve play centres to service the entire borough. (Jubilee Arts Archive)

11 Across Britain, community arts organisations in the 1970s all acted on the same observation that the cultural needs of residents in poor boroughs were not addressed. Kentish Town, Small Heath, Handsworth, Tower Hamlets, Telford, Smethwick... these councils, among many others, were all urban working-class areas suffering from economic deprivation and typically considered as problem areas. Choices in terms of provision of social services by local authorities were made at the expense of culture and the arts.

12 Inequalities in cultural provision for working-class communities were compounded by the transformation of working-class environments in post-war Britain. Indeed, the lack of access to leisure activities in deprived urban areas highlighted the broader issue of the failures of post-war town planning. In the context of reconstruction, town planning was enrolled in the endeavour to raise living standards. This chimed in with the emphasis on increased state controls over the economy and coordinated efforts to extend state provision. However, the construction of new council estates and the demolition of derelict inner-city housing as part of “slum clearance” was preferred to the alternative option of renovating existing housing in working-class neighbourhoods. (Greed 2014: 115, 280) Close-knit working-class communities were dispersed on new estates, in which high-rise buildings replaced the more traditional terraced houses.4 These choices transformed the way children were able and allowed to play. Working- class forms of sociability were considerably undermined as a result of these

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transformations in the urban environment. Furthermore, the housing estates built in the 1950s and 1960s were designed and planned in ways which did not take into account the needs of the populations which were to be housed in them: Planning was based upon a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach, with very little involvement of, and hardly a word of protest from, the people, who were meant to be the beneficiaries of the planning system. (Greed 153)

13 Community activists were at the forefront of campaigns meant to hold local authorities and planning agencies to account.5 They lent their support to tenants' associations, in their denunciation of housing problems (insalubrious buildings, disrepair) and in demands for play spaces and community centres.6 In many instances, they played a role in advocating greater consultation and involvement of the population in planning decisions affecting their very conditions of existence. A report written in 1987 by members of Free Form, a North London community arts organisation created in 1969, emphasised the role played by community artists and community activists in this shift: Once the scale of the building failures began to be realised, people started to challenge both the power of the architectural profession, which had produced the vision, and that of the planning profession, which had helped put it into practice. […] There were increasing demands by the public for a greater say in the decisions which affected them, and they were being supported by some professionals who were beginning to redefine their role, as well as by the voluntary sector. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, community arts and community architecture have been recognised, established and are flourishing nationally and internationally. (Free Form Arts Trust Ltd. 2)

14 At a time when cultural studies were developing fundamental theoretical insights into the processes of transformation of working-class cultures in post-war Britain, community arts organisations agitated at a grassroots level to give a voice to the people whose lives were affected by these processes, yet whose concerns were disregarded and whose cultural expressions were dismissed if ever acknowledged.7 Community arts organisations were perfectly aware of the undermining if not wilful destruction of working-class culture: Small Heath is a generally run-down inner-ring area in the midst of redevelopment, renewal and general improvement. The population [...] is predominantly working class, the culture of which has been almost totally suppressed in that opportunities for cultural expression rarely exist. (Trinity Arts)8

15 Community artists denounced the deleterious combination of social deprivation and cultural marginalisation in the neighbourhoods they worked in. Developing access to facilities and resources, was therefore part of a strategy to raise awareness within the community about the lack of cultural provision locally, and to encourage demands from within the community for more cultural activities and for a commitment from local authorities in the long term: When Jubilee goes into a community, we're aren't trying to drop goodies on the people from heaven, what we're trying to do is work with local people for them to identify needs in their own area, not necessarily artistic needs, but for example are there play facilities for children, suitable facilities for old folks, anything like that, youth clubs... And for them to identify that need, and for us to help them find the right channels of resources, of communications, with the bodies that can help like the local authority, what we will do is that we will instigate the project, by doing a piece of street theatre, doing a pub show, doing a play scheme, but from there on end, we will respond to how that community takes up what we've set up. (Jubilee Arts Archive 1977)

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16 Community arts organisations adopted very direct and pragmatic modes of action, opening cultural spaces, organising festivals, making connections between people, scraping together what grants they could get from local authorities, the Arts Council or specific programmes such as Urban Aid.9 A very efficient way of initiating projects was through the use of buses. Inter-Action’s was not the only one. In the 1970s, several community arts organisations purchased converted double-deckers: Trinity Arts and Jubilee Arts all bought their own bus in the 1970s, while the Islington Bus Company used it for its lending library. These vehicles made excellent mobile resources, which could easily circulate to places where no play provisions existed. They were easily identified in the neighbourhoods on their different routes and provided points of focus for leisure-based activities in areas which lacked them. Equipped with video and photo equipment, materials for puppet shows or theatre performances, they could also be used as libraries or stage sets, and were transformed into bases for temporary play schemes deployed on patches of waste-ground.10 Women's groups, tenants' associations, as well as pensioners' groups also used them as meeting spaces. Thankful users from the Bermuda Mansions Tenants Association in Walsall wrote a cover letter emphasising the important part [Jubilee Art's Bus played] in highlighting a number of tenants’ grievances, redundancies at local firms and helping the unemployed to find a use for their enforced free time, [and] the importance of the bus to the youth of Sandwell and the roll (sic) it plays in taking art to the people who would otherwise not bother to seek art. (Jubilee Arts Archive c. 1984)

17 On a more symbolic level, therefore, these friendly and brightly-coloured buses did respond to essential needs and provide a much-needed resource, a safe space, and a rallying point for talents and initiatives locally. Because they provided a structure for the organisation of creative activities at a local level, community arts projects acted as catalysts for the expression of people's aspirations and visions, enabling communities to re-imagine themselves.

Leisure and empowerment: Enabling communities to reclaim control

18 The provision of spaces for leisure activities was a stepping-stone towards the recognition of common needs and interests within the community. The role of community arts groups, as Jubilee Arts recognised, was to ignite in people a desire to act together and appropriate the objective of “arts for all”: A community arts group must make available a structure for collective action which the community has not had hitherto the opportunity to explore — a structure which gives access not primarily to the products, but to the processes of a whole range of creative activities. In time, the control and organisation of such a project must become the responsibility of the local community as much as that of the artists involved. Only then will it be accepted as a legitimate organ of self- expression by the people with whom it works” (Jubilee Arts 1977: 2)

19 Community arts practices were part of the same impulse which characterised community action initiatives in the 1970s.11 Peter Hain defined community action as “a style of political action through which people gain the confidence to agitate for their rights and the ability to control their own destinies” (Hain 1976: 21). These objectives were embedded in a larger ambition to generate processes of empowerment at the level

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of the whole community. The concept of empowerment can be defined as a social process whereby individuals as well as social groups develop self-confidence and skills, as well as a critical consciousness of their material conditions, and begin to take action on problems identified by them and affecting their lives. Through collective action, people reclaim control over decision-making processes and become agents in their own destiny. From the 1960s and through the 1970s, the concept belonged to a radical rhetoric of social and political change from below (Bacqué; Biewener 2015). Community arts organisations were driven by such objectives. The notion of “self-help” is a leitmotiv in the discourse of community artists and how they conceived their action in the community. Away from the Victorian acceptation of the term, with its emphasis on virtuous individual reform (Smiles 1866), community artists tended to use the notion of self-help as a synonym for empowerment, to describe the process whereby people would seek to reclaim control over their community's destiny and improve conditions for themselves though their own agency.

20 One example of a local initiative which federated the energies of a whole community towards a common purpose was the Tower Hamlets Arts Project (London). The collective emerged from the resistance to an arts project proposed in 1974 by the Greater London Arts Council and funded by Thames TV, for which there had been no consultation with the local population. Ten thousand pounds were to be allocated to professional artists for the temporary use of commercial billboards, the idea being to bring the work of established gallery artists to the people: “Eyesites” was quickly nicknamed “Eyesores” in the neighbourhood. People active in the borough's rich voluntary sector objected to what they considered to be money inappropriately spent as well as a paternalistic gesture (Braden 23). They organised public meetings in order to debate over and propose an alternative project, defended their case to Thames TV and eventually managed to reverse the initial decision and win the allocated sum.12 The rationale of Tower Hamlets Arts Project was that money should be used to support existing arts and media groups and help them expand. Tower Hamlets Arts Project coordinated the activities of the different community arts groups, with activities in video, photography, music, murals, theatre, creative writing... The Tower Hamlets Art Project Community Bookshop was created then, and still exists to this day as the Bricklane Bookshop.13 The budget made provision for the “Big Show”, a large collaborative event consisting in taking over the exhibition space of the renowned Whitechapel Art Gallery for an entire month. The whole project had a definite impact both in terms of the development of provision for the arts locally and in the vision the local population gained of itself through its achievements. Symbolically, members of the community had managed to reclaim a project imposed on them and instead had defined their own inclusive, long-term and open project: The Greater London Arts Association proposal had the unforeseen and beneficial effect of making a public issue of the arts in the borough. It also raised public consciousness over the high degree of creative activity that had been achieved by residents and professionals locally. (Braden 24)

21 Maggie Pinhorn, a filmmaker involved in the Basement Project (a community video group active in the Tower Hamlets Arts Project) described her role as being an enabler of other people's expressions, as someone who accompanied processes of personal empowerment: I am in the business of building up people's confidence in order that they can express themselves creatively and use their imaginations. That is possibly the most

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political act that you can be doing. [...] What I can see as a result of people having been involved in that kind of work is that they are not going to do it in terms of film or video or anything else, but in their personal lives. So you might build up somebody's confidence enough for them to complain about their housing conditions. To go along and demand a decent flat to live in. To get a job, to think and to write more, to do whatever else for themselves to improve their own quality of life. (Nigg and Wade 182)

22 The “Fun Farm” is another example of a collective endeavour involving a local community. It was one of the many activities developed under the umbrella of Inter- Action: a derelict building was refurbished on a patch of land in Kentish Town and transformed into an “urban” farm complete with animals and activities such as gardening, horse-riding, pottery, a repair shop, women's groups... “Land that was dead and cut off from the housing estates […] has been reclaimed and through a voluntary body turned into a real leisure-producing enterprise.”14 The organisation flourished because of the active participation of the local community, across age groups, in the project. The skills and the confidence developed by participants had direct positive effects on people’s lives.

23 These examples offer illustrations of how economically deprived, working-class communities found the strength and resource, with the help and experience of community arts organisations, to develop their own initiatives and act locally on issues affecting their own lives. Leisure, used as a point of entry for participants, became a lever for processes of empowerment both on an individual and collective level.

Democratisation of culture or cultural democracy?

24 The activities enabled by community arts organisations challenged the narrow association of art with the taste of an elite (equated with “high art”). Instead, they defended the notion that artistic production should not be reserved to an exclusive class of people, mainly middle-class, but be enjoyed, practised and experienced by all sections of society. In its annual report for the year 1987-88, Telford Community Arts, made this idea very clear: [This is] not the Royal Opera, but for the people of the Wrekin…15 To make their own art that is imaginative, exciting and effective, and expresses the interests of the working-class. We challenge the notion that the arts are something for “other people” to do, for the “well-off”, for the “well-educated”, or other privileged sections of society. (Telford Community Arts, 2)

25 Such a proposition challenges traditional notions that art must necessarily refer to a canon of established oeuvres, genres or artists. Instead, it places emphasis on the cultural, symbolic and aesthetic processes and meaning that artistic expression sustains, on the social contexts in which art take place.16 It is grounded in an analysis which combats processes of cultural hegemony and fights for the recognition of minority groups’ cultural expressions as equally valid and worthy. To Steve Trow, founding member of Jubilee Arts, community arts were based on the “conviction that the creation of original work, rooted in local cultures, local experience and aspirations, has a potency and a resonance that can re-shape our perceptions of what is valuable and what may be possible.” (Trow 1992:1)

26 Community arts practices absorbed and built on the theory of culture developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s in cultural studies departments, notably in

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Birmingham. Cultural studies broke new ground in the study of ideology, power and culture: they both recognised culture as the sphere of production of conflicting meanings and signifying practices, and described the mechanisms of reproduction of ideological domination (Hall 1990; Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1991). The perpetuation of the unequal distribution of the means of cultural production in society was one such mechanism. Community arts organisations embodied a struggle to intervene on this problematic: they addressed this imbalance by tackling the problem of access to the means of cultural production and circulation, and by fighting for the recognition of cultural pluralism and of people's agency as cultural producers. As artist Sue Braden wrote in 1978: The truth is that people make culture. They make it in towns and cities, in villages and hamlets, on housing estates and in suburbs, in Hampstead and in Hull. It is to do with self-expression and social needs. It is active, not passive. It is neither a subculture nor an alternative. It is active and to be lived rather than passive and to be appreciated. (174)

27 As well as redefining “art” to include very diverse creative practices (theatre, video, photography, creative writing, silk-screening, murals, etc.), community arts recognised that processes were just as important as products and underlined the importance of the context and uses of artistic production. The notions of access, participation and collaboration, central to community arts, blurred the traditional distinction between artist and spectator, professional and amateur. These perspectives undermined the classic concept of the artist as an individual endowed with genius, and encouraged instead processes of collective authorship.17 Such conceptual shifts allowed to move away from the logic of the commodification of art, offering instead the idea that the means of expression and cultural production should be collectively shared and control, and remain outside of the commercial sphere.

28 In this fight, radical community arts practitioners defined their commitment to cultural democracy as opposed to the aim of cultural democratisation, a policy defended by the Arts Council. Through the 1970s, community arts organisations and the Arts Council were locked in a tug-of-war over competing definitions of art and culture and over which art forms and practices should be funded. The Charter of the Arts Council, redefined in 1967, determined two objectives: “to develop and improve the knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts” and “to increase the accessibility of the arts to the public throughout Great Britain.” From the early 1970s, the Arts Council seemed to consider community arts as a minor practice, a worthwhile experimental venture, but certainly not as part of the artistic traditions it usually supported. It did consider and respond to grant applications from community arts organisations through its “new activities committee” (1969-70) and “experimental arts committee” (1970-74). Largely due to the pressure exerted by the newly created Association of Community Artists (created in 1974), and thanks to the supportive conclusion of the report of the Community Arts Working Party (formed in 1974 and chaired by Harold Baldry), the Arts Council allocated a fraction of its funding to community arts projects throughout the 1970s.18 The Community Arts Committee was maintained until 1979.

29 Yet the two entities supported contradicting projects: the Arts Council construed its aims around the notion of the democratisation of high culture, interpreting its Charter to mean encouraging accessibility to the great works of art throughout the country, and privileging appreciation over practice.19 In contrast to this, from the late 1970s onwards, the Association of Community Artists defended the notions of cultural

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democracy and cultural pluralism, which reflected a much more bottom-up approach to cultural production. To Owen Kelly, author of one of the few reference books published at the time which attempted to give a theoretical framework to community arts practices, cultural democracy meant “producing the right conditions within which communities can have their own creative voices recognised and given sufficient space to develop and flourish” (6): [Cultural democracy] revolves around the notion of plurality, and around equality of access to the means of cultural production and distribution. It assumes that cultural production happens within the context of wider social discourses, and that [cultural production] will produce not only pleasure but knowledge. (101)

30 Understood as a radical social and political project, cultural democracy confronted the reproduction of elite culture, and worked to de-construct the ideological domination of bourgeois taste.

Community arts in the era of Thatcherism

31 By the beginning of the 1980s, the expanded community arts network appeared more structured. Even though the Arts Council stepped back from directly funding organisations in 1979, it facilitated the devolutionary process towards an increased role of Regional Arts Associations in supporting community arts (Arts Council of Great Britain 1980). Regional Associations became the main source of public funding for community arts organisations,20 alongside local authorities, while private sources such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation remained supportive of the movement (Hewison et Holden 2006).

32 However, what the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher had in tow for culture and the arts was particularly worrying for the community arts sector. In keeping with the policy of cuts in public spending, the annual funding to the Arts Council was reduced and some of its committees axed in 1979 and 1980 (the Community Arts and the Photography Committees respectively). The Prime Minister made no mystery about her traditional conception of art: art was high art, heritage, the national institutions and the national canon.21 The State should remain aloof from intervention in the domain of artistic production for fear of generating a form of official State art. On the other hand, the government developed incentives for private businesses to increase their patronage of the arts and encouraged the view that the arts were to be considered as a productive, wealth-generating economic sector.22

33 Already a minor voice in the artistic field through the 1970s, the community arts movement was now forced to adopt strategies of resistance against the new Conservative rhetoric and policies. As the Association of Community Artists was compelled to adopt charity status, under new directives in 1980 requiring that organisations applying for public money should be charities (therefore blunting their political edge), its campaigning activity was taken over by the Shelton Trust, which expressed its radical commitment to “an egalitarian and plural society by the extension of democratic practice to all social relationships” (Shelton Trust quoted in Higgins 2012: 34).

34 In 1986, the Shelton Trust reaffirmed the core political project of community arts practices around the concept of cultural democracy. Culture and Democracy: The Manifesto read as an unabashed socialist critique of ideological systems of domination

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and of cultural hegemony under capitalism. It identified the necessity for struggles in culture and for cultural pluralism, against the cultural exclusion of alternative voices and traditions. It advocated for forms of cultural production understood as collective not individualistic, free as opposed to commercial and profit-driven, active and not passive: “in a genuine democracy people make their culture rather than have it made for them — locally, nationally and internationally” (Another Standard 1986: 39). Yet community arts, a field of practice which had greatly expanded from the late 1960s, was also divided on these objectives.

35 In spite of the enduring commitment to these values on the part of the more radical community arts organisations which managed to survive cuts in their funding in the 1980s, the ideological sea-change of New Right politics did take its toll on the radicalism of the movement. François Matarasso, a participant in, and a historian of, community arts practices, identifies middle of the 1980s as the moment when what was left of a radical agenda in community arts organisations was durably undermined. A telling sign of this, he points out, was the shift in the choice of terms and designation of the practice: The path from “community art” to “participatory art”, whilst seen as merely pragmatic by those who made it, marked and allowed a transition from the politicised and collectivist action of the seventies, towards the depoliticised, individual-focused arts programmes supported by public funds in Britain today. […] The trend of the past forty years had been from radicalism to remedialism. (Matarasso 216)

Conclusion

36 A survey of the origins and development of the community arts movement in the 1970s and 1980s, through the prism of leisure gives insights into the structuration of the cultural field in Britain in that period. It highlights the way specific contestations were shaped, at the grassroots level of communities, from a struggle for access to leisure and creative practices to more radical demands for a recognition of cultural pluralism.

37 From its emergence in the late 1960s, the movement embodied a cultural opposition to dominant systems: an opposition to elitist conceptions of art and the effects of social distinction they entail; to a top-down conception and practice of politics; to commodified forms of leisure, based on a passive logic of consumption. The community arts movement played a central role in the definition of a socialist cultural politics, based on concepts of empowerment, diversity, collective authorship, democratic access to and control of the means of cultural production. At stake in the practice and theory of community arts, was the struggle to establish the conditions for a genuine participatory democracy, in which the arts would play a central role, as a vehicle for the expression of collective meanings and the definition of cultural alternatives. These practices belonged to the radical activism of the late 1960s and 1970s and embraced its core principle that social change should come from the people themselves.

38 Yet this type of radical discourse was jeopardised in the changed political and ideological landscape of the 1980s: the notion of public support for the arts was seriously undermined by the Conservative government's assaults on state provision, while the notion of empowerment was absorbed in a neoliberal discourse stressing individual responsibility and redefined in a way which neutralised their radical potential (Bacqué and Biewener). The versatile notion of “community” was itself

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reclaimed in a conservative rhetoric for its connotations of traditional social order and moral regulation (Buckler 2007).

39 Community arts practices first appeared as interventions meant to tackle inequalities in cultural provision across the country, and agitated for more culture, not less, for all. However, the implementation of austerity programmes first under Thatcherism, then under the coalition government from 2010 and under the current conservative government, has meant that access to culture is yet again one of the first casualties of political arbitrations. The dramatic closure of public libraries in Britain illustrates the fact that cultural provision is never safe from attack. The fact that poorer constituencies bear the brunt of cuts tends to point to a persistent class divide in terms of access to culture and the arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Arts Council Community Arts Evaluation Working Group. Community Arts: A Report. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977.

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Arts Council of Great Britain. British Image 1. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975.

Arts Council of Great Britain. “The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Regional Arts Associations: Towards a New Relationship”. Blythe House, London. Arts Council Archives, 1980.

Association of Community Artists. “Press Release”. Blythe House, London. Arts Council Archive, 1977.

Association of Community Artists. Community Arts: Principles and Practices; A Series of Papers Arising out of the Barnstaple National Conference. Shelton Trust: South Tyneside Community Arts, 1980.

Augustin, Jean-Pierre. L’animation professionnelle: histoire, acteurs, enjeux. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000.

Bacqué, Marie-Hélène and Carole Biewener. L’empowerment, une pratique émancipatrice ? Paris: la Découverte, 2015.

Bootle Arts and Action. Art in Action, A Community Photographic Project on Merseyside. Bootle Art and Action, 1980.

Braden, Su. Artists and People. London: Routledge, 1978.

Bricklane Bookshop. http://bricklanebookshop.org/history/index.html

Buckler, Steve. “Theory, Ideology, Rhetoric: Ideas in Politics and the Case of ‘Community’ in Recent Political Discourse.” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 9 (1), 2007: 36-54. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2007.00248.x

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Culture, Media, Language; Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-9. Londres: Hutchinson, 1991.

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Clark, Timothy. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. London: Thames & Hudson, 1973.

Cork, Richard (ed.). Art for whom? London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.

Cork, Richard. The Social Role of Art : Essays in Criticism for a Newspaper Public. London: G. Fraser, 1979.

Craig, Gary, Marjorie Mayo and Keith Popple (eds.). The Community Development Reader: History, Themes and Issues. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011.

Crehan, Kate. Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Berg Publishers, 2013.

Crummy, Helen. Mine a Rich Vein: A History and Vision of Craigmillar. Edinburgh: Craigmillar Communiversity Community Press, 2004.

Free Form Arts Trust Ltd. Cultural Action for Community Development: A Report on the Goldsmith’s Square Estate, London. Paris: UNESCO, February 1985.

Greed, Clara H. Planning in the UK: An Introduction. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Hain, Peter (ed.). Community Politics. London: John Calder, 1976.

Hall, Stuart. “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”. The Humanities as Social Technology, October 53, 1990: 11-23. DOI: 10.2307/778912

Hewison, Robert and John Holden. Experience and Experiment; The UK Branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1956-2006. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2006.

Higgins, Lee. Community Music: in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.

Inter Action Trust. “Application to the Arts Council of Great Britain to House Inter-Action’s Arts Work.” Arts Council Archives, Blythe House, January 1974.

Inter Action Trust. “Application for Grant Aid 1976-7.” Jubilee Arts Archive, Smethwick Library.

Jubilee Arts Archive. “1977”, film footage, c. 1977. https://vimeo.com/120796300, 2015.

Jubilee Arts Archive. “Bermuda Mansions Tenants Association, letter from Secretary Geoff Hunt. http://jubileeartsarchive.com/resources/, c. 1984.

Jubilee Arts Archive. “Interview with Kate Organ”. https://vimeo.com/124754699, 2015.

Kelly, Owen. Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadel. London: Comedia Publishing, 1984.

Loney, Martin. Community Against Government. The British Community Development Project, 1968-78: A Study of Government Incompetence. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983.

Matarasso, François. “‘All in this together’: The Depoliticisation of Community Art in Britain, 1970-2011.” In Community, Art, Power. Rotterdam: International Community Arts Festival, 2011: 214-240.

Meister, Albert. “Animateurs et militants.” Esprit, N°5, mai 1973: 1093-1115. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/24262723

Moser, Heinzu, Emanuel and Alex Willener. L’animation Socioculturelle ; Fondements, modèles et protiques. Geneva; IES, 2004.

Nigg, Heinz and Graham Wade. Community Media: Community Communication in the UK: Video, Local TV, Film and Photography. Zurich: Regenbogen-Verlag, 1980.

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Samuel, Raphael, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove (eds.). Theatres of the Left 1880-1935 (1985): Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America. Routledge Revivals. History Workshop Series. London: Routledge, 1985.

Sinclair, Andrew. Arts and Cultures; The History of the Fifity Years of the Arts Council of Great-Britain. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995.

Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art. The Hornsey Affair. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Thatcher, Margaret. “Speech at the Royal Academy Banquet.” May 27, 1980. http:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104370

Telford Community Arts, “Not the Royal Opera.” Annual Report 1987-88. Arts Council Archive, London, Blythe House.

Tickner, Lisa. Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution. London: Frances Lincoln, 2008.

Trinity Arts. “GASP and Friends - Application for Financial Support, April 76 - March 77.” Arts Council Archive, Blythe House, London, 1976.

Trow, Steve. “Coming of Age.” Mail out. 1992. http://jubilee.plmcreative.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/coming-of-age-v2.pdf?575e96

Whitechapel Art Gallery. Art for Society. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1978.

Young, Michael and Peter Willmott. Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.

NOTES

1. Some projects specialised in one artistic practice while others developed a multi-disciplinary approach and offered activities in theatre, music, video, photography, printing, pottery or mural painting… 2. Kate Organ, Jubilee Arts, from “Dangerous Play”, Ania Bas, 2014. http:// www.brendanjackson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Dangerous-Play-Web.pdf. 3. Formal or disciplinary contexts such as schools for example. 4. A process observed from the late 1950s in the East London borough of Bethnal Green by sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott (1957). 5. The Community Development Projects, a national programme initiated by the Home Office in 1969 and abruptly ended in 1976 provides an interesting example of community workers challenging the government. The Home Office commissioned research and action projects in 12 boroughs considered as severely “deprived”, with the assumption that poverty could be tackled through specific piecemeal interventions at a local level. The conclusions of social scientists and community workers on the ground was that poverty was structural and required considerable and coordinated state intervention. CDP workers advocated for a radical change in the way community development was addressed, away from paternalistic social pathology models (Loney 1983; Craig, Mayo, et Popple 2011). 6. Photographer Bill Dolce, member of Bootle Art and Action (Merseyside), and photographer Paul Carter, active in Blackfriars Settlement (South London), both underline one role photography had in a community arts and community action context, as evidence to denounce bad housing and insalubriousness, with some success. (Arts Council of Great Britain 1975; Bootle Arts and Action 1980) 7. One founder member of Jubilee Arts, Stephen Lacey held a Masters' degree in Contemporary Cultural Studies.

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8. The story could be repeated in many of the environments where community arts projects developed. Inter-Action, based in Kentish Town, North London, for example, was an area notorious for its crime rate and youth delinquency at the turn of the 1960s. 9. Urban Aid was a programme implemented from 1975 to tackle social inequalities in inner cities, particularly by allocating money to community centres or law centres. (Greed, 119) 10. “We were very much celebrities, because our bus was bigger and more impressive and more sophisticated and it had a darkroom in it. We didn’t just do Play-doh or stencilling. We were quite the sort of radical people of the play bus world. Because we weren't just a play bus, we were an arts bus.” Jubilee Arts Archive, “Interview with Kate Organ”, 2015. 11. These initiatives could take the form of setting up law centres, neighbourhood centres, claimant’s unions, organising squatting actions to shed light on the housing crisis (Hain 1976: 71). 12. People felt that “the scheme was irrelevant to the borough because it did not meet any outstanding needs nor encourage enough involvement and the participation necessary to be of long term benefit to the community.” THAP News, vol. 1, N°1, January 76, p. 101. 13. See http://bricklanebookshop.org/history/index.html. 14. “Investing in leisure. Out of the waste land”, Municipal and Public Services Journal, 12 September 1975, p.1161. Inter-Action papers, Arts Council Archives, Blythe House, London. 15. Wrekin is a geological landmark five miles West of Telford, in Shropshire. 16. Paul Carter, a photographer involved in the Blackfriars Settlement (South London) and initiator of the “Photography Project”, emphasised the value and meaning that art works have in the specific contexts in which they are created: “Many of the photographs used in the project are not what many people would consider good photography. They are not great images with a universal message able to transcend time and culture. They are very humble images. The important thing is that they work in the context. They are made by people of the community for the community. […] I think the photographs produced are art. They are not elitist art. They are the people's art. They are people's expression and search for themselves and the power to create the kind of life they want for themselves.” (Arts Council of Great Britain 1975: 93) 17. The “demystification” of art was a byword of many practitioners, that is, the challenge to conceptions of creativity as something reserved to a specific category of people, artists, but inaccessible to laypersons. 18. In 1972, the Arts Council financed fifty-seven organisations and artists described as belonging to the category “Community Arts” for a total sum of £176,000. The following year, £350,000 were attributed to seventy-five projects (Nigg & Wade 30; Kelly 15). A million pounds was reserved to community arts in 1978 (Sinclair 184-5, 224). 19. In particular Roy Shaw, General Secretary of the Arts Council, took position for the democratisation of culture in his essay “Arts for All”, c. 1985. 20. Regional Arts Associations began to recognise the positive social impact of community arts and started funding projects in the 1970s. There remained regional differences in terms of financial commitment. The Greater London Arts Association, Northern Arts and West Midlands Arts were particularly supportive. 21. “[Art] is a vital part of our civilisation, of our vision, and our heritage. […] The health of society depends as much on the discouragement of rubbish as on the fostering of excellence.” (Thatcher 1980). 22. “The arts world must come to terms with the fact that Government policy in general has decisively tilted away from the expansion of the public to the private sector. The Government fully intends to honour its pledge to maintain support for the arts as a major feature of its policy, but we look to the private sphere to meet any shortfall and to provide immediate means of increase.” Norman St John Stevas, Minister of State for the Arts between 1979 and 1981, in Sinclair (1995: 248).

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ABSTRACTS

The concept of leisure offers an interesting prism for the analysis of the community arts movement in Britain. The emergence of community arts from the late 1960s was closely related to a critique of the exclusive character of mainstream art appreciation and practice and to the struggle for people's access to the means of cultural production. As a tool, leisure was used by practioners to enable the expression of usually unheard voices, thus fostering processes of “authorisation”. Instead of being considered as a secondary claim, access to leisure, with its rich associations with play, “fun” and recreation, was given pride of place in the movement's practical and political framework. It became a political aim: that of opening alternative spaces and of harnessing the dynamic and subversive dimension of creative expression in the encouragement of collective action at a local level. In a crucial way, community arts projects asserted the equal validity of all cultural forms and signifying practices, therefore challenging classical definitions of art. The cultural pluralism advocated by community artists confronted the distinction between “high” and “low” culture and sought instead to redefine art around the concept of expression, away from the figure of the individual artist and towards the possibility of co-authorship in the production of collective meanings. The article analyses the politics of leisure produced by community arts organisations both in discourse and practice. Based on archival sources from several organisations as well as interviews with former members, the study offers a survey of different practices and identifies core principles of the movement: accessibility, collective action, empowerment, and cultural democracy. These themes were jeopardized in the 1980s, in the context of the successive Conservative governments.

Le concept de loisir offre un prisme fertile pour l'analyse du mouvement community arts en Grande-Bretagne. L’émergence de ce mouvement à la fin des années soixante est étroitement liée à la critique du caractère exclusif des mondes de l’art, tant dans l'accès aux œuvres que dans la pratique artistique. Il participe d'une lutte pour l'accès démocratique aux moyens de production culturels. Le loisir peut être tout d'abord envisagé comme un outil à la disposition des animateurs, qui favorise l'expression de voix habituellement marginalisées et qui conduit à des processus d’« auteurisation ». Loin d'être considéré comme une revendication secondaire, l'accès aux loisirs, dans ses connotations riches qui incluent le jeu, le divertissement et la récréation, fut mis au premier plan dans le cadre d'action du mouvement. Il devient un projet politique : celui d’ouvrir des espaces alternatifs et d’exploiter la dimension dynamique et subversive de l'expression créative propice à l'émergence d’actions collectives au niveau local. D’une manière cruciale, les projets community arts affirment l’égale validité de toutes les formes culturelles et des pratiques signifiantes, remettant ainsi en cause les définitions dominantes de l’art. Le pluralisme culturel revendiqué par les community artists mettent en question la distinction hiérarchique qui séparent les formes nobles et populaires de la culture et cherchent au contraire à redéfinir l'art autour du concept plus ouvert d’expression créative. Ce déplacement permet de révoquer la figure de l’artiste individuel et d’évoluer vers la possibilité d'imaginer un partage de la fonction auteur dans la production de significations collectives. L’article analyse les enjeux politiques du loisir dans le contexte des organisations community arts à travers les discours et pratiques produits. Basée sur un travail dans les archives de différentes organisations ainsi que sur des entretiens avec d’anciens membres, l'étude met en lumière différentes pratiques et identifie les principes fondamentaux du mouvement : l’accessibilité, l’action collective, la mise en capacité des individus (empowerment) et la démocratie culturelle. Ces thèmes se trouvent mis à mal pendant les années 1980s, dans le contexte des gouvernements Conservateurs successifs.

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INDEX

Keywords: leisure, community arts, community action, cultural policy, empowerment, radicalism, town planning, Thatcherism Mots-clés: loisirs, maisons de la culture, action communautaire, politiques culturelles, mise en capacité des individus, radicalisme, urbanisme, Thatchérisme

AUTHOR

MATHILDE BERTRAND Mathilde Bertrand is Assistant Professor in British studies at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. She is the author of a dissertation on the history of British photography between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, with a focus on politically radical photographic practices. Her research interests the uses of photography in activism in post-war Britain, the debates over the politics of photographic representation in that period and the British community arts movement. Contact: mbertrand[at]u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

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Outdoor Leisure Activities in Simon Roberts’s We English Photographic Project: Re-writing landscape and nation

Karine Chambefort

1 In 2008, Simon Roberts worked with a large-format camera to produce fifty-six views of the English landscape featuring groups of people engaged in outdoor leisure activities. By choosing, in a rather provocative way, to call his book We English (Roberts 2008), the photographer posited the relationship between the leisure activities recorded in his photographs and a sense of national identity or Englishness. The unabashed flag- waving tone of the title is also found on the book cover, quite literally: it shows Saint George’s flag and the green silhouette of England on a bluish background, looking like an island on its own, separated from Wales and Scotland, and other British Isles (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Simon Roberts, We English (cover)

2 This echoes the fairly recent emergence of English nationalism in the British public sphere: since the development of Scottish and Welsh nationalism in the 1990s and the devolution of powers, the question of English identity as distinct from British identity has been raised. Besides, a form of political nationalism is now active in England pushing for English votes on English laws in Westminster.1

3 In that context, the provocative title and eye-catching cover of We English seem to be direct claims that the photographs inside the book – namely, pictures of people spending their free time outdoors – may provide clues to a definition of a distinctive English identity. This implies that the English can be characterized by contrast with the Others, whoever they are, that there is such a thing as typically English leisure, and that it can be evidenced through pictures.

4 It is not the purpose of this article to discuss – again – the notion of photographic evidence. As a matter of fact, from a strictly sociological point of view, We English fails to represent the 82,9 % of the English population2 who live and entertain themselves in urban areas most of the year, and those who prefer indoor leisure activities. The question here is not so much about the sociological truthfulness of We English. Nor is it about the documentary quality of Simon Roberts’s pictures. It is true that the fifty-six pictures in the book are documentary in style, with a distant-observer perspective, usually from a slightly elevated position. However, let us stress that, like any photographs, they result from multiple processes of selection, at various stages of the project: from the initial choice of places and subjects to the final editing processes for the book and exhibitions, out of hundreds of plates produced across England during a year-long road trip. As photographer Paul Graham once put it, taking photographs,

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including documentary photographs, involves “selecting elements from the world and putting them together to make up another world.” 3Consequently, this paper will not dwell on the documentary quality of the photographs of We English, but mostly on their narrative quality. Our main concern here is the selection and choices operated by the photographer: what kind of England is put together by those photographs of outdoor leisure and to what extent does it break from previous narratives? In other words, we will be looking at the ways a representation of outdoor leisure in England serves a narrative on English identity and perhaps on nationalism in general.

5 And the least we can say, as a last word of introduction, is that We English has been a powerful narrative, with quite an exceptional career in contemporary British visual culture. The list of venues where the series has been exhibited, plus the number of newspapers in which it has been reviewed, reveal unprecedented levels of circulation. Just to name a few places, We English was shown at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (2009), the National Media Museum, Bradford (2010), the mac, Birmingham (2011), the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (2011), Flowers East gallery, London (2011), and Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff (2012), in other words, in most of the art and photography venues that count in the UK. Few, if any, series in the history of British photography, have known such publicity and success.4 Therefore, anyone interested not just in photography, but in British culture and politics should engage with this narrative.

Outdoor leisure as cultural theatre?

6 It is important to deal with a photobook as a whole and as an object in itself, as Martin Parr has reminded us in his history of the photobook (Parr and Badger). Simon Roberts obviously took special care in editing his book for publication so as to cover a vast range of leisure activities in We English. About twenty different leisure practices are represented, with a few of them recurring several times, like seaside promenading, hiking, picnicking, bathing and sunbathing. Yet we may wonder how truly English all these activities are. Pastimes like promenading on beaches or picnicking in parks are rather common or even universal. As a matter of fact, most of the outdoor activities represented in We English are not much different from those of other people in other nations. For instance, similar photographs of outdoor leisure were produced in Russia by Simon Roberts himself in his previous project Motherland (2007) or by Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky.5 There is also much resemblance with some of Massimo Vitali’s images of Italian beaches. Such similarities may point to a standardization of pastimes and behaviours in the wake of globalization. They also seem to indicate that only the choice of location by the photographer, that is to say, the landscape – rather than the activities themselves – lends the scenes their supposedly distinct and specifically national character.

7 A number of features traditionally associated with rural England are recognizable in the book. Almost a quarter of the pictures are seaside pictures – like Woolacombe Bay, Devon or Holkham, Norfolk – which repeatedly remind the viewer of the insular nature of the country and echoes the graphics on the book cover designed by FUEL. Similarly, a few views of the enclosed fields typical of the English countryside are instrumental in identifying the landscape as truly English (see the pictures of Stanage Edge, Hathersage, Derbyshire and of Fountains Fell, Yorkshire Dales). Such identification stems from a whole terrain of previous representations in visual culture, from

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landscape painters Richard Wilson and John Constable to photographer Fay Godwin (Godwin 1990). These references are acknowledged by Simon Roberts, for instance when he deems his picture of the Haxey Hood to be “Constable-esque, with the Church spire, flat horizon and rolling skies.” (Roberts ‘commentary’) (Figure 2)

Figure 2: Simon Roberts, ‘Haxey Hood’

8 As shown by John Taylor in A Dream of England, past representations of the English landscape shape the imagination of contemporary tourists and viewers. They frame their idea of landscape and leisure, which in turn informs their definition of the national community. A process of repetition is at work, which Taylor identified as one of the chief characteristics of tourist imagery: it “reliably re-presents the already known. It guarantees a high level of a group solidarity and satisfaction.” (Taylor 243) Although the pictures in We English are not postcard pictures, they sometimes hint at touristic imagery and seem to question it. This was particularly emphasized when some pictures from We English were actually published as postcards to promote the Bradford exhibition. Thus an open dialogue is engaged with representations of landscape from both the history of art and tourist imagery, so that the Englishness of landscape, rather than the Englishness of pastimes, takes centre stage.

9 A few exceptions to this can be found with photographs of some outdoor activities that have been constructed in collective memory as typically English through recurring representations in visual culture. Simon Roberts explicitly addresses this legacy. As he explained in a 2012 interview,6 not only was he inspired by the works of Flemish painter Lucas Van Valckenborch, who painted bird’s eye views of village life near Antwerp (1575) in the late 16th century; but he also founded his project on a whole set

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of references from British visual culture. Indeed, interest in leisure activities in British art can be traced back to 18th century conversation pieces, some of which were set outdoors, depicting garden parties, or members of the aristocracy going for strolls and hunts on their estates (Shawe-Taylor 2009). Simon Roberts’s picture of hunters shooting birds at Heberdens Farm (Finchdean, Hampshire) reminds the viewers of this long tradition, even though there is no indication of the social status of the people there. In the 19th century, sporting events became popular and provided painters with opportunities to produce almost ethnographic representations of the social stratification of English rural life: cricket matches and horseraces were featured in paintings like William Powell’s Derby Day (1856-8) or John Roberston Reid’s Country Cricket Match (1878). Over the years and with the help of photography, these activities have come up so often in pictures of England that they have become motives, and eventually, national icons. After Frith, Derby Day, at Epsom, was pictured by Cartier- Bresson (1955), Homer Sykes (1970), Josef Koudelka (1972) or Martin Parr (2004), just to name a few. Simon Roberts acknowledges this lineage by literally referencing previous representations: “this is my reinterpretation of Frith’s painting,” (Roberts ‘Commentary’) he comments about his photograph of Derby Day at Epsom at the end of his book (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Simon Roberts, ‘Derby Day at Epsom’

10 As for more typically working-class pursuits, they have been seldom represented in painting in past centuries, not that the working class had no leisure time at all, as Emma Griffin (2005) has shown. There are a few representations of fairs like that of Croydon by George Hawkins (1833) or much later, the Lancashire Fair by L.S. Lowry (1946). Simon Roberts’s photograph of the Epsom fun fair in We English definitely

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echoes those previous representations. In terms of popular outdoor activities, beach- going and bathing have been more prominent in visual culture. Pictures of seaside resorts have long been icons reflecting the development of popular holidays. As early as 1827, Constable had produced one of the first representations of modern seaside leisure in Chain Pier, Brighton (1827): he was recording the ongoing transformations of landscape with the building of the Pier in the background, the Marine Parade in the middle ground and the presence of bathing huts on the beach where ladies and children are walking or bathing, mixing with fishermen at work in the foreground. In the 1980s, Blackpool beach-goers were photographed by Chris Steel-Perkins (2009), while New Brighton’s working class holiday-makers gave Martin Parr the subject for what was to be his breakthrough series The Last Resort (Parr 1986). Simon Roberts, who belongs to the next generation of British photographers, suggests that his own pictures of Blackpool promenade and beach could be seen as a sequel to this.

11 The photographer even encouraged comparisons by including a timeline of British photographers on the blog he dedicated to We English. He considers his own contribution as an “update” on previous records. According to him, this is a timely update, as there has been new popular interest in English locations for outdoor leisure and tourism since the 2008 credit crunch. The media even coined the phrase “staycation” to describe this “rediscovery” of England, as many people could no longer afford to travel abroad for their holidays.

12 Therefore, the supposed Englishness of some of the pastimes pictured in We English results both from centuries-old practice and from recurring representations. It implies continuity and memory, as some pursuits have been transmitted, reproduced, and represented. Indeed, visual culture is one way the “imagined community” takes shape. Benedict Anderson, who coined the phrase, showed that national identities and traditions are not only invented, as Hobsbawn insisted (Hobsbawm and Ranger), but also interiorised by people through various means. They are constantly re-activated by the work of educational institutions, the media, or museums, as French historians Anne-Marie Thiesse and Philippe Noiriel have also shown. So we may consider that We English is a photographer’s contribution to this ongoing “imagining” process and we have seen that Simon Roberts does claim to play his part in this chain writing of national icons.

A dialogical approach

13 Besides digging into English visual culture, Simon Roberts also turned to the public to suggest typically English pastimes and places for his project. People were asked to send in ideas through the photographer’s blog and forum. As he was travelling around the country in a motorhome, he posted news of his whereabouts in The Times and in the local press so that people could direct his attention to specific locations and events. The archive for this public consultation is still available today online7 and offers an interesting insight into what people consider typically English leisure. Most of the time, they mention cultural heritage and previous representations. Sometimes, they tend to rehash what seems to be stereotypes on English eccentricity. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that, while taking up some national icons, Simon Roberts managed to steer clear of clichés on the English character, notably the supposed taste for strange pastimes. Only one photo shows a rather funny activity: Mad Maldon Mud race where joggers

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have to cross the Blackwater Estuary at low tide and trudge in mud (Figure 4). In his comments on the book, Simon Roberts is prompt to stress that “We English is resolutely not a catalogue of quirky pastimes undertaken by eccentrics.” About Mad Maldon Mud race, he insists that the race was invented in 1973 and has not been a long tradition as the story has it.

Figure 4: Simon Roberts, ‘Mad Maldon Mud race’

14 Interestingly, the public consultation for We English also reveals that some members of the public preferred to go down memory lane, suggesting very personal activities or locations. And so did Simon Roberts, when he decided to photograph the place where he used to go tobogganing as a child or the beach near his grand-parents’ home. In that case, English leisure activities would simply be the mundane practices of English people in their familiar environment. From that angle, the nation is conjured up as a network of personal memories from the many individuals who have been living, or in some cases, used to live in England. This suggests that people develop roots and a sense of belonging through leisure activities that are not specifically English but are related to English places in their personal memories.

15 In a nutshell, the activities and places represented in We English were selected along different but complementary lines. The photographs result from negotiations between personal and collective memories and from negotiations between inherited cultural representations and ongoing relationships to leisure and landscape. Simon Roberts made this clear by establishing an online dialogue with the public ahead of the project and by explaining his choices in retrospect in the book’s comments pages. Overall, he developed a reflexive approach that is perhaps lost to the viewers who discover the

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photos in galleries without a full view of the project. Yet, what comes out of such a dialogical creation is a more open definition of Englishness and national identity than traditional views based on ethnic identity and so-called cultural values. Here, outdoor leisure activities and landscape are not deemed to be a mere cultural theatre.

Outdoor leisure as social theatre

16 In We English, leisure activities are also represented as the terrain for many social interactions, or as a social theatre, mainly through a number of aesthetic devices.

17 First of all, let us stress that all the places represented in We English are public places with a majority of beaches and parks, which means, on the whole, rather vast tracts of land. No one is seen barbecuing in their own backyard, although it surely is a favourite, weather permitting. When gardens are shown, they are allotments in Middlesbrough, that is to say, gardens run collectively, which are known to allow for shared moments. Second, the photographer decided to look mainly at groups of people. Only two pictures out of fifty-six feature just one person or two. Third, photos are always shot from a distance so that people are often figures dotting the landscape, clustering here and there. They can rarely be recognized individually. These photographic choices called for the use of a specific camera which could at once frame vast areas of landscape and still record and retain a richness of detail on print. Simon Roberts opted for a large format camera, involving the use of a single plate for each shot, a rather long exposure time, which requires a tripod, a dark cloth and a shutter release cable. In that position, the photographer is a distant observer and has little interaction with the subjects in his pictures who tend to forget about his immobile presence and to be unaware of the ‘decisive moment’ when he releases the shutter. This ads to the impression of a theatre as the photographer himself stands as a spectator rather than a participant in the scene. All the subjects are indeed busy with their various activities, interacting with each other.

18 Furthermore, Simon Roberts used an elevated perspective (often taking pictures from the roof of his motorhome) so that the picture plane tends to open and the middle ground is made more visible. This aesthetic choice is a departure from the conventional perspective used in pastoral representations of England. It creates a new sense of openness by contrast with the intricacy usually found in picturesque paintings like those of Constable. The human figures are revealed to be truly scattered in space. Photographs of beaches like those of Blackpool show how evenly people are distributed, keeping a respectful distance from others and making the most of the available space. A form of continuity is created between the foreground and the middle ground, which emphasizes interactions between subjects in different areas of the picture and an engagement with space rather than a relationship between the photographer and the people in the foreground.

19 Because of all the aesthetic choices we have just described, outdoor leisure activities in We English take a social dimension. The many individual connections with landscape during leisure activities in public places produce a form of connection between people. Landscape is not merely the backdrop for those activities: it is shared space, where convivial moments are spent. So there is a sense of community through shared environment, more than community through shared culture. We are looking at a kind of social theatre beyond the cultural theatre. This means that the photographer’s

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aesthetic choices tend to transcend and overwhelm the thematic choices that we have analysed in our first part. I would suggest that Simon Roberts tends to shift ground through formal devices to consider nationality in terms of participation, or perhaps citizenship, beyond history and culture.

20 From that angle, the pictures of We English are more political than they seem. They offer a re-definition of identity formation and national belonging. We saw on the one hand that Englishness can be found in personal and collective memories, in cultural references from the past which are re-produced and appropriated through visual culture. On the other hand, it seems that the aesthetic codes of the photographs in We English prove national belonging to be also written in the present. It is the paradoxical nature of photography to both capture the present and produce a record. Here, photographs seize the ongoing dynamics of collective identity formation. They imply that the English are all the people who happen to be here at this moment whatever their ethnic identity or cultural background. In fact, there is a good chance that some people in Simon Roberts’s pictures would not identify as English on a census form. In our view, this is very well epitomized by the picture of Derwentwater lake (Kenswick, Cumbria) where families are strolling on a sunny day: in the middle of the picture, two groups have met and stopped for a chat. The two families are visibly different, as the one on the left can be identified by their clothes as a Muslim family. Nonetheless, what is happening here in the social theatre of a Sunday stroll around the lake, is not ethnic distinction and division. On the contrary, the visual language of the photograph produces a very inclusive narrative.

21 This stands in contrast with the brashly nationalistic and exclusive title and cover of We English. “We English” suggests that there are such things as essential characteristics, an innate form of Englishness, which makes the English different from others. There is definitely a “them-and-us” ring to this title which implies that group identification arises from a sense of difference from other groups. Yet, ironically, as the viewer goes over the pictures, the assertiveness of the title dissolves into a much more complex view. This discrepancy urges the viewers to think again of England, and more generally, of the nation.

New perspectives on rural England?

22 The visible sense of openness and conviviality in We English definitely contrasts with notions of a parochial, stratified, ethnocentric rural England previously raised by some critics about pastoral representations of the nation in visual culture, in the heritage industry and in tourist imagery (for eg. Short 1992; Helsinger 1997; Hewison 1987). From that prospect, it may be said that Simon Roberts offers a re-writing of rural landscape.

23 In most pictures, the prevailing impression is that anyone can access most of the places and outdoor pursuits represented. Many leisure activities are virtually free and available for all. A few pictures still hint at class divide, like that of Cirencester Park Polo Club. However, as Simon Roberts commented on his photograph of a shooting party in Heberdens Farm (Finchdean, Hampshire), things are not always what they seem: the hunters in the picture are not upper-class landowners, but a group of builders that he describes as “aspiring”, pointing to a certain social mobility in rural England.

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24 On a similar note, limited ethnic diversity has also been one of the features of rural England. In the 80s, photographers like Ingrid Pollard showed that the English countryside and its visual representations had excluded ethnic minorities. Pollard’s series Pastoral Interlude pointed that the presence of black people in rural England still felt odd in 1987 (Pollard 1987). The text that she associated to her image of a black lady posing with her back to a wire fence and a view of England’s “green and pleasant land” bitterly echoed Wordsworth’s idyll: […] it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread […] (Pollard 1987)

25 In We English, it seems that this has been put to rest. Black and ethnic minority people (to use the British sociological terms) are indeed present in many pictures, but no particular emphasis is placed on that detail. They are just part of the crowd, as in the picture of Keynes Country Park Beach (Shornecote, Gloucestershire). In the photo of Lindisfarne Castle, a black lady is going through a gate on her way out of the castle site. This part of the picture may seem to some viewers as an update to Pollard’s famous shot; but it is worth noticing that here, the lady features among many other people, perhaps forming a couple with the white man also going through the gate, which points to social transformations in England in the past thirty years. Simon Roberts makes similar comments about another picture in the series: This photograph was taken at Stanage Edge in the Peak District, a popular destination for rock climbers. In the mid-ground a Muslim couple wearing distinctive grey robes follow a footpath down the hillside. We tend to think of these kinds of views of rural England being inhabited by the white middle classes, and I like that this photograph challenges the stereotype. Talking to the couple depicted, I learned that they were from Leicester on a week’s walking holiday, staying at a B&B in the nearby village of Hathersage. They spoke of feeling completely at ease in the area and described how they often spend their holidays exploring the English countryside. (Roberts ‘Commentary’)

26 Contrary to Pollard’s feeling of “unease” back in the 1980s, this Muslim couple say they are “completely at ease” in the English countryside. Thus the outdoor leisure activities represented in We English are shown to be occasions when people simply live their lives and engage with the environment they share with the rest of the population without much questioning it.

27 Finally, the vast range of activities compiled in the series reveals the influence of other countries on England. It tends to indicate the changing nature of both rural life and tourism, contrary to what heritage does. For instance, the development of camping and caravanning in parks, as in Gordale Scar Campsite (Malham, North Yorkshire), has probably been inspired more by American outdoor culture than by English tradition. The same goes for surfing, pictured in Salcombe Sands (Devon). Leisure activities and access to the countryside and seaside have evolved, so that rural England seems to have been become more outward-looking on many accounts.

28 However, this view should be qualified, by remarking on the great degree of control that has accompanied this transformation of leisure and rural England, which is particularly visible in Simon Roberts’s pictures.

29 It has always been a feature of the representation of English landscape to stress the domestication of nature over the wilderness. Picturesque paintings of English

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landscape made little room for untamed nature. Painters looking for sublime views of uncultivated ragged mountains were more likely to turn to Wales, like Richard Wilson for his view of Llyn y Cau (1774), or to Scotland. English landscape, by contrast, was mostly mapped, enclosed and organized territory. Even as tourism developed in Britain in the 19th century, new connections with nature were made, but they mostly consisted in visiting selected beauty spots. One picture by Simon Roberts epitomizes this harnessing of nature: in the landscaped gardens of the Northington Grange, a very smartly dressed couple are having a picnic during the Opera festival; a black fence cuts the green scenery into two strictly delineated areas. What lies beyond the fence, though, is also cultivated land, for agricultural purposes.

30 Besides this organization of landscape, Simon Roberts’s photos often subliminally point to a parallel regulation of outdoor leisure activities. In many pictures, everything seems to be organized for safe and comfortable leisure. Even Scafell Pike summit bears the marks of human presence with a piece of a drystone wall: the hikers, all perfectly equipped to face hostile natural elements, are checking maps, watches or perhaps compasses, implicitly reminding us that everything but the weather in under control. The fences and hedges typical of enclosed land that are visible in many pictures are complete with gates, walking paths, and signs. In the picture of Dunstanburgh Castle, the concern for safety is emphasized by the yellow jackets that cyclists are wearing. In other pictures like that of Delamere Forest Park, picnicking takes place on picnic tables in designated areas. In a few instances, designated areas end up being crowded as in Keynes Country Park Beach (Gloucestershire). The organization of space and leisure reaches a climax in the picture of Burrs Country Park Caravan Club near Manchester where the road and grass pitches form an abstract geometric pattern.

31 Many pictures suggest that outdoor leisure activities are valued and encouraged as long as they remain on the provided tracks. They evidence an increasing regulation and standardization of leisure practices in England, which perhaps qualifies the openness and dynamism that we have described previously. Such “consistent concern for order and control” (Matless 153) has been analysed by David Matless as the “moral geographies of English landscape” and leisure in the 1930s and 40s. Yet, judging by most pictures in We English, it is arguably still true that “we have an ecology of pleasures whereby people and their practices are mapped in a necessary relationship with particular environments, and —in the case of those not recognizably part of an open-air culture— are not to take themselves or their practices into other environments.” Thus, Simon Roberts’s project opens onto complex “dialectics of freedom and power, popular pleasure and citizenship” (Matless 154) and suggest that defining England through outdoor leisure and landscape is not just a matter of cultural geography but also of moral and political geography.

Conclusion

32 Besides choosing outdoor pursuits and places to be photographed for his series We English, Simon Roberts made aesthetic choices which shape a discourse on leisure and nation that lies beyond cultural types and locations. The photographer debunks the idea of outdoor leisure as a mere cultural theatre. He proposes a more personal and complex view, suggesting that national identity cannot be defined merely in terms of heritage, cultural values and practices. Outdoor leisure is also a social theatre.

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Openness and conviviality prevail in most pictures so that We English offers a rather refreshing view of rural England, and more generally, of a nation which contemporary politics have shown to be tempted by retreat and backlash. Here, on the contrary, Englishness and, more generally, nationality are examined in terms of participation, of political and moral geography. This certainly accounts for the very broad appeal of Simon Roberts’s project and its success beyond the borders of England.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, Verso, 1983.

Daniels, Stephen. Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.

Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia. London: Routledge, 2004.

Godwin, Fay. Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1990.

Griffin, Emma. England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660-1830. Oxford: Oxford UP/ British Academy, 2005.

Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815-1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997.

Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a climate of decline. London: Methuen, 1987.

Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Lodge, Guy. The Dog that Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community. Institute for Public Policy Research, 2012.

Matless, David. “Moral geographies of English landscape”. Landscape Research 22(2) 1997: 141-155. 10.1080/01426399708706505

Morley, David and Robins, Kevin (eds.). British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Noiriel, Gérard. À quoi sert « l’identité nationale »? Marseille: Éditions Agone, coll. ‘Passé & présent’, 2007.

Noiriel, Gérard. Qu’est-ce qu’une nation ? Paris: Bayard, 2015.

Parr, Martin. The Last Resort. Manchester: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1986.

Parr, Martin and Bagder, Gerry. The Photobook: A history. volume 1, London: Phaidon, 2004.

Roberts, Simon and Daniels, Stephen. We English. London: Chris Boot, 2009. Includes: “Commentary” section, unpaged.

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Shawe-Taylor, Desmond. The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life. London: Royal Collection Publications, 2009.

Short, Brian. The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Skey, Michael. National Belonging and Everyday Life: The Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Steele-Perkins, Chris. England. My England. Newcastle: Northumbria Press, 2009.

Taylor, John. A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.

Thiesse, Anne Marie. La création des identités nationales. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.

Urry, john. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage Publications, coll. “Theory, Culture & Society”, vol. 1., 2002.

Wells, liz. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2011.

Website

Roberts, Simon, We English, [Blog], http://we-english.co.uk

Pictures/Paintings/Photographs

Hawkins, George. Croydon Fair. 1833, (watercolour and ink on paper), Croydon Art collection, Croydon Clocktower.

Lowry, L.S. Good Friday, Daisy Nook. 1946, The UK Government Art Collection. https:// artcollection.culture.gov.uk/artwork/296/

Pollard, Ingrid. Pastoral Interlude. 1987, (Gelatin silver print coloured by hand, 25.5x38.8 cm), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O107865/pastoral- interludeits-as-if-the-photograph-pollard-ingrid/

Van Valckenborch, Lucas. Winter landscape near Antwerp with snowfall. 1575, (oak, 61 × 82.5 cm), Städel Museum, Franckfort. http://www.staedelmuseum.de/en/collection/winter-landscape- snowfall-near-antwerp-1575

Wilson, Richard. Llyn y Cau, Cader Idris. Wales, 1774, (Oil paint on canvas, 511 x 730 mm), Tate Gallery, London. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wilson-llyn-y-cau-cader-idris-n05596

NOTES

1. English Votes for English Laws: An Explanatory Guide to Proposals, Cabinet Office, July 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/441848/ English_votes_for_English_laws_explanatory_guide.pdf 2. Office for National Statistics – Rural population and migration 2013/2014, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 9 July 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/ rural-population-and-migration. 3. Paul Graham, interview with Thomas Weski, at Le BAL, Paris, 15 September 2012, personal notes.

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4. In comparison, Martin Parr’s best known series about Britons The Last Resort (1986) and The Cost of Living (1989) or his more international series like Common Sense (1995) and Small World (1999) which have travelled the world extensively, never toured the UK in such an exhaustive manner (for various reasons, not developed here, but mostly due to the very different institutional context for photography in Britain some twenty years ago). See http:// www.martinparr.com/cv/exhibitions/ 5. Alexander Gronsky, Pastoral 2, 2008-12 and Massimo Vitali, Rosignano Fins #5, 2002-06. 6. Interview with the author, Hove, July 2012. 7. Still available here: http://www.we-english.co.uk/your_ideas.php

ABSTRACTS

Simon Roberts’s We English series of photographs produced in 2008 has encountered unprecedented success in Britain and abroad. Recording scenes of outdoor leisure activities in various places in England, it has become in a few years the most exhibited series in the history of British photography. It was also published by Chris Boot as a book of fifty-six photographs. The photos show groups of people involved in a variety of activities like hiking, paragliding, angling, hunting, bird watching, horseracing, tobogganing, “mud-racing”, picnicking, or just strolling and relaxing. As the title of the series invites the viewer to consider the Englishness of the activities represented, We English is first analysed as an update on previous representations of English customs, by looking at the rich intertext in Simon Roberts’s pictures, through centuries of English visual culture from 18th century paintings to contemporary photography. Yet this article aims to establish that there is more to Simon Roberts’s project than merely a cultural theatre where English traditions are re-enacted. It is shown that the photographer has considerably broadened the scope through key aesthetic choices. By exploring the relationship between people and public places, We English turns outdoor leisure and landscape into a social theatre. The sense of community and belonging emerges out of shared environment and space rather than from cultural practices that are reproduced and re-presented over time. This paper argues that this approach allows the photographer to reformulate the question of Englishness and national identity altogether and to offer new perspectives on rural England, with outdoor leisure activities creating a sense of openness and conviviality contrasting with previous notions of a closed, stratified, ethnocentric society.

La série de photographies de Simon Roberts intitulée We English (2008) connaît un succès sans précédent en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde, sous la forme à la fois d’expositions et d’un livre de cinquante-six photographies. Ces images réalisées avec un appareil à chambre grand format représentent des scènes d’extérieurs dans différents lieux d’Angleterre, où des groupes de personnes s’adonnent à tous genres d’activités de loisirs comme la randonnée, le piquenique, la chasse, le parapente, la promenade ou le farniente à la plage. Le titre We English semble inviter les spectateurs à déceler des caractéristiques typiquement anglaises dans les pratiques et les paysages représentés. Cet article interroge donc en premier lieu la notion d’anglicité à travers les loisirs et les paysages photographiés par Simon Roberts. Ceux-ci constituent-ils un simple théâtre culturel où se jouent et se re-jouent les traditions anglaises ? Les images de Simon Roberts présentent certes un très riche intertexte avec toute la culture visuelle anglaise que nous retraçons brièvement de la peinture à la photographie contemporaine. Elles peuvent en cela être

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considérées comme une contribution de plus à la longue histoire de la représentation des loisirs anglais. Néanmoins, cet article montre comment les choix esthétiques de Simon Roberts tendent à transformer ce théâtre culturel en théâtre social. En effet, au fil des photographies, le sentiment d’appartenance et de communauté semble émerger avant tout du partage de l’espace public et de l’expérience collective, et d’une forme de convivialité. L’anglicité ainsi définie s’avère donc beaucoup plus ouverte et moins ethnocentrique qu’il n’y paraît. Au-delà, la série livre une véritable réflexion sur la notion même d’identité nationale.

INDEX

Mots-clés: anglicité, loisirs d’extérieurs, paysage, photographie, Grande-Bretagne, Roberts Simon, représentation Keywords: photography, Great-Britain, Englishness, landscape, outdoors, leisure, Roberts Simon, representation

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Politically Engaged Leisure: The Political Participation of Young People in Contemporary Britain beyond the Serious Leisure Model

Sarah Pickard

Introduction

1 Leisure Studies have grown in breadth and depth since the 1960s, encompassing ever- wider areas of research.1 The analysis of the relationship between leisure and young people is a fundamental part of Leisure Studies. Within this academic field, leisure in relation to political participation and especially that of young people remains largely unexamined. Existing works on leisure tend not to address the place of political participation, beyond certain aspects of volunteering and citizen participation. In parallel, the political socialisation of young people and their political participation are considered in Political Sociology and Political Studies, but these academic fields tend to elide the potential place and role of leisure.

2 Young people in Britain have been affected directly by a host of policies from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (2010-2015) and then the Conservative government since 2015. Notable youth policies within the context of austerity have included the increase in university tuition fees, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and student maintenance grants, the cuts to spending on higher education and the reduction of Youth Services. Young people have also been affected especially by the lack of affordable accommodation and mental health care, as well as high rate of youth unemployment compared to other age groups (Jones 2017). During the same period, the country has experienced a rise in political participation of young people: youth membership of all the main political parties has increased (Keen and Apostolova 2017; Pickard 2015) and youth-led protest has grown (Pickard 2014a, b, 2018a, b). Indeed, the current generation of young people in Britain

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— those aged between 16 and 24 — are the most politically active for over a generation (Pickard 2018a, b).

3 This article brings together the different themes of leisure, young people and political participation. In particular, it examines whether it is possible to apply the ‘serious leisure model’ devised by Robert Stebbins in the 1980s to political participation among young people and to what extent the term ‘politically engaged leisure’ might be appropriate, especially in contemporary Britain. The article first identifies gaps in the existing literature on Leisure Studies regarding leisure, young people and political participation. It then describes and evaluates the theoretical framework of Robert Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP). The article goes on to analyse whether the SLP can be applied specifically to young people’s political participation in contemporary Britain. It ends by proposing a new term to describe such activities: ‘politically engaged leisure.’

A gap in existing literature on leisure, young people and political participation

4 It is widely acknowledged that leisure as a concept is difficult to define (Bergero 1962: 37-8), ambiguous (Dumazedier 1967) and even “treacherous” (Rapoport and Rapoport 1974: 214). Leisure is traditionally defined as the time that individuals spend when they are free from work obligations (Dumazedier 1967; Parker 1971, 1976) and family or household responsibilities. Dumazedier (1967) underlines that leisure affords people the opportunity for relaxation, the broadening of knowledge, and social participation. According to Fulcher and Scott (2011: 653), leisure generally provides “freedom, choice, self-expression, and creativity,” terms to which this article will return.2 Moreover, leisure is usually considered highly valuable and the emotions it engenders makes it pleasurable for the individual (Rojek 2010; Harris 2012).

5 In the increasingly documented Sociology of Leisure, there are two main schools of thought. First, there exists the ‘historical and theoretical’ (structuralism-functionalism and neo-Marxism) approach that examines the changing nature of leisure and its place in social change (Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison and Myers 1960; Clarke and Critcher 1985). Second, there is the ‘formal approach’ tradition centred on empirical studies, which addresses various questions such as the relation between work and leisure, or leisure and culture. Studies reveal marked differences in leisure patterns according to gender, class, ethnicity, and age. Among others, Scraton and Bramham (1995) point out that the constraints of class, gender and ethnicity remain influential in the consumption of leisure, but they do not discuss fully the specificities of young people, their lifestyles and identities pertaining to leisure. However, one particular angle of investigation within the formal approach to leisure is the examination of how leisure patterns change through the life cycle (Rapoport and Rapoport 1975). Indeed, young people tend to have more free time than other age groups and fewer financial obligations (Pickard 2000). This inevitably impacts on the leisure of young people for whom leisure activities occupy a “preponderant place” (Dumazedier 1967: 58). In addition, leisure interests constitute an essential part of the individual and collective identities of young people, especially regarding self-definition, self-identification and a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded peers with shared values and activities.

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6 British youth culture centred on leisure and consumerism emerged during the 1950s following the advent of the teenager and the consumer society that originated in the United States.3 Since then, the pastimes and interests enjoyed specifically by the younger generation — generally to the exclusion of older generations — have been studied comprehensively in Cultural Studies and Youth Studies. The original focus of research was on the role of clothing, music, movies, radio and television programmes, magazines, etc. in the lives of increasingly numerous and affluent British youth with a growing disposable income and free time (Abrams 1959; Hopkins 1963) due to changes in labour law. Research then shifted to analysing the leisure activities of British young people in relation to youth subcultures (Brake 1980), especially deviancy and resistance in terms of tastes in music and clothing, pioneered by the influential (Marxist, post- structuralist and feminist) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, for example, Teddy Boys, Mods and Skinheads (Cohen 1972; Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige 1979), followed by Punks and Ravers (Hendry 1983, 1993). An ongoing criticism emerged regarding the commodification and consumerist nature of mass culture and leisure (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972; Adorno 1991) that could be applied to exploited young people (and other age groups). Subsequently, there was a move away from the term ‘youth culture,’ towards the use of terms such as ‘tribes’ and ‘scenes’ (Maffesoli 1988, 1996; Bennett 1999; Hesmondhalgh 2005), lifestyles and ‘neo-tribes’ (Hetherington 1998), in post-modern society (Shildrick and MacDonald 2006). More recent studies of youth leisure are overwhelmingly centred on the role of new social media, digital media and new technologies (Buckingham and Willett 2013; Buckingham, Bragg and Kehily 2014) in the lives of ‘digital natives’ (Prensky 2001). There is thus a very substantial and ever-increasing amount of academic literature on leisure, young people and youth culture, as well as Youth Studies more generally (Furlong 2009, 2012).

7 At the same time, there is a growing body of work on the relationship between young people in Britain and political participation, originally driven by anxiety about falling rates of turnout at elections since the 1960s and especially at the start of the twenty- first century among 18 to 24-year-olds. The academic narrative previously tended to argue that young people were politically apathetic and disinterested in traditional or conventional politics, such as voting or being a member of a political party (Pirie and Worcester 1998; Putnam 2000; Phelps 2004, 2005). However, more recent discourse refutes this stance and posits that this age group is alienated from electoral politics (Henn, Weinstein and Wring 2003; Marsh, O’Toole and Jones 2007; Henn and Foard 2014; Fox 2015), in part due to political institutions incapacity and/or reluctance to engage with young people (Pickard and Bessant 2017), preferring to focus on the ‘grey vote’ as older generations have higher electoral turnout rates (Pickard 2009). There is a growing emphasis on young people taking part increasingly in non-electoral forms of political participation (Muxel 2010; Grasso 2017), such as demonstrating, flash mobs and e-politics, as well as how they ‘live’ politics though ‘everyday’ politics (Bang 2005), such as ethical consumerism (boycotts and buycotts) and vegetarianism, as well as one- issue politics, such as environmental concerns and political protest (Pickard 2018c). In particular, researchers are exploring how young people ‘do’ politics online through social media, new technologies (Bessant 2015; Pickard 2015, 2018b) and whether this can be a key to increasing political participation and reducing the democratic deficit (Loader, Vromen and Xenos 2014).

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8 Three striking parallels stand out here. First, both leisure and political participation play crucial roles in the individual and collective identities of young people. Second, the internet and social media are playing burgeoning roles in the ways young people experience both leisure and politics in contemporary Britain. Third, there is a clear growth of academic studies on leisure and young people, on youth culture and on the political participation of young people. Nonetheless, there exists very little research on political participation as a leisure activity. Indeed, Leisure Studies, Political Sociology and Political Science remain largely compartmentalised leading to gaps in intellectual thinking (Pickard 2016). This article attempts to open some of the doors linking these disciplines.

The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP): a theoretical framework of leisure

9 Robert Stebbins4 began carrying out research on the nature and function of leisure in the early 1970s. Most of his work has been based on findings from ethnographic studies, insider accounts, participant observation and interviews. Stebbins’s definition of ‘leisure’ has barely changed during his decades of research on the subject; in one of his more recent works, he imbues leisure with the following meaning: “Un-coerced, contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both)” (Stebbins 2007: 4), which is close to traditional definitions of leisure (see above).

10 For Stebbins, leisure can range from casual, fleeting engagements, to intensive short- term projects, to more serious lifetime commitments that require a great deal of time, money, and energy. His theoretical framework evolved early on into three main forms of leisure, first ‘casual leisure,’ second ‘project-based leisure’ and third ‘serious leisure’5 (Stebbins 1982). Within Stebbins’s theoretical framework, ‘casual leisure’ is immediately and intrinsically rewarding. It tends to be a relatively short-lived, pleasurable activity that requires little or no special training to enjoy it. Furthermore, it is fundamentally hedonic, engaged in for the significant level of pure enjoyment, or pleasure.6 Examples of casual leisure include, passive entertainment (television, recorded music), active entertainment (games of chance, party games), play, relaxation, sociable conversation, and sensory stimulation (eating, drinking, having sex) (Stebbins 1997). ‘Project-based leisure’ for Stebbins is short-term, moderately complicated and either one-shot or occasional. It tends to be a creative undertaking carried out in free time that involves considerable planning, effort, and sometimes skill or knowledge. Examples of project-based leisure include, arts festivals, sports events, religious holidays, individual birthdays and national holidays (Stebbins 2015).

11 Lastly, and more significantly for this article, according to Stebbins, the third category is ‘serious leisure.’ This describes a leisure activity involving knowledge, experience, and specific skills (as opposed to casual leisure). Serious leisure is highly interesting, important and fulfilling to the participant for whom it “embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness” (Elkington and Stebbins 2014: 16).

12 Serious leisure is distinguished from casual leisure by six characteristics: the need to persevere at the activity, the need to put in effort to gain skill and knowledge, the

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realisation of various special benefits, the unique ethos and social world, an attractive personal and social identity, and the availability of a “leisure career.” Stebbins also states: Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience (Stebbins 1992: 3).

13 Partaking in serious leisure provides a number of ‘personal rewards’ and ‘social rewards’ for the participant, which partially explain his/her motivations. The personal rewards can be summed up as personal enrichment (cherished experiences), self-image (known to others as a serious leisure participant), self-expression (expressing skills, abilities, knowledge), self-gratification (superficial enjoyment and deep fulfilment), self-actualisation (developing skills, abilities, knowledge), and re-creation (or regeneration of oneself through serious leisure after a day’s work financial return) (Elkington and Stebbins 2014). The social rewards include: social attraction (associating with other serious leisure participants, with clients as a volunteer, participating in the social world of the activity), group accomplishment (group effort in accomplishing a serious leisure project; senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic), and contribution to the maintenance and development of the group (including senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic in making the contribution) (Elkington and Stebbins 2014).

14 The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) has been the focus of Stebbins’s continuing research; he has written about serious leisure in relation to numerous fields, including liberal arts hobbies (1994), cultural tourism (1996a), barbershop singers (1996b) and musical production (2017). Other academics have written about the Serious Leisure Perspective on various subjects, such as folk music (Henderson and Spracklen 2014), bird watching (Lee, McMahan and Scott 2015) and DIY (Brayham 2015). However, there has been little research on young people and/or political participation within the Serious Leisure Perspective theoretical framework.

The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) pertaining to young people and to politics

15 Notwithstanding the substantial body of work on the Serious Leisure Perspective since 1979 (see reference list), some lacunas stand out in Stebbins’s work. Arguably, the most noteworthy is the quasi absence of consideration of the traditional sociological variables of social economic class, gender, ethnicity and age in the Serious Leisure Perspective theoretical framework. This is despite numerous other sociological works underlining the different experiences of leisure according to one’s social class, as well as post-modern feminist works and research on the specificities of young people’s experience of leisure (see above). Stebbins barely mentions the particularities of leisure regarding young people, despite the key role it plays in their lives.

16 Indeed, young people are mostly invisible in Stebbins’s Serious Leisure Perspective analyses and when they do appear, it is almost solely within negative contexts. The cursory references to young people concern “deviant” youth seeking thrills and stimulation, such as drugs, alcohol, gangs and gambling (Stebbins 2007: 66). For errant

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youth, certain serious leisure activities are portrayed by Stebbins as sufficiently risky to potentially entertain them (and implicitly keep them out of trouble): To the extent that wayward youth have little or no taste for repetitions and constant experiences, then what kind of leisure will alleviate their boredom? […] Spelunking, orienteering and some kinds of sports volunteering exemplify non- repetitive serious leisure that is both exciting and, with the first two reasonably adventurous (Stebbins 2007: 67).

17 The lack of acknowledgement of young people as actors in leisure and their specificities, as well as the highly normative and reductive references to young people in Stebbins’s work can be viewed as problematic. Together, they constitute a weakness in the understanding of how young people pursue leisure and how leisure is experienced by young people. However, recent work on young people learning about and participating in performing popular music as a positive and productive leisure pursuit (Moir 2017) shows well how the Serious Leisure Perspective can be applied efficaciously to them in relation to self-development, identity and belonging.

18 Another ongoing shortfall of the Serious Leisure Perspective, as devised and examined by Stebbins, is that it almost completely omits to take into account political engagement or participation, i.e. involvement in political parties, participation in social movements for/against socio-political change and political collective action. Stebbins does examine volunteering as a serious leisure pursuit relative to being an unpaid helper in a museum, hospital or a non-profit organisation (Stebbins 1992, 1996c, 2007, 2015).7 But volunteering within an overtly political organisation or association is largely absent from his analyses. In a more recent work, he mentions tantalisingly and transitorily political participation within the context of volunteering: The goal of bringing people together to create and enhance democracy, government legitimacy and general community functioning can be accomplished through many forms of social leisure. Political volunteering is but one kind of such leisure. Leisure when it brings us in contact with other people, can be conceived of as community citizen participation or more specifically, if it has political import, as political citizen participation (Elkington and Stebbins 2014: 147).

19 Yet Stebbins does not develop here how citizen participation can be considered a serious leisure pursuit. Elsewhere, he mentions briefly participation in (social) ‘movements’: Movements are abound that gain members through their own volition, suggesting that the members experience no coercion to become involved. Some religious movements serve as examples, as do movements centered on values like physical fitness and healthy eating. Still, the latter two also attract people who feel pressured by outside forces to participate, as when their physical prescribes exercise or weight loss or face an early death. Thus some social movements are composed of enthusiasts who are there for leisure reasons and other people who are compelled to be there (not leisure). Finally, there are movements that seem to find their impetus primarily in people who feel driven to champion a particular cause, such as the temperance movement of early last century and the vigorous antismoking movement of modern times. A strong sense of obligation fuels their participation. Those who make up the gun control and nuclear disarmament movements seem cut from the same cloth. Whether this is leisure must be determined empirically through interviews with members (Stebbins 2007: 57).

20 But Stebbins does not allude to the ‘politicalness’ of participating in movements that defend causes that are highly political (for example, gun control and nuclear disarmament). Furthermore, for Stebbins, such activities cannot be considered serious

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leisure when participation is “coerced.” The origin of the obligation is not made fully explicit, but we can deduce it might be coercion from peers or one’s conscience.

21 Thus, the SLP theoretical framework contests the hegemonic notion that leisure must be centred uniquely on hedonism, as serious leisure does not have to be always enjoyable and associated with freedom. This is undeniably a strength of Stebbins’s work, according to Raisborough (2007). Nonetheless, the SLP generally elides the potential for political participation to be considered a serious leisure pursuit. Indeed, Raisborough (2007) also argues that serious leisure remains for the most part apolitical in nature. For Puddephatt, Stebbins tends to “ignore many of the more latent aspects of leisure that make it such an interesting and important topic for study” (Puddephatt, 2007: 1). In his analysis, Puddephatt regrets that the Serious Leisure Perspective does not explore how “different types of leisure help to focus the community, improve social solidarity, and positively affect collective political participation,” which constitutes a key positive outcome of taking part in politics. Moreover, Stebbins does not address how “leisure serve[s] to distract people from politics and civic issues, encourage consumerism, delay maturity and moral development, and prevent upward mobility” (Puddephatt 2007: 1). Political participation is thus largely under-analysed as a leisure activity within the Serious Leisure Perspective.

22 There is a vast repertoire of individual and collective political participation (a term that is almost as nebulous as leisure), which spans from signing an e-petition and wearing a sticker supporting a cause or organisation, to burning down a government building and other violent acts (Braud 2016: 359-360). In Political Science, political participation is usually divided into ‘traditional,’ ‘institutional,’ or ‘conventional’ forms (e.g. voting and being a member of a political party) and ‘non-traditional,’ ‘non- institutional’ or ‘unconventional’ forms (e.g. taking part in a social movement, going on a march and occupying a space). Thus, different forms of political participation demand different degrees of effort and engagement from the participant. Klandermans outlines the “taxonomies of participation” pertaining to political participation. For him: Two important dimensions to distinguish forms of participation are time and effort. Some forms of participation are limited in time or of a once-only kind and involve little effort or risk — giving money, signing a petition, or taking part in a peaceful demonstration. […]. Other forms of participation are also short-lived but involve considerable effort or risk — a sit-in a site occupation, or a strike. […] Participation can also be indefinite but demanding little — paying a membership fee to an organisation or being on call for two nights a month. […] Finally, there are forms of participation that are both enduring and taxing, like being a member on a committee or a volunteer in a movement organization (Klandermans 2004: 360).

23 This hierarchy of time and effort in terms of perseverance and commitment mirrors markedly the Serious Leisure Perspective’s triptych categorisation of the types of participation in leisure (casual, project-based, serious). What Klandermans classifies as “enduring” and “taxing” resonates with what Stebbins’s classifies as characteristics of serious leisure. Moreover, such activities can involve knowledge, experience, and specific skills, as well being highly interesting, important and fulfilling to the participant and embodying earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness, which are all characteristics of serious leisure, according to Stebbins (see above).

24 For some young people, their involvement in politics corresponds more to what Stebbins calls casual leisure or project-based leisure. For these young people, their participation is occasional, with few costs (and benefits), and some may only get

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involved due to encouragement from peers. In other words, such young participants are not fully engaged in their political participation and might be there for ‘just for fun,’ dabbling in politics when the opportunity arises (for example, at election time or a demonstration) like any other leisure activity as part of their development.

25 For other young people, taking part in politics ticks many of the boxes associated with the Serious Leisure Perspective definition of serious leisure, as it can be highly interesting, important and fulfilling to the participant for whom it “embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness” (Elkington and Stebbins 2014: 16). Moreover, participating in politics can provide young people with several of the ‘personal rewards’ associated with serious leisure: personal enrichment, self-image, self-expression, self-gratification, self-actualisation and re-creation, as well as the ‘social rewards’: social attraction, group accomplishment and contribution to the maintenance and development of the group (Elkington and Stebbins 2014). The more committed young people take politics seriously and are involved in politics across the range of political participation, from sharing a political tweet to canvassing and protesting.

26 In this way, political participation of young people can indeed meet the criteria of serious leisure within the Serious Leisure Perspective theoretical framework established by Stebbins. Nevertheless, the Serious Leisure Perspective does not seem to consider political participation to be a form of serious leisure. One explanation might be that Stebbins does not deem it possible for political participation to be carried out on a voluntary basis (uncoerced) and potentially a pleasurable experience.

From serious leisure to politically “engaged leisure”

27 The absence of analysis of political participation within the Serious Leisure Perspective is partially addressed by what Mair terms “civic leisure,” which she defines as “leisure that resists the hegemonic tendencies towards consumerization and commodification and most importantly, attempts to generate open and public discussion about issues that are important to society” (Mair 2002: 215). Lamond, Kilbride and Spracklen also address the counter-hegemonic nature of political protest as leisure: As global capitalism and state controls exert enormously limiting power on the spaces and forms of work and popular culture, leisure time becomes the only time when it becomes possible to resist the hegemonies in other parts of everyday life. […] Thus, protest becomes a form of communicative leisure, the only space and practice where counter-hegemonic resistance becomes possible, and new public spheres are potentially constructed (Lamond, Kilbride and Spracklen 2015: 21-22).

28 Thus, there are clearly leisure activities that do not comprise the passive consumption of leisure-related commodities, but do encompass taking part in activities of a serious, political nature.

29 To take this conceptualisation of certain leisure activities further, I suggest a new term — politically ‘engaged leisure’ — as a form of post-materialistic leisure within the context of neoliberalism. Politically engaged leisure is dependent on a sense of citizenship and it is important to individual and collective identities through shared political values and goals. Notably, the concept of politically engaged leisure acknowledges the satisfaction and pleasure of participating in politics individually and collectively for a perceived good (citizenship), rather than a consumer good. Young

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people (especially students) tend to have fewer responsibilities and more free time than older generations to pursue leisure interests and thus they are generally more available and able to take part in politically engaged leisure pursuits. Participating in politically engaged leisure can be a formative part of the political socialisation of young people as they are exposed to political influence.

30 Politically engaged leisure meets the criteria traditionally prescribed to leisure activities and many of the characteristics of ‘serious leisure,’ whilst emphasising the deliberate act of being involved in a leisure activity encompassing politics. Thus, politically engaged leisure takes place during time free from work, obligations and responsibilities on a voluntary basis. Politically engaged leisure provides opportunities for relaxation, self-expression, creativity, broadening of knowledge and social participation. In addition, politically engaged leisure embraces knowledge, experience, and specific skills, as well as being highly interesting, important and fulfilling to the participant, involving earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness, as stated in the SLP. Politically engaged leisure is therefore both a conventional and a counter- hegemonic form of leisure, which embraces the contemporary political context.

31 Significantly, politically engaged leisure can also be congenial, a characteristic of political participation that is often overlooked in Political Science. Indeed, politically engaged leisure can be considered valuable and pleasurable to the participant in part due to the positive emotions it engenders. However, the role of emotions in politics is usually overlooked (Braud 2016: 392).8 Jasper stresses how participating in social movements is important to one’s identity and he underlines the “joy and pride” (Jasper 1998: 417) to be had through expressing “oneself and one’s moral,” by taking part in collective behaviour: A collective identity is not simply the drawing of a cognitive boundary; most of all, it is an emotion, a positive affect toward other group members on the grounds of that common membership. Defining oneself through the help of a collective label entails an affective as well as cognitive mapping of the social world. Partly because of this affection, participation in social movements can be pleasurable in itself, independently of the ultimate goals and outcomes (Jasper 1998: 145).

32 For this sociologist, “the richer a movement’s culture — with more rituals, songs, folktales, heroes, denunciation of enemies, and so on — the greater these pleasures” (Jasper 1998: 417). These points are echoed by Klandermans (2004: 367) who argues that “movement organizations not only supply sources of identification; they also offer all kinds of opportunities to enjoy and celebrate the collective identity: marches, rituals, songs, meetings signs, symbols and common codes” (see also Hunt and Benford 2004). Over a century ago, Durkheim described the “collective effervescence” experienced during collective religious acts: The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others (Durkheim 1915: 215-216).9

33 This collective pleasure obtained from participating in politics resembles the pleasures of participating in leisure due to what Rojek calls “sociability.” This is the “pleasurable enjoyment and emotional stimulation that follow from voluntary interaction with others. The pleasure generated by being in the company of others is often experienced

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as feelings of emotional closeness, fellowship or camaraderie” (Rojek 2010: 122). These pleasures rooted in collective leisure (see also Best 2010: 14) and collective political participation, for example, being an activist in the youth wing of a political party, taking part in a march, producing political art, or staying on a peace camp (see Gallant 2012; Latzko-Toth, Pastinelli and Gallant 2017; Van de Velde 2011) mirror many of the personal and social rewards provided by serious leisure according to Stebbins (see above).

34 Even though conceptualisations of both leisure and pleasure are evolving, the two remain intimately linked according to Rojek (2010: 187): The old idea that leisure study is about what pleasure-accumulating individuals and groups do in their free time has been modified by a new research agenda having to do with the multiple meanings of pleasure, the social economic and political context in which time is coded and represented as ‘free,’ the use of leisure in enhancing personal and group direction, and the ideological connotation of freedom in a society based on inequality. […] Freedom and pleasure are slowly being redefined as socially and economically conditioned human qualities rather than timeless, natural capacities of authority and power.

35 Politically engaged leisure is thus intimately linked to the context when and where it is taking place. Indeed, for Roberts, leisure should be defined by its economic, political and social contexts (Roberts 1986: 1) and “leisure is highly context-dependent” (2).

36 The specificities of the contemporary political context in Britain and the political reactions of young people illustrate well how the concept of politically engaged leisure can be applied. In Britain, since the arrival of the Conservatives in power, in 2010, there has been an increase in traditional/conventional/electoral and non-traditional/ unconventional/non-electoral forms of political participation and young people are the major actors. Young people have been at the vanguard of both forms of political participation in Britain, including increased membership among all the main political parties’ youth wings, especially the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn became leader in September 2015 and the creation of Momentum (Pickard 2017a, b), increased turnout of 18-24 year-olds in the 2015 General Election,10 a high turnout rate for the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence (approximately 75%) (Electoral Commission 2014; Batchelor, Fraser, Ling and Whittaker 2017), and increased involvement in diverse forms of collective political protest (university tuition fees, Occupy London, etc.) both offline and online (Grasso 2017; Pickard 2018b). This political participation of young people in Britain sits within the context of a “growth of global social movements and transnational collective action” (della Porta and Mattoni 2014; see also Braud 2016) and young people around the world are regenerating politics through imaginative and creative forms in times of diverse crises (Pickard and Bessant 2017).

37 For many of these young people in Britain, politically engaged leisure is dependent on the political context marked by numerous policies having a negative impact on their well-being, and political participation is essential to their individual identity, but also a source of pleasure and positive emotions via collective political identities.

Conclusion

38 This article underlines the nebulousness of the terms leisure, political participation and young people. It also shows the lack of cross fertilisation among academic fields,

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especially between the Sociology of Leisure and Political Science. Regarding the Serious Leisure Perspective developed by Robert Stebbins, the specificities of young people’s relationships to leisure and their role in leisure remain under-examined. Yet both leisure and political participation play key roles in the individual and collective identities of young people. The potential for individual and collective political participation to be considered a serious leisure pursuit is also under-analysed within the Serious Leisure Perspective. Thus, Stebbins seems to discount the specificities of young people in leisure depoliticise serious leisure. Not encompassing political participation — especially among young people — as a form of serious leisure in the Serious Leisure Perspective reveals a limit of this theoretical framework to date. However, with the growth of Leisure Studies, Youth Studies and Political Sociology the Serious Leisure Perspective is being applied to ever-wider contexts; there thus exists increasing scope for political participation to be examined as a serious leisure pursuit as it does fit many of the criteria ascribed to serious leisure pursuits by Stebbins.

39 The concept of politically engaged leisure goes some way addressing whether taking part in electoral and non-electoral politics can be considered a form of leisure. Here politics and leisure are combined primarily through a sense of pleasure from shared belonging, shared identities and shared post-materialistic goals within the realm of citizenship, which are appealing to young people In Britain, in the twenty-first century, political participation across the scale of committed is growing particularly among young people. Much participation is facilitated through the increasing use of social media and new technologies in leisure and politics.

40 However, more qualitative work is needed with young political activists within conventional/traditional and unconventional/new forms of political participation regarding their motivations for participating in politics, especially the place of emotions, identity and context, and to what extent they consider it leisure. Such studies will improve our understanding of leisure, young people, politics and the forces at play in contemporary British society, where the leisure activities of young people do not all correspond to Adornian and Gramscian versions of consumerist leisure as a form of oppression, or other negative portrayals of young people’s consumption of individualised, privatised, self-serving or hedonistic leisure.11 Political participation can be considered a counter hegemonic form of serious leisure and young people in Britain and around the world today the agents of political change, in politically engaged leisure.

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NOTES

1. Earlier studies of leisure do exist, in particular Veblen (1899), but Leisure Studies flourished as from the second half of the twentieth century. 2. Rojek (2000) states that this is an “old fashioned” definition of leisure and that the “leisure society” is dead, hence the need for post-modern definitions of leisure. 3. The term ‘youth culture’ was devised by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1942 (Parsons, 1942). 4. Robert Stebbins works at the Department of Sociology at the University of Calgary, in Canada. 5. For diagrams that classify different types of leisure according to Robert Stebbins’s theoretical framework, see here: http://www.seriousleisure.net/slp-diagrams.html . 6. In this way, Robert Stebbins’s definition of casual leisure is linked to Chris Rojek’s definition of ‘deviant leisure’ (Rojek, 1997: 392-393). 7. Other researchers also discuss the Serious Leisure Perspective in relation to volunteering (Parker, 1987, 1992; Lockstone-Binney, Holmes, Smith, and Baum, 2010). 8. Braud (2016: 392): “Dans l’était actuel des analyses savantes du comportement électoral restera toujours difficile de bien saisir cette part de l’imagination et d’émotion qui conditionne les comportements des électeurs. Les auteurs de The American Voter [Campbell, Converse, Miller and

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Stokes 1980] ne les avaient pourtant pas totalement négligées mais les études qui se sont situées dans leur sillage leur ont accordé peu d’attention.” 9. Durkheim (1912: 308): “Or, le seul fait de l’agglomération agit comme un excitant exceptionnellement puissant. Une fois les individus assemblés il se dégage de leur rapprochement une sorte d’électricité qui les transporte vite à un degré extraordinaire d’exaltation. Chaque sentiment exprimé vient retentir, sans résistance, dans toutes ces consciences largement ouvertes aux impressions extérieures : chacune d’elles fait écho aux autres et réciproquement.” 10. The turnout rates of 18-24-year-olds based on surveys after general elections are as follows: 1979 = 62.5, 1983 = 63.9%, 1987 = 66.6%, 1992 = 67.3%, 2001 = 40.4%, 2005 = 38.2%, 2010 = 51.8% and 2015 = 58.0%. However, turnout of young people remains lower than the average for the British population: 2001 = 59.4%, 2005 = 61.3%, 2010 = 65.0% and 2015 = 66.1% (British Election Study 2015). 11. Young people also participate in other forms of leisure that can be considered, at times, political and resistant, for example, such as dance / rave culture (Blackman, 2005).

ABSTRACTS

This article discusses leisure in contemporary Britain pertaining to the political participation of young people in relation to the concepts of ‘serious leisure’ and ‘politically engaged leisure.’ Leisure is a fundamental component of a young person’s individual and collective identities, and some young people discover an interest in politics during their transition to adulthood. Research on the sociological concept of Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) (Stebbins, 1982) has been carried out regarding many different activities, but it has rarely been considered apropos young people or indeed political activities. This article examines whether the Serious Leisure Perspective can be applied to traditional and innovative forms of political participation carried out by British youth in the twenty-first century and to what extent politically engaged leisure might be a more fitting term. By adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, the article identifies gaps in the current body of work on leisure and aims to add to academic understanding of leisure by pushing the boundaries of the existing conceptualisations of it. The article illustrates that is it possible to conceptualise political participation as a leisure activity and that the Serious Leisure Perspective could be used to describe it. The article goes on to suggest a new concept politically engaged leisure could be a useful way to describe political participation of politically committed young people in contemporary Britain.

Cet article explore les loisirs en Grande-Bretagne contemporaine par rapport à la participation politique des jeunes et les concepts de ‘serious leisure’ (loisirs sérieux) et ‘politically engaged leisure’ (loisirs politiquement engagés). Les loisirs constituent un élément essential de l’identité individuelle et collective des jeunes et certains découvrent un intérêt pour la politique lors de leur transition vers l’âge adulte. Les recherches sur le concept sociologique de Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP) (Stebbins, 1982) portent sur de nombreuses activités, mais rarement concernant les jeunes ou bien la participation politique. Cet article examine si le Serious Leisure Perspective peut être appliqué aux formes traditionnelles et nouvelles de la participation politique des jeunes Britanniques au vingt-et-unième siècle et si le terme ‘politically engaged leisure’ n’est pas plus adapté. Par une approche interdisciplinaire, cet article identifie les lacunes dans les travaux

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existant sur les loisirs et tente de contribuer aux analyses des loisirs en élargissant les conceptualisations actuelles du terme. L’article montre qu’il est tout à fait possible de considérer la participation politique comme loisirs et que le Serious Leisure Perspective peut être véhiculé et appliqué. Enfin, l’article propose qu’un nouveau concept ‘politically engaged leisure’ (loisirs politiquement engagés) pourrait être utile pour décrire la participation politique chez certains jeunes politiquement actifs en Grande-Bretagne de nos jours.

INDEX

Mots-clés: engagement, loisirs, loisirs engagés, participation politique, protestation, jeunes, jeunesse, Royaume-Uni Keywords: engaged leisure, political participation, protest, serious leisure, young people, youth, United Kingdom

AUTHOR

SARAH PICKARD Senior lecturer and researcher in British Studies - politics and sociology, University of Sorbonne Nouvelle. Member of CREW EA 4399. Sarah Pickard completed a PhD (Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000) on the relationship between the birth of youth culture and youth policy in post-war Britain. Her research now focuses on the interaction between youth policy and youth politics in contemporary Britain. For a detailed CV including a list of her publications see here: http:// www.univ-paris3.fr/pickard-sarah-127807.kjsp?RH=1296815685421. Contact: Sarah.Pickard [at] sorbonne-nouvelle.fr.

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The Work/Leisure Frontier Tourism, Gambling, Gardening, and Surfing the Web as Objects of Control, Discipline and Legislation

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Graphic Interlude The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles and the United States

Tim Knowles

1 British artist Tim Knowles indirectly reflects upon leisure through the idea of drifting and chance, notably the dynamics of ink flowing, boat sailing and men and women walking.

1. Leisure: chance and idleness?

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Tim Knowles, Ink on Paper Landscape, Corner Concertina #3 [detail], 2016. Ink on Paper

2. All play and no work?

Tim Knowles, Tree Drawing - Ginko [detail], 2012. Ink on Paper and C-type prints

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Tim Knowles, Tree Drawing - Hawthorn on easel #1, 2005

3. Left to one’s own devices

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Tim Knowles, Path of Least Resistance, 2013

A public event where participants were instructed to walk directed by the landscape and gravity. “Walk like water running”. http://timknowles.co.uk/Work/PathofLeastResistance/tabid/515/Default.aspx

Tim Knowles, Where the wind blows - Maiden Voyage [Hestercombe Gardens], 2017

A sailing vessel that travels wherever the wind blows it with no way to steer it.

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Tim Knowles, Windwalk – Five walks from Charing Cross, 2008

5 Channel video, mixed media object and wall drawing.

Tim Knowles, Mass Windwalk Sydney, 2013

Participatory event with smart phone app tracking.

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ABSTRACTS

This graphic interlude features a selection of photographs of artworks which can illustrate the topic of this issue: “The Cultures and Politics of Leisure in the British Isles and the United States”.

Cet interlude iconographique comporte une sélection de photographies d’œuvres d’art illustrant à leur manière le thème de ce numéro: « Les cultures et politiques de loisirs dans les Îles britanniques et les États-Unis ».

INDEX

Mots-clés: loisirs, photographie, politique, Royaume-Uni, Irlande, Grande-Bretagne, États-Unis Keywords: leisure, photography, politics, United Kingdom, Ireland, United States

AUTHOR

TIM KNOWLES Tim Knowles lives and works in Bristol. Although his work does not tackle the issue of leisure, Tim Knowles indirectly reflects upon it via the idea of drifting and chance, notably the dynamics of walking and sailing. “In a series of staged, and variously recorded, events, people funnel down hillsides, vessels drift across bodies of water, ink runs down pleated paper, light trails through the darkness, tracks are traced through grass.” (Lizzie Lloyd, ‘Conversations with Tim Knowles’, The Dynamics of Drifting, ed. Tim Martin, Taunton: Hestercombe, 2017). His work is exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally. For a full list of his work and exhibitions, visit www.timknowles.com.

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Early Tourism in New Mexico: A Primitivist Pastime or a Tool of Integration?

Susanne Berthier-Foglar

Introduction

1 In the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century the culture of leisure came to New Mexico as a by-product of transcontinental railroad travel. Leisure in Thorstein Veblen’s (1899) definition as “abstention from labour” and the pursuit of a non-economic activity affirming “evidence of wealth” and “social standing” (21) was— in New Mexico at the time—the attribute of white Americans of urban origin traveling to a remote region of the country. In contrast, the visited peoples were mostly tribalized Native Americans with the Hispanic population coming in second as a tourist attraction. There had been “Anglo” visitors to New Mexico in the early Territorial period (post-1846); however, since they were military men, traders or administrators of the Territory, they did not undertake the trip for mere enjoyment despite the fact that they laid—through their writings about people and places—the foundation for the vision of later travelers. What was new in the 1880s was the acceptance of non- utilitarian traveling. The early tourists came to New Mexico to simply enjoy the trip despite the accepted notion that one would profit, in an educational way, from the journey, much as the 18th century British “grand tourists” broadened their worldview. In New Mexico, the picturesque views of natural wonders were not the main attraction, as they were at the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone; it is in a large part the indigenous and their way of life who became the local specialty as exotic Others. The authentic setting and the historic villages (i.e. Pueblos) contributed to the feeling that the tourist was experiencing the persistence of history and of the Others’ culture.

2 This paper is about the dynamics opposing the tourists’ aspiration for a primitivist experience in exotic authenticity (Thomas 19) seen as an antidote to the fast-paced city life, surrounded with standardized products, and the indigenous wish to be left alone

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and, more specifically, to avoid interference by federal authorities threatening their way of life. I will attempt to trace the evolution of the discourse created by the service sector marketing tourism in Indian2 country and reinforced by the indigenous people(s) themselves who have built upon a fairly standard marketing rhetoric to transform it into their own cultural manifesto. The paper starts with a case study of the marketing of leisure in New Mexico, discusses the interference of primitivist cultural tourism with federal policies of assimilation and concludes with an analysis of the persistence of the discourse created by the leisure industry about indigenous landscapes and peoples and perpetuated by the Indigenous themselves.

The railroad services to travelers

The Southwest becomes accessible

3 While the transcontinental railroad had a geopolitical purpose, its role in transporting tourists emerged shortly after its completion. The Southern route of “the Santa Fe”, as it was called in New Mexico, reached Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1880 and continued to the West (Bryant 62). It was immediately used by the expeditions of the newly created Bureau of Ethnology on their way to study the Zuni in Western New Mexico (DeGolyer. “Zuni and Cushing.” 14). Other expeditions and individual researchers followed, each producing a bounty of documents, including a wealth of articles and books targeting the general public and putting New Mexico on the map as the place in the United States where one could see the original inhabitants in their ancestral dwelling places.

4 Early non-academic publications, the forerunners of travel literature, appeared in the 1880s. Susan Wallace, the wife of New Mexico’s Governor Lew Wallace, wrote about her visits to the remote area (Land of the Pueblos. 1888), and Charles Fletcher Lummis (1892), a journalist who crossed the continent on foot wrote about his travel experience among the Pueblos. He also gave ‘curiosity’ about his country as the main reason for his trip: “I am an American and felt ashamed to know so little of my own country as I did, and as most Americans do,” but he was also eager to admit that the trip “was purely ‘for fun’, in a good sense” (Lummis 1892: 2). Academics also wrote for the general public creating a strong incentive for the tourists to include these small indigenous groups in their visits, villages (Pueblos) of several hundred inhabitants at most. Tailoring their publications to their readership, the travel authors often included the term “adventure” as a means to insure better circulation. Thus, ethnographer Franck Hamilton Cushing wrote an account of his “adventures” among the Zuni, originally published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (Cushing 1882-83).

5 A major purpose of early tourist endeavors in New Mexico was thus to see the original inhabitants in their ancestral villages, going about what was imagined to be their daily lives since time immemorial. While the term cultural tourism would be used only in the last decades of the 20th century (McKercher and DuCros 6) its New Mexican roots reach back to the scientific study of the Southwestern tribes.

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Catering for the traveler along the railroad: The railroad stops as tourist destinations

6 Traveling per se gradually became accepted as leisure with an educational purpose (Veblen 24). Since the travelers came from the middle and upper classes of society (McCannel 13), they also expected to travel in comfort. Early transcontinental railroad travel did not cater to the bodily needs of the passengers who had to provide for their own meals or purchase substandard fare at railroad stops. To make traveling more comfortable, businessman Fred Harvey (1835-1901) in agreement with the Santa Fe railway company opened restaurants—and later hotels—catering in style to the railroad passengers. From the first restaurants, opened in the late 1870s, to the 1940s signaling the demise of rail travel, the Fred Harvey Company had opened 84 establishments. In New Mexico, some of them became what we call today “destination hotels,” i.e. places one would travel to because of what they offered and where the traveler was tempted to spend more than one night. The most famous in New Mexico were the Montezuma (opened 1882) and the Castaneda (1898), both in Las Vegas (NM) as well as the Alvarado (1902) in Albuquerque (Bryant 111-2). All of them had a link to local culture through their architecture or their interior decoration.

Proto-pueblo architecture: Mary Colter’s designs

7 As his chain moved to the west, Fred Harvey wanted to imbue his hotels and restaurants with a regional flair and he hired architects who experimented with the local vernacular, taken in a very broad geographical sense as it came to include elements copied from the Franciscan adobe churches of Northern New Mexico, and the Californian Missions, alongside with real elements from historic pueblos. In this experimental context, Harvey hired a young industrial designer, Mary Colter, who was at first in charge of interior design such as lunchrooms and lobbies, and soon moved on to larger projects. Her style vocabulary based on “stair-step buttresses, projecting roof- beams, stone roof-drains, and chimneys made of old pottery” (Wilson 113-4) became the trademark of the proto-pueblo style that evolved into the “Santa Fe style” and led to a consensus—in the first decades of the 20th century—to impose a strict building code in the urban area of New Mexico’s capital. Today’s view of the city’s famous plaza surrounded by two-story buildings in either one of the approved styles (proto-pueblo and its “Territorial” variant with Greek revival details) with wide portales (i.e. pedestrian porches) along the streets feels historic while it was designed to pander to the tastes of the visitors.

The Indians and the manufacture of tourist trinkets

8 Herman Schweizer, the manager of a railroad stop on the Santa Fe line in Navajo country who operated a restaurant business, added a line of Navajo rugs and jewelry and sold them to the travelers. His success prompted the Harvey Company to add tourist shops at other locations (Bryant 119-120). For Martha Weigle, the display of Indian crafts and selling of Indian ware at the railroad stops occurred at a time when the traveler was not yet ready to leave the tracks to explore the country (“From Desert to Disney World.” 21) but it would lead the way for a more intimate tourist experience. However, Indians soon became active participants in the tourist economy as the turn of

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the century and the first decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of a lively market for handmade goods. The Arts and Crafts movement had led the way toward the fashion for hand-wrought items whose “visible imperfections” exalted “the defective” (Veblen 74). The tourists in search of the primitive were on the same track.

9 The fact that the manufacturers of the goods were Indians, a group still said to be primitive—not taken in a negative sense—added a strong marketing argument. Purchasing an Indian-made object was a way to counter the overwhelming presence of industrial goods that had become the norm in the first decades of the 20th century. Northern New Mexico thus became a haven for an escapist movement—composed of artists and intellectuals—acknowledging the cultural importance of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent (Jacobs 59-60). While it may be claimed that the production, by the Indigenous, of tourist trinkets is linked to the commodification of their culture, the reality is that tribal communities also profited from selling their wares at the railway stops, in “curio shops,” and in museum stores as it provided families with much needed income while enabling them to stay in their home villages (Lange 1953). The success of the tourist trade led Fred Harvey to hire resident artists who lived on the premises of the Harvey establishments, often in constructed “Indian Villages,” and who would demonstrate their skills for the tourists in an authentic- looking setting reminiscent of World Fair exhibitions. While the “tourist gaze” (Urry 51) in such settings was particularly intrusive, it also fostered cultural pride in the participating craftspeople and allowed the emergence of artistic careers. Two female potters, Nampeyo (Hopi) and Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo) both launched successful careers and supplemented their family income with the sale of their artistic production (Howard and Pardue 109). Even today, pots by the prolific Maria Martinez grace the shop-window displays of upscale galleries.

Cultural tourism versus federal assimilation policies

Indian Detours: Organizing the “tourist gaze”

10 Fueled by early travel narratives, and mainstream ethnographic publications, the “tourist gaze” has also been modeled by Fred Harvey’s marketing discourse. Through his Indian Detours company he started to offer scenic Harveycar limousine tours into Indian country, guided by fashionably clad couriers, young women originally dressed in Navajo blouses and skirts and adorned with silver squash-blossom jewelry and concha belts (Indian Detours. Brochure. 1930). The Indian Detours brochures were keen to inform the traveler that the women hired by the Courier Corps were often college graduates, knowledgeable “in one or more foreign languages aside from Spanish” and had undergone a four-month training cycle of book work, field trips, and lectures by the leading authors in Southwestern ethnography, archaeology and history. Moreover, the training was organized in cooperation with the University of New Mexico (Indian Detours. Brochure. 1930). The main tour desk of the company was based at Santa Fe’s La Fonda Hotel, and the detourists, as they came to be called, had access to a lecture lounge and a reading room stocked with Southwestern classics. The tours themselves were meticulously organized to various locations including Pueblo villages and places of archaeological interest. Contact with the inhabitants involved purchasing crafts and attending tribal ceremonials. Harvey’s marketing discourse aimed at presenting the

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Detours as an exclusive off-the-beaten-path experience, away from “the steel ribbons of the railroads”—belittled as “iron-spiked lines of least resistance”—to places were ancient cultures could be experienced first-hand (Indian Detours. Brochure. 1930).

11 Overnight tours often came back to the La Fonda, as accommodation was scarce in the backcountry. The travelers who visited the prehistoric Puyé Cliff dwellings and the archaeological excavations at Frijoles Canyon (in Bandelier National Monument), stopped in pueblos on the way, most notably in San Ildefonso, to visit the private homes, meet the potters and purchase their wares. Other trips were scheduled to local Pueblos in time for ceremonial dances. Archival photos of the 1930s show that the cars and buses of Indian Detours invaded the Pueblos, their massive bulk parked right on the plazas where the ceremonies were taking place. The terraced roofs of the houses surrounding the event were largely occupied by tourists who crowded out the locals, hogging the best seats. The “tourist gaze” (Urry) had become a codified practice of consuming experiences at the expense of the local inhabitants (McKercher and du Cros 9; McCannell 21). After the tours, the shopping for crafts, the attendance of ceremonials, the tourists retreated to have tea, dinner, and a dance to a Mexican orchestra, or a “Southwestern talk” in the Indian Lecture Lounge (Indian Detours. “Roundabout Old Santa Fe” 1930).

12 The situation appears crassly colonial as it seems that the experience of the Others’ culture was limited to sampling a primitivist experience before retreating to the comfort of Western “Anglo-Saxon” hospitality. However, the long-term effects of tourism on tribal communities have to be viewed in a more favorable light. The early decades of the 20th century have not witnessed the destruction of tribal culture. Pueblo and Navajo artists have produced goods for the market. However, from craftspeople they have often become artists. In the formative years of the market they were often counseled by traders so as to adapt their creations to consumer tastes and market trends. Indigenous objects were adapted to the needs of the buyers, large ollas (jars) would become table lamps, carpets were produced in the colors in fashion in mainstream decorating, small and portable objects were produced to fit into travelers’ suitcases (Howard and Pardue 126). While in the beginning these trends were largely due to the presence of mainstream art dealers, they have been integrated by the indigenous artists who have developed a feeling for the market. The tribal Indian has been fetishized by the gaze of the dominant group in search of exotic authenticity (Thomas 19, 98), however, in the long run, i.e. two to three generations later, the Indigenous Other remains profoundly Indian.

Pueblo response: Secrecy as a survival technique

13 Tourism theorists question the authenticity of staged performances and cultures kept alive for visitors (McKercher and DuCros). However, the situation of the Pueblo derives from over four centuries of colonization and assimilation policies. With the Spanish colonization starting in 1598, they were Christianized, at least superficially as it appeared they had added the Christian God, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary to their original pantheon, calling upon their own sacred entities whenever they felt that the new religion was not effective. Since the Padres kept a watchful eye on their flock, ancient ceremonies often had to be conducted stealthily and when disobedience became apparent, repression was swift and violent. In 1680, a major rebellion took place,

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ousting the Spanish colonials for at least 12 years, and a smaller aftershock occurred in 1696 (Berthier-Foglar). The long habit of scrutiny by outsiders, as well as their profound wish to be left alone, has led to a culture of secrecy that has constantly been reinforced throughout the 20th century (Brandt 124). Regulations concerning the presence of outsiders have become stricter over time. While in the 1930s the Detourists parked their cars on the plazas, it has been observed that in the 1980s parking was limited to fields outside the pueblos, and in the 1990s fee-parking was set up in enclosed areas further away from the plazas (personal observations 1982 to 2016). The Pueblo have transformed an intrusive situation into a business-like endeavor whereby a service rendered requires the payment of a fee.

14 It is not the point here to discuss the advent of capitalism among the Indigenous as a replacement of communal agriculture supplemented by hunting and gathering. Of importance here is the fact that the Pueblo are free to manage and control access to certain sites on their land, and to impose rules in accordance with the US Code of laws giving the tribes jurisdiction over certain areas of their administration. The mere fact that the colonized indigenous are able to impose their rules has an empowering effect (Urry 127).

The federal Indian policy of assimilation versus the primitivists

15 Pueblo secrecy was also in part dictated by the assimilationist policies of the federal government. During the Indian Detours period of the first decades of the 20 th century, the federal government was active in promoting the assimilation of Indians into the mainstream. Residential schools taught manual skills to Indian children, girls learned how to manage an American household, a home furnished with a table, chairs, and the basic implements of a kitchen, as opposed to the open hearth and floor mat seating of a Pueblo household. Since it was believed that assimilation was most effective when targeting women, the Indian Office had set up a service of visiting “field matrons,” female agents to the tribe who were to advise women on questions concerning cleanliness and morals. These matrons reported to the local Superintendent of Indian affairs and informed him of the progress of assimilation. They were active at the same time as the tourists came specifically to witness authentic tribal ceremonies while tending to shun situations where obvious assimilation had occurred (Jacobs 51-5).

16 In the 1890s, the last “Indian war” was over, and the push to teach Indian children in residential schools was at its highest. However the American public, mostly urban and Eastern, showed an avid interest in the old and disappearing frontier days and in real Indian warriors. The World Exhibitions exhibited people for an educational purpose, alongside the inventions and technical achievements of the day, and showman Buffalo Bill made a career of staging the Old West, including Indian attacks on a stagecoach. For this purpose, real Indians were hired, preferably those who had participated in the Indian wars and who looked the part (Kasson 97-87). Critics from the federal government argued that the theatrical representation of Indian warriors in action glorified their “savage past” and they attempted to outlaw their participation in the show. The Indian Office reluctantly gave permission to Buffalo Bill to hire one hundred Indians for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the Wild West Show was a success (Prucha 712-715; Gallop 40). The detourists as well as other primitivists from the New Mexican art colony went a step further and visited tribal Indians in their

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Pueblos. However, Indian Affairs officials were not pleased with the budding tourist industry in the Southwest.

17 For the next decades, until 1933 and Franklin Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal, subsequent Commissioners of Indian Affairs have unsuccessfully tried to ban Indian performances in shows and to regulate practices deemed offensive. However time did not alter the white public’s wish to gaze at “the savage” and tourism into Indian country changed the problem as at this time it was the viewers who traveled to the performers. In 1921 Commissioner Charles Burke explained in a circular to the Superintendents of Indian Affairs the necessity to legislate against the Lakota Sundance—considered offensive because of self-inflicted wounds—the practice of the give-away—considered contrary to market-economy—and all the dances involving what was seen as “immoral relations between the sexes”. His philanthropic goal was to prepare Indians for survival “in the midst of all races” and he considered dances inconsistent with “civilization” as they “retain[ed] elements of savagery of demoralizing practices” (Burke. Circular 1655. 1921). To achieve his ends, he declared that the ceremonial dances were akin to a leisure activity for the participants, to be performed for “pleasure and relaxation” and that they thus could be limited in time and duration so as not to impinge on the regular working hours. Burke failed, or refused to consider their profound religious value and accepted that they were at most “healthful exercise.” For those who disregarded his ban, he envisioned “punitive measures” to eradicate tribal ceremonialism (Burke. Circular 1655. 1921).

18 Two years after his 1921 circular, Burke issued a supplement to the Superintendents, adding that the conference of missionaries, held in 1922, reinforced his opinion on the strategy to minimize the existence and impact of dances (Burke. Supplement to Circular 1655. 1923). Burke’s insistence implies that Circular 1655 had not achieved its intended goal. In his 1923 Supplement to Circular 1655, Commissioner Burke presented his plan of action to eradicate all forms of Indian ceremonials. He set out to severely curtail the number of hours taken up by the ceremonials: “limited to one in each month in the daylight hours of one day in the midweek, and at one center in each district; the months of March and April, June, July and August be excepted.” Since ritual dances are determined by cosmic occurrences, reorganizing their timing, and shortening the rituals to the daylight hours of one day, led to a loss of religious meaning, and effectively transformed the dances into “entertainment.” Moreover, by not allowing night ceremonials, the federal power attempted to keep an eye on the events, although it would have been imaginably difficult to implement such a rule. As if the above was not efficient enough, Burke added: “That none take part in the dances or be present who are under 50 years of age,” thus attempting to prevent the transmission of ceremonial knowledge. As for the tourist industry, Burke added “That a determined effort be made by the Government employees in cooperation with the missionaries to persuade the management of fairs and “round-ups” in the town adjoining the reservations not to commercialize the Indian soliciting his attendance in large numbers for show purposes” (Burke. Supplement to Circular 1655. 1923).

19 In the Southwest, as elsewhere, Burke’s Circular went unheeded and the tourist business in Indian Country flourished. In 1924, the Commissioner issued a Second Supplement to Circular 1665, because “so far not many Superintendents have responded”. (Burke. Second Supplement to Circular 1655. 1924). Meanwhile a vibrant intellectual community was established in Taos, under the leadership of Mabel Dodge,

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patroness of the arts, who married Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, and who invited influential individuals from around the world, including D.H. Lawrence and Carl Gustav Jung, whom she believed to be able to inform the world that the Pueblo have the answer to the ailments of modern society (Luhan 1937). Adding to the publicity created about the Pueblo, Charles Lummis who had gained fame through his walk across the continent published Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo extoling the virtues of a people who are “the original, the First Americans” (Lummis 1925: 203). It seemed that two worldviews coexisted without intersecting, the assimilationist program of the federal government and the tourists’ and intellectuals’ vision of the Indian as relic of a potent primitive world, a classic case of fractured and contradictory colonial projects (Thomas 97).

The persistence of an imposed discourse

The positive side of tourist income (Meriam Report)

20 How did the Pueblo survive the discourse imposed upon them by the tourist industry and by the primitivist intellectuals seeking answers from the Pueblo? It is interesting to see that what the administration has called the “Indian Problem” from the late 19th century to the 1930s has been analyzed from various viewpoints. In the 1890s, the debate was dominated by the “Friends of the Indians,” philanthropists meeting yearly to discuss in a paternalistic setting how mainstream America could help the Indians to assimilate into white society (Prucha 611-623). A consensus emerged that land held in severalty was the roots cause for tribalism and the lack of assimilation and that an allotment policy redistributing reservation land (i.e. land held in trust by the government for the tribes) to Indian individuals, with the view that they would become individualistic farmers, would automatically favor their assimilation (Prucha 659-681).

21 Meanwhile—up to 1917—demography confirmed that the Indians were dying out and the intended results of the 1887 Allotment Act did not materialize. Tribal and detribalized Indians lived in dismal conditions, marred by poverty and disease, they were plagued by anomia leading to self-destruction, and the administration requested yet another assessment of the “Indian Problem.” The 872-page report entitled The Problem of Indian Administration, or Meriam Report after his main author, was published in 1928. The team of the Institute for Government Research hired for the extensive surveys in 1926-27 comprised policy specialists, field-workers and one Winnebago Indian, Henry Roe Cloud, who had a degree in anthropology. The report came to the general conclusion that the economic situation of the tribes was not viable: The economic basis of the primitive culture of the Indians has been largely destroyed by the encroachment of white civilization. The Indians can no longer make a living as they did in the past by hunting, fishing, gathering wild products, and the extremely limited practice of primitive agriculture. The social system that evolved from their past economic life is ill-suited to the conditions that now confront them, notably in the matter of the division of labor between the men and the women. They are by no means yet adjusted to the new economic and social conditions that confront them. (Meriam Report. Chapter 1)

22 However, the surveyors noted that the Pueblo stood out among all the other Indians as they had a functional economy based on traditional crafts, mainly pottery, which they sold “at good prices, directly to tourists” (Meriam Report. 532.) Moreover, the Pueblo women were not the typical ‘drudges’ who had to submit to ‘brute and savage’

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husbands, refusing their advancement to the status of independent woman (Jacobs. Engendered Encounters. 52). Since the surveyors were impressed by the positive economic development, they recommended that other tribes follow the same path (Meriam Report. 125). In the 1920s, the assimilationist policies of the Indian administration started to show cracks, and they were fueled in part by tourism as a purveyor of eager audiences for Indianness and as an outlet for Indian crafts.

23 The often-voiced criticism of tourism in an underdeveloped region as an imperialistic endeavor (Smith 4) is therefore misplaced in the case of the Pueblo who have been able to set their own agenda. For Nicholas Thomas (51, 97), the contradictory “colonial projects” can be profitable to colonized cultures as the colonial government (in the broad sense, Thomas includes civil and religious authorities under the heading) does not have a unanimous position when dealing with the natives. In the case of the Pueblo, coexisting visions of assimilation and cultural makeover coincided with a primitivist admiration for tribal culture. Their long habit of secrecy enabled the Pueblo to cater in a minimalistic way to the tourist industry while preserving their identity. However, there is no question that the tribal culture has been transformed over the decades, especially as the economic basis shifted from traditional occupations to wage work. Nevertheless, the Pueblo have accepted as their own the discourse of the tourist industry regarding their identity, and culture. More specifically they even have accepted the aesthetics of Anglo representation of Pueblo identity. As proof one needs only to look at George Dorsey’s Indians of the Southwest, published in 1903 by the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System to promote tourism in Pueblo country The author is curator of anthropology and he has called upon illustrator A. S. Covey to create chapter headings and drop caps reminiscent of medieval manuscripts and representing traditional motives transformed into westernized designs (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Dorsey. Indians of the Southwest

Designs by A.S. Covey. 1903. 21

The Santa Fe Indian Market

24 In 1922, white philanthropists, called “Indian lovers” by their detractors, organized the first Indian Market in Santa Fe as a showcase for local arts and crafts. They set up juries per type of artwork and awarded prizes for the best in each category. In the beginning both the organizers and the juries were “Anglos” and they pushed in a paternalistic and protective fashion for legislation that would protect the Indian craftsperson—the first Indian Arts and Crafts Act was passed in 1935 (Mullin 132.) While the legislation was imposed from the outside it also responded to the needs of Indian crafts people and ultimately favored their production over the wares of non-Indian producers. Over time, the Indian crafts people and artists gained visibility and independence from the promoters and buyers of Indian Detours. The rules gradually changed and power is now in the hands of the formerly colonized. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of the high-quality arts and crafts, the jewelry, the weavings, and the paintings still bear the mark of the early 20th century tourist illustrations (Dorsey. The Indians of the Southwest; the Indian Detours brochures). One may question whether it is due to the tastes of the public, expecting a certain type of motives, or whether it is the native artists themselves who have internalized the design. Both factors are probably involved. However, whether the former takes precedence over the latter, or not, is relatively unimportant when considering the absence of blatant commodification of indigenous culture and the fact that the artists and craftspeople are able to sell their production at a fair price.

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Conclusion: Is tourism exploiting or integrating the Indigenous?

25 In New Mexico, between the late 19th and the early 20 th centuries, the question of whether tourism is exploiting or integrating the Indigenous is relevant. However, the Indigenous are not passive victims of the tourist gaze (Nash) and they deliver—up to a certain point—what is expected of them. They pursue a strict policy of secrecy to reserve certain rituals for insiders. From the point of view of marketing, the scarcity of ceremonials creates a demand that draws visitors. Their authenticity—they have a function for insiders—draws tourists to view them and to buy the authentic, the indigenous, the handmade item produced by the group.

26 This paper set out to explore the dynamics opposing the tourists’ aspiration for a primitivist experience and the indigenous wish to be left alone. The two groups still coexist in symbiosis. The tourists are still in search of a primitivist experience, accepting the rules the Pueblo have set up to regulate visits by outsiders, and even accepting a tightening of the rules, with more ceremonies and places that are off limit. The Pueblo still fight to keep their identity alive, setting up a niche economy in profitable casinos that enable them to finance what could be called their lifestyle, such as an anachronistic looking buffalo herd owned by the Pueblo of Sandia on the outskirts of Albuquerque, next to a typically American suburban (non-Indian) housing project.

27 It is to be noted that while the aesthetics of Indian art follow the rules spelled out by the early 20th century tourist industry, not a single pueblo has set up a business of “plastic medicine men, “ i.e. fake shamans, that no pueblo has a tourist facility inside the old village. At most a few tourist stands selling crafts are open at hours determined by the tribe (and not by the market) in places such as Taos Pueblo. When tourist facilities have been built by the tribes, including casinos, they are located as far as possible from the tribal living quarter on the outskirts of the tribal territory, along an already blighted thoroughfare.

28 According to McKercher and du Cros, “academic literature is replete with stories portraying tourism as a destroyer of communities” (McKercher and du Cros 26-28). The present example of the interaction between a leisure seeking public, eager to pay for a primitivist experience, and small groups of indigenous peoples who could easily have disappeared within a generation, is a demonstration that the dynamics can favor the Indigenous.

29 In the case of Northern New Mexico, tourism has participated in the survival of Indianness and also in the economic integration of the tribes. Even in the presence of a tourist economy, with strong economic ramifications into tribal economies, the communal life of insiders takes precedence over the tourist activity. Taos Pueblo, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, closes down for visitors for several hours during funerals, obviously unannounced events. Other pueblos operate a “closed pueblo policy” and open only on certain days. Violators who disregard the no trespassing sign are said to be prosecuted according to the posted signs. It seems tourism has become a tool of integration while elements of what was formerly called “primitive” survive (non-Christian ceremonials for instance) moreover tourism has not destroyed those who were formerly the seemingly passive object of the “tourist gaze.”

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Burke, Charles H. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Circular 1655 to the Superintendents, April 26, 1921. National Archives, Washington D.C.

Burke, Charles H. Supplement to Circular 1655 to the Superintendents, February 14, 1923. National Archives, Washington D.C.

Burke, Charles H. Second Supplement to Circular 1655 to the Superintendents, March 4, 1924. National Archives, Washington D.C.

Davis, William H. El Gringo or New Mexico and Her People. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857.

DeGolyer, E. “Zuni and Cushing.” My Adventures in Zuni. Santa Fe, New Mexico: The Peripatetic Press, 1941. 11-24.

Dorsey, George Amos. Indians of the Southwest, with illustrations by A.S. Covey. Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System, 1903.

Drumm, Stella M. Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico. The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1926.

Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies, 1844. Kansas Collection Books. https://www.kancoll.org/ books/gregg/

Indian Detours Brochures, 1930 to 1946, notably: “Indian Detours — Most Distinctive Motor Cruise Service in the World.” 1930. “Off the beaten path in the great Southwest.” 1936. “Indian Detours Roundabout Old Santa Fe New Mexico.” 1940. Online at http://www.library.arizona.edu/ exhibits/pams/access.html

Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1937.

Lummis, Charles F. Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo: Our Wonderland of the Southwest, Its Marvels of Nature, Its Pageant of the Earth Building, Its Strange Peoples, Its Centuried Romance. New York: Century Co, 1925.

Lummis, Charles F. A Tramp across the Continent. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1892.

The Problem of Indian Administration (Meriam Report). Ed. Research, Institute for Government. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1928.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899.

Wallace, Susan E. The Land of the Pueblos. New York: John B. Alden, 1888.

Secondary sources

Berke, Arnold, and Alexander Vertikoff. Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Berthier-Foglar, Susanne. Les Indiens pueblo du Nouveau-Mexique. Bordeaux: PU de Bordeaux, 2010.

Brandt, Elisabeth A. “On Secrecy and the Control of Knowledge: Taos Pueblo.” In Stanton K.Tefft (ed.). Secrecy. A Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Human Science Press, 1980. 123-46.

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Bryant, Keith L. History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1974.

Gallop, Alan. Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001.

Howard, Kathleen L. and Diana F. Pardue. Inventing the Southwest. The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Publishing, 1996.

Jacobs, Margaret D. Engendered Encounters. Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1999.

Kasson, Joy. Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Lange, Charles H. “The Role of Economics in Cochiti Pueblo Culture Change.” American Anthropologist 55.5 (1953): 674-94. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1953.55.5.02a00070

McCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, (1976) 1989.

McKercher, Bob, and Hillary du Cros. Cultural Tourism. The Partnership Between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. New York: The Haworth Hospitality Press, 2002.

Mullin, Molly H. Culture and the Marketplace. Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Nash, Dennison. Anthropology of Tourism. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 1996.

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Vol. 1 and 2. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 1984.

Smith, Melanie K. Issues in Cultural Tourism Studies. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1994.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. Theory, culture & society. Second edition. ed. London ; Newbury Park [etc.]: Sage, [1990] 2002.

Urry, John, and Larsen Jonas. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage, 2011.

Weigle, Martha. “From Desert to Disney World: the Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Compant Display the Southwest.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45.1 (1989): 115-37.

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Wilson, Chris The Myth of Santa Fe. Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

NOTES

1. The preferred nomenclature is “the Pueblo” (without the mark of the plural) for the people, and “the Pueblos” for the villages. 2. The term ‘Indian’ will be used here—in a historic and non-derogatory way—as ‘Native American’ is a post-1960s neologism and ‘Amerindian’ is reserved for anthropology or linguistics. Moreover, ‘Indian Detours’, as a brand, carried positive weight and the term ‘Indian’ was—and is —used in the administrative language in the United States.

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ABSTRACTS

In the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century the culture of leisure came to New Mexico and Indian Detours were organized for the “Anglo” tourists eager to witness the exotic (and so-called primitive) cultures within the United States. The authentic setting, the historic villages (i.e. Pueblos1), and the pre-industrial lifestyle of their inhabitants contributed to the tourists’ experience of Otherness. The primitive way of life was not perceived by the tourists as being negative but as an escape from the pervasiveness of industry and urbanization. However, the wishes of the tourists clashed with the federal assimilation policies. Indian Commissioner Charles Burke issued numerous circulars to the Superintendents with strict rules concerning the exhibition of Indianness. He lamented the fact that Indians catering to the tourist industry postponed their assimilation as productive members of the American society. This paper also questions the intrusiveness and long-term impact of the “tourist gaze” upon Indians viewed at the train stations or in “Indian villages” set up in hotels or tourist destinations. New Mexican architecture and more particularly the Santa Fe Style have largely copied Pueblo vernacular. Under such extreme circumstances of colonial appropriation, coupled with the advent of the market economy, it is astounding that the Indians survived the onslaught of cultural tourism. Despite the marketing of tours targeting their villages and history as well as their arts and crafts production, the Pueblo have never given in to selling their ceremonies. They have set up barriers of secrecy limiting the primitivist experience of the tourists to what they wanted them to see. They have accepted the advice of traders in matters of styles of objects produced. But they have gradually taken over the management of the “tourist gaze” and have profited from the fetishization of all things Indian. With a lively market for tourist goods, it seems tourism has become a tool of integration while elements of what was formerly called “primitive” survive (non-Christian ceremonials for instance). Moreover, tourism has not destroyed those who were formerly the seemingly passive object of the “tourist gaze.” (363)

Entre les dernières années du XIXe siècle et les premières décennies du XXe siècle, la culture du loisir a fait son apparition au Nouveau-Mexique et les voyages guidés sous le label Indian Detours ont été organisés pour les touristes Anglo-Américains (appelés Anglo dans le pays) en quête des cultures exotiques et dites « primitives » au sein même des États-Unis. Les lieux authentiques, les villages (pueblos) historiques et la vie préindustrielle de leurs habitants contribuaient à l’expérience de l’Altérité de la part des touristes. La vie « primitive » n’était pas perçue par les visiteurs comme un élément négatif mais comme un moyen d’échapper à l’industrialisation et à l’urbanisation devenues omniprésentes. Cependant, les souhaits des touristes entraient en conflit avec les politiques fédérales d’assimilation des Indiens. Le Commissaire aux Affaires Indiennes, Charles Burke, émit un grand nombre de circulaires aux Surintendants détaillant des règles strictes pour éviter que les Indiens ne deviennent des attractions foraines. Il déplorait en particulier le fait que les Indiens impliqués dans l’industrie touristique repoussaient leur assimilation en tant que membres productifs de la société américaine. Cet article pose aussi la question de l’intrusion et de l’impact à long terme du « regard touristique » sur les Indiens que l’on pouvait observer dans les gares ou les « villages Indiens » mis en place dans les hôtels et les lieux touristiques. L’architecture du Nouveau-Mexique, et plus particulièrement le style de Santa Fe, ont largement puisé dans le vocabulaire architectural des Pueblos. Dans des circonstances aussi extrêmes d’appropriation coloniale, couplées à l’avènement de l’économie de marché, il est étonnant que les Indiens aient survécu à l’arrivée massive du tourisme culturel. Malgré le marketing des visites guidées ciblant leurs villages et leur histoire aussi bien que leur artisanat et leur art, les Pueblo n’ont jamais accepté de vendre leurs cérémonies. Ils ont mis en place une

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politique du secret qui forme une barrière protectrice autour de leurs rituels et qui limite l’expérience primitiviste des touristes à ce que les Indiens veulent bien leur montrer. Ils ont accepté le conseil des commerçants pour ce qui est des styles et du type d’objets produits. Toutefois, ils ont graduellement pris en main la gestion du « regard touristique » et ont profité de la fétichisation de tout ce qui est Indien. Dans le contexte d’une forte activité marketing en matière de produits pour le tourisme, il semblerait que ce dernier soit devenu un outil d’intégration, alors même que subsistent des traits culturels auparavant considérés « primitifs », par exemple des cérémonies non-chrétiennes ; au final, le tourisme n’a pas détruit ceux qui avaient été les objets apparemment passifs du « regard touristique ».

INDEX

Mots-clés: Indian Detours, Nouveau-Mexique, Santa Fe, Pueblo (Amérindiens) Keywords: Indian Detours, New Mexico, Santa Fe, Pueblo (Native Americans)

AUTHOR

SUSANNE BERTHIER-FOGLAR Université Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4. Specialist of Native American history. Contact: susanne.berthier-foglar [at] univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

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“Tote Clubs”, Dog Tracks and Irish Sweepstake: Controversy and Compromise Over Popular Gambling in Interwar Britain

Emmanuel Roudaut

1 In 1927, writing to his colleague at the Home Office, the Chancellor of the Exchequer described gambling as a “rather difficult, highly controversial and moderately important subject” (Miers 2004: 309). The Chancellor, Winston Churchill, was not concerned with the morality of gambling. His priority was to balance the budget without raising income tax or resorting to protectionist measures. This was why he had introduced a Betting Duty in 1926, a measure which would bring at least some £6,000,000 in revenue, or so it was hoped. Such a scheme, however, was regarded with great suspicion by the Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks. “Jix”, a self-confessed “Puritan Home Secretary,” lifelong teetotaller and anti-gambler, considered taxation or even the regulation of gambling as state approval of a sinful activity, an inducement to crime. The Home Office was therefore opposed to any relaxation of the law on betting and gambling, whereas effective taxation could only be based on legal activities. The divergence between these ministers encapsulates the stalemate in the search for a satisfactory policy on gambling in the interwar years. The resulting status quo in the criminal law led to the predictable fiasco of the Betting Duty, as the Treasury had grossly underestimated the extent of illegal betting. Even in its best year (1927-28) the duty only produced £2,700,000, and it was scrapped in 1929 (Dixon 1991:269-297). With the persistent, although declining as we will see, influence of moralist and paternalist views on working-class gambling and leisure, the legalisation of street betting, the illegal elephant in the room, remained an unrealistic prospect for another generation. However, two major developments brought the issue of gambling back on the legislative agenda. The first was the emergence of commercial greyhound racing. The second was the Irish Hospital Sweepstake, a foreign lottery inaugurated in 1930 and extremely successful in Britain, where lotteries had been banned for more than a

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century. A Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting was set up in 1932 to deal with what many contemporaries presented as “a grave social menace.” The Betting and Lotteries Act, passed in 1934, reinforced the clampdown on the “Irish Sweepstake” and ruled out the alternative of reviving a national lottery in Britain, either for good causes or for the Exchequer. This can be regarded as the last victory of the anti-gambling movement in Britain, but a closer analysis of the debates and provisions reveals a weakening of its influence. What was achieved was an awkward compromise due to the unexpected convergence between the moral concerns of traditional pressure groups and the determined lobbying of commercial interests. An evolution of public perceptions is also noticeable, confirming the gradual acceptance of betting as a non- reprehensible leisure activity for male working-class adults, and, perhaps more surprisingly, for women. The present article seeks to provide an overview of this evolution, mainly by drawing on previous research but with new insights into the debates surrounding the passing of the Betting and Lotteries Act.

The ubiquity of illegal betting

2 The popular television series Peaky Blinders, first broadcast in 2013, is largely based on the porosity between legal and illegal betting in the 1920s, the former often serving as a cover for the activities of criminal gangs. Unobtrusive allusions in contemporary cinema, like a brief exchange (a few seconds) between the street bookie and the policeman on the beat in Passport To Pimlico, one of the great box-office successes of 1949, provide telling evidence of the ubiquity of this phenomenon until the legalisation of betting-shops in 1961. The concision of this dialogue, and similar examples in other Ealing comedies and numerous press-cartoons, show that this “underground” reality was familiar territory to mass audiences. Screenwriters and cartoonists did not have to labour the point.

3 Although no further explanation was needed at the time, a brief historical reminder is required to understand these allusions now. In the second half of the 19th century, concern about gambling had increasingly focused on sports betting. This was mainly due to the spectacular growth of horse racing and the increased availability of betting opportunities. Betting on horses was no longer confined to punters at the racetrack or gentlemen in their clubs. It could be practised by the urban masses, thanks to the development of commercialised pub-based betting in London and other cities. This innovation had rapidly been banned by the Betting Act 1853, which remained the basis of betting legislation until 1960. The use of any house, office, room or other place for receiving cash betting was declared illegal. The measure was clearly announced as a paternalist attempt to deal with working-class gambling (Dixon 1991:39); therefore the prohibition applied mainly to cash betting away from the racecourse (off-course cash betting), the only form of betting available to the majority of the population. It did not apply to betting among members of a club, or to credit betting by correspondence, but this required a respectable address, a bank account, and preferably a telephone. It was still legal to bet in cash on the racecourse, but working-class access to legal betting facilities had been significantly reduced with the closure of many racecourses around London in 1879. This class-discriminatory dimension, which had always been resented, aroused even more hostility in the post-1918 age of universal franchise.

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4 Moreover, the prohibition of cash betting had failed to prevent the expansion of popular betting, on which there is now a substantial scholarly literature. After 1853, bookmakers simply moved their operations to the street, although betting houses continued to operate in some regions (Clapson 1992:24-49; Dixon 1991:43-5). In the 1880s, betting and sporting news became indispensable weapons in the circulation wars of the “new journalism” and the popular press, providing the small punter with reliable information. Average odds at the start of the race (starting prices) were published in the press and served as a national norm for the settlement of winning bets. Illegal transactions could therefore be quietly carried out without lengthy negotiations (Stevenson 1984:384-6). Despite the reinforcement of repression voted by Parliament in 1906, street betting became “one of the most distinctive features of English town-life, observable to anyone” (McKibbin 2000:372; Chinn 1991). A sophisticated underground economy developed, with a network of lookouts and “bookies runners”. This led to a considerable level of police corruption, stage-managed arrests being part of the arrangement. It has been argued that this amounted to “an unofficial kind of administrative regulation, with bribes and fines serving as licence fees” (Dixon 1991:224). By 1914, betting on horse races had become “one of the most common leisure British activities” (Huggins 2000:232) among British males and the vast majority of bets were illegal.

5 The fact that prohibition had proved unworkable led to a radical change in police attitudes (Dixon 1991:198,258). In pre-war investigations (Royal Commission on the Duties of the Metropolitan Police 1908), the level of police corruption had been dismissed as insignificant; the standard response being that it was confined to a few “bad apples.” In 1911, when it became apparent that the 1906 Street Betting Act had failed to eradicate illegal gambling, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had merely advocated more stringent measures, echoing the views of the Anti-Gambling League (Dixon 1991:131-5). After the war, on the contrary, police representatives heard by various parliamentary enquiries (Select Committee on a Betting Duty 1923 (henceforth SC 1923); Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure 1928-1929; Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting 1932-33 (henceforth RC 1932-33)). were unanimous in saying that prohibition could not be enforced when the public saw no moral distinction between betting at Ascot (which was legal) and betting in the street (which was not). As this brought the law into disrepute, most of them were in favour of administrative regulation. Their case was reinforced by the reduction in drinking and drunkenness. Wartime controls had continued in peacetime thanks to the Licensing Act 1921, and drink offered a “lesson in control” which could be favourably contrasted with the poor record of prohibition in the US. However, in a Memorandum submitted to the 1923 Select Committee, the Home Office rejected the views of the police: “It is an undoubted fact […] that a very large proportion of offences of dishonesty […] are attributable to excessive betting. No statistics are available in support of this proposition. Certainly there are no statistics which contradict it” (Dixon 1991:194-5). Building on this circular reasoning, it was then argued that legalization would increase working-class betting. It was conceded that eradication could not be achieved but preserving the status quo would at least ensure its containment. Accordingly, the Street Betting Act was not repealed, which is the main reason for the failure of the Betting Duty, as David Dixon has demonstrated. Plans to replace it with a licensing system were scrapped in 1929 by the incoming Labour government, whose Chancellor, Philip Snowden, shared the views of Joynson-Hicks.

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A disruptive newcomer: the “Tote” and its imitators

6 Churchill’s only lasting legacy with regard to betting was the introduction of pari- mutuel, or pool betting. The Jockey Club had requested that the proceeds of the Betting Duty should contribute to the improvement of horse breeding and racing. The request was refused, but instead, the Racecourse Betting Act 1928 established a system of cash pool betting dedicated to that purpose and operating exclusively on the racecourse.

7 Pari-mutuel consists of a pooling of the stakes, which are divided among the winners once the operating expenses and commission have been deducted. Pool betting was a relative novelty in Britain, where commercial betting was controlled by bookmakers, who relied exclusively on fixed-odds betting, a contract in which the amount of the winnings is fixed in advance. The implementation of this innovation on a large scale was facilitated by the invention of a new system, the “Totalisator”, presented to a parliamentary committee in 1926, which could calculate large numbers very quickly, and was more reliable than previous systems. The “Tote”, as it came to be known, was controlled by an official body, the Racecourse Betting Control Board (RBCB), whose members were appointed by the government, the Jockey Club and other racing organisations. Racing circles had long been interested in pool betting, hoping that it would both subsidise the sport and drive the bookmakers out of the racecourse. The Tote, however, was a qualified success, and never threatened the dominant position of bookmakers and fixed-odds betting on horse racing. But the indirect involvement of the government gave a certain legitimacy to betting, the very thing that anti-gamblers feared. As the Christian Social Union put it a few years later, Government representatives should be “withdrawn from the Board” to which they gave “undesirable prestige” (RC 1932-33 paragraph 400).

8 The special status of horse racing in British society protected the Tote from serious controversy, but this was not the case when pool betting developed in less prestigious sports like dog racing and football. Dog racing was not a new sport. It had a cross-class following, ranging from the aristocratic patrons of “coursing”, where greyhounds chased a live hare, to whippet racing in mining communities, usually in pursuit of a rabbit or an artificial bait. But in the mid-twenties, the invention of the electric hare opened up new opportunities and led to a spectacular rise in commercial greyhound racing (Clapson 1992: 138-61). In 1925, a company (The Greyhound Racing Association (Manchester) Limited) was registered in Manchester with enough capital to establish a large stadium catering for 25,000, starting its operations in 1926. Within a year, 62 greyhound race companies were registered at a total capital of £7 million. Attendances reached 8 million in February 1929, twice the number recorded in April 1927 (Miers 2004:308). By December 1932, 187 tracks were in operation, rising to 220 one year later (RC 1932-33, paragraph 142). There were now more greyhound tracks than racecourses, and the discrepancy was even larger for fixtures. In Greater London, for instance, 4,000 greyhound fixtures were organised each year within 15 miles of Charing Cross against 187 for horse racing. In 1931, paid attendances at tracks licensed by the National Greyhound Association Racing Club, which represented only half of the total, amounted to 18,000,000. Contrary to Joynson-Hicks’s prediction in November 1928 that “it wouldn’t last” (Miers 2004:308), the popularity of greyhound racing continued to rise and reached a climax in the late 1940s. Several factors can explain this success. Most

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tracks were located in densely populated urban districts. Meetings took place on a daily basis, in the evening, after work, unlike horse racing which took place in the afternoon. Being more accessible, the dog track had in effect become “the poor man’s racecourse,” where one could bet in cash without breaking the law.

9 The sudden emergence of commercial greyhound racing revived the traditional arguments against popular gambling, with an increase in anti-racing literature after 1927. As the National Anti-Gambling League was now a declining force, the impetus came from the Protestant churches, with the creation of a National Emergency Committee of Christian Citizens in December 1927. These views dominated press discourse, although they only represented a minority of the population. By May 1928 the Home Secretary had received over 1,600 motions from religious and secular organisations, as well as a cross-party deputation of MPs pressing him to take action. Tracks were described as “canine casinos”, a “social evil” creating secondary poverty by encouraging excessive gambling (Huggins 2007:113-4). A particular concern was the need to protect women and the young, with regular complaints that young women and “girls of tender years” had been seen betting on the dogs. These arguments had been used against horse racing in the previous century, but other attacks came from those who considered that unlike horse racing, dog racing was not a real sport, but simply a vested interest supporting gambling. Churchill himself, a keen horseman in his youth, dismissed the dog tracks as an “animated roulette,” but his attitude smacked more of class prejudice than moral concern.

10 What proved most contentious was not the presence of bookmakers at dog tracks, but the introduction of pari-mutuel, or tote betting, on greyhound racing tracks in the wake of a House of Lords ruling. Under the 1928 Racecourse Betting Act, the tote was supposed to be the monopoly of horse racing fixtures. Besides, the case used as a precedent (Attorney General v. Luncheon and Sports Club (1929), A.C. 400) was unrelated to greyhound racing, and merely intended to prove that a club organising pari-mutuel betting was not a bookmaker, and therefore not liable to betting duty. However, after a first experiment which survived a court challenge in 1929, the number of “greyhound totes” had reached 130 by the end of 1932. Such a development was bound to increase the hostility of anti-gamblers. Under the Act of 1928, the proceeds of the tote were allocated to the support of horseracing. As we have seen, the status of dog racing as a sport was much more controversial. In addition, the proceeds of the greyhound totes were entirely pocketed by the organisers or served to lower entrance fees. There was not even a semblance of a good cause.

11 Opposition to greyhound totes was not confined to anti-gambling ginger groups, its legality was questioned by bookmakers, who regarded pool betting as unfair competition. The Leeds Greyhound Racing Association was taken to court by a bookmakers association and lost in appeal in December 1932. It was now confirmed that greyhound totes had no legal basis. However, the government was still reluctant to act, for fear of being accused of applying double standards for dog tracks and racecourses. Besides, the major greyhound companies cultivated an image of respectability, with a National Greyhound Racing Club emulating the Jockey Club and a Greyhound Racing Totalisator Board (set up in October 1931) (Roudaut 1997: 287) modelled on the RBCB, the controlling body of the official racecourse totalisator.

12 A more serious moral panic derived from another controversial effect of the House of Lords ruling: the development of the so-called Tote Clubs. In October 1931, a company,

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Pool (Tote) Clubs Limited, had exploited the same legal loophole to open a chain of clubs with a nominal membership fee (a shilling for a year). Membership gave a right of entry to all clubs in the chain, originally six in London, spreading rapidly to 32 throughout the country. Similar initiatives mushroomed within a few months. In December 1932, 284 tote clubs had been created. Members could bet on horse races in the afternoon and dog races in the evening, which to critics was conducive to continuous, and probably excessive, betting. Moreover, since the organiser of a pool was not regarded as a bookmaker, bets could be taken in cash. In other words, these new “gambling hells” were creating a situation similar to the proliferation of betting shops in mid-Victorian London. This flew in the face of the 1853 Betting Act, the fountainhead of betting legislation, which prohibited betting shops.

The Irish Hospitals Sweepstake and the Royal Commission

13 The development of tote clubs prompted widespread condemnation when it came to public notice in the last months of 1932,1 but another basis of gambling legislation was already being challenged, and it was this, rather than the fate of the tote, which led the government to set up a Royal Commission in April. In 1930, The Irish Free State had authorised the Irish Hospital Trusts to raise funds by organising sweepstakes on classic British races (usually three, including the Epsom Derby and the Grand National). In fact, this sweepstake amounted to a lottery since punters bought a numbered ticket. A few days before the race, a draw paired competing horses with specific numbers. All tickets with a number matching a horse received a prize, the highest prize being awarded to the ticket matching the winning horse. By the end of 1933, 27 million pounds had been raised and it was estimated that two thirds of the tickets had been bought in Britain (Coleman 2009). The problem was that lotteries, especially foreign lotteries, had been banned in Britain since 1826. The law was being flouted on a massive scale for the benefit of a foreign country. The main attraction lay in the amount of prize money, with the first prize culminating at £350,000 in the second sweepstake.2 Publicity was provided by the coverage of the results in the British press, while reports on the derisory penalties incurred by offenders proved more of an incentive than a deterrent. Questions were raised in parliament and a private member’s bill proposed the creation of a national lottery similar to the “Irish sweepstake”, the proceeds of which would fund good causes in Britain. The bill was rejected, but shortly afterwards the government set up a Royal Commission whose remit included the burning issues of lotteries and tote betting. An interim report devoted to tote betting was published in January, shortly after the court case which had confirmed the illegality of greyhound totes. The final report was submitted a few months later, in June 1933. It was more usual for a Royal Commission to sit for two or three years, and the speed of the proceedings in this case reveals a sense of urgency.

14 To a large extent, the recommendations of the Royal Commission pointed to a tightening of the existing law. Concerning the Irish Sweepstake, stakes intercepted by the Post Office should be confiscated, instead of being returned to the sender. It was also assumed, wrongly, that the Irish Sweepstake would be a short-lived phenomenon, an assertion which was contradicted by other parts of the report. Above all, proposals for a National Lottery, which had prompted the setting up of the Commission, were

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firmly rejected. The feasibility of such a scheme was not in doubt, but it was asserted that it would have serious social consequences on the poorest sections of the community, deluded by the prospect of large prizes.3 A National Lottery for good causes was considered even less advisable than a Lottery funding the Exchequer, because of the probable competition between various deserving causes and the likely fall in traditional methods of fund-raising. British hospitals, it was argued, were likely to be worse off in such a system. Furthermore, a National Lottery for good causes would create a “confusion of motives, a most insidious method of encouraging the gambling habit” (ibid, paragraph 444). The only positive change concerned raffles and small lotteries, which were merely tolerated by local authorities. It was recommended to legalize them, but under strict conditions (small stakes, small prizes, and charitable or local purpose).

15 When it came to tote betting, the repressive tone was even more pronounced. Private operators were often suspected of opaqueness, especially in the amount of their commissions and deduction of costs.4 Above all, tote clubs were accused of increasing the amount of gambling, whereas official policy was its containment. The standard defence of proprietors was that their establishments were merely diverting punters from illegal street-betting, but this was strongly rejected in the report: “Much ingenuity had been spent in the provision of modern facilities [such as] telegraphic or telephonic communications with the racecourses,” which rendered tote clubs “much more attractive than the betting houses of 1853” and made gambling “more seductive.” A parallel was made with the Irish Sweepstake, which had created a habit among people who had previously “felt no desire to participate in mammoth lotteries”. Likewise, betting facilities at greyhound tracks or in tote clubs had been “not so much the means of meeting an existing demand, as the instrument for fanning and encouraging a latent propensity” (RC 1932-33, paragraph 207). The Commission was therefore clearly in favour of the prohibition of tote clubs and dog totes. It was stated that the organisers of a racing fixture should have no financial stake in betting on their tracks. Therefore, tote betting should be strictly limited to racecourses for the benefit of horse racing, as provided by the Racecourse Betting Act. Severe restrictions were also advocated for the frequency of fixtures in dog racing5 and the number of races in each fixture. Other recommendations aimed at limiting the creation of new tracks.

Shifting attitudes and legal stagnation: the 1934 Act

16 The report was greeted with satisfaction by anti-gambling associations and religious figures, especially in the Nonconformist churches. The Home Office announced the drafting of a bill along these lines. Indeed the Betting and Lotteries Bill introduced in the spring of 1934 included some of its recommendations. The prohibition of lotteries, including foreign lotteries, was confirmed, with the exemptions suggested in the report. A provision clearly aimed at the Irish Sweepstake made it easier to obtain search warrants in connection with a lottery and to use force if necessary. The number of fixtures in greyhound racing was considerably curtailed. In some cases, the bill went even further than the recommendations. The age of legal betting was raised to 18, instead of the suggestion of the report to raise it from 16 to 17. Hard-line views also prevailed on the intractable issue of street betting, the only one on which the commission had distanced itself from anti-gambling views. Its report had noted the

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failure of the Act of 1906, which, “by allowing credit betting but not [cash] betting, [was] unfair to the working man and represented ‘class legislation’.” (RC 1932-33, paragraph 279). The legalisation of postal cash betting was presented as the best alternative. It was concluded that the Street Betting Act could not be effectively enforced without “the addition of some further facility for [cash] betting, whether or not postal cash betting,” (ibid, paragraph 311) but this call for a partial relaxation of the prohibition was not acted upon. The government had opted for the preservation of the status quo.

17 What is remarkable, however, is the great difficulty with which the bill was passed, in spite of the impressive majority of the Coalition government, more than 500 MPs. It took several weeks of debate and extreme pressure on the government backbenchers to secure its passing in November. The second section of the text, which dealt with lotteries, was so controversial that the government was forced to impose a whip on some occasions. The most serious attacks came from members of the Conservative Party, which was the leading partner in the coalition. Churchill, who had been relegated to the backbenches since 1929, took an active part in a rebellion against what he described as “class legislation of a most objectionable character” (The Manchester Guardian, Tuesday November 13, 1934: 6 [Roudaut 1997: 327]).

18 These tensions reflected changing attitudes to popular leisure, crossing party lines as well as class boundaries. Churchill, like many of his colleagues, would have preferred the Tories to govern on their own and resented a policy inspired by the junior partner in the coalition, the National Liberals. Indeed, anti-gambling views, like the temperance movement, found more supporters among the Liberals than among the Tories, despite notable exceptions such as Joynson-Hicks. As for Labour, it had traditionally been led by committed anti-gamblers, who had often begun their public careers as temperance workers or lay preachers. This did not prevent Churchill from calling on the Opposition to join him in the “defence of the rights of ordinary men”. Significantly, a number of Labour MPs expressed similar views on the harmless character of staking a few pence on a sweepstake or a lottery, even though the party leadership sided with the government on this issue. This evolution was not confined to parliament. If the Labour- supporting Daily Herald, which had increased its circulation to 2 million in 1933, was studiously neutral in its reporting on the debates, it was also happy to publish the results of greyhound races as well as advertisements for football pools (Daily Herald Nov.13, 1934:2; ibid, Nov.12, 1934:17). Labour voters and activists were no longer, if they had ever been, unanimous in their condemnation of all forms of gambling as a sinful activity and an opiate for the masses.6 A more relaxed view of commercial leisure could now be voiced in a publication largely owned by the TUC.

19 It was also pointed out that some restraints on press freedom bore similarities to another government bill strongly opposed by Labour, the Incitement to Disaffection Bill, largely prompted by worries about pacifism, communism and fascism, and better known as the Sedition Bill. One of the most contentious clauses was a ban on the publication of all sports results related to the Irish sweepstake or another lottery, which aroused much derision and prompted Churchill to quip that Irish newspapers might have to be banned in Britain. This was withdrawn, as well as the possibility to prosecute the individual buyer of a lottery ticket. The final version provided that only sellers and organisers could be fined or imprisoned, and that the onus of the proof would lie on the prosecution. These concessions show that much of the debate had

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moved away from a paternalist concern for the working class to focus on the infringement on civil liberties.

20 Attitudes had also changed at Whitehall, as David Miers’ study of departmental archives has shown (Miers 2004: 308-14). Home Office internal documents abounded with dismissive comments on the prejudice and sweeping generalisations to be found in anti-gambling propaganda. Since the 1920s, most officials had cautioned against hasty action against greyhound racing.

21 Another factor was the bookmakers’ search for respectability. In an attempt to eliminate violence and intimidation by gangs from the racecourses,7 their associations had formed Pitch Committees and reached an agreement with the Jockey Club and the police in 1929. Allocation of pitches was now subject to approval by racecourse management, under Jockey Club’s jurisdiction. Despite sporadic outbreaks, racecourse violence subsided considerably in the following decade. This evolution led to the recognition that official engagement with the bookmakers’ commercial interests was a “necessary condition of effective regulation” (Miers 2004: 284). A further step was taken in 1932, when regional organisations decided to confederate and form a National Bookmakers Protection Association (NBPA) in order to lobby more effectively against competition from the Tote.

22 Other commercial interests were to play a significant part. A striking feature of the government bill lay in the concessions made to the greyhound-racing and football pools operators, who were allowed to continue their tote or pool-betting operations, contrary to the recommendations of the report. Such leniency contrasted sharply with the government’s intransigence on lotteries. Despite pointed questions and strong reactions in parliament, the Home Secretary refused to explain why a clause making football pools illegal had been deleted from the original text. In fact, this was partly due to the changes mentioned above, but also to a carefully orchestrated campaign of corporate lobbying. A Pools Promoters Association (PPA) was created shortly after the publication of the bill and intervened discreetly to avoid a ban on football betting. A similar move on greyhound totes had been anticipated since the recommendations of the Royal Commission. Within days of the publication of its interim report, the National Greyhound Racing Society had published a rebuttal of its arguments and launched a high-profile protest campaign. Memoranda were sent to the Home Office pointing out implications for local communities and employment. In an interview with the Times (11 January 1932), its secretary had called the report “a bookmaker’s charter, presented by an anti-gambling commission”. He had a point: the bookmakers had a vested interest against greyhound totes, which they rightly saw as an attempt to undermine their activities. This was, as we have seen, the main reason behind the creation of the NBPA. Indeed the test case confirming the illegality of greyhound totes had been brought by bookmakers who feared a tote monopoly. While the rivalry between bookmakers and pari-mutuel operators had a long history, with violent incidents before the war, the occasional convergence between moral campaigners and the commercial interest of a section of the betting industry was not new. It was alleged, for example, that in reprisal against Churchill’s Betting Duty, bookmakers had supported the anti-gambling Labour Party in the 1929 General Election (Dixon 1991:296).

23 Moreover, as pointed out by Mike Huggins, the more select greyhound tracks had a cross-class appeal and cultivated their respectability. Like the enclosed racecourses of the late nineteenth century (Roudaut in Pickard 2014:239-250), they were heavily

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capitalised and needed to secure their profitability by differential pricing and the provision of numerous amenities catering for the middle classes, at least before 1939. For a few years, there was an aura of modernity in the larger tracks, with their floodlights, a novelty not found at other sporting venues, music and a carefully orchestrated pageantry, including the presence of celebrities to provide glamour (Huggins 2007:104-6). The proletarian image of greyhound racing was only partly accurate, but it was deliberately emphasised to denounce a class-discriminatory ban, a theme which was conveniently relayed in the press, including the Economist and the Daily Telegraph.

24 The social and economic background of the main actors also played a part. The leading dog-tracks owners were affluent and well-connected businessmen. Some board members of the National Greyhound Racing Society also sat in the Commons or the Lords and were able to defend their interests in parliament. At any rate, the views of the betting industry, despite the occasional scathing remark in the Times or the Manchester Guardian, were relayed by the press to an extent which would have been unthinkable before the war. Once a pariah, the betting industry was gradually becoming part of the mainstream leisure industry. In this context, official advice went against upsetting the fragile balance between rival pressure groups, as evidenced by this note written for the Home Office two years before the first reading of the bill: I am strongly opposed to getting further involved […] The Home Office has nothing whatever to do with improving breeds of horses nor is it the business of government departments to favour totes as against bookmakers […] The general policy is for the Home Office not to move legislation on betting and gaming (except concerning children) and to block what disturbs the status quo […] The various interests should be left to fight it out among themselves (Miers 2004:310).

Conclusion

25 Although it was intended to provide a comprehensive overhaul of betting legislation, the most striking aspect of the Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 is how little was achieved. 8 This was politely acknowledged in an official report published in 1951: “The law relating to betting, lotteries and gaming, except for modern legislation covering only a small part of the field, is obscure, illogical, and difficult to enforce. […] In most respects, therefore, the law today does not differ from the law as it was in 1933” (RC 1949-51, paragraphs 10&12). Following a Royal Commission set up in reaction to the creation of the Irish Hospital Sweepstake and the development of commercial greyhound racing, the reform of 1934 had overlooked the most widespread form of illegal betting, leaving the central issue untouched. It could also be argued that the errors made with street betting in 1906 were repeated with the repressive strategy chosen to deal with the Irish Sweepstake. In the first place, official intransigence did not dispel the impression that there was one law for the rich and one for the poor. Shortly after the passing of the law, the Daily Herald noted that if proposals for a national lottery had been rejected, private ones remained legal, including the socially exclusive Stock Exchange Sweep and the Baltic Sweep, which offered very large prizes (Daily Herald, 15 Nov. 1934:6). Above all, and despite an increase in the judicial arsenal, the punitive approach proved similarly ineffective. In 1932, the royal commission observed a “widespread disregard of the law as to lotteries” which had “brought this branch of the law into contempt”. There was a risk that “contempt for one branch of the law [would] breed a general contempt for the

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law in general”. The solution recommended to bring this to an end was a strengthening of repression, although it had proved useless against street betting. Indeed, according to a previous report published in 1923, the Street Betting Act of 1906 had not prevented “the continual breaking of the law by millions of people,” which could “establish a general weakening of respect for the law” (SC 1923, paragraph 15, quoted by Roudaut 1997: 332). The obvious analogy had not dissuaded the government from repeating a failed strategy. As with street betting, magistrates were often reluctant to prosecute for the new offence. Moreover, the rising tide of unemployment in the 1930s provided an army of easily replaceable ticket dealers. Even in a period of full employment, as the London Police Commissioner acknowledged some fifteen years later, “it [was] not too difficult to get a ticket in the Irish Sweep if you want[ed] it” (RC 1949-51, paragraph 136:39). If a drop was observed in the receipts of the Irish Hospitals Trust after 1934, it was probably due to the rising popularity of the football pools, whose annual turnover was estimated to have jumped from £8 million in 1933 to £22 million in 1938 (ibid, paragraph 110). By the late 1930s, an estimated 10 million coupons were filled in each week. In fact, the emergence of alternative betting facilities proved more effective than prohibition, and it may be more illuminating to regard the 1930s as a watershed rather than a period of stagnation. Ostensibly, the official stance on lotteries may be seen as a victory for anti-gamblers, but it was the last one, and its significance was undermined by concessions to tote and football pools operators. More momentous was the signal sent by the intensity of the debates and the change in the nature and extent of press coverage. This was confirmed two years later when the Football Association (FA) launched the so-called “Pools war” (Huggins 2013:44, 99-119). In an attempt to drive the pools companies out of business by preventing them from publishing their weekly coupons in time, the FA refused to disclose the fixture lists until two days before the match. The public outcry was so massive that the FA had to back down very rapidly.9 A few weeks later, a private member’s bill seeking to ban the pools also suffered a crushing defeat, while several Labour MPs joined their Conservative colleagues in calling for a more tolerant approach and less interference with recreational pursuits. This time, Labour dissenting voices were more outspoken than in 1934. One of them openly criticised his former party leader, George Lansbury, for “assuming a superior morality and assuming that they knew a great deal better than the working people” (Hansard, HC. Deb. 03 April 1936, c. 2884). This bluntness reflected the strength of public reaction to the FA’s short-lived initiative.10 Likewise, antigambling views were increasingly marginalised in the press, where the controversy gave rise to an unprecedented amount of discussion on the pools. As Huggins puts it, this coverage “reemphasized that they were perhaps the greatest leisure phenomenon of the decade, and a major part of British social life”. It was stressed that the supposed “social effects” of betting, especially self-inflicted poverty, could not apply to a few pence spent each week on the pools. Moreover, the weekly interval precluded any suspicion of continuous or compulsive betting. The same was true of allegations of corruption since organisers had no financial interest in match fixing, given the nature of pool betting. In fact, far from destroying the pools as intended, the events of 1936 enhanced their status in British society. This would benefit the betting and gambling industry as a whole. A point of no return had been reached, which had a clear impact on later governmental initiatives, in keeping with the fading of religious Nonconformity as a force in British public life (including Liberal and Labour politicians). All subsequent reforms would tilt towards liberalisation. Even if they were rejected at the time, many

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of the arguments rehearsed by the Royal Commission and during the debates of 1934 would resurface to justify the creation of Premium Bonds in 1957, the legalisation of betting shops in 1961, and the launch of the National Lottery in 1994.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attorney General v. Luncheon and Sports Club (1929), A.C. 400.

“M.P.s’ Revolt Against Betting Bill Grows.” Daily Herald, November 13, 1934: 2.

“Reading Dog Wins Puppies’ Final At Wembley.” Daily Herald, November 12, 1934: 17.

“Legal experts were last night prophesying a flood of law suits over the Betting and Lotteries Act.” Daily Herald, 15 November 1934: 6.

Hansard, HC. Deb. 03 April 1936, c. 2884.

Royal Commission on the Duties of the Metropolitan Police 1908.

Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure 1928-1929.

Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting 1932-33.

Report of the Royal Commission on Betting, Lotteries and Gaming 1949-1951. London: HMSO, 1951.

Select Committee on a Betting Duty 1923 Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure 1928-1929.

The Manchester Guardian, November 8, 1934: 3.

Burns, John. Brains Better than Bets or Beer: The Straight Tip to the Workers. Clarion Pamphlet, n°36, 1902.

Chinn, Carl. Better Betting With a Decent Feller. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Clapson, Mark. A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823-1961. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992.

Coleman, Marie. The Irish Sweep: a History of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes, 1930-1987. Dublin: U. College Dublin P., 2009.

Dixon, David. From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Hilton, John. Why I Go In For the Pools. London: Allen & Unwin, 1936.

Huggins, Mike. Flat Racing and British Society 1790-1914. London: Frank Cass, 2000.

Huggins, Mike. “‘Everybody’s Going to the Dogs’? The Middle Classes and Greyhound Racing in Britain Between the Wars.” Journal of Sport History 34 (4) Spring 2007: 401-421.

Huggins, Mike. “Association Football, Betting and British Society in the 1930s: The Strange Case of the 1936 ‘Pools War’.” Sport History Review 44 (2), 2013: 99-119.

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Laybourn, Keith. Working-Class Gambling in Britain, c. 1906-1960. The Stages of the Political Debate. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 [1998].

Miers, David. Regulating Commercial Gambling. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. 1938.

Roudaut, Emmanuel. “Les Controverses sur le jeu dans la société britannique (1890-1961): le cas des paris sportifs”. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Université Lille 3, 1997.

Roudaut, Emmanuel. “’Roughs on the Turf’ and ‘Suburban Saturnalia’: Anti-Social Behaviour on Victorian Racecourses”. In Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain. Ed. Sarah Pickard. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 239-250.

Stevenson, John. British Society 1914-45. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.

NOTES

1. Concern (and press coverage) grew after the summer, when the number of tote clubs increased dramatically (25 at the end of June 1932, 284 on December 10). 2. It was subsequently capped at £30,000. 3. “These large prizes are a dazzling lure to the ordinary man or woman. To all but a few thousand people in this country, a sum of, say, £30,000 seems to offer a transformation of their lives. […] Lotteries appeal with especial force to those in straitened circumstances, and to those in economic insecurity, since they hope to gain financial stability by winning a prize.” RC 1932-33, paragraph 455. 4. Some Pool Promoters had been involved in scandals. One, prosecuted in Edinburgh in 1930, had been found to be taking a total commission of 77 per cent. Another case would find a commission of 34 per cent. But the main organisations claimed to limit their profit to 5 per cent of the total income. See Hilton (1936: 8-9). 5. 10 a month, 100 a year. 6. For a classic articulation of anti-gambling socialism, see Burns (1902). For an overview of Labour’s evolution on gambling and teetotalism, see Dixon (1991: 72-81). See also Laybourn (2007). 7. These “gang wars” form the backdrop to the television series Peaky Blinders, already mentioned. 8. Ironically, the law was passed shortly after the repeal of prohibition in the United States, with the adoption of the 21st Amendment in December 1933, and the creation of the Loterie nationale in France in July 1933. 9. George Orwell has written a famous description of popular reactions to this initiative: “I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury.” (Orwell 1938:81). 10. MPs, journalists and football clubs received a substantial number of letters on the subject. Most of them were in support of the pools. See for instance a sample published by the presenter of weekly Broadcast Talks on the BBC (Hilton 1936).

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ABSTRACTS

In Britain, paying upfront to place a bet on a horserace, or any other sporting event, was illegal until 1961. Although it lasted more than a century, this prohibition, frequently condemned as socially discriminatory, proved rapidly unenforceable. Large-scale networks of underground betting prospered, with attendant police corruption. The uneasy balance achieved by the combination of repression and implicit arrangements between lawbreakers and law enforcers was seriously disrupted by three simultaneous developments during the 1930s. The rapid growth of commercial greyhound racing and football pools, combined with the launching of an Irish lottery based on British horsing racing, was highly controversial and led to a tightening of betting laws in 1934. However, the very premises of prohibition were openly questioned during the parliamentary debate, in a context of economic depression and universal suffrage. Dissent came from both sides of the House and was extensively covered by the press. Moreover, some sections of the betting industry had improved their public image and increased their economic and political leverage, which enabled them to obtain significant concessions. Antigambling groups, once so influential, were now put on the defensive, although their moral concerns could occasionally converge with the economic interests of some sport-betting entrepreneurs. Thus, the rejection of a national lottery cleared the way for the expansion of football pools, which facilitated the continuation of the ban for another sixty years by providing a viable commercial alternative. Ostensibly, the compromise of the 1930s was the last great victory of anti-gambling agitation in Britain, but it dented a fragile and ambivalent status quo and sowed the seeds of the liberalising laws of the late twentieth century.

Instituée au siècle précédent, la prohibition des formes les plus populaires de paris sportifs perdura jusqu’à la seconde moitié du XXe siècle au Royaume-Uni. Perçue comme une législation de classe, cette prohibition s’avéra rapidement inapplicable. Une économie souterraine se mit en place à grande échelle, au prix d’une forte corruption policière. Cet équilibre instable entre répression et accommodements fut bouleversé par certaines innovations de l’entre-deux- guerres. Le développement simultané des courses de lévriers, des football pools et d’une loterie irlandaise prenant pour support les courses de la saison hippique anglaise suscita de vives polémiques ainsi qu’un durcissement de la législation en 1934. Certains aspects fondamentaux de la prohibition furent toutefois ouvertement remis en cause dans les débats parlementaires de l’époque. Dans un contexte politique transformé par le suffrage universel et la crise économique, ces tensions, qui transcendaient les clivages partisans, trouvèrent un écho sans précédent dans l’opinion et dans la presse. S’y ajoutait le pouvoir accru de certains secteurs de l’industrie du jeu, tant sur le plan économique qu’en matière d’image, ce qui conduisit le gouvernement à faire des concessions sélectives. Les ligues de vertu, dont l’influence avait été déterminante depuis un demi-siècle, se retrouvèrent ainsi sur la défensive, mais les intérêts corporatistes des uns pouvaient converger avec les préoccupations morales des autres. Ainsi, par exemple, l’idée d’une loterie nationale fut écartée jusqu’à la dernière décennie du siècle, mais le maintien de cette interdiction fut facilité par l’existence des football pools, qui remplissaient une fonction analogue dans un cadre purement commercial. Si le compromis des années trente semble constituer la dernière victoire du rigorisme en matière de législation du jeu, il ne fit que remodeler un statu quo ambigu et portait en germe la libéralisation de la fin du siècle.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: loteries, paris, sport, Irish Sweepstake, tote clubs, courses de lévriers, Royaume-Uni Keywords: lotteries, betting, sports, Irish Sweepstake, tote clubs, greyhound racing, United Kingdom

AUTHOR

EMMANUEL ROUDAUT Senior Lecturer in British Studies at Sciences Po Lille (France). His main field of research is the cultural and social history of Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially the history of leisure and sexual politics. Recent articles include “‘Roughs On The Turf’ and ‘Suburban Saturnalia’: Anti-social Behaviour on Victorian Racecourses” (Sarah Pickard (ed.), Anti- social Behaviour in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 239-250) and “Quand le personnel devient politique: nouvelles radicalités et nostalgie de l’ordre moral » (Gilles Leydier, dir. Le Royaume-Uni à l’épreuve de la crise, Paris, Ellipses, 2016, 201-219). He has also edited a book on British political posters: Affiches politiques du premier XXe siècle, Paris, Mare et Martin, 2016. Contact: emmanuel.roudaut [at] sciencespo-lille.eu

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Meaningful Plots: Leisure, ‘Rational Recreation’ and the Politics of Gardening in British Allotments (Mid 19th -mid 20th Centuries)

Arnaud Page

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author wishes to thank Fabrice Bensimon, John Mullen, Rachel Rogers as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper.

1 In 2009, when Queen Elizabeth II authorised the creation of a 4x10 metre vegetable patch in the garden at Buckingham Palace, this royal assent was seen as a symbol of the dramatic rise in popularity of the “grow your own” movement (“Queen turns corner…” 2009; “The Queen installs…” 2009). If many gardeners in Great Britain, like the Queen, have in recent years replaced some of their own flower beds with vegetables, the most visible achievement of this movement has been in the renewed popularity, after several decades of neglect and decline, of the allotment plot which is said to be going through a “renaissance” as illustrated by the nearly 100,000 people who are currently on the waiting-lists for one of the 300,000 plots available around Great Britain.1 In addition to being the focus for this vogue for vegetable gardening, the allotment today is a site where many highly political questions seem to be springing up, in the more visible actions of “guerrilla gardening” and protests against evictions, which are linked with the question of the reclaiming of “urban commons”, or in the more ordinary and less visible operations of urbanites wanting to grow their own fresh, preferably organic, vegetables which is usually explicitly related to wider concerns about the relocalisation of food systems and the sustainability of future agriculture (McKay 2011).

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2 If contemporary allotment gardening is frequently presented as a form of leisure that is saturated with important political issues, it seems, at first sight, to share very little with its 19th and early 20thc. ancestor. Until fairly recently, on the relatively rare occasions when historians paid attention to allotments, it was generally assumed that they were a simple form of charity and a way for rural landowners and middle-class industrialists and reformers to keep the discontent of agricultural labourers and the working class in check, by providing them with a tiny plot of their own to improve their lot, both materially and morally. The allotment was traditionally described as a way to goad the poor into adopting a form of “rational recreation”, that emulated the practices of upper and middle-class gardening, while being adapted to their own needs, by offering a little supplement to their diet (Gaskell 1980; Constantine 1981: 390). Over the past few years, however, the subject has been the focus of more detailed attention in Great Britain and the allotment has become a more complex setting and the gardener a much less passive figure than used to be the case. If the basic features of allotment provision in England have not been completely revised, much closer attention has been paid to the details surrounding the uses of these plots. The present paper will mostly be concerned with analysing the current literature, and illustrating it with some original evidence, to show how early allotments are relevant and worthy of attention in the broader discussions on the culture and politics of leisure. It will first insist on the fact that the history of allotments should prompt us to question the narrative that describes the continuous progress of modernity as a straightforward evolution from subsistence-work to leisure and recreation. It will also attempt to show that the picture of charity and discipline described above must be complemented by one where the allotment could be a site of empowerment, one which provided gardeners with a sense of independence, community and agency.

Work or Leisure? Allotments as hybrid sites

3 In the 1980s, reflecting generally on the question of leisure, marxist historians John Clarke and Charles Crichter launched an attack on the optimistic celebration of the “Leisure Revolution”, arguing that leisure could not be seen as merely the culmination of a continuous and abstract process in which market capitalism had progressively offered more and more freedom of choice and recreation opportunities (Clarke and Crichter 1985: 48-49). While they were interested in other leisure forms, Clarke and Crichter’s critique may provide a useful starting point to discuss the question of allotments, which are often said to have become truly recreational places only in recent years.

4 After the heyday of the first half of the twentieth century, the allotment movement seems to have been marked by gradual decline, in part due to the rise of new leisure activities. In 1969, a Committee was set up to review policy on allotments in England and Wales, and argued that if allotments were becoming less and less popular in contrast with the fortunes of the movement in Denmark, Western Germany or Holland, it was precisely because they had failed to fully embrace the notion of “leisure” gardens (Ministry of Housing 1969: 1). The Committee led by Harry Thorpe, a professor of Geography at Birmingham, constructed a stark contrast between the old allotments and the new, purely recreational, forms of gardening. One of their main recommendations was indeed that the name “leisure gardens” be adopted in lieu of the

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term “allotment”, which carried all the stigma associated with charity and subsistence (Ministry of Housing 1969: 354). The new forms of leisure gardens should serve mostly recreational purposes and would be marked by higher rents and new standards of beauty, accessibility and attractiveness (Ministry of Housing 1969: 32, 77, 174). According to this view, the history of allotments was characterized by a continuous and unilinear journey from subsistence and largely unchosen work to recreation and pleasure (in other words, a “leisure revolution”), one which still had not been completed by the early 1970s in Britain. One may thus wonder if nineteenth and twentieth-century allotments and the business of tending to the “potato ground” should be included in discussions of leisure activity, an area which appears fundamentally at odds with the notion of subsistence-work.

5 Let us first remark that if today's allotments are indeed rarely oriented towards the question of “pure” subsistence, it is probably very unlikely that any allotment gardener would not agree that whatever his or her main motivations, at the root of gardening still lie two rather indisputable facts : allotments do produce fresh food and they still often require strenuous physical work.2 In other words, one can not entirely dismiss the question of food provision, nor can today's “leisurely” gardening be considered as being work-free, as if the two categories (work / leisure) belonged to distinct, sealed spheres. Similarly, with past allotments, one sees that these distinctions subsistence / pleasure and work / leisure were never entirely clear. On the one hand, allotments, especially in the nineteenth century, undoubtedly performed a real function of contributing to the subsistence of agricultural labourers, as yields per acre were usually very high and superior to those obtained by farming. Using a very wide range of sources, allotment historian Jeremy Burchardt has thus shown that rural allotments in the nineteenth century could contribute as much as 12 % to a family's income (Burchardt 2002: 4).3 On the other hand, the question of “leisure” was already central when allotments began to be provided on a wider scale in the 1840s. The Select Committee on the Labouring Poor, which in 1843 advocated the setting up of allotments, indeed insisted on the patches being rather small so that labourers would only tend them in their “leisure moments” and not neglect their wage labour.4 “Leisure” here of course meant only “non-work” (i. e. paid work) time, but this illustrates how the distinction between work and leisure is more complex than it seems, and how discussions of leisure should pay attention to the “fluidity of the boundaries between work and leisure” (Clarke and Crichter 1985: 52).

6 It is probable that it was precisely because of this hybrid nature and this undefined position on the work-leisure continuum, that allotment gardening figured much less prominently in most histories of working-class leisure than football, gambling or drinking. Allotments seem however worth investigating as hybrid ground because they transcend many traditional dichotomies such as material and non-material rewards or work and leisure, and undermine the simpler narrative of a continuous progress from unchosen work and drudgery towards leisure and recreation. If leisure was not invented in the late twentieth century, it may be interesting, then, to include the question of allotments in discussions of leisure as they provide a striking example of how an activity could, and still can, be considered both as work and as leisure. More importantly, the use of allotments was far from being merely oriented towards subsistence. The rise of allotments must indeed be seen in the wider context of a type of working-class gardening which was not directly useful, as may be seen in the development of flower growing and window gardening in the second half of the

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nineteenth century and the attendant rise of local horticultural societies shows and contests (Wiles 2014: 23, 161; Burchardt 2002: 172). As recent work has shown, the distinction between the material and the non-material aspects of allotments is somehow artificial, even for earlier periods, and scholars have instead emphasised the multiplicity of their meanings and functions (aesthetic, medicinal, social) which contradict the simpler narrative according to which the subsistence-oriented allotment of the 19th century was replaced by the leisure garden of the 20 th (Borsay 2006: 116; Willes 2014: 96).

Allotments and the “disciplining” of the poor

7 One wonders if the relative neglect, until recently, of allotment gardening in histories of working-class leisure could not also be explained by the fact that it was seen as less disorderly, rowdy or illegal than other leisure activities, and so maybe a little too “respectable”. Allotments were indeed developed partly in the first half of the 19th century as a response to social disorder, and were seen by rural landowners and middle-class reformers as a way to induce the poor to use their free time in a productive and “rational” way. From the early 19th century, with growing concerns that the erosion of common rights might become threatening to public order, enclosure Acts started to include the provision of allotments as a way of compensating the loss of common lands. Following the Swing Riots of 1830, allotments thus became increasingly favoured as a way of appeasing agricultural labourers, many schemes in Norfolk and Suffolk being for example initiated in the areas that were worst affected by rural disorder (Archer 1997: 23). As the scheme had the dual benefit of appeasing discontent while boosting their rental income, it was embraced by most landowners, and by 1840, there were already more than 100,000 plots across the country (Burchardt 2002: 69, 226). Allotments were increasingly endorsed by the various official committees appointed to find solutions to poverty such as the 1834 Poor Law Commission or the 1843 Select Committee on the Labouring Poor : The allotment system also appears to be the natural remedy for one of the detrimental changes in the condition of the labouring classes of this country, which the lapse of years has wrought, by gradually shutting them out from all personal and direct interest in the produce of the soil, and throwing them for subsistence wholly and exclusively upon wages.5

8 In the 19th century, allotment gardening was thus mostly envisaged by its supporters as a way of mitigating social disruption and alleviating some of the evils and disorder brought about by the loss of common land. However, even then, the question of subsistence was never the main objective of allotments, and their provision had much more to do with giving the poor an occupation whose benefits were mostly of a moral nature. Allotments were regarded with increasing optimism by landowners and reformers alike as it was believed that they would teach the poor the values of self- reliance, industry, self-improvement, and it was argued that “the cultivation of a few vegetables and flowers (...)” would help “to keep a man at home and from the ale- house…”6 By the 1870s, it had become something of a commonplace to extol the virtues of gardening, which would teach labourers to become “more responsible, independent, and self reliant” (Archer 1997: 26-7). The number of plots therefore increased rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century, from around 250,000 plots in 1873 to nearly 500,000 by 1895 (Ministry of Housing and Local Government 1969: 14).

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9 In the early years of the twentieth century, if allotments continued to figure prominently as instruments of social and moral reform, the locus and the target of the movement certainly shifted towards urban areas and the industrial working class. The rapid development of British cities in the nineteenth century had led to increasing fears that the disconnection of the urban working class from nature would lead to physical and moral degeneracy. This concern had initially led to the creation of public parks in all major cities, but by the end of the nineteenth century, allotments became increasingly favoured as a way to provide a leisure activity that could re-create some form of bond between the urban working-class and the soil (Mathis 2010: 86). Most of the early initiatives were thus led by philanthropic businessmen such as the Marshalls in Leeds or the Cadburys in Bournville (Nilsen 2014: 36). In the case of York, the famous manufacturing and philanthropic Rowntree family played a key role in the encouragement of gardening among their employees, which they conceived as a way to promote among them a form of rational and healthy recreation. The objective of the Rowntrees, who let allotments to their employees, was clearly to “improve” their moral character and to discourage drinking, betting or gambling, which were forbidden on allotment grounds (Wilson 2012: 736). The promotion of gardening by the Rowntrees led the leaders of the city of York to see allotments and gardens as the solution to the worst evils of modern urban life, as the Lady Mayoress of York argued at a meeting where the Rowntrees had just presented information on the progress of allotments in the city : “Much of the disease and discomfort due to overcrowded town life and lack of means of rationally spending leisure time would disappear if people only had gardens and allotments” (“The allotment movement in York…” 1903: 10, my emphasis).

10 As Great Britain was marked in the early twentieth century by a rising feeling of anxiety about the nation's decline, gardening came to be seen not only as a cure for social disruption but also as a patriotic endeavour. As the focus of the allotment movement shifted towards the urban working class, the argument that gardening would maintain the physical health and vigour of the nation began to be voiced more powerfully than before, especially after the Second Boer War (1899-1902), which raised concerns about the poor physical condition of the working class. The Inter- departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which reported in 1904, indeed helped popularise the benefits for physical health of allotments, and praised the initiatives of the Rowntrees and the Cadburys (Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration 1904: 35, 87, 195). Allotments came to be viewed as a better solution to the problem of physical degeneracy than sport which was seen as rapidly succumbing to the “competitive spirit”, leading football and other sports to be increasingly something to “watch” rather than to “play” (“The use and abuse of leisure” 1909: 4). The necessity for the nation to encourage gardening among all classes may for example be seen in the words of Lord Rosebery, former Liberal Primer Minister and one-time leader of the movement for National Efficiency, who argued in 1909 that providing more land to the working class would “promote a really valuable social reform” and be of “solid advantage to the community”, by developing “mental discipline” and encouraging the re-creation of some link between the urban working class and nature (“Lord Rosebery on Gardening” 1909: 266-7). In the atmosphere of anxiety of the 1900s, the encouragement of gardening thus increasingly became a political imperative, and the 1908 Small Holding and Allotments Act required local councils to provide allotments to the labouring population7.

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11 Unsurprisingly, during the two world wars, the patriotic nature of gardening became more and more obvious, and allotment provision developed extremely rapidly, as the quest for self-sufficiency made it essential to convert all unused land into food- producing sites. Requisitions of land made possible by the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 led the number of plots to increase from 600,000 in 1913 to 1.5 million by the end of the conflict. Similarly, the Second World War was marked by a rapid increase in the number of plots, from around 750,000 to nearly 1.5 million by 1945 (Ministry of Housing and Local Government 1969: 14). Despite the reactivation of the primary function of allotments as sites for food production (also fundamental in the period of the Great Depression) rather than moral or physical regeneration, it could also be argued that such campaigns as the requisition of lands under the Defence of the Realm Act (WWI) or “Dig for Victory” (WWII) were as much about developing food self-sufficiency as they were about lifting the people's morale and encouraging a patriotic sentiment of cooperation (Ginn 2012: 296).

12 The common thread which runs through all the aspects of allotments we have seen so far is that the provision of gardening grounds seems, at first sight, to have been probably the most consensual way to organise the leisure hours of rural labourers and of the urban working class, one that would combine food production, with physical and moral health, while curbing social conflict and uniting an entire nation of gardeners in times of crisis. This led some historians in the 1970s to describe the promotion of allotments, not only as a form of outdated charity, but as an attempt by middle-class reformers to discipline forms of leisure and to replace disorderly forms of recreation with one whose main goal was the material, physical and moral “improvement” of the working class. As it became gradually associated with gardening rather than farming, this form of “leisure”, contrary to the music-hall, fairs or the public house which distracted the worker from family and home, represented a way to civilise the poor, and “to control and discipline the working class in their use of leisure, and to encourage the pursuit of ‘rational recreations’” (Constantine 1981: 390). In the words of another historian, by “keeping labourers out of the beer houses and off the poor rates”, allotments and gardening in general could thus be seen as “the essential realisation of a utilitarian concept of the use of leisure time through rational recreation”, which provided “a means of control over the moral and physical lives of the labouring population” (Martin 1980: 479-501). Allotments were thus described as a tool for the middle-class “to regulate, survey and control the living spaces and recreational activities of working-class subjects” by fostering the emulation of upper-class practices and ideals (Taylor 2008: 22; Martin 1980: 484). According to this vision, gardening as a leisure form was mostly an upper-class occupation which was gradually transmitted down the social ladder so that everybody could indulge in the “pleasures” offered by this aristocratic pursuit (Constantine 1981: 388). It could thus be argued that this critique was actually a variation, if approaching the question from a different point of view, of one of the tenets of the Thorpe Report, according to which the problem with allotments was that they had not gone far enough in emulating the practices and aesthetics of upper-class gardens, and had still not completely been purged of their utilitarian origins.8

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Restoring the complexity of allotments

13 As Gareth Stedman Jones argued nearly 40 years ago, there is, however, a fundamental problem with an approach that focuses only on the moral coercion associated with the rationalisation of working-class leisure : “Far more attention has been paid to the ways in which entrepreneurs or the propertied classes attempted to change popular uses of leisure time than to the ways in which craftsman, artisan or working-class activists attempted to organise their non-work time” (Stedman Jones 1977: 162). The focus on the charitable or “disciplining” aspects of allotments stemmed mostly from the nature of the documents used, which involved a focus on legislation and on the arguments put forward by elite proponents of allotments, negating the experience of the gardeners themselves. The first rebuttal of this view of allotments occurred with the publication in the late 1980s of a seminal book by geographer David Crouch and anarchist theoretician Colin Ward, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture, which contradicted the views expressed both in governmental reports or in more radical history, by elevating, on the contrary “the value of plots to empower, to enable (and) to provide a choice that frees from the marketplace” (Crouch and Ward 1997: xix). If the insights of Crouch and Ward were not immediately followed by empirical studies, one may detect, over the past 15 years, something akin to an “allotment renaissance” among historians as well, whose work has allowed us to see some of the complexity and diversity of the interests and motivations of the allotment movement.

14 This work has for example qualified the traditional picture according to which allotments first developed in rural areas after 1830 then spread to the cities in the twentieth century. As Margaret Willes has argued in The Gardens of the British Working Class (2014), the story of “leisure” gardening among the poor has a much longer history than historians have traditionally assumed and she begins her own narrative in the Tudor Period (Willes 2014: 2). As for urban allotments, most studies used to cite the exception of Birmingham, which boasted as many as 2000 “guinea gardens” in the 1830s, but it was generally agreed that allotments in the nineteenth century were a purely rural phenomenon and became an urban one only in the twentieth century (Willes 2014: 147). It seems, however, that here too the picture is more complex than this and that urban allotments were more widespread than previously assumed. One may cite the example of some East-End gardeners, in 1846, who used to garden on waste-land and were forced to abandon gardening because of the pressure exerted by rapid urbanisation, a process described by the Horticultural Magazine, which lamented the loss of “many small gardens […] to give way to brick and mortar buildings (and factories)” (Willes 2014: 111). It has indeed been shown that urban allotments were more widespread than assumed, for example in Sheffield where there were 1200 gardens in the 1780s (Flavell 2003: 102). A recent study, using Geographic Information System, has thus studied the provision of allotments and detached gardens in ten cities (including Nottingham, Exeter, Ipswich, Lancaster and Newcastle) and has reached the conclusion that they “were a common feature in and around 18th century towns in England” (Thornes 2011: 110).

15 Another area for fruitful research, which can only be briefly hinted at in the remit of this article, is the gendered dimension of allotments. In 2006, a British newspaper ironically commented upon the recent feminization of allotments as an intrusion upon the last remaining preserve of the male, as if women had until now never set foot on

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these plots, except perhaps during wartime (“It’s curtains…” 2006; see also Borsay 2006: 113). It should be pointed out, however, that in the 19th century, given the long working hours of farm labourers, and as allotment rules usually forbade Sunday work, male workers could not perform all the tasks involved by themselves and those gardens were usually tended to by the entire family (Burchardt 2002: 170; Moselle 1995: 487). Some evidence also suggests that gardening remained, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, one of the only “leisure” forms that was shared by the whole family. 9 For obvious reasons, the presence of women on allotments was also given a tremendous boost during the two world wars. If it has been argued that such campaigns as “Dig for Victory” and their invariably gendered stereotypes actually reinforced traditional roles, women being generally confined to menial tasks, we should be wary of assuming that the stereotypes outlined in those advertisements and campaigns necessarily reflected or reinforced gender roles in the gardens themselves (Ginn 2012: 301). More generally, despite the invisible nature of women's work in statistics (most female gardeners were registered under their husbands’ names), it seems that many of them stayed on after the wars ended, and became respected as gardeners in their own right (Butcher 1918: 35).

“Can the gardener speak?”

16 In his 1957 book, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, Richard Hoggart singled out allotment gardening as the embodiment of the various forms of leisure where working-class men could “exercise personal choice, act freely and voluntarily” and become “specialists” (Hoggart 1957: 327). This theme seems to have picked up by most recent works devoted to the subject, leading to a reassessment of allotments as places that could empower rather than discipline. It has for example been suggested that allotments and gardening could foster the development of new vernacular forms of knowledge and skills, invisible in gardening magazines, but which undoubtedly contributed to an increased sense of individual agency. As the work experience provided by the allotment differed radically from that of the factory, it usually required creativity and autonomy, and contributed to a heightened sense of pride and self- respect (Crouch and Ward 1997: 26; Burchardt 2002: 167). Allotment gardening may have been “a middle-class solution to a working-class problem”, but gardeners “adopted the scheme as their own” and set to the task in their own way (Scott 2005: ii). This may for example be seen in the case of the Dig for Victory Campaign (WWII), which is often viewed and reminisced upon as a rare case of the nation coming together and gardening as the ultimate form of patriotism. Franklin Ginn has shown, however, that if the campaign could be interpreted as an attempt by the government to “extend order into the domestic sphere”, what is probably more significant is the failure of this attempt, governmental pamphlets and recommendations (over what to grow and how to tend to one's garden) being generally ignored by gardeners whose habits and motivations retained considerably more autonomy than the neat narrative of an army of patriot gardeners suggests (Ginn 2012: 297-8).

17 Allotments also enabled gardeners to create their own “natural spaces” in formerly derelict urban wasteland. In the 1980s, Crouch and Ward argued that allotments represented an “aesthetic challenge to the rules and conventions of urban planning and landscaping” and one recent book has developed the idea of allotment-gardening

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as a “vernacular intervention on the landscape” to emphasize how gardeners participated in their own modest way to the creation of urban landscapes (Nilsen 2014: 147). These views are offered as a rebuttal to the common lament in the post-war period that many allotments had simply become “horticultural slums”, as Harry Thorpe described in the 1970s the sites where gardeners had built sheds and greenhouses, without any regard to standardization or, according to him, aesthetic considerations (Ministry of Housing and Local Government 1969: 178). If the main reason lying behind “the rickety-built sheds, the haphazardness of the rows, and the eclectic mix of plants” was usually less aesthetic than economic, the wider point is that this “intervention on the landscape”, was actually a source of frequent conflict and negotiation between authorities, associations and gardeners (Scott 2005: 100).

18 As sheds, fowl-houses and other buildings on allotments became more widespread in urban allotments, they indeed became a major bone of contention between gardeners and representatives of local authorities, who denounced the “squalor and untidiness which seems to be inevitable in allotment structures” (“Allotment notes” 1917: 3). In Hull, for example, the Corporation tried to mount an action in the early 1930s by making it compulsory to secure the permission of the Allotments Committee before any new shed could be erected (“Hull allotments” 1931: 6; “Hull allotment holders and their huts” 1931: 4). It was felt indeed that the “ramshackle huts” put up by allotment holders undermined the respectability of the movement, which had formed such an important basis at its beginnings. The issuing of strict regulations “with the sole idea of uniformity instead of the usefulness of the plots and the comfort of the plot-holders” was, however, deeply resented by the gardeners, many of whom, in the period of the Great Depression, could not afford the authorised hut in any case (“Huts on Hull allotments” 1934: 12; “Allotment grievances” 1934: 10). The regulations insisted on only new wood being used in the erection of these huts, which ran contrary to the traditional practice of picking up and reusing waste material. In addition to the question of cost, plot-holders objected to the proposed uniformity of the sheds, which according to them stifled the desires and designs of individuals. They also objected to the small size of the authorised sheds, which would undermine one of the key functions of allotments, i. e. “to be centres of social activity”. This led to long debates in the various local associations, and to the conclusion that the only way forward was to associate plot-holders in the decision-making process and the devising of workable regulations (“Hull Allotment Grievances” 1934: 16).

The allotment as fertile ground for politicization

19 It seems that if allotments were meant to increase the “respectability” of the working class, this did not necessarily entail the suppression of political and economic antagonisms and conflicts, quite the contrary. For example, if the relationship between Chartism and the allotment movement in the 1840s was at first sight somewhat strained (the latter was accused of depoliticising labourers), the two movements seem, upon closer historical investigation, to have converged much more than previously assumed. Analysing the allotment movement’s demand for more land, which coincided with the genesis of the Chartist Land Plan, Burchardt has shown that the question of allotments in several cases increased dissent and working-class demands, rather than appeased them and has thus argued that the two movements were in fact rather

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compatible and cross-fertilising. A few years after this, allotments also participated in the transformation of militancy and helped foster the rise of agricultural trade- unionism in the 1870s, the provision of allotments indeed figuring prominently among the demands of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union. If these plots were mostly considered as a way for labourers to acquire some level of independence in a context of agricultural crisis and fear of unemployment, in some cases they also rendered agricultural strikes possible, by stimulating “horizontal solidarity” and providing for some modest form of self-sufficiency (Burchardt 2002: 210-13).

20 The most important aspect of the new work on allotments is indeed that these plots were a site for strengthening the independence of gardeners. This point is actually not new in any real sense and was developed for example in 1918 by the historian F. E. Green, who wrote about rural allotments in the following terms: “The allotment, indeed, becomes a base ‘to fly to,’ as labourers say, when times are hard and labour troubles have to be fought out. To the labourer, the allotment is the castle behind the walls of which he can bargain more manfully with his heavily armed foe — the farmer” (Green 1918: 91). In the nineteenth century, the idea of developing allotments for agricultural labourers was indeed not consensual and if landowners were generally favourably disposed towards the scheme, farmers were much more opposed to it : many were reluctant to give up land, but their opposition was mostly based on the fear that labourers would dilapidate all their strength, and, given the choice, would focus on their own plot rather than on wage labor. It was felt that allotments would not only undermine the labourers' dedication to work but would also weaken the farmers' “bargaining position vis-a-vis the labourers” by allowing the latter to be partly self- sufficient and autonomous (Burchardt 1997: 165-175).

21 It has also been been argued that allotments provided for many workers the first “tangible political connection to government”, especially in the twentieth century (Scott 2005: 111). The desire to acquire or preserve one’s plot “fostered a better appreciation for political activism” and encouraged political participation at a local level. Allotments thus stimulated the formation of committees and societies by tenants, which played a role in the day-to-day organisation of the plots but which were also instrumental in petitioning landowners and, later on, local authorities, in order to have more land be made available. Once again, if the benefits of allotments and gardening had become commonplace and something of a cliché by the 1880s, the means by which to attain these and to improve the provision of allotments, were clearly not consensual, and led to prolonged debates on whether allotment provisioning should remain a voluntary endeavour or if some degree of coercion should be adopted (Onslow 1886).

22 It was the latter course that was eventually favored, and after the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act, the provision of allotments came to be seen as a duty of the local authorities, which, it has been argued, altered the roles and duties of the Corporations as envisaged by the working-class residents (Wilson 2012: 733). In the case of York, for example, if the creation of allotments stemmed mostly from the initiative of businessmen and middle-class reformers, its consequences were actually quite unexpected. It led to the creation of collective organisations and actions in order to transform the initial terms, once most allotments were under the responsibility of the York corporation. Allotments fostered “working-class activism”, and led to regular actions and debates with the aim of improving the lot of gardeners, on topics such as the provision of amenities, the right to keep poultry or pigs on the plots, and more

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importantly, the questions of rent and security of tenure. As Ross Wilson writes, the provision of allotments “created a new set of relationships between citizens and the civic authority”, fostering an active political role for allotment-holders (Wilson 2012: 743).

23 Similarly, The Vacant Land Cultivation Society, first formed in the US, opened a branch in London in 1907 and petitioned local authorities to secure the provision of additional land for working-class gardeners. Far from being a consensual and painless task, this involved, according to one of the leaders of the VLCS, a constant fight against the “inaction” and “procrastination” of the London County Council (Butcher 1918: 19). Horticultural shows as well as allotment congresses were thus generally the occasion for voicing concern at evictions, the rise of rents and served to encourage allotment holders to fight at a local level to obtain security of tenure. The First World War was thus marked not only by an increasing number of patriot gardeners, but also by heightened levels of administrative and political activity since, for example, many allotment holders volunteered for the VLCS (“Congress of Allotment Workers” 1923: 8; Scott 2005: 53).

24 But even more important than the work and actions of the largest movements and associations, was the day-to-day work and political activities of local associations who bargained with the local authorities to obtain security of tenure and protested against evictions. From the end of the First World War, there were indeed countless episodes of eviction: the London County Council for example took the decision to evict 14,000 allotment holders in February 1919. In the interwar period, allotment holders throughout England became engaged in protests, conflicts and protracted negotiations on the question of access to land (“Derby Problem of Allotments” 1933; “Allotment Protest” 1934: 4; “Allotment Grievances” 1934: 10). Similarly, the picture of unanimity that is sometimes projected upon the “Dig for Victory” campaign should also be qualified as allotment holders organised quickly, as soon as 1943, in view of the end of the conflict to avoid being evicted as had been the case after the conclusion of the First World War. In Hull, for example, an Allotment Protection Association was formed in 1943, to contest the reallocation of allotments for other planning purposes, including, very often, areas for other leisure forms such as football fields or public parks (“Allotment for Playing Fields” 1932: 5; “Newland allotments” 1943: 1). If the post-war period was marked, until the 1970s, by a decline in the number of sites and gardeners, some allotment holders were not content with the explanation usually given (increased prosperity and the rise of new forms of leisure such as the television rendered the prospect of tilling the soil during one's leisure hour less and less attractive) and believed that they were also political reasons for the allotment's fall from grace. They thus targeted British local authorities who very often failed to provide sites with satisfactory amenities and security of tenure, and therefore continued to press for better gardening conditions and protection against evictions (Ministry of Housing and Local Government 1969: 31-3, 113).

Conclusion

25 It seems at first sight that there is very little in common between the nineteenth- century rural allotment holder tilling a potato patch and the current figure of the new city “leisure gardener”, enjoying his (or her) recreational plot while relating this to

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political questions, such as appreciation of a different, more meaningful form of work, the relocalisation of food systems, the question of individual agency in urban design or the defence of the urban “commons”. This overview of the history of allotments until the 1950s, and the survey of the recent literature devoted to these plots, has however attempted show that work and leisure have not always been distinct, watertight categories. More importantly, if this leisure form used to be seen mostly as a rather depoliticised and consensual way of remediating all kinds of ills and conflicts, it may be that its effects were rather more complex and at times empowering than the simple picture of charity and discipline suggests. In other words, the 'earthly labour' of nineteenth and early twentieth century predecessors was also embedded in a complex web of meanings and political relations, and, as the author of a recent book on the subject has argued, these plots deserve our attention since “much more was at stake in these gardens than the provision of vegetables and a few flowers. Poor relief, access to land, social reform, public health, education, civic agency, and the political voice of the worker were all imbricated in the cultivation of these small garden plots” (Nilsen 2014: 1).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Newspaper articles

“Allotment for Playing Fields.” The Gloucester Citizen, March 31 1932: 5.

“Allotment grievances.” Hull Daily Mail, 27 February 1934: 10.

“Allotment notes.” Hull Daily Mail, 23 July 1917: 3.

“Allotment Protest.”, Hull Daily Mail, 6 February 1934: 4.

“Congress of Allotment Workers.” Western Morning News, 26 February 1923: 8.

“Derby Problem of Allotments.” Derby Evening Telegraph, 28 April 1933.

“Dig for recovery: allotments boom as thousands go to ground in recession”, The Guardian, 19 February 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/19/national-trust- allotments

“Hull Allotment Grievances.” Hull Daily Mail, 14 December 1934: 16.

“Hull allotment holders and their huts.” Hull Daily Mail, 11 July 1931: 4.

“Hull allotments.” Hull Daily Mail, 3 March 1931: 6.

“Huts on Hull allotments.” Hull Daily Mail, 12 February 1934: 12

“It’s curtains for the traditional allotment as women move in.” Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2006. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1508897/Its-curtains-for-the-traditional-allotment- as-women-move-in.html

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“Lord Rosebery on Gardening”, The Spectator, 21 August 1909: 266-7.

“Newland allotments”, Hull Daily Mail, 7 June 1943: 1.

“Queen turns corner of palace backyard into an allotment”, The Guardian, 14 June 2009. https:// www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/14/queen-allotment-organic-gardening

“The allotment movement in York, some interesting figures.” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 17 August 1903: 10.

“The Queen installs a vegetable patch at Buckingham Palace”, The Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2009. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/5523619/The-Queen-installs-a- vegetable-patch-at-Buckingham-Palace.html

“The use and abuse of leisure”, Falkirk Herald, 27 October 1909: 4.

Other sources

Archer, John E. “The Nineteenth-Century Allotment: Half an Acre and a Row.” The Economic History Review 50(1) 1997: 21-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2600009

Borsay, Peter. A History of Leisure: the British Experience since 1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Burchardt, Jeremy and Jacqueline Cooper. Breaking New Ground: Nineteenth-Century Allotments from Local Sources. Milton Keynes: FACHRS, 2010.

Burchardt, Jeremy. “Rural Social Relations, 1830—50: Opposition to Allotments for Labourers.” The Agricultural History Review 45(2) 1997: 165-175. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40275163

Burchardt, Jeremy. The Allotment Movement in England, 1793-1873. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2002.

Butcher, Gerald W. Allotments for all: The Story of a Great Movement. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918.

Clarke, John and Charles Crichter. The Devil Makes Work. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.

Constantine, Stephen. “Amateur Gardening and Popular recreation in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Journal of Social History 14(3) 1981: 387-406. DOI: 10.1353/jsh/14.3.387

Crouch, David and Colin Ward. The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 1997 (1988).

Flavell, Neville. “Urban Allotment Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. The Case of Sheffield.” The Agricultural History Review 51(1) 2003: 95-106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40275844

Gaskell, S. Martin. “Gardens for the Working Class: Victorian Practical Pleasure”, Victorian Studies 23(4) 1980: 479-501. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3826832

Ginn, Franklin. “Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain.” Journal of Historical Geography (38) 2012: 294-305. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2012.02.001

Green, F. E. “The Allotment Movement.” Contemporary Review, 1 July 1918: 90-6.

Hasbach, Wilhelm. A History of the English Agricultural Labourer. London: P. S. King & Son, 1908.

Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Pelican Books, 1958 (1st ed. 1957).

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Mathis, Charles-François. In Nature We Trust: Les paysages anglais à l'ère industrielle. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010.

McKay, George. Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden. London: F. Lincoln, 2011.

Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments, Cmnd 4166, London: HMSO, 1969.

Mitchell, E. Lawrence. The Law of Allotments and Allotment Gardens (England and Wales). London: P. S. King & Son, 1924.

Moselle, Boaz. “Allotments, Enclosure, and Proletarianization in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern England.” The Economic History Review 48 (3) 1995: 482–500. DOI: 10.1111/j. 1468-0289.1995.tb01428.x

Nilsen, Micheline. The Working Man’s Green Space: Allotment gardens in England, France, and Germany, 1870-1919. Charlottesville: U. of Virginia P., 2014.

Onslow, Earl of. Landlords and Allotments: The History and Present Condition of the Allotment System. London: Longman, Green & Co., 1886.

Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, London: HMSO, 1904.

Scott, Elizabeth Anne. “Cockney Plots: Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London’s East End, 1890-1918.” MA Thesis, 2005. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/SSU/ TC-SSU-12212005213638.pdf

Stedman Jones, Gareth. “Class Expression versus Social Control? A Critique of Recent Trends in the social history of ‘leisure’.” History Workshop (4) 1977: 162-170. DOI: 10.1093/hwj/4.1.162

Taylor, Lisa. A Taste for Gardening, Classed and Gendered Practices. London: Routledge, 2008.

Thompson P. and T. Lummis. Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918, 1870-1973. SN 2000, 7th Edition. UK Data Service, 2009.

Thornes, Rosemary. “Detached Gardens and Urban Allotments in English Provincial Towns, 1750 to 1950: Distribution, Abundance and Transformative Processes.”, Phd Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/3060/1/Thornes11PhD.pdf

Willes, Margaret. The Gardens of the British Working Class. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.

Wilson, Ross. “Social Reform and Allotment Gardening in Twentieth-Century York.” Journal of Urban History 38 (4) 2012: 731-752. DOI: 10.1177/0096144211430152

NOTES

1. In fact, the waiting lists are probably due as much to the sharp decrease since the 1970s in the number of plots as to any sudden form of “renaissance”. 2. The “subsistence” aspect of contemporary allotments should not, however, be completely discarded. See for example “Dig for recovery: allotments boom as thousands go to ground in recession”, The Guardian, 19 February 2009. 3. For a complete list of the sources and access to Burchardt’s database, see Burchardt and Cooper (2010) and the accompanying CD-ROM. 4. Report from the Select Committee on the Labouring Poor (Allotments of Land) (1843: iv) quoted in Hasbach (1908: 240).

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5. Report from the Select Committee on the labouring poor (allotments of land), p. v, quoted in Moselle (1995: 483). 6. “The Allotment system”, The Penny Magazine, vol. 14 (1845: 88), quoted in Ministry of Housing and Local Government (1969: 10). My emphasis. 7. “If the council of any borough, urban district or parish are of opinion that there is a demand for allotments (for the labouring population) in the borough, urban district or parish (and that such allotments cannot be obtained at a reasonable rent and on reasonable conditions by voluntary arrangement between the owners of land suitable suitable for such allotments and the applicants for the same) the council shall provide a sufficient number of allotments and let such allotments to persons (belonging to the labouring population) resident in the borough, district, or parish and desiring to take the same”. “The Small Holdings and Allotments Act, 1908” in Mitchell (1924: 60). 8. This point was developed by Crouch and Ward (1997: 9). 9. This is suggested by many interviews of British people recalling their childhood in the Edwardian period in the oral history project by Thompson and Lummis (2009). See in particular interviews n° 143, 378, 383, 428, 449 and 433.

ABSTRACTS

If allotment gardening remained until recently a relatively under-researched aspect of leisure history, it has become, in the last few years, the object of considerably more detailed attention. The present paper attempts to present a synthesis of this work which has considerably enriched our understanding of this form of leisure. Not only does the history of allotment gardening in Great Britain challenge traditional dichotomies between work and leisure, but it also shows how gardening was embedded in a complex web of meanings and political relations. While allotments used to be described as a rather depoliticised and consensual form of recreation, recent historical work indeed shows that its effects were rather more complex and at times empowering than was assumed.

Si le jardinage communautaire est resté jusqu' à récemment un aspect relativement peu étudié de l'histoire des loisirs, il est devenu, ces dernières années, l'objet d'une analyse beaucoup plus détaillée. Le propos du présent article est de présenter une synthèse de ce travail qui a considérablement enrichi notre compréhension de cette forme de loisirs. Non seulement l'histoire des jardins communautaire en Grande-Bretagne remet en question les dichotomies traditionnelles entre le travail et les loisirs, mais elle montre aussi comment le jardinage était ancré dans un réseau complexe de significations et de relations politiques. Alors que les jardins communautaires étaient autrefois décrits comme une forme de récréation plutôt dépolitisée et consensuelle, les récents travaux historiques montrent en effet que leurs effets étaient plutôt plus complexes et parfois habilitants qu'on ne le pensait.

INDEX

Mots-clés: jardinage, Royaume-Uni, loisirs, jardins communautaires Keywords: allotment gardening, gardening, United Kingdom, leisure

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AUTHOR

ARNAUD PAGE Senior Lecturer, at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. After initial work on the history and institutionalisation of the social sciences in Great Britain, particularly in connection with the establishment of the London School of Economics (1895-1914), Arnaud Page's current research project focuses on the evolution of knowledge and techniques in the field of soil management. This issue is being studied mainly through the globalisation of the nitrogen cycle (chemical fertilizers) in the British world between 1840 and the end of the Second World War. Contact: page.arnaud [at] gmail.com

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The Relation Between Production, Labor Regimes and Leisure Forms: From slavery to digital capitalism

Olivier Frayssé

Introduction

1 The advent of the digital age has profoundly transformed the work and leisure environments of a growing number of people all over the world, and in many ways blurred the frontier between these two human activities, so that a reappraisal of the relationship between work and leisure is in order. To examine this changing relationship, one needs first to see how it has evolved over time. The focus here will be on the history of the relationship under specific conditions, capitalism, and in one country, the United States of America. For the historical background of this issue, we can draw on numerous studies of leisure activities that have pointed to their relations to specific historical and geographical, hence cultural work environments, and a few studies of the relationship itself. In their Work and Leisure, John T. Haworth and A. J. Veal have collected a wealth of information based on recent research on theoretical approaches and historical analyses (Haworth and Veal 2004). While they have stopped short of exploring the specific changes in leisure forms that the digital era has effected, they provide useful theoretical tools and explore many interesting issues. The second edition of Kenneth Roberts’ Leisure in Contemporary Society (2006) devotes some space to this specific issue. On the other hand, the subject of leisure per se has not often been dealt with specifically by students of the digital era, who have focused more on work practices and organization, communication issues and economic mechanisms. In this regard, Payal Arora’s inspirational The Leisure Commons, A Spatial History Of Web 2.0 (2014) stands out as the one book that explores the issues of leisure in the digital age from an historical perspective, incorporating the work / leisure issue in its discussion of the concept of the commons, from gardens and parks to public spaces in general.

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2 This paper has three objectives: first, to provide a theoretical approach inspired by Marx and Mingione to the connection between the way we work and the way we engage in leisure, based on the concepts of labor regime and production regime. Second, to present evidence of what this approach can contribute to the cultural history of the United States, and finally, to provide an assessment of the work / leisure relationship in the era of “digital capitalism”, to use the phrase coined by Dan Schiller (1999).

3 But first, we need to give a definition of capitalism, then explore the work / leisure dichotomy under capitalism. Then we will be able to define the notions of labor regime and regimes of production and see how it can be used to make sense of leisure forms in the history of the United States. Finally, we will see how the changes in work and leisure patterns that have occurred in the digital era confirm the central hypothesis, that labor regimes and production regimes to a very large extent determine leisure forms.

1. Capitalism

4 For a student of capitalism, Marx is not a bad place to start. When reading Marx, we can notice that he deals with the capitalist mode of production in two different ways.

1.1. The capitalist mode of production as one

5 First, he describes the capitalist mode of production as one, which can be distinguished from previous ones such as Asiatic or feudal. It is distinguished from the outset by two characteristic features: first, it produces its products as commodities; second, surplus- value is the direct aim and determining motive of production. “Capital essentially produces capital, and does so only as long as it produces surplus-value.” (Marx 1976 vol. 3: 1020).

6 In a footnote to the fourth German edition of Marx’s Capital, Friedrich Engels claimed that “the English language has the advantage of possessing two separate words for these two different aspects of labour” (Marx 1990: 138n16). The word work refers to all activities that produce differentiated values in use (a chair, a tomato, a show), regardless of the social context, while labor points to what produces undifferentiated values in exchange, labor time being the measure of this value. Unpaid labor time generates surplus value for the capitalist.

7 The production and capitalist appropriation of surplus value is obtained from human labor in two different forms. The first form is market subordination, when the appropriation of surplus value is done through what looks like market operations. This was the case of the putting out system that prevailed in the textile and clothing industry in England in the 18th century, the Lyon fabrique system in France that continued into the 19th century, or the price lists negotiated between carpenters and builders in the days of the Young Republic in the US: while the workers retained ownership of the means of production, they depended so much on capitalists for raw material inputs and access to markets that they had to work long hours and thereby create value for the capitalists who fixed the prices at which they bought their productions, below the full exchange value of the commodities they were producing.

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This is what takes place today for “independent contractors”, “atypical workers”, or Uber drivers.

8 The second form involves an expropriation of the means of production of the workers by the capitalists and establishment of the wage relation, which involves formal subordination of labor to capital. Formal subordination under capitalism can take various forms: slavery, the master/servant relationship, and wage-based labor contracts, whether life-long employment, at will employment, zero-hour contracts, etc. This definition does not exist with Marx, for whom the distinction between formal subsumption and real subsumption points to something else, but what we are interested in here is not economic subjection but the social form of exploitation, which impacts the degree of control that capitalists have to exert on leisure forms.

9 The capitalist mode of production is characterized by the dominant part played by capitalist production in total production. Hence, Marx speaks of more or less developed capitalist modes of production, depending on the proportion of total production that is organized on capitalist principles, i.e., that produces values in exchange. There is no doubt, according to that definition, that we have been living under capitalism for at least two centuries, and have witnessed an extension of the capitalist mode of production everywhere and in every domain. On the other hand, identifying particular moments and specific spaces in this development of capitalism, particular capitalist modes of production, is also a necessity for the student of social and cultural history trying to make sense of leisure forms.

1.2. The capitalist mode of production as many

10 Capitalism involves “constant and daily revolutions in the mode of production” (Marx 1976, vol.3: 372), which suggests that each of these little daily “revolutions” changes some of the features of the capitalist mode of production while not altering its nature, which is to produce capital. When considering longer periods, Marx himself described a succession of stages: pre-industrial, where we can observe that market subordination is predominant as far as capital is concerned, and industrial, where formal subordination becomes the norm, when a labor contract is substituted for a commercial contract. Later students of capitalism paid attention to other dimensions of the conditions in which surplus value was produced: observers of the distribution of capital and the mechanisms through which it extracts surplus value speak of monopoly capitalism, financial capitalism, imperialism, state monopoly capitalism, “Wal-Mart” capitalism. Authors focusing on the characteristics of formal subordination, often in relation to the technical aspects of production identify pre-Fordism, Fordism and post-Fordism. Observers of the technical dimension of labor processes and the relation it bears with the mode of surplus-value production come up with concepts such as pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial, digital, cognitive capitalisms, etc.

11 Furthermore, the development of the capitalist mode of production does not happen in a vacuum, but under specific technical, geographical and historical – therefore cultural – circumstances, hence a variety of modes of capitalist production, which led observers to distinguish between models: “Rhineland”, “Neo-Confucianist”, “Anglo-Saxon”, etc. (Albert 1991).

12 The history of capitalism in the US can similarly be considered as a succession of stages, each marked by the predominance of one mode of capitalism, and also by regional

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variations, the case of Southern slavery as a mode of formal subordination under capitalism being the more visible.

1.3. The notions of labor regimes and regimes of production

13 This study of the connection between stages of capitalism and leisure forms will focus on two dimensions of these stages: the labor regimes in operation at one stage, and the production regimes.

14 I use labor regimes in the Mingione (1997: 158) sense: “the relatively coherent and permanent set of social rules which enable to mobilize the energy of workers in typical forms.” The typical forms would be, in the US case, slave, servant, wage earner (occasional, seasonal, at a point in the lifecycle, long life employment, professional mobility etc.), a particular role in a family production unit (artisan’s shops, agricultural or retail establishments), free-lancer / independent contractor, etc. This also involves culture and ideology, race and sex / gender assignations, etc. In other words, the concept addresses the question of what makes you work in a typical form.

15 The notion of production regimes is inspired by Marxism (capitalism as many modes of production, i.e. ways of producing commodities) and especially Gramsci’s approach to the Fordist system (Gramsci 1977): the typical forms of the work / labor process, which have an immediate effect on workers’ life at work. Production regimes are constantly revolutionized under capitalism, because of changes in technology linked with the advancement of sciences and techniques and the changing organic composition of capital (“labor saving devices”) under the pressure of competition and ultimately the iron laws of financial capitalism (which is the phase when financial capital becomes the driver rather than the auxiliary of production). In other words, the concept addresses the question of what working under specific conditions, in typical forms, does to you.

16 Several labor regimes may coexist on the same territory and at the same time, while one regime, because it concentrates the bigger share of value production or mobilizes the most important legal and institutional resources, is dominant. For example, in the Antebellum South, slavery (with several slavery sub-regimes depending on the nature of the occupation and the localization of the activity) was the dominant labor regime, but it coexisted competitively with independent farming, artisans, servants, apprenticeships, various types of free labor employment arrangements, etc. In the US, during the 1920-1970 period, original Fordism (the regimentation of workers that explicitly inspired both Communist Russia and Nazi Germany) and then what the French regulationist school called the “Fordist Compromise” (after the successful class struggles of the 1930s and the consolidation of the system during the war which made the production regime less oppressive) was the dominant production regime, which transformed the labor regime, but it coexisted with other regimes of production involving self-employment and non-Fordist work arrangements and prolonged the life of previous labor regimes, especially in the rural South. The dominant labor regime interacts with secondary regimes and profoundly influences society and culture, but is constantly in tension with the specificities of evolving regimes of production. For example, the temporalities associated with a labor regime, whether long (preparation for productive activity, productive phase, non-productive phase) or short (work day, week, year) become structuring elements of social life and cultural production that the revolutionizing of production regimes constantly challenges.

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17 Articulating the two concepts enables us to understand specific situations and evolutions. Let us take two examples from the history of the textile industry in the Antebellum United States, in Massachusetts and Georgia.

18 In Massachusetts, “the Boston Associates, pioneer American industrialists, had built up Lowell and other towns like it to overcome early nineteenth-century rural and village prejudices and fears about factory work and life and in their regulation of working- class social habits hoped to assure a steady flow of young rural women (‘girls’) to and from the looms.” (Gutman 550). The case of the “Lowell girls”, who were not only well- paid, but encouraged to engage in genteel pursuits in their free time, shows how the prevailing labor regime (essentially rural, with a traditional restriction of women’s labor to the domestic economy and specific farming tasks, etc.) shaped the production regime in a first period (from 1814 to the mid 1830s). Then, the changes in the production regime resulting from competition (here, the severity of the clock, the intensification of work, reductions in wages, etc.) resulted in New England women organizing, making demands, striking, and then leaving the labor force (they were replaced by Irish immigrants). This helped shape the emerging labor regime as New England moved to an industrializing wage-based society.

19 In the Southern textile mills, the dominant labor regime, slavery, facilitated the creation of modern textile mills. Quoting a mill owner, Randall M. Miller observes: “In comparing the raw, undisciplined New England workers with bondsmen fresh from the fields, he favored the blacks. They were ‘early trained to habits of industry and patient endurance’.” (Miller 476). But the production regime soon challenged the labor regime: “The masters recognized their dependence on the bondsmen by offering incentives and rewards free time, overpayment, and internal mobility - to spur them on. Failing that, the masters inflicted punishment, but their growing dependence on slaves militated against excessive, sustained brutality, for the blacks would have none of it.” (Miller 474). Since the Civil War put an end to slavery, there is no way of knowing what changes the industrial production regime would have brought to the labor regime that was slavery.

20 The tension between a preexisting labor regime and a changing regime of production results ultimately in a change in the labor regime: for a while, the reshaped labor regime is in tune with the production regime, but the latter will change sooner or later, and tensions will reappear. During the period where the two regimes are aligned, the production regime is part of the labor regime, since it becomes the “normal” or “standard” way to engage in typical production activities, like assembly-line or waitress work in the 1940s.

21 But one can say that the labor regimes always contain the production regimes as one of their components. The stigma or valorization attached to a particular production regime (part of the old labor regime or of an emerging one) are part of the prevailing labor regime: the caste systems in Asia codified that dimension of labor regimes; in the West, it is rather cultural systems that define “good” and “bad” production regimes at a given time within a labor regime. The tensions born from the disappearance, due to changes in the production regime, of the place one’s occupation used to have in the labor regime (underpaid, procedure-driven teachers), or the emerging of a new labor regime in one’s production regime (on-call nurses) are cases in point.

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22 The tension between labor regimes and production regimes participates in the shaping of class conflicts, influences the modes of organization of workers, and helps define the framework in which leisure activities are conducted.

2. Production and reproduction

23 Obviously, the forms of leisure of laboring classes, rather than those of the “leisure class” identified by Veblen (Veblen 1899), are what we are interested here. How can we conceptualize leisure for the purpose of this inquiry? I will use the definition of leisure as residual (Roberts 1999: 5), not only in time management (time freed from working and other obligations), but also, fundamentally, in terms of power (moments when a person is left to her own devices, free to do what she pleases). As a matter of fact, the word leisure (licere) has its roots in the notion of the license, permission, given to an individual to do something else than what is expressly demanded by those exercising power over her by virtue of the type of subordination that shapes their relationship.

24 This definition is consistent with the observation by Marx that “the realm of freedom begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends” (Marx vol.3: 959-960). This labor determined by necessity has two forms: productive labor, that produces surplus-value, and reproductive labor, which reproduces this labor power. We can thus distinguish between a sphere of production, where the labor power of humans is expended, and the sphere of reproduction, where it is reproduced. The sphere of leisure is included in the sphere of reproduction, as we can see in the language of “rest and re-creation”, entertainment, which comes from entretien, in the sense of maintenance, and also amusement, or desport, as a necessary diversion from the torture that is work in one of its dimensions (Frayssé 2014). Leisure is only a part of that sphere, that includes sleep, and reproductive labor, usually performed by women, such as preparing food, clothing, rearing the next generation of workers, etc.

25 There is obviously a contradiction between the necessity for employers, especially direct employers (in the case of formal subordination) to relax control during a specific leisure time (whether as paternalistic charity or as included in a labor contract) to enable reproduction, and the necessity to keep control to ensure restoration of control when back to work both in terms of ability to work, willingness to work and submission to control, which in turn depends on the production regime. Indirect employers (in the case of market subordination) must also pay attention to the leisure time of workers to make sure that enough manpower is available (this depends on labor market conditions) and that workers will be willing to engage in further “commercial” relations when rested. This explains the huge role of employers, the ruling class as such, in organizing the leisure time of workers, through direct control, social control, notably in the form of morality (since licere and decere, what ought to be done, the decent thing, have always been correlated, issues of morality inform the debate on what is permitted), and with the help of political authorities. Their actions inform the labor regimes, since this social control determines “the relatively coherent and permanent set of social rules which enable to mobilize the energy of workers in typical forms”.

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Diagram 1: the original division between production and reproduction spheres

26 Three questions arise: what is the sphere of necessity and where does it end, or conversely, what is the space reserved for leisure? To which extent is employer control over the sphere of what is permitted necessary? How is this control exercised: through prohibition, injunction, education, seduction? The question that we shall deal with within the space of this article is the issue of control.

27 Under capitalism, one obvious dimension of the control needed over the leisure sphere is the maximization of the consumption sphere within the leisure sphere, as soon as the wage society is in place: workers must buy and consume what has been produced so that surplus value is realized. This became particularly true when mass production demanded mass consumption, and organized consumer credit (as opposed to store credit) developed at the end of the 19th century. The turning point in the development of consumer credit was indeed 1919, when General Motors created General Motors Acceptance Corporation, its financing arm, which was one of the factors that helped it surpass Ford in the mid-1920s. As Daniel Boorstin wrote, “it was hardly an exaggeration to say that the American standard of living was bought on the installment plan” (Boorstin 426).

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Diagram 2: the growth of consumption activities in the reproduction sphere

28 The other dimension is the social control of what is done in leisure times and spaces. The degree of social control over the leisure sphere of the laboring classes exercised by the class in power depends mainly on three dimensions of the labor regime: first, the nature of the labor process and what it demands from the workers (production regime): what kind of work is performed, hence what is required for the reproduction of the labor power of these workers (for example, some types of labor allow for, and sometimes require drunkenness to offset the most terrifying and gruesome aspects of the tasks, as soldiers know, whereas others demand sobriety); second, the mode of subordination of workers, i.e. how much and which type of control is needed / available during leisure time; thirdly, the type of class formation and struggle, expressed both quantitatively in the demands of the workers for more time “off the cross”, and qualitatively in the aspirations to autonomy during leisure time of the laboring class, that translate into hiding, transgression, negotiation, and revolt. Since leisure spaces / times are limited, competition between the classes, sexes, and races, for these spaces introduces another dimension of conflict. Thus the production regimes, the labor regimes and their interaction and conflictual character, together with other types of social conflicts define and structure the leisure times and spaces. Both the productive and reproductive spheres contain dispositifs, to use the Foucauldian notion, but the people that are meant to behave in a certain way by them constantly challenge these dispositifs in several ways, and this also holds true in the realm of leisure.

3. Practical application of these notions to US history

29 To illustrate the usefulness of these notions to understand the history of leisure in the US, four examples from different periods may be shortly mentioned.

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30 The first example is that of the slave holidays. One dimension of these holidays that was regularly reported by former slaves was that slaveholders insisted on getting the slaves drunk during these holidays, where they enjoyed a degree of freedom. They got sick for want of habit, so that a connection between freedom, foolishness and pain was established in their minds, and they returned to work happily (Douglass 47-8). Here we can see how subordination during the leisure time served to enforce the disciplines of hard labor in working periods. Douglass’s and other slaves’ resistance to the getting drunk schemes of masters, also based on Christian morality, was evidence of the larger conflict about the institution of slavery itself (Frazier 52).

31 The second example is that of public parks, which were largely designed to provide clean and Americanizing leisure for 19th century workers, especially immigrants, as part of establishing a labor regime consistent with industrialization. In his address to the American Social Science Association of 1870, Frederick Law Olmsted made a case for public parks as first enabling the reproduction of the labor power of workers in the unhealthy urban environment: “Is it doubtful that it does men good to come together in this way in pure air and under the light of heaven, or that it must have an influence directly counteractive to that of the ordinary hard, hustling working hours of town life?” (Larice and Macdonald 42). But the moral imperative, providing an alternative to unclean and immoral pastimes is just as important: Again, consider how often you see young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks […]. There is nothing among them or about them which is adapted to bring into play a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness, or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search of physical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink, and eat all manner of vile things. Whether on the curb- stones or in the dramshops, these young men are all under the influence of the same impulse which some satisfy about the tea-table with neighbors and wives and mothers and children, and all things clean and wholesome, softening, and refining (Larice and Macdonald 42).

32 And the park is the place where Victorian ideals of genteel family life, complete with gender roles, can be impressed on the masses. Olmsted describes the achievements of New York’s Central Park: There is one large American town, in which it may happen that a man of any class shall say to his wife, when he is going out in the morning: “My dear, when the children come home from school, put some bread and butter and salad in a basket, and go to the spring under the chestnut tree where we found the Johnsons last week. I will join you there as soon as I can get away from the office. We will walk to the dairy-man's cottage and get some tea, and some fresh milk for the children, and take our supper by the brook-side” and this shall be no joke, but the most refreshing earnest. (Larice and Macdonald 43).

33 As a matter of fact, many workers rapidly turned these leisure spaces into political spaces where they would express their aspirations for “time for what we will”, which often fell short of Victorian expectations in terms of behavior and included demands for the 8-hour day (Rosenzweig 1983).

34 A third example would be the totalitarian organization of leisure under Ford, when the harsh demands of the regime of production on the assembly-line required an overhaul of the labor regime. Off-duty workers were enrolled in sporting activities to keep them healthy, were required to attend church services and educational courses to keep them moral, and the fitting character of their behavior during their time off was

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scientifically organized and monitored by Ford’s “Sociological department” which functioned as an engineering department of dispositifs and a secret police. The aim was to prepare the workers for the unrelenting disciplines of the assembly line, and temperance was of the essence (Ford was a staunch supporter of Prohibition… and a promoter of the 40-hour week, so that workers could have leisure). Workers resisted the disciplines imposed on both labor time and leisure time by organizing inside the factory and taking over the management of leisure activities (Lichtenstein 1995). At the same time, one way to adapt while at work in the Fordist factory, as shown by the famous study by Michael Burawoy (Burawoy 1979), was to inject into the labor process itself elements traditionally associated with leisure, such as play, thus proving Huizinga right in his anthropological approach of play as a quintessentially human activity (Huizinga 1951).

35 Contemporary examples abound. One can mention the importance of the leisure activities of workers to recruiters in order to find the appropriate candidate for a specific job within a specific labor regime: recruiters, looking mainly for healthy temperate churchgoers in Fordist days now target diverse types, such as humanitarian activists or extreme sports adepts, who have perfected their particular working skills in their leisure time.

4. Leisure and work in the Digital Age: solution and dissolution?

36 One of the promises of the Digital age was to make work more like play, a leisure-like activity, thus providing a solution to the problem posed by the competition between the time one has to devote to labor and time “off the cross”, free time, a competition that has always been at the center of class struggles. Much has been written about the blurring frontier between work and play, work time and leisure time, workspaces and leisure spaces (Scholz 2012).

4.1. The myth of the idealized digital production regime

37 In a typical Google work environment, members of the “creative class” (Florida 2003) develop new ideas while playing table tennis and toy with them when back in front of their screens. In the production regime of the “symbolic analysts” identified by Robert Reich (1991), lifestyles born with the counterculture are often a prerequisite for recruitment in the cultural industries and no obstacle in the hiring of geeks.

38 Indeed the counterculture was essentially a rebellion against Fordism that took place in the leisure sphere, but paid attention to the production sphere and looked for a change in both spheres, and in the connection between them: in the countercultural project, mass production by robotized workers would be replaced by customized artisan productions, consumption was to be tailored to the needs of individuals and not the necessary mass outcome of mass production (Frayssé 2015). The concept of digital artisan developed by Barbrook (1997) accounts for the changes to be made on the production side. On the consumption side, the sharing economy would replace the vertical submission of consumers to marketing schemes of companies, both equalizing and inferiorizing, by cooperation and dialogue between producers and consumers, among consumers themselves, and even coproduction by producers and consumers

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(one of the meanings of prosumerism), on a horizontal plane. Because of its anti-Fordist origins, participants in the counterculture could adapt to, and inform, this obviously post-Fordist production regime, reshape the labor regime accordingly, and thus provide an ideology for new aspects of contemporary capitalism. As a matter of fact, the cultural paradigm of the new labor regime is so strong that even the logistics employees at Amazon, who perform drudgework in a Fordist-Taylorist dispositif, are constantly reminded that they are supposed to “work hard, have fun, make history” (Malet 2013).

39 The result is that what was touted as a solution to the contradiction between two types of human activities, work and play, seems to have resulted in the dissolution of these categories for the tiny minority that “works hard, has fun, and makes history.” One is tempted to question the reality of even this production regime in terms of autonomy, though, since the economic and social pressure on these “knowledge workers” is huge in terms of economic performance (production) and stage performance (be a team member and play with your teammates).

40 The frontier between work and play might also look blurred for the millions who perform a growing part of their work and spend a growing part of their leisure time on their computers, tablets and smartphones, but a closer analysis of their production regimes is needed, and, first, of the conditions for their existence.

4.2. The conditions of the new production regimes

41 First, the productive sphere is expanded when consumer goods are turned into producer goods. Most visible is the triple use of computers, tablets and smartphones, which are versatile by nature. One can work on them, but also use them to purchase on-line entertainment, to play and communicate. The omnipresence of these machines in our daily lives has consequences on the home / travel / work categories: the combination of spatial and time arrangements are infinite, as you work “in the comfort of your own home”, attend to your emails in the bus, and take five minutes here and there in your office to surf on the Net, text or email family and friends.

42 Second, the “sharing economy” turns consumer goods such as houses (Airbnb) and cars (Uber) into producer goods. These are also highly symbolic goods, symbolic of the home, the private, autonomy and power (“an Englishman’s home is his castle”), of freedom from the obligation to grow capital and freedom to do “what we will”. Subjectively, these goods become tainted with the stigma of obligation as we interiorize the profit motive into our interiors. Objectively, the work we perform to get our houses ready for “guests” and our cars tidy, the handing out of house keys, the driving of clients, etc. produces surplus value, one part of which is appropriated by the platform we depend on to rent out our possessions and market our labor power. This is clearly a form of market, not formal, subordination, although Uber drivers in the US have successfully challenged the commercial nature of their contract, as part of the campaign against misclassification that has been going on for several years. It is part of the new labor regime marked by market subordination.

43 Third, the labor market relies increasingly on “amateurs”, who engage in “serious leisure” for free, to establish themselves as brands, or for profit. Wikipedians produce what encyclopedia writers used to get paid for.

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44 What labor regimes are permitted by these new conditions, and what are the controls that are exerted on workers during their leisure time? Here we must distinguish between what the workers usually consider as work, and what comes out as labor because it produces surplus value but is not regarded as work by the people who provide that labor, i.e., some forms of prosumer labor.

4.3. The new labor regimes of the digital age

45 The new paradigmatic production regime tends to be the logged-in labor regime (Huws 2016). Wherever you happen to be, work starts when you log in, and stops when you log out. It is the contemporary version of the clock-in regime used in factories. Here we must distinguish between formal and market subordination, which imply different and competing labor regimes, and between different types of work.

46 When labor is formally subordinated, that is when the wage relationship exists formally, or is disguised as independent contract work (Uber), the logged-in regime works in two different ways, depending on the nature of the tasks.

47 For repetitive tasks, there is a strict monitoring of the number of hours spent actually using whatever software your company or “client” has decided you should be working with, the length and content of your conversations if you are a call-center operative, etc. The labor process itself is thus closely monitored, and we can speak of this production regime as neo-Taylorism. The distinction between labor time and time off is clear-cut. The training period for these tasks is very short, there is an ample pool of workers willing and able to take up these jobs, including on-call workers, and new employees are not expected to work as quickly as experienced ones. Thus absenteeism or turnover are not a problem. This is different from the situation on assembly lines, where the need to have the same workers showing up every morning to work at a predetermined rhythm was the reason why Ford had to control both their loyalty to the firm with high wages and their capacity to perfectly perform their tasks, which had led him to make the reproduction of their labor power a scientific matter, and hence to control their activities during their leisure time. The only control that the service companies we are dealing with here need on the leisure time of their employees is control of the image of their companies, and absence of anti-capitalist activities. Here, the surveillance tools provided by the Internet, especially the monitoring of Facebook profiles, enables firms to exclude applicants or fire employees when they have engaged in activities that damage the company’s image or pose a threat of labor organizing, a surveillance that has been extended to tenants by landlords (Dewey 2016).

48 When tasks are more diverse, and do not need to be performed immediately and / or sequentially, the logged-in labor regime does not involve control of the process, but of the result. You may log in at any time you want, provided you get things done. The time pressure is not applied during long sequences, bounded by clear limits, but throughout your life, as long as you are employed. Catching up with professional emails at any moment is routinely expected by supervisors, colleagues and customers alike, so that every second of your waking lives is potentially or actually devoted to work. The same surveillance tools of the leisure time apply, i.e. as far as the image of the company or the willingness to organize are concerned. Here, leisure monitoring through Social Networking Sites (and forced participation in them) brings employer’s control of the leisure sphere to unprecedented heights (Fuchs et al. 2013). And, conversely, a case has

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been made for allowing workers to wander away from their tasks to get a breathing space by cyber-loafing to increase productivity, thus also “manufacturing consent” in the Burawoy sense (Chen and Lim 2011).

49 When market subordination prevails, the division between complex tasks and repetitive tasks remains somewhat valid in terms of time management but get blurred too: for complex work like tasks contracted for on Upwork (the 2015 new name for result of a merger between Elance and oDesk in 2014), such as writing, translating, fixing software bugs, etc., the usual commercial contract spells an expected result and a deadline. It is up to the freelancer to manage her time, but the pressure of the usually short deadline means that when you accept a task, you must forget about time off for the duration.

50 For repetitive tasks such as performed by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, each task (HIT) comes in with an amount of time in which the worker must complete the HIT, and an amount of time after which the HIT will no longer be available to workers, which means an apparently stricter discipline. In both cases, looking for tasks that you want to perform on the basis of labor time/reward, the reputation of clients, etc. is a very time-consuming task that you are not paid for, and which also creates surplus-value for the platforms. In both cases, the consequence is that leisure time, as residual time off work, is to be found between moments of task searching and task performing. Here economic necessity is the primary engine.

51 In terms of control of your leisure time, surveillance is not performed by the final clients, but by the platforms, that check both your appreciation of their services and your willingness to organize with other workers to obtain better rates by calling employers to account. Workers escape this surveillance by setting up their own platforms, where they exchange anonymously on these subjects. Unsurprisingly, low- paid workers, geographically concentrated in the US and Canada, have more experience in that field than better-paid freelancers, working from the whole world, the US but also India, the Philippines or Africa and the Middle-East, and have been using sites like Turker Nation and MTurk Forum, or even installed the Turkopticon application, which enables them to offer find “ways of supporting one another in context of their existing practices. The system allows workers to make their relationships with employers visible and call those employers to account.” (Irani and Silberman 616).

4.4. Specificities of prosumer labor

52 Under the name prosumer labor or work, we can distinguish five completely different realities: first, the coproduction of goods and services by consumers, which was the countercultural project and exists marginally at the artisan level, but has long been the norm for the professions, as patients describe their symptoms, comply with prescriptions, report progress, etc., or when clients provide the material that lawyers work on; second, the shifting of tasks from the company to the consumers: it started with self-service “super”-markets in the 1930s, and has profited immensely from digital devices, starting with the touch-tone keypad in 1963 (Palm 2015) and culminated when millions could navigate along the pages of platforms to input product details and delivery information, effect payment, download tickets, vouchers and invoices (and

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print them originally, but increasingly just download them on a device). These two first types do not appear like leisure at all, it is work all right and feels like it.

53 The third form of prosumer labor is the “labor of watching” described by Dallas Smythe for TV viewers forced to watch ads and thereby build brands and which is omnipresent on the Web (Fuchs 2015).

54 The fourth form, content generation, has all the characteristics of leisure activities: posting a photo on Instagram or Facebook, writing a comment on a newspaper article, “liking” a product, brand, comment, event or person on Facebook, rating hotels on Tripadvisor, etc. is done voluntarily, it often contains less of the “toil and trouble” characteristics that Adam Smith ascribed to labor and provided as a rationale why labor should be paid (Smith vol. 1 1976: 82) than bridge, bassoon or softball playing. Viewed subjectively, it is leisure pure and simple. From an objective economic viewpoint, since these contents become the platform’s property, it is labor, generating surplus value that is appropriated by the platform. The success of this type of crowdsourcing depends on the crowd’s members’ willingness to spend some of their leisure time in these particular leisure activities, and platforms compete for this leisure / labor time, via reminder emails or, in the case of Facebook, by integrating all the communication needs of users into the platform.

55 The fifth and last form is data generation. The data we produce routinely and more or less unwittingly when surfing the Net at leisure during our leisure time are stored and analyzed for a variety of commercial purposes. “Big data” gathering is the digital form of the labor of being watched. Cookies that help track consumer behavior are hosted for free in the Internet user’s digital device, whereas AC Nielsen pays (a little) to install its “people meters” in the homes of the people it wants to watch (and for the labor of pressing the buttons to tell them whether you are watching or not), and Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron) pays 45 dollars a month plus goodies to have you carry their device measuring your exposure to radio signals (Fong-Torres 2010). The difference with content generation is that the labor we provide is not connected to the form of leisure we engage in, but with the substance of our leisure, the time spent on leisure activities on the Net. The digital Fable of the bees has us buzzing around for our own diverse purposes and producing honey for the platforms.

56 Since consumption and leisure activities have themselves become part of the production sphere, the arrangement of the various spheres is reorganized.

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Diagram 3: the overlapping spheres in the digital era

Conclusion

57 In the forms of content generation and data production, and to some extent of exposure to ads, the digital era thus provides a solution to the contradiction between two imperatives of capital: the maximization of unpaid labor time versus the necessity to preserve reproductive time. The more time we spend surfing, the more labor we provide, and the more we reproduce our labor power, both for paid and unpaid work. The multiple pathologies that arise from spending our leisure time on the Net, starting with lack of physical exercise and inability to concentrate for long periods, or memory loss (Carr 2011) may have huge social and personal costs, but they usually do not get in the way of reproducing the specific types of labor power that are demanded by the digital economy, rather the opposite, since the forms of work and leisure activities, and the skills they develop, converge, so that, here again, the leisure forms are aligned with the labor regime.

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ABSTRACTS article uses the notions of stages of capitalism, labor regimes and production regimes to explore the relationship between the way people work and their leisure. It starts with a clarification of what is meant by the capitalist modes of production, proceeds to define labor and work regimes, and analyzes the specific demands made by various labor regimes and production regimes on the leisure time of workers, which it illustrates by examples taken from the history of leisure in the US. The advent of digital capitalism, rooted in the US, has profoundly transformed the work and leisure environments of a growing number of people all over the world, and in many ways blurred the frontier between these two human activities, so that a reappraisal of the relationship between work and leisure is in order, especially from the angle of prosumer capitalism, which is the subject of the last part.

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Cet article utilise les concepts de stades du mode de production capitaliste, de régime de travail et de régime de production pour explorer la relation entre la façon dont nous travaillons et nos loisirs. Dans un premier temps, la notion de mode de production capitaliste est explicitée, celles de régime de travail et de régime de production définies, et les conséquences de chaque régime de travail et de production sur les loisirs des travailleurs analysées, ce qui est illustré par des exemples tirés de l’histoire des loisirs aux États-Unis. L’avènement du capitalisme numérique, une invention américaine, ayant largement bouleversé à la fois les procès de travail et les loisirs, la relation entre les régimes de production et de travail du numérique et les loisirs est l’objet de la dernière partie, qui porte une attention particulière au travail du consommateur.

INDEX

Keywords: capitalism, labor regime, regime of production, digital capitalism, leisure, production, reproduction, United States, history, prosumerism Mots-clés: capitalisme, capitalisme numérique, régime de travail, régime de production, loisirs, production, reproduction, histoire, États-Unis, travail du consommateur, prosumérisme

AUTHOR

OLIVIER FRAYSSÉ Olivier Frayssé is Professor of American Studies at the University of Paris Sorbonne. A graduate of École Normale Supérieure and Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris he is affiliated to the Paris Sorbonne research center Histoire et Dynamiques des Espaces Anglophones, where he heads the Work, Culture and Society in Anglophone Countries research axis, which studies the specificities of Anglophone societies in relation to the issue of work and labor and focuses on work-related issues by taking account of the social and cultural contexts of these societies. Frayssé’s latest productions related to digital capitalism include “How the US Counterculture Redefined Work for the Age of the Internet”, in Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O’Neil (eds.), Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism: The US Matrix (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), “Is the Concept of Rent Relevant to a Discussion of Surplus-Value in the Digital World?”, in Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs, (eds.), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and “Guy Debord, a critique of modernism and Fordism: what lessons for today?”, in Emiliana Armano and Marco Briziarelli (eds.), The Spectacle Of ‘Free’ Labour: Reading Debord In The Context Of Digital Capitalism, Westminster University Press, forthcoming. Contact: fraysseo [at] aol.com.

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Varia

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Fighting Colonial Violence in “Indian Country”: Deconstructing racist sexual stereotypes of Native American Women in American popular culture and history

Sophie Croisy

1 In 2007, Amnesty International published a report entitled “Maze of Injustice: the failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA” (Amnesty 2007). This report is the result of a two-year investigation (in 2005 and 2006) among Native social activists, health workers, legal workers and Native rape survivors who testified on the state of violence against Native women in their tribal communities. This report also relied on statistical studies conducted throughout the U.S. by the Department of Justice. According to the report, “34.1 per cent of American Indian and Alaska Native women — or more than one in three — will be raped1 during their lifetime; the comparable figure for the USA as a whole is less than one in five” (Amnesty 14). The document indicates that “According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in at least 86 per cent of reported cases of rape or sexual assault against American Indian and Alaska Native women, survivors report that the perpetrators are non-Native men” (Amnesty 16). These worrisome figures do not, however, reflect the reality of sexual assaults against Native women according to the Amnesty International investigators as not all rape victims report the rape as they are afraid of being re-victimized or ignored by the police. This fear is explained in the report as the expression of a lack of trust in official government agencies due to centuries of traumatizing relations with them.

2 In October 2012, internationally renowned Ojibway author Louise Erdrich released her latest novel, The Round House, and won the National Book Award for fiction. This text illustrates the conclusions, sadly relevant nowadays, of the 2007 Amnesty International report as it deals with a case of sexual violence perpetrated by a non-Native man on a Native woman, on reservation premises. The text emphasizes the racist ideology

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behind the crime and the difficulty the victim and her family face, because of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction issues, to get the attacker prosecuted. The fact that nationally and internationally acclaimed Native writer Louise Erdrich felt compelled to write about this issue in the 2010s stresses the contemporaneity of racist sexual violence against Native women in the U.S. and the urgency of effective action against it. The text also stresses the legally numbing complexity of the relationship between federally recognized Native American tribes and the U.S. government, which prevents racist sexual crimes taking place on reservations from being punished. Despite the positive but limited effects of recent legal improvements, racist sexual violence against Native women remains a current and worrisome issue in the U.S. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate and make visible the complex web of contemporary practices and causes, both cultural and legal, which participate in explaining this painful situation. As part of that process, this article investigates contemporary instances of racist stereotyping of Native American women in American mainstream culture as well as their historical (cultural and legal) roots.

Contemporary racist stereotyping of Native American women

3 The colonial system progressively implemented in the young American colonies and subsequently reinforced by the American government of the new Republic has disseminated fallacious representations of Native cultures in order to justify decisions and actions taken against them in the context of an expansionist and civilizing mission: the theft of Native lands and the Native American genocide throughout the era of the Indian wars, governmental politics of assimilation of Native Americans and the implementation of the reservation system which has legalized Native communities' loss of sovereignty in matters of cultural practices and governance are the most visible traits of that mission.

4 The fallacious representations that have justified the dislocation of culturally complex and diverse Native communities have either mythologized (through stereotypes of the romantic/vanishing Indian, the Indian princess supporting the colonial process, the Indian saint as master work of the Christian missionary) or dehumanized (through the savage Indian, the drunk Indian, the dirty/disease-ridden Indian, the promiscuous “squaw” stereotypes) Native Americans.2 These representations were fabricated by discoverers, colonizers, politicians, fiction writers and journalists in the centuries of American colonization and expansion. Dehumanizing stereotypes were reinforced by the ideology of scientific racism popularized in the U.S. by eugenicist Madison Grant through his book The Passing of the Great Race published in 1916. They were promoted by 20th century policies of assimilation as well as mainstream cultural productions — the Hollywood industry, in the first half of the 20th century and through the Western genre, is responsible for the dissemination of negative images of Native Americans which have erased the historical, cultural and social reality of Native communities in the U.S.

5 Unfortunately, these degrading stereotypes are still with us today: the “savage Indian” has become the mascot of sports teams and contemporary hipster music bands throughout the U.S.; the drunk Indian remains a widespread representation which posits alcoholism as a Native cultural trait;3 and the over-sexualized Indian woman has

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become a global object of desire from the sexy Halloween Indian costumes for women available on clothing websites to contemporary “sexy squaw” performances found in fashion and music shows.

6 Contemporary examples of cultural appropriation pervade the music and fashion industries. If a number of contemporary American hipster music bands have adopted names that recall problematic images of Native Americans,4 the themes of their songs do not address issues related to Native American history or politics, nor do they address the role of certain music trends in reiterating these images and the violence they both carry and promote.

7 The reference, through the name, to problematic representations of Indianness (the blood-thirsty savage or the Noble savage are the images that are most often called upon in music band names) implies a historical and cultural decontextualization of the name. This contextual vacuum designifies the name and prevents it from being properly processed and understood through an analysis of its constructed origin and development. The signifier “Indian” thus becomes a floating one5 as it is detached from its referential contexts, but not for long as this lack of meaning ends as soon as it begins with the return of long-imposed, easily available and self-perpetuating fixed meanings — a trail of problematic signifiers — whose endurance has been tested through time. These meanings are one-dimensional, stereotypical representations and discourses about Native Americans found in American history books past and present, mainstream 20th century films, advertising and other popular culture media.

8 Fans of contemporary hipster music band Neon Indian (whose song lyrics are mostly about the effects on young adults of making love, losing love, taking drugs and drinking alcohol) experienced first-hand the effects of designification during a performance at the 2010 Bonnaroo music festival when a group of young, non-Indigenous women wearing headdresses, colorful feathers, and war paints on their naked breasts took over the stage as the band was singing their “Deadbeat Summer” hit (Keene 2010). The young women danced around to the beat and lyrics of a song about the summer-time reminiscence of a lost love.

9 Appropriation by the music and fashion industries of the Native American headdress is an issue that has been dealt with in the media on various occasions. This example of “playing Indian,” a long-winded process analyzed by Philip J. Deloria in his eponymous 1998 book (Deloria 1998) as a way to imagine and re-imagine American identities through time (and as a way for a culture group to perform domination upon another, through cultural appropriation) is an instance of cultural mimicry which, in the context of contemporary hipster culture, is often justified as a countercultural move towards the adoption of a revolutionary American identity (based on emancipatory experiences, though there is nothing emancipatory or revolutionary in making cultural appropriation consumable and marketable). As a matter of fact, Native Americans retain, within counterculture movements, this revolutionary aura as they have been — and still are, in more ways than one — historical obstacles to cultural imperialism in the U.S. However, relying on a name but depriving it of its cultural and historical heritage and then associating it with song lyrics that promote sex, drugs and alcohol, only allow for a caricatured, lampooned representation of Native cultures. The effect is a revival of hegemonic perceptions of Native Americans: Native culture as a dead culture — only a generic and empty name remains, and a problematic one too as it encompasses the whole of Native American communities as if they were one

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homogenous entity. This homogenous group is invested with hedonistic characteristics by non-indigenous cultural communities and thus falls back into stereotypical categories. This impromptu spectacle, completely disconnected from the song and its theme, is an instance of designification of the name which then re-activates the “drunk Indian” and “promiscuous squaw” stereotypes already contained in the word (Neon) “Indian.”

10 Cultural appropriation as a contemporary, neo-colonial practice of representing Native Americans by depriving them of their historical and cultural complexity is an issue that has been raised by the U.S. media, both Native and mainstream. However, the objectification and sexualization of Native American women in contexts of cultural appropriation is not yet receiving sufficient attention. The young ladies “playing Indian” at the Neon Indian concert offered a sexualized caricature of Native women, thus reinforcing the contemporaneity of the “promiscuous squaw” stereotype: a lurid, savage and sexually available Native woman. Similarly, in the fashion industry, Victoria’s secret 2012 infamous fashion show staged an overtly sexualized Karlie Kloss wearing a headdress on the runway (“Here We Go Again…” 2012): another sad example of cultural appropriation and stereotyping that harms the image of Native women and amplify their objectification and sexualization.

11 Accusations of cultural appropriation of Native American imagery have targeted a number of mainstream music artists, but one of the most recent and problematic instances, in the pop music industry, of racist and gender stereotyping of Native Americans is the music video of “Looking Hot,” a song from No Doubt’s 2012 Push and Shove album (No Doubt 2012). Angela R. Riley, a professor at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, wrote an open letter to No Doubt in response to the video and stated that “the video diminishes Native people and Native cultures while, simultaneously, co- opting Indians and indigeneity for exploitative gain. In essence, it represents the grossest kind of cultural misappropriation... Most importantly, however, the video is rife with imagery that glorifies aggression against Indian people, and, most disturbingly, denigrates and objectifies Native women through scenes of sexualized violence” (Riley 2012). No Doubt pulled the music video from the Internet after such accusations of cultural appropriation and promotion of racist and sexist violence, and making public apologies; however, the video remains easily available on the web, which raises the issue of the responsibility of global media, or rather their inability, in preventing the perpetuation of racist and sexist ideology.

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13 The song is about a woman who is “looking hot” and is very much conscious of the effect she has on those who look at her. The woman plays with the fact that she is sexy and further constructs her sexiness with clothes (“How is this looking on me?”) but also tells the onlookers that she, in fact, hides behind her “uniform” which she uses as a diversion, implying that her physical appearance covers up an emptiness inside. Though the song seems to allude to the loss of a woman's inner self in a society that focuses on superficial, consumerist ideals, its problematic “Native contextualization” blurs the intended message of the song rather than sustains it since the message and the chosen context for its diffusion are disconnected. Here again, designification is the

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rule as the intervention of Native American cultural (mis-)representations entails a loss of historical and cultural contextual meaning and the return of stereotypes.

14 The video opens with a shot on tipis erected in a prairie and a sexy-looking Gwen Stefani wearing a highly glamorized version of plains Indians' garments and regalia (or so we conclude since we are standing in a prairie), all of it shiny with gold and silver colors. The second scene is a close shot on Stefani who is riding a horse, her hair blowing in the wind. These opening shots recall the monolithic and stereotypical representation of Native Americans, in American popular culture, as plains Indians (living in tipis, wearing long hair and riding horses), a representation that gets interrupted by a quick change of setting as we then witness Gwen Stefani, hands tied with a rope, being dragged into the limits of an old Southern mission by two cowboys out of a traditional Western film—one quite nondescript and the other one looking like the famous Lone Ranger, but Tonto-less. This abrupt change of setting (from the prairie to the Southern desert) not only recalls the fast pace of colonialism during the American expansionist era and the fact that the very first target of the U.S. expansionist desires was the land, but it also represents Native cultures as easily and quickly delocalizable, thus trivializing displacement and dishonoring the memory of Native Americans who endured the tragedy of relocation. The quantity and multiplicity of instances of cultural appropriation are numerous in the video. Towards the end of the video, we learn that the “Native woman” played by Stefani and her male mate were captured during a battle, which is staged in the video, opposing cow-boys (fighting with guns) and Indians (fighting with bows and arrows and spears, of course), to then be brought to the pueblo. We also witness the representation of a war dance which, we guess, takes place before the battle and for which the music beat changes: from electronic beats throughout the song, we move to reggae beats for the purpose of the war dance representation. Moreover, shots with a guitarist and Gwen Stefani wearing over-feathered headdresses, shots with Gwen Stefani in a tipi filled with Native American and African tribal artifacts6 — and a wolf which symbolizes Native Americans' natural state, shots with aggressive and savage-looking Indians ready to go to war, all these images collide cultural “ingredients” from different ethnic groups as well as introducing and repeating images that sustain stereotypes of Native Americans (the savage Indian, the vanishing Indian) performed by white Americans (since a dead people cannot play its own part), and make for a visually and historically incomprehensible ethnocultural soup which deprives Native Americans, as well as their traditional objects and ceremonies, of cultural and historical worth and meaning. They also preclude any chance of modern resistance to cultural appropriation and other forms of violence (such as violence done to Native women against which tribal support is key) against Native cultures and people as the setting evokes a long gone past and the symbolic defeat, through the Indians versus cow-boys battle episode, of Native America against the nation's colonizing forces.

15 In the first scene, Gwen Stefani holds in her hand a long, crooked at the top, wooden stick which resembles a prayer stick, primarily used by medicine people, which implies that this “Native woman” is connected with the spiritual world and maybe imbued with shamanic powers. Medicine stick and sexy, shiny, garments are thus intimately connected, a collusion which recalls the problematic (to most forms of feminisms), because too rapid and restrictive, association between womanhood and sexuality when it comes to claiming power. This female power masquerade lasts only a second, however, and is quickly replaced by another kind of masquerade: that of her

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subordination to two cow-boys as we witness Gwen Stefani hands tied, up above her head, to some stake in the wall of an adobe house in the Southern village, and surrounded by the cowboys holding guns in their hands, one of them pointing his gun at the still sexy-looking (despite having been dragged in the dirt) prisoner, standing invitingly with her legs apart as she sings, “Take a good look, won’t you please, cause that's what I want.” This sexy pause and the demand for attention (“take a good look”) and action (“that's what I want” which recalls the expression “wanting it” as it applies to sexual intercourse) directed to the viewer—her first viewers being the cowboys/ jailers who are the first ones looking at her — conjure up once again the stereotype of the loose and promiscuous Native woman, thus denigrating Native women and once again reinscribing and thus justifying the violence of colonial ideology towards Native women's bodies then and now. The promiscuous squaw reference “endows...imperial agents with routinely unrecognized privilege or worse with the power and pleasures associated with dehumanizing others, while literally marking the lives and bodies of indigenous women” (King 97). The “sexy, promiscuous squaw” stereotype as well as other stereotypes of Native Americans revived in the video remind readers of the colonial strategies of appropriation and dispossession against which Native Americans have been fighting since the 1980s as they started reclaiming “rhetorical sovereignty (King 100), defined by Scott Richard Lyons as “a people’s control of its meaning” (Lyons 447), more precisely as “The inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in [the attempt to revive not their past, but their possibilities], to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse” (Lyons 449-450).

16 Though most of the artists who were accused lately of cultural appropriation by Native communities publicly apologized for it, it seems as though repetition is the motto as instances of cultural appropriation reoccur on a regular basis, from Seven Jacobs’ racist performance on The Today Show last June, wearing a particularly bulky headdress and faking the wrong Indian accent to present the weather forecast (Vrajlal 2016), to the more recent criticism over Free People’s Native-American-inspired line clothes. This fashion faux pas is the latest instance of a fashion brand appropriating Native cultural components for fashion effects.7 Here again, cultural appropriation is staged in a way that clearly illustrates the issue of objectification and sexualization of Native women. As a matter of fact, the website displays photo shots of women taking sexy pauses (mouth half open, legs naked, shirt open enough to see the upper part of a breast), carrying “flags” that look like feathered pipes, wearing headdresses, fringed purses, shoe leggings, or an Indian blanket (with very little clothing under it).8 No matter what the media is, women who are made to “play Indian” are almost systematically portrayed as highly sexualized.

17 Native communities have been waging a rhetorical war against the inappropriate, stereotypical use of names either imposed upon them — such as the word “Indian,” originally an exonym which is in fact a historical mistake — or pertaining to some of their communities — such as the word “squaw,” an Algonkian word which signifies “being female” and which has been turned by early North American colons into a derogatory, racist term as it has come to signify the sexual promiscuity of Native women. Stereotypical representations of Native women performed by non-Natives not only deny Native women the right to control public discourses about their identities, but also reinscribe over and over again in the national consciousness global negative stereotypes about Native womanhood which participate in devaluing, denigrating them

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and conjuring up the violence of conquest in contemporary attitudes and behaviors towards Native women. Racist and sexist cultural appropriation in the American mainstream music and fashion industries are performed by non-Native women and orchestrated by non-Native women and men, the ultimate goal being to market a product. The result is a spectacle which displays simplistic, perverted, historically and culturally inaccurate knowledge about “Native womanhood” which concatenate racist perspectives on Native cultures and patriarchal representations of womanhood inherited from colonialism. The manufacture of these myths about Native women took place over time and space. It is grounded in the colonial history of the U.S., a history which has repeatedly valued diverse forms of violence directed against Native women in the U.S.

The historical (cultural and legal) causes of violence against Native American women

18 In November 2014, a coalition of organizations demonstrated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a response to a strip club advertisement, “to protest the hyper- sexualized and defaming stereotypes of Indigenous women to promote stripping and which lends to support of human trafficking in Minnesota” (“Coalition to protest inappropriate…” 2014). This demonstration is one example of the complex web of actions taken by grassroot organizations across the country to fight against the targeting of Native women by sex-traffickers and the disproportionate percentage of Native women involved in commercial sex trade (Sweet 2015). This reality is the consequence of the concatenation of a number of issues facing Native women and communities in the U.S.9 (poverty, lack of job opportunities on reservations, poor self- esteem, a failing education system, land dispossession and the exploitation of natural resources on reservations, etc.), among which a history of objectification and dehumanization of Native women by the “great actors” of American history.

19 As a matter of fact, one important aspect of the colonial, racist project of the young American nation and its early governments was the control of Native bodies. As Luana Ross and Andrea Smith state in an essay entitled “Native Women and State violence,” colonizing forces at play in U.S. society have attempted “to eradicate [Natives’] very identity and humanity. They [have] attempt[ed] to transform Indian people from human beings into tobacco pouches, bridle reins, or souvenirs — an object for the consumption of white people” (Smith and Ross 1). This quote reminds us of the history of mutilation of Native bodies as a manifestation of colonial violence. One infamous example of such violence was supervised by Andrew Jackson during the Creek war of 1813-1814 when soldiers sliced strips of flesh from the bodies of about 800 women, men and children to be tanned and turned into bridle reins.

20 The violence inflicted to Native bodies in contexts of war and missionary work, and under assimilation policies and practices such as the boarding school experience, is a symptom of the historical representation of Native bodies as a form of pollution or infection: famous military man John Chivington is said to have pronounced the now famous line, “Kill and scalp all, big and little; Nits make lice” before launching the attack that led to the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in 1864 at Sand Creek where Native women, men and children were cut open, mutilated, scalped, murdered as they were the “disease” that threatened U.S. moral, cultural and geopolitical

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integrity. In the 19th century, Native bodies were constructed as dirty vessels that transported diseases in order to justify genocide. They were also marked by sexual perversity, but it is the colonial, racist ideology of early explorers and missionaries that produced the damaging stereotype of the “promiscuous squaw,” the evil counterpart of another famous stereotype, that of the Indian princess (fictional representations of Pocahontas or Sacagawea epitomize that stereotype). The “promiscuous squaw” stereotype was nourished by early missionary correspondences, captivity narratives, novels, paintings and then reproduced in scholarly works by American historians and writers in the 19th century. The white, Christian, heterosexist biases in these documents have created and then reinforced the problematic association between Native women and sexual sin. Native women were thus sexually violable since only “pure” bodies counted as human, hence the wholesale rape and mutilation of Native women's bodies during the Indian wars. Women were the targets of slaughter because they were overtly sexualized, objectified, dehumanized, and they were so partly because they secured the physical and cultural continuance of their “infectious” people against the colonial project of expansion and nation-building, a project which equated to nothing less than ethnic cleansing.

21 This heritage of violence done to Native women and promoted by the state in the 19th century remained vivid in the 20th century. Native American women were subjected, like poor women and women of color in general, to coercive population control practices through much of the 20th century. In the ’60s and ’70s, 25 % of Native women between 15 and 44 years old were sterilized without their consent under the authority of the Indian Health Service. The U.S. government is required to provide health care to federally recognized tribes since 1787 and tribal dependence for health services on the above-mentioned agency turned tribes into easy and “accessible victims” (Torpy 1) of institutionalized racism: “In the seventies […] a group of Indian Health Service physicians implemented an aggressive program of Native American sterilization. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, hospitals in just four cities sterilized 3,406 women […] between 1972 and 1976” (Black 400). Native women had to submit to sterilization as they were told that if they refused, they would lose welfare benefits or custody of their children.

22 What's more, throughout the history of the relationship between the American government and Native tribes, Native American women have been disenfranchised as the patriarchal workings of the colonial, and then young national institutions of the region were reproduced in dealing with tribes, no matter what their tribal organization was, in negotiation processes. Female leaders were thus pushed aside the political scene of American history and attempts by anthropologists, sociologists or historians at understanding the functioning of matriarchal societies were scarce until the 20th century. According to Hilary N. Weaver’s 2009 article entitled “The Colonial Context of Violence: Reflections on Violence in the Lives of Native American Women,” “The introduction of a patriarchal worldview espoused both in American society and in Christian institutions that vest power primarily in male leaders and conceptualize spirituality in terms of a male deity further undermined the roles of indigenous women […] For Native American women, historical trauma and contemporary social issues are [thus] intimately intertwined […] (Whitbeck et al. 2004)” (Weather 1555).

23 Before the modern era, a few Native American women pervaded American history and the white American imagination, from Pocahontas to Sacajawea to the famous generic

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Cherokee princess. These figures were noble, saintly, mythologized by the colonial imagination and did not represent the complex reality of the life and place of tribal women in their communities, but rather promoted the colonial desires of a national agenda. In the 20th century, the Hollywood industry offered a rather one-dimensional representation of Native women, that of the “Celluloid Maiden […] a young Native American woman who enables, helps, loves, or aligns herself with a white European American colonizer and dies as a result of that choice” (Marubbio ix). If in the early days of Hollywood movie industry Native women were portrayed as drudges, obedient squaws. Very few Native women wrote about their lives and few scholars wrote about Native women to present objective perspectives on them.

24 The second half of the 20th century definitely brought a dimension to the role, place of and stakes for women in Native communities. Native American women from the past, their roles and responsibilities, were rediscovered (Woltrip 1964; Gridley 1974) — though representations were often romanticized, embellished and oftentimes inaccurate or not enough documented — through the work of modern historians and anthropologists; sociologists and health specialists started studying the specifics of Native American women's roles in tribes as they looked at matrilinearity, child-rearing practices, specific ceremonies performed by women, the psychological and social issues women faced in their communities, etc. Moreover, Native women writers,10 activists, artists, leaders began to receive tribal and national recognition and the specific issues that afflicted Native women were heard in a context of movements that demanded gender equality, civil rights, and in the case of Native Americans, tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

25 Nevertheless, stereotypes, physical violence, political erasure under colonial and early modern systems have impacted Native American women's lives permanently in the past and in the present. The historical legacy of colonial trauma, all too visible today in contemporary representations of Native women, has created a national climate in which Native American women’s bodies are systematically objectified, eroticized, and thus devalued, and which does not sufficiently takes into account the past and contemporary realities of oppression that have intensified the issue of racist, sexual violence perpetrated against Native women today. The racist sexual violence endured by Native women today is the consequence of the reinforcement overtime of cultural and social injustices through laws which have institutionalized the inferior status and subordinacy of Native Americans. As a matter of fact, the protection of Native women's rights is tied to the larger issue of tribal sovereignty in matters of legal action and governance.11

26 The Major Crimes Act12 of 1885 limited the jurisdiction of tribal governments by mandating that a major crime committed on a reservation be prosecuted by the federal government, thus curtailing the protection of tribal members, among which women, against violent crimes. Two years later, in 1887, the General allotment Act was voted by Congress. It disrupted the communal organization of tribes by parceling tribal land into allotments of 80 to 160 acre sites distributed to tribesmen, and it tore apart matrilineal systems of land inheritance by depriving Native women of their rights to owning land, thus reducing their autonomy and power and imposing a patriarchal organization of tribes, which participated in the process of silencing Native women's voices and issues within their communities. Absence of legal protection against violence at home and loss of status within tribal communities are two features of the complex legal, social

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and cultural web of issues that have turned women into easy targets of violence. Though the Indian New Deal of 1934 ended land allotment and allowed again for a communal, traditional form of governance on reservations, great harm had already been done by then to the status of women within tribes.

27 In 1953, Public Law 28013 officially gave 6 states jurisdiction to prosecute criminals on reservations and permitted the other states to acquire jurisdiction at their option; The law was passed during the era of termination (the U.S. government wanted to terminate Indian tribes and force assimilation into the larger society: that meant no more funding from the government to health, social, education and legal services on the reservation) and relocation (tribal people were encouraged to leave their reservation and settle in metropolitan areas). So this law, the purpose of which was to put an end to the special relationship between the federal government and tribes throughout the nation, limited further tribal autonomy as state jurisdiction, that is state criminal laws, were imposed upon tribes. Public Law 280 meant that tribes received no more funding from the federal government to organize their own police and courts since state police and courts took over the responsibility of securing law and order on reservations—that law sounded the death knell of Indian sovereignty. Moreover, funding to the states that adopted that law was insufficient for police officers, state attorneys and judges to deal with criminality on reservations. Thankfully, the law was amended in 1968 under Lyndon Johnson's presidency — Johnson ended termination policies and most tribes regained their status as federally recognized entities with a right to self-government.

28 These laws as well as a number of Supreme Court decisions have made the determination of criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations very complex. They have created much confusion as to who should prosecute whom when a crime is committed as state, tribal and federal governments have in certain cases concurrent jurisdiction. This confusion and the lack of proper funding to federal, state and tribal police to deal with crimes on reservations rendered complex legal action against criminals. As far as racist sex crimes were concerned, the lack of proper training of police officers in dealing with sexual assault cases, which were not then at the top of the list of major criminal concerns, curtailed the protection of reservation women against off- reservation sex criminals.

29 Other laws added up to these complications in the 1960s and 1970s. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 finally authorized all tribes to prosecute violent crimes, but punishment could not exceed a year in prison and/or 5000 dollars in fines. That same year, Gray versus United States stated that an American Indian man who committed a rape in Indian Country would receive a lower penalty if the victim was a Native woman, a decision which legally revived the historically constructed lower status of Native American women. Ten years later, in 1978, the court case Oliphant versus Suquamish Indian tribe (U.S. Supreme Court, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978)) concluded with the decision that tribal sovereignty over violent crimes could simply not apply to Non Natives. This court case decision made it easy for off- reservation criminals to act on reservations and it made it impossible for Native women to get protection from non-tribal sex criminals.

30 Change began to happen as late as 1994 when the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA) was passed, which “recognized crimes like rape, domestic abuse and stocking as matters of human rights” (Erdrich 2016) and authorized grant programs to help

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protect women from these assaults and to help victims of sexual abuse. One of these programs, the Tribal Sexual Assault Services Program, strengthened “the ability of tribes to respond to violent crimes against Indian women, enhance victim safety, and develop education and prevention strategies”.14 The VAWA was reauthorized in 2000 and 2005, and in 2006, over $6.7 million dollars were awarded to 35 American Indian and Alaska Native communities under the STOP VAIW (Services-Training-Officers- Prosecutors Violence Against Indian Women program) initiative and other initiatives that sought, among other things, to improve the rate of prosecution of sex criminals on reservations.

31 A further step was taken with the VAWA Reauthorization Act of 2013 which, despite opposition from Conservative Republican representatives, was passed and added provisions, in the now famous Title IX entitled “Safety for Indian Women,” that allow tribal police and courts to prosecute non-Indians in cases of domestic violence, dating violence and violation of Protection Orders. Moreover, the law allows tribal governments to issue and enforce protection orders against all persons. This law is definitely a victory in the battle to protect Native women from violence and in the struggle tribes are conducting today to assert internal sovereignty, but it requires improvement still: as a matter of fact, if sexual assault occurs within the limits defined by the law, that is if the victim knew her victimizer, then the defendant will be prosecuted in tribal court. However, if there is no clear evidence of prior acquaintance between victim and victimizer, then prosecution by tribal court is forbidden; either the state or federal government must prosecute, which greatly reduces the chances to take the criminal to trial.

Concluding remarks

32 There is an overtly complex set of jurisdiction laws in the U.S. which are an impediment to the prosecution of sex crimes on reservations and the protection of tribal women against outsiders, and so “The jurisdictional confusion that may ensue when an act of violence occurs sometimes produces an inadequate and delayed response to female victims” (Bachman et al. 8). Since the issue of Native women's protection against crimes at home is tied to that of tribal sovereignty, clarification and simplification of laws are needed before real improvement can take place, which is what tribes across the country are demanding today. More power to the local, tribal government of a tribe must be afforded to encourage tribal women to tell their stories and to prosecute their attackers.

33 If the U.S. law needs to evolve, so do the place and representations of Native women within tribes and within mainstream American culture and governance so that their historically vital, intellectual, political and creative abilities be publicized and put to good use. Native women are slowing moving to the front of tribal leadership in the U.S. and challenging the patriarchal systems implemented since the early days of colonization. At the national level, in 2009, President Barack Obama appointed two Native American female leaders to important positions: Jodi Archambault Gillete, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member, became the deputy associate director of the president’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, a Lakota woman from the Rosebud Indian Reservation, became the first female director of the Indian Health Service. Having a voice on the national platform is important for Native female

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leaders to foster change in the representations Americans as a whole share about Native American women. Finally, the role of the media (news coverage, films, series, video games) seems crucial in order for decolonized images of Native American women, defined by them, to come through.

34 Changes in the role and representations of Native American women are of course related to more global changes yet to come: changes in the roles and representations of indigenous and minority women in contemporary societies worldwide. Racist sexual violence against Native women is one visible, tragic national instance of violence against so called “minority women,” which is one complex aspect of larger processes of nation-based and global femicides, with their multifarious origins and contexts in the U.S. and worldwide. It is thus important to keep operating analyses of the complex relationship between minority gender groups and instances of nation-based colonial ideology inherited from successive, racist political agendas, and repeatedly diffused, ad infinitum, into popular culture, as if injurious images of minority women in a national or global psyche, or collective consciousness, had been molded forever, time-stamped. It is necessary to continue the work of critiquing contemporary representations of minority women based on this notion of arrested development and replacing these representations with a historicized analysis of their complex, modern realities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blog

Keene, Adrienne. Native Appropriation blog. http://nativeappropriations.com/2010/06/nudie- neon-indians-and-the-sexualization-of-native-women.html#comments .

Fashion website:

Festival Shop Trend, Free people, https://www.freepeople.com/the-festival-shop-trend/

Laws and grant program

Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. 1978, Justia U.S. Supreme Court, https:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/435/191/case.html.

OVW grant programs. The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/ovw/ grant-programs#tsas.

Public Law 280, 1953, Tribal Court Clearinghouse: a project of the Tribal Law and Police Institute, http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/pl280.htm.

The Major Crimes Act. United States Department of Justice, 1973, https://www.justice.gov/usam/ criminal-resource-manual-679-major-crimes-act-18-usc-1153

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Music video

No Doubt. “Looking Hot,” 2012, https://vimeo.com/92061363

Newspaper articles

Author unknown. “Here We Go Again: Victoria’s Secret Angel Karlie Kloss Dons Headdress.” Indian Country Today. 11 August 2012, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/11/08/ here-we-go-again-victorias-secret-angel-karlie-kloss-dons-headdress-144773 [accessed in 2016]

Author Unknown. “Coalition to protest inappropriate hyper-sexualized stereotypes of indigenous women in Minneapolis.” Native News Online.net. 24 November 2014, http://nativenewsonline.net/ currents/coalition-protest-inappropriate-hyper-sexualized-stereotypes-indigenous-women- minneapolis/

Author Unknown. “Urban Outfitters Wins Latest Round in Navajo Nation Case.” The Fashion Law. 12 July 2016, http://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/urban-outfitters-wins-latest-round-in- navajo-nation-case

Burleson, Anna. “'Siouxper Drunk T-shirts spark controversy at UND.” Grand Forks Herald. 12 May 2014, http://www.grandforksherald.com/news/education/2676387-siouxper-drunk-t-shirts- spark-controversy-und

Erdrich, Louise. “Rape on the Reservation.” The New York Times. 26 February 2013, http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/native-americans-and-the-violence-against-women- act.html?_r=0.

Sweet, Victoria. “Trafficking in Native Communities.” Indian Country Today. 24 May 2015. http:// indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/05/24/trafficking-native-communities-160475 [accessed in 2016]

Vrajlal, Alicia. “The Today show slammed for ‘cultural appropriation’....” Daily Mail Australia. 2 June 2016. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3621152/The-Today-slammed- cultural-appropriation-weather-presenter-Steve-Jacobs-dressed-Native-American-s-latest-blow- breakfast-ratings-decline.html

Reports

Amnesty International USA. “Maze of Injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA.” 2007. https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/maze-of-injustice/

The Minnesota American Indian Women’s Resource Center. “Shattered Hearts: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota.” 2009. https:// www.niwrc.org/resources/shattered-hearts-commercial-sexual-exploitation-american-indian- women-and-girls-minnesota

Bachman, Ronet, Heather Zaykowski, Rachel Kallmayer, Margarita Poteyeva and Christina Lanier. Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and the Criminal Justice Response: What is Known. 2008. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/223691.pdf

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Scholarly books and articles

Black, Edwin. War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. 2nd edition. Washington: Dialog Press, 2012.

Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 2015.

Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

FitzGerald, Michael Ray. Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the “Good Indian.” Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2014.

Green, Rayna. “Native American Women,” Signs 6(2) 1980: 248-267. DOI: 10.1086/493795

Green, Rayna. Native American Women: A Contextual Bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Gridley, Marion E. American Indian Women. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1974.

King, C. Richard. Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century. Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2013.

Lubber, Klaus. Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native American in United States Literature and Visual Arts, 1776-1894. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

Lyons, Scott Richard. “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What do American Indians Want from Writing?” College Composition and Communication 51(3) February 2000: 447-468. DOI: 10.2307/358744

Marubbio, M. Elise. Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in film. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2006.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. “The ‘Floating Signifier’: From Lévi-Strauss to Lacan.” Yale French Studies (48), “French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis,” 1972: 10-37. DOI: 10.2307/2929621

Murphy, Jessyca. “’The White Indin’: Native American appropriations in Hipster Fashion,” Academia.Edu. Diss. The New School for Public Engagement, 2013. https://www.academia.edu/ 8106379/ _The_White_Indin_Native_American_Appropriations_in_Hipster_Fashion_in_Unsettling_Whiteness

Riley, Angela R. “Oh No They Didn't! UCLA-American Indian Studies Open Letter to No Doubt.” November 2012. http://chantalrondeau.com/post/35141094639/oh-no-they-didnt-ucla- american-indian-studies.

Smith, Andrea and Luana Ross. “Native women and State Violence.” Social Justice 31(4) 2004: 1-7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768269

Torpy, Sally J. “Native American Women and Coerced Sterilization: On the Trail of Tears in the 1970s.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24(2) 2000: 1-22. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.17953/aicr.24.2.7646013460646042

Weather, Hilary N. “The Colonial Context of Violence: Reflections on Violence in the Lives of Native American Women.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 24(9) 2009: 1552-63.

Weston, Mary Ann. Native American in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century Press. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Woltrip, Lela, and Rufus Woltrip. Indian Women: Thirteen Who Played a Part in the History of America from the Earliest Days to Know. New York: David MacKeay, 1964.

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NOTES

1. For the updated (2012) definition of rape in the U.S., go to the U.S. Department of Justice website at https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/updated-definition-rape. 2. For a study of early stereotypes of Native Americans, see Lubber (1994). For a study of the evolutions of these stereotypes in the 20th century, see Weston (1996). See also FitzGerald (2014). 3. For more on the issue, see Burleson (2014). Unfortunately, the “drunk Indian” stereotype is reinforced today by the logos of t-shirts sold by on-line cloth companies such as “Red Dirt Shirts” or “Feeling Good Tees” (relayed by Amazon) which associate Indianness with alcoholism. The most popular t-shirt logo “My Indian name is Runs with Beer” exemplifies the racist, stereotypical connection between drinking and Native Americans. 4. Warpaint, Indian wars, Geronimo are but a few examples of such band names. For more information about appropriations of Native American cultural artifacts by American hipster bands, see Murphy (2013). 5. For a definition of the “floating signifier” concept, see Mehlman (1972). 6. The result is a meaningless multicultural soup that is as offensive to Native American cultures as it is to African cultures and Jamaican music makers. 7. See the July 2016 article on The Fashion Law website about the case filed by the Navajo Nation against Urban Outfitters on grounds of cultural appropriation (“Urban Outfitters Wins…” 2016). 8. See the Festival Shop Trend of the Free people website at https://www.freepeople.com/the- festival-shop-trend/, last accessed October 9, 2016. 9. #The 2009 report “Shattered Hearts: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota,” drafted by the Minnesota American Indian Women's Resource Center is a clear and complex assessment of the state and causes of Native American women's forced involvement in sex trafficking. http://indianlaw.org/sites/default/files/ shattered%20hearts%20report.pdf , last accessed October 9, 2016. 10. For a more precise assessment of the evolution of the place of Native American women in American history, see Green (1980; 1983). 11. For a more complex analysis of the laws that have participated in curtailing Native women's rights to bodily integrity and safety, see Deer (2015). 12. United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource- manual-679-major-crimes-act-18-usc-1153, last accessed October 9, 2016. 13. Tribal Court Clearinghouse: a projet of the Tribal Law and Police Institute, http://www.tribal- institute.org/lists/pl280.htm, last accessed October 9, 2016. 14. The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/ovw/grant-programs#tsas, last accessed October 9, 2016.

ABSTRACTS

Colonialism, its ingrained sexism and racism, and the consequential loss of tribal sovereignty through the elaboration by the American government of a complex legal system that has limited tribal jurisdiction, have had disastrous consequences on the bodily and social integrity of Native American women, past and present, in the U.S. This article analyzes problematic, stereotypical representations of Native Americans, men and women in contemporary mainstream American culture, focusing on stereotypes which promote violence against Native women, and

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deconstructs these representations through an analysis of the colonial (cultural and legal) history of racist violence perpetrated by non-Natives upon Native Americans in general and Native women in particular.

Le colonialisme, doctrine politique à laquelle le sexisme et le racisme sont des éléments inhérents, et notamment la perte qui en a découlé de la souveraineté tribale du fait de l'élaboration par le gouvernement américain au 19e siècle d'un système juridique complexe qui a limité la juridiction des gouvernements tribaux, ont eu des conséquences désastreuses sur l'intégrité physique et sociale des femmes amérindiennes. Cet article analyse les représentations problématiques et stéréotypées des amérindiens, hommes et surtout femmes, dans la culture américaine dominante contemporaine. Il se focalise sur les stéréotypes qui favorisent la violence contre les femmes amérindiennes et déconstruit ces représentations par l'analyse de l’histoire coloniale (culturelle et juridique) caractérisée par la violence raciste commise à l'encontre des amérindiens en général et des femmes amérindiennes en particulier.

INDEX

Mots-clés: violence, femmes, minorités, stéréotypes, Amérindiens, culture populaire, souveraineté, colonialisme, États-Unis Keywords: violence, minority, women, Native American, stereotyping, popular culture, sovereignty, colonialism, United States

AUTHOR

SOPHIE CROISY Sophie Croisy is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Versailles Saint- Quentin-en-Yvelines. She teaches American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries (including contemporary Native American literature) and 19th century American history. She is the author of Other Cultures of Trauma: Meta-metropolitan Narratives and Identities (2007), a book on the representation of trauma in the fiction of contemporary Caribbean, North African and Native American writers. More recently, she edited a book entitled Globalization and Minority cultures: The Role of “Minor” Cultural Groups in Shaping our Global Future (2015) on the complex relationship between globalization and cultural minorities worldwide. She is currently working on two projects: a book project on the representation of trauma in Ojibway writer Louise Erdrich's most recent fiction and an article on the representation of the link between nature and culture in the novels of Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan. Contact: sophie.croisy [at] uvsq.fr

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Translating Polysyndeton: A new approach to “Idiomaticism”

Joachim Zemmour

Introduction

1 The aim of this research paper is to present a couple of new syntactic rules — or construals — dealing with the structure of the complex sentence in French, which I came to formulate while working on the translation of “polysyndeton”, specifically from English into French, as part of my PhD dissertation (Zemmour 2012). I am purposefully placing the word “grammatical” in quotation marks since, as we shall see, these structural rules are not dependent upon any rigid, arbitrary linguistic patterns — which is the traditional definition of grammar — but rather upon thought patterns that are specific to what may be called “French idiomaticism”. To apply these structural rules, one must have deep logical and semantic understanding of the sentence. If applied, these rules allow the sentence to be felt as perfectly normal — that is, idiomatic — in any given type of French written text. If the rules are not applied, then the sentence cannot truly be rejected as being ungrammatical, but will be felt by native French-speakers as being awkward, not very naturally phrased, or not genuine.

2 This presentation will thus follow the train of thoughts that led me to the discovery of these rules or — I should prefer to say — “tendencies” of written French. As a first step in this demonstration, I shall give a synthetic outline of my approach of the functional divergence between the English conjunction “and” and the French conjunction “et”, in view to illustrate how the particular function of “et” in French—as opposed to that of “and” in English—impedes a literal or direct translation of English coordinated structures into French, as far as the complex sentence is concerned (whence the frequent use of subordination, coordinating paraphrases, and other devices.). Comparing therefore French with English, I shall eventually draw out a few complex tendencies regarding the use of the coordinating conjunction “et”, leading to a set of rules whose validity many genuine examples will contribute to support.

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“And” vs. “Et”: a Fundamental Cognitive Divergence

3 Polysyndeton (from Greek πολυ, “many” and σύνδετος, “bound together” —i.e. “many- ands”) is one of the major syntactic devices used in texts written in English. More than a mere figure of speech, relegated to poetic or literary texts only, it may be considered as a figure of syntax that has survived over the centuries: from the early Christian texts to the poetry of the Romantics, down to modern-day English. In an article entitled “Coordination et cognition” (EA 58-4, 2005), French linguist Jean-Rémi Lapaire, writing about the syntax of the English sentence, highlights “l’importance des coordonnants dans la masse lexicale générale d’un texte (autour de 4 %) et la centralité de and dans le système de la coordination.”

4 Yet, in many cases, a direct translation of the English polysyndetic structure into French seems impossible to achieve. Indeed, French translators traditionally (but quite unofficially) tend to avoid the repetition of “et” at all cost—supposedly because of the “ugliness” of the [e] sound1. As opposed to English texts in which the word “and” stands for 4% of total lexicon, I have found that French texts use coordinated structures amounting to only 1.5 to 2% of their global lexical items. Indeed, the French language “ties up” sentence elements by other means than mere coordination, especially the following: simple neutralization of the coordinating device (whether or not coupled with the use of a punctuation sign), coordinating paraphrases, and subordination (whether verbal or adverbial). Many linguists have noticed that French is “une langue liée”, in the words of Canadian translatologists Vinay and Darbelnet (1958: 220); and that, by comparison, English is a more flexible language, allowing for a much freer use of coordination. As a matter of fact, Anglophone authors writing in the polysyndetic style of novelists such as, for instance, Ernest Hemingway, are extremely difficult to translate in idiomatic French, since the translator often has to “sacrifice” the style for the sake of intelligibility. Or in the two linguists’ own words: “Même en essayant d’écrire comme Hemingway il est douteux que le français s’accommode de deux « et » de suite. [...] C’est une des caractéristiques du style de Hemingway d’utiliser très peu de charnières. Il est possible, surtout en français moderne, de procéder de même, jusqu’à un certain point” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958: 229). What attracted my attention was this enigmatic “jusqu’à un certain point”, and I therefore endeavoured to understand the difference between English coordination and French coordination (from a translatologist’s, not a linguist’s, perspective).

5 If we should refer to traditional grammar2, the only constraint pending upon “et” is that it must relate two words, phrases or clauses of same syntactic function—which, in pragmatic terms, highlights a structural impossibility in French, yet without providing us with any solution to solve it (as far as interlingual translation is concerned). We thus have to seek the solution elsewhere. In her book Syntaxe comparée de l’anglais et du français, Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher (1981: 82) brought a few answers to this complex question: Lorsque des procès mis en relation sont exprimés par des verbes animés et envisagés en tant qu’occurrences, l’absence ou la présence d’un signe de coordination aura une incidence sur la détermination aspectuelle dans l’inter- relation des procès. Nous avons souvent – en français une juxtaposition qui pourra prendre une valeur de chronologie mais sans que celle-ci soit explicitée par des marqueurs linguistiques. – en anglais une séquence :

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[67]–He swung it once and twice and again. He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt. (E. Hemingway, The Old Man, p. 107) – Il cogna deux fois, trois fois, dix fois. La barre se rompit. Il continua à cogner avec le morceau cassé. (J. Dutourd, p.145) En français, les procès sont simplement ordonnés dans le temps du récit. En anglais, ils s’enchaînent dans un ensemble et chaque procès est repéré par rapport au procès qui le précède dans la séquence.

6 In this excerpt, Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher — interestingly enough — quotes a sentence taken from a novel by Ernest Hemingway to illustrate the polysyndetic character of a typical English (complex) sentence. Her claim seems to be that the French language, by ordering the actions chronologically — that is, by making a list of them — is more analytical than the English language, which situates every action according to the previous one, in a sort of straightforward/immediate way. While French has a broad analytical view of the events, English would appear to narrate everything “as it happens”. However, this statement born of a thorough contrastive analysis does not tell us why it is impossible to proceed in exactly the same way in French. And the answer to that, as shall be shown, lies in the way in which the function of “et” is thought in French. Or, to state my approach in more simple words: What happens in the mind of an English-speaker when s/he encounters “and” in a text is different from what happens in the mind of a French-speaker when s/he encounters “et”. From this psychological3 divergence, arise most of the diverse “tendances déformantes” — in the words of Antoine Berman — in the French translations of foreign texts (especially as far as English polysyndeton is concerned). Although this paper — a synthetic overview of my doctoral research — does not fit in one specific and exclusive theoretical framework, being of experimental and cross-disciplinary nature, one may argue that most, if not all of the “French tendencies” described here are instances of what Cognitive Linguistics would call construals, a concept described by R. W. Langacker in the following terms: An expression’s meaning is not just the conceptual content it evokes — equally important is how that content is construed. As part of its conventional semantic value, every symbolic structure construes its content in a certain fashion. It is hard to resist the visual metaphor, where content is likened to a scene and construal to a particular way of viewing it. […] In viewing a scene, what we actually see depends on how closely we examine it, what we choose to look at, which elements we pay most attention to, and where we view it from. (Langacker 2013: 55)

7 In this article, I am only presenting (what I consider to be) a few instances of French “construals”, in their concrete form/realisation as syntactic rules, while leaving the mystery of the nature of the (French) “mind” itself unsolved.

8 According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), “and” is a form of conjunction—that is, a type of cohesive/structural link that binds two elements of a sentence, or two separate sentences. They claim that the cohesive function of “and” is achieved principally through meaning; in other words, “and” would only be the linguistic mark of a preexisting semantic or logical link. Therefore “and”, in itself, may not serve as a creator of semantic or logical link. This analysis seems to be shared by Quirk (1972: 560), according to whom, “And denotes merely a relation between the clauses. The only restriction is the semantic one that the contents of the clauses should have sufficient in common to justify their combination.” If we follow this idea, “and” may not be used, then, as a discourse-

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organizing device. This is what Halliday and Hasan (1976: 233) seem to agree on, when they claim that: The “and” relation is felt to be structural and not cohesive, at least by mature speakers; this is why we feel a little uncomfortable at finding a sentence in written English beginning with And, and why we tend not to consider that a child’s composition having and as its dominant sentence linker can really be said to form a cohesive whole.

9 Through this simple statement, the authors seem to occult a whole piece of English literature, including: King James’s Bible, Romantic poetry, the novels of Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, among many others. In other words, they dismiss some of the most influential literary works of the English language (especially the Bible, which contributed to shape the language), known for their extensive use of polysyndeton. Contrary to what the two linguists claim, “and” is indeed used as a discourse-organizer in many texts written in English by mature speakers, including modern-day newspaper and “blog” articles (as shall be shown later). In an experimental study, I chose a sample of technical/pragmatic text taken from a website dealing with the diverse species of butterflies thriving in Great-Britain,4 managed by professional English-born writers, and exhibiting a straightforward polysyndetic character. Here is, as a typical instance of what I call English polysyndeton, a short paragraph taken from this website: The blue form of the female in which the blue scaling extends over the fore and hind wings obliterating the brown ground colour except along the costa and outer margins, and with orange lunules present on all wings is called ab. ceronus.

10 The authors of this website were all either professional journalists, or professional (technical) writers, whose language proficiency is not to be doubted. From the highly technical content of the quoted sentence, one can clearly see indeed that this is not a “childish” sentence; yet, the syntax at the end of the sentence may appear to be rather free and puzzling (at least, for a French-born reader). “And with” here attaches the last clause to the grammatical subject found at the very beginning—that is, “the blue form of the female”—in a very flexible way that would be utterly impossible to replicate in French. As a consequence, it might be said that the conjunction “and” creates textual cohesion in this particular sentence, instead of being the trace of a pre-existing logical link. What is far more interesting in Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English (1976: 233), however, is the way that they distinguish two different functions of “and” in English: an additive function (for words, verbs and adverbs bound together), and a conjunctive function (in the case of whole clauses bound together). The first only adds up one element to another, while the second implies a logical link. We shall see, later on in this demonstration, that the French link-word “et” only shares with “and” its additive function. Quirk (1972: 561-2) seems to share the view of Halliday and Hasan when he evokes the idea of a purely additive “and” that he contrasts with a series of other functions (consequence, chronology, commentary, etc.). What seems rather obvious, therefore, from reading these authors’ interpretation of the function of “and”, is that the typical concept of “coordination” attributed to the word by traditional grammarians falls short of its complex and manifold potentialities. “And” is indeed a coordinating conjunction in English, but not only.

11 According to Lapaire and Rotgé (1991: 298), the main difference between coordination and subordination is that “les subordonnants et coordonnants partagent une même fonction jonctive (“de mise en relation”) entre une proposition P1 et une proposition

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P2, mais […] la subordination — ainsi que le suggère son nom — les hiérarchise très nettement.” What seems clear is that in many instances, “and” has properties very close to subordination in the English complex sentence. This concept of “prioritization” , however, is extremely difficult to handle since it is closely related to psychology and the way in which the human mind interprets reality. According to Quirk (1972: 720), “While coordination is a linking together of two or more elements of equivalent status and function, subordination is a non-symmetrical relation, holding between two clauses X and Y in such a way that Y is a constituent or part of X” whereas S. C. Dick (1980: 59) laconically explains that “[t]he term subordination is mostly used for constructions in which a clause functions as a modifier”. Should we apply this consensual definition of subordination to the above-mentioned sentence, we would find that “and with orange lunules present on all wings” is a constituent — that is, an attribute — of “the blue form of the female”, having the same function as “in which the blue scaling extends […]” with its obvious subordinating conjunction, but not sharing any link — whether symmetrical or asymmetrical — with this previous clause (i.e. there is no obvious link between the fact that the blue colour extends on the wings, and the fact that the tips of the wings have orange spots, the two being almost antagonistic). It might therefore be said that “and with” has a subordinating function here — although the word “and” is traditionally associated with coordination. The two clauses do not stand on the same plane. It would seem, then, that the boundary that sets apart coordination from subordination is a very fuzzy one, and depends more on the speaker/writer’s state of mind and level of psychological elaboration, as 20 th century structural linguist Lucien Tesnière (1959: 313) suggested: “Mais en fait, l’hypotaxe, étant plus abstraite que la parataxe, n’est pas toujours aperçue par les sujets parlants, de telle sorte que, même s’il y a véritablement hypotaxe dans le rapport des idées entre elles, ce rapport peut n’être pas senti, auquel cas l’idée est exprimée, un peu inexactement il est vrai, sous la forme structurale de la parataxe.” Although I do not agree with Tesnière’s idea that speakers of polysyndetic languages — such as English — “lack” abstract comprehension of the links between the ideas they express (i.e. my hypothesis is rather that they do not need/are not expected to express these hierarchical links, but can do so if they wish to), I adhere to his conception of hypotaxis being a more “psychologically elaborated” — that is, a clearer, more analytical — expression of the link that binds up two complex ideas or elements (although it must be added here that Tesnière paradoxically believed that there was no relationship between psychology and syntax).

12 If we now turn to Tesnière’s (1959: 109) conception of the sentence, in which the node is embodied by the verb (rather than by the grammatical subject), we can schematize our original sentence using the following stemma,5 where all levels correspond to a certain form of syntactic priority (ranging from top=superior to bottom=inferior), and all the vertical lines symbolize the links that the mind draws between those levels:

The blue form of the female called ab. Ceronus

in which the blue scaling extends over the fore and hind wings / and with* orange lunules present on all wings

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Obliterating the brown ground colour (except along the costa and outer margins)

13 Thus represented, the (simplified) stemma of this sentence shows without any doubt that “and with” acts here as a subordinating conjunction that transforms the subject “the blue form of the female” by means of an attributive clause. Should we leave aside the first of the two attributive clauses, and rewrite the sentence without modifying anything in its syntax, the result would thus read as follows: *The blue form of the female and with [which has] orange lunules on all wings is called ab. ceronus.

14 Such an artificial rephrasing shows how very much flexible, even “primary” in its construction, the original sentence happens to be, especially in the binding together of the grammatical subject and its second attribute. One easily understands that the author, once having reached the end of the first (lengthy) attributive clause, somewhat forgot about the original syntax he had intended for the sentence and carried on expressing his thoughts by using “and” as a linking device. In English, such a “loose” textual binding does not appear to be shocking for the authors. The word “and” seems to be used as an active textual connector that originates from the writer’s “instinctive mind” rather than from any notion of factual logic. The word “and” thus only states that a link exists, whether or not this link can be interpreted from the syntax or context-meaning, in a sort of “moving forwards” of the mind. When the precise nature of the link is not directly interpretable, the reader then assumes that the link exists, and moves backwards or forwards to find the right interpretation. My view is that contrary to English, where “and” may have both a semantic and textual function, the word “et” in French only has a semantic function, which implies that the logical or semantic link that “et” expresses should be salient from the context. Therefore “et” cannot establish the link, it is only the textual marker of a pre-existing link that the reader should have no difficulty (re)interpreting. While English “and” has a much broader anaphoric range, which might be said to correspond to a “moving forwards” of the mind, French “et” indicates that the link is manifest, and that the reader’s mind should not move very far backwards to interpret it (i.e. the mind should look backwards to the closest element of same syntactic nature), which would then correspond to a “moving backwards” of the mind. Whenever the first or main element is either too far back in the sentence, or not clearly or directly interpretable, the French writer will try to clarify the link by using either subordination or a coordinating paraphrase, in order to prevent any interpretative effort on the reader’s part. What the reader expects is therefore different with “and” or with “et”. This is what clearly show the two commissioned French translations of the original English sentence, which are reproduced here below: * La femelle présente une forme bleue appelée aberration ceronus : ses écailles bleues s’étendent sur les ailes avant et arrière, masquant le brun de la couleur de fond–les côtes et la marge externe des ailes sont épargnées. Des lunules de couleur orangée sont également présentes. (Aquitaine Traduction, 2011) ** La femelle sur laquelle des rayures bleues s’étendent sur les ailes antérieures et postérieures à la place du marron qui est la teinte majoritaire, sauf le long des bords extérieurs et la partie centrale, et qui arbore des lunules orange sur les ailes est appelée ab. ceronus. (A4 Traduction 2011)

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15 What is striking in these two independent translations of the same sentence is the systematic reinterpretation of the link between the grammatical subject and its second attribute. In the first version (Aquitaine Traduction), any form of syntactic linkage between “les côtes et la marge externe des ailes” and “des lunules de couleur orange” is strictly avoided by a complete restructuring of the sentence, so as to prevent any confusion of the mind. By bringing subject and verb closer together, by clearly setting apart the two attributes through the lengthening out of the two adverbs into verbs, through the addition of both a full stop and the adverb “également”, one clearly understands that “des lunules de couleur orange” is detached from the (brown- coloured) “côtes et marge externe des ailes”, which would not have been the case if the translator had chosen “et”.

16 In the second version (A4 Traduction), the translator seems to have been rather literal (the syntax follows very closely that of the original sentence), except at the very spot where the coordinating link might mislead the French reader. Although the translator kept the word “et” (for the sake of faithful literality, we may suppose), s/he opted for a twofold lengthening by using a subordinating device, “qui” (which reminds the reader of the original subject) and by using the verb “arborer” which clearly refers to the insect. This reinterpretation of the original English sentence thus allows for more clarity in the French text, although we notice a translation mistake here (the female insect itself is not what specialists call “ab. Ceronus”, it is only a certain colour-pattern present on a few individuals). Thus, interestingly enough, the psychology of French syntax (which I have proposed to call French idiomaticism) is responsible for the translation mistake here. If we keep the literalistic syntax of this translated sentence, and if we reestablish the original syntax at the end, the resulting sentence would indeed seem quite puzzling to a French reader: (?) La femelle sur laquelle des rayures bleues s’étendent sur les ailes antérieures et postérieures à la place du marron qui est la teinte majoritaire, sauf le long des bords extérieurs et la partie centrale, et avec des lunules orange sur les ailes est appelée ab. ceronus.

17 I believe that the fact that “et” tends to call the reader’s attention backwards to the closest element of same syntactic nature is at the heart of the translation problem treated above. From this specificity in the function of “et” in French, arises a series of structural “laws” or tendencies that I shall now synthetically outline with the help of some genuine examples.

Syntactic Rules Regarding the Use of “Et” in the French Complex Sentence

18 In this second part, I shall present a sample of some of the major syntactic rules or “tendencies” of written French that I have reconstructed from thorough observation and analysis of the texts pertaining to my corpus (mainly, works of 19th century and early 20th century poetry and literature, as well as one contemporary text of pragmatic character). The literary texts were primarily chosen within the field of Romantic literature for the simple reason that, in order to conduct a contrastive study of original English texts with their French corresponding versions, I needed to find works that had been extensively translated in the French language (at least twice, and preferably more than twice), by different translators, which is the case of a number of British and

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American literary works written in the 19th century, while modern works have usually been translated only once — if at all. As explained earlier, the pragmatic text — whose specificity was that it belonged to the 21st century and was therefore a realistic sample of modern language use — had never received any French translation as yet, and I therefore commissioned two professional and independently-led translations. The following rules are not, strictly speaking, “grammatical rules” in the sense that their non-observance has no effect on the “linguistic acceptability” of the sentences; the latter look perfectly correct in their construction, and do not seem to break any grammatical rules as far as traditional French grammar is concerned, although native speakers may feel a certain “strangeness” or “awkwardness” in them, and may even have difficulty making clear sense of them. Such non-observance corresponds to what French teachers often call, for lack of a better word or explanation, “le mal dit”. I have proposed to classify these rules within the category of idiomaticism, as a field separate from grammar.

Rule of Asyndetic Enumeration and Syntactic Closure

19 As many other linguists — including Lucie Hoarau (1997: 164) — have also claimed in their works, I have suggested in my doctoral dissertation that the most idiomatic way to present a list of lexical (especially nominal) items in French is by using what is traditionally called “asyndetic enumeration”, which means that all the elements of the list are presented the one following the other, separated by a comma — that is, without any coordinating conjunction — with the word “et” (usually unpreceded by a comma) marking the end of the list, while introducing the very last element of the latter. A typical example of that would be: ce matin, au marché, j’ai acheté du pain, du fromage, de la salade, des courgettes et des pommes. In French, given the fact that “et” calls the reader’s mind backwards to the closest element of same syntactic nature, polysyndetic enumeration is therefore used as a stylistic device in order to insist on every single element of the enumeration, with the effect of suggesting a certain feeling of excess, of superfluous abundance (i.e. a certain form of “heaviness”). In a French polysyndetic enumeration, the mind is drawn backwards and is made to rest and ponder upon each enumerated element, as opposed to English polysyndeton in which the mind is pushed forwards in a sort of emphatic movement, suggestive of exuberance and (bountiful) profusion. To illustrate this fundamental difference, let us consider these two sentences taken from my corpus, where polysyndeton is used first in English and then in French: * Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, […] (from John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, 1819) ** Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins, Polis comme de l’huile, onduleux comme un cygne, Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins; Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne... (from Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Bijoux”, 1857)

20 In the first stanza by John Keats, the polysyndetic structure summons up an image of natural growth and profusion, so that the mind looks forwards to the next element of this floral abundance with a delightful feeling of expectation; whereas in the French

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stanza by Charles Baudelaire, polysyndeton is clearly used as a (classical) stylistic device, and the effect achieved here is much different. Indeed, the poet does not want to convey a feeling of endless profusion (although he does use a botanical metaphor), nor is he trying to create an effect of expectancy — but on the very contrary, Baudelaire here is heavily insisting on his ideal lover’s body parts, thus creating a feeling of (erotic) languorousness… He is trying to call back and fix his memories of the loved woman, instead of projecting his mind forwards into the future. Due to this functional divergence regarding the use of polysyndeton in the two languages, it might be observed that on the whole, the French translators of John Keat’s poem mostly used either asyndeton (only commas) or canonical enumeration (no comma before “et”) in their rendition, while the poets who translated Baudelaire’s poem into English— reversely—transformed the polysyndeton into asyndeton (which clearly proves that in terms of its effect/function, English polysyndeton corresponds rather faithfully to French complete asyndeton, and vice-versa). Here are, as an illustration of this hypothesis, some of the French and English translations of these two well-known stanzas: Excerpt from John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, [...] (original text, 1819; straightforwardly polysyndetic, as reflected by the second “and” right in the middle of the list, and the use of commas before “and”) Chaque senteur que ce mois printanier offre À l’herbe, au fourré, aux fruits sauvages ; À la blanche aubépine, à la pastorale églantine ; Aux violettes vite fanées sous les feuilles ; Et à la fille aînée de Mai,[…] (Alain Sueid, 1994; clearly asyndetic as far as the second and third verses are concerned; use of canonical enumeration applied to the whole stanza) Les senteurs que le mois saisonnier distribue À l’herbe, et au buisson, aux sauvages fruitiers – L’épine blanche et l’églantine des prairies ; Aux violettes tôt flétries enfouies sous les feuilles ; Et à la fille aînée de mai, […] (Fouad El-Etr, 2009; a rather unsettling rendition where the translator, it seems, particularly in the second verse, has “hesitated” between asyndeton and polysyndeton, so that he somewhat “merged” the two in a very unusual way) J’isole dans l’obscur odorant les senteurs : L’herbage et le fourré, les ronces, l’aubépine, Sous les feuilles les violettes qui déclinent Hélas, et l’églantinier des pastoureaux, Et la rose musquée aux pétales mi-clos, […] (Pierre-Louis Matthey, 1950; here again, asyndeton and polysyndeton both seem to have been merged in a very unusual way)

21 Such a comparison shows that the effect conveyed by polysyndeton in English is clearly different from that conveyed by the same sentence-structure in French, and is more naturally conveyed by asyndeton. Let us now turn to some of the translations of Baudelaire’s stanza from “Les Bijoux”: Excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Bijoux”:

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Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins, Polis comme de l’huile, onduleux comme un cygne, Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins ; Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne… (original text, 1857; straightforwardly polysyndetic) Her limbs and hips, burnished with changing lustres, Before my eyes clairvoyant and serene, Swarmed themselves, undulating in their sheen; Her breasts and belly, of my vine the clusters, (Roy Campbell, 1952; neutralization of the original polysyndeton, use of canonical enumeration) The whole lithe harmony of loins, hips, buttocks, thighs, Tawny and sleek, and undulant as the neck of a swan, Began to move hypnotically before my eyes: And her large breasts, those fruits I have grown lean upon, (George Dillon, 1936; mixed use of complete asyndeton and polysyndeton) In turn, her arms and limbs, her veins, her thighs, Polished as nard, undulant as a swan, Passed under my serene clairvoyant eyes As belly and breasts, grapes of my vine, moved on. (Jacques Leclerc, 1958; straightforward use of asyndeton)

22 These three examples show that asyndeton is preferred over polysyndeton when it comes to translating French polysyndetic structures, which seems to corroborate my hypothesis. It also shows, as a natural consequence, that polysyndeton is not the natural way of expressing enumeration in French (not any more than asyndeton is the preferred structure in English), and that its use conveys a strong stylistic effect due to the breaking of the usual idiomatic rule. As have already been stated earlier, the idiomatic way of expressing enumeration in French is: element 1, element 2, (potentially extensible) ET element 3. Upon encountering the conjunction “et” following a list of enumerated elements (usually nouns), the French mind stops, then makes a review of what has occurred previously, before integrating the last element of the list. This implies, therefore, a strong analytical reaction attached to the use of “et” once integrated in a list. I have put forwards the hypothesis that in the case of an enumeration, the conjunction “et” must introduce an element that is syntacticly closed. Whenever the last element is syntacticly developed or “lengthened out”, the psychological expectancy attached to “et” is broken. As a consequence, each time the last element is being developed, the French writer will tend to substitute a coordinating paraphrase for the conjunction “et”. The following examples, taken from Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), shall illustrate this idiomatic rule: “Les outils furent sortis de la caisse, où se trouvait justement la pelle de Fleurance. Puis, quand Maheu y eut enfermé leurs sabots [1], leurs bas [2], ainsi que le paquet d’Étienne [3], il s’impatienta brusquement. ”

23 [Here, it is the first time that “le paquet d’Etienne” is being mentioned, so that “d’Etienne” is not really an attributive but rather a genitive, that is an equivalent for “that belonged/belonging to Etienne”, whence the idea of syntactic development and the use of “ainsi que” rather than “et”.] “À chaque bourrasque, le vent paraissait grandir, comme s’il eût soufflé d’un horizon sans cesse élargi. Aucune aube [1] ne blanchissait* dans le ciel mort, les hauts fourneaux [2] seuls flambaient*, ainsi que les fours à coke [3], ensanglantant* les ténèbres, sans en éclairer l’inconnu. ”

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24 [The clause “ensanglantant les ténèbres, sans en éclairer l’inconnu” develops the nominal group “les fours à coke” (emitting reddish smoke) that ends the list of “light- related” items, whence the use of a coordinating paraphrase. The common verb, “flambaient”, also breaks the list.] “On se contentait, à la Direction, de dresser des listes de renvoi, on rendait les livrets en masse : Maheu [1] avait reçu le sien, Levaque [2] aussi, de même que trente-quatre de leurs camarades [3], au seul coron des Deux-Cent-Quarante.”

25 [The underlined clause is a locative attibute of “trente-quatre de leurs camarades”, whence the use of “de même que” rather than “et”.]

26 In the following paragraph, I shall compare a sentence taken from a short story by Ernest Hemingway with its published French translation, so as to illustrate the same rule of French idiomaticism: “There were four hundred and fifty passengers and the crew on board of her […]”. (Ernest Hemingway, After the Storm, 1933)

27 This sentence is actually an enumeration or list of the boat’s passengers. Therefore, the conjunction “and” closes the list that is here constituted of two elements: four hundred and fifty passengers + the crew. Let us now see how this sentence was coped with in its French translation: “Il y avait à bord quatre cent cinquante passagers plus l’équipage […]”. (Translation by Henri Robillot and Marcel Duhamel, 1949)

28 What we can see here is that the translators eluded the problem of imperfect syntactic closure by relocating the locative item “on board of her” at the beginning of the sentence, while also using the coordinating paraphrase “plus” (which is quite unusual in written French). I would also suggest the following possible rendition: Il y avait quatre cent cinquante passagers, ainsi que l’équipage à bord.

29 I suggest that a literal rendition with “et”, as follows, would imply the (absurd) idea that somehow only the crew is on board: (?) Il y avait quatre cent cinquante passagers et l’équipage à bord.

Rule of Avoidance of Syntactic Ambiguity

30 I have put forwards the hypothesis that French writers systematically avoid any form of double — or multiple — interpretation of the syntax of a sentence. A more pragmatic definition would be that French tends to reject any form of double or multiple stemma (i.e. when the sentence can theoretically be schematized by two or more stemmas), and therefore imposes a single syntactic interpretation, leading to a single possible stemma. This, of course, does not apply to certain specific forms of poetic discourse, where ambiguity is purposefully sought. It is a characteristic feature of (what I have tried to define as) French idiomaticism, which demands a certain amount of interpretative clarity on the writer’s part (thus narrowing the range of interpretative possibilities offered to the reader). By contrast, the English complex sentence can hold a double stemma/ syntactic interpretation as long as the right interpretation (in terms of meaning) is clearly interpretable from the context, or as long as the double stemma does not affect the general meaning at all. Yet, in French, the syntactic interpretation (which is to be distinguished from the “logical” interpretation or “the sense”) has to be always clarified and made unique, whether or not the understanding of the meaning is

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involved. In the present case, I am — naturally — only coping with the problematic use of “et” in the complex sentence (although I believe this phenomenon reaches far beyond the sole problem of coordination). In order to illustrate this view, I have selected two instances of mirrored (English/French translated) sentences from the aforementioned pragmatic text used in my corpus, and I shall now comment individually on these: * Although very similar in appearance to a Brown Argus, the two can be separated by location in the British Isles, since the Northern Brown Argus is found only in the north of England and Scotland. Translation 1(Aquitaine Traduction): Malgré une grande ressemblance avec l’Argus Brun, ces deux espèces ne résident pas dans les mêmes régions des îles britanniques : l’Argus de l’hélianthème se rencontre uniquement au nord de l’Angleterre et en Écosse. Traduction 2 (A4 Traduction): Bien que son apparence soit similaire à celle de l’Argus brun, ces deux espèces se distinguent de part [sic] leur localisation dans les Îles britanniques, l’Argus de l’hélianthème n’étant présent qu’au nord de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse.

31 In the original sentence, the use of coordination does not seem to pose any specific problem. Any English-speaker (and more specifically, any resident of Great-Britain) would clearly understand that the butterfly called “Northern Brown Argus” lives in the north of England and in Scotland. Indeed, contrary to human beings, insects know of no boundaries, and it therefore seems quite obvious that a species of butterfly would not “skip” part of a country for whatever fanciful reason. As a matter of fact, due to the flexible nature of “and” in English, the last part of this sentence — that is, “in the north of England and Scotland” — might receive three syntactic interpretations: (1) in the north of England and in Scotland (which is obviously the right interpretation), (2) in the north of England and in the north of Scotland (which is syntacticly possible, but totally nonsensical, when one knows the geography of Great-Britain and the way butterflies behave) and 3) in the north of an imaginary land that would be understood as the unification of both England and Scotland (such as “Trinidad-and-Tobago”, for instance). One might claim that the original English sentence is somewhat clumsy, and that its author should have plainly written “in Scotland”, had he been better acquainted with stylistics; yet our point here is not to judge neither the author of the text, nor its translators, but simply to look at a published piece of written text in English, and the way two professional translators dealt with it, as it is quite revealing of the “problem” of polysyndeton. In this case, let us just remark that the English sentence, as inelegant as it may sound, cannot really be described as “agrammatical” or unacceptable. As a natural feature of Anglophone psychology (such is my hypothesis), the English reader picks up the right interpretation, and is therefore not particularly puzzled by the structure of the last clause. What seems very interesting, though, is the fact that the French translations both clarified — in other words, interpreted — the end of the sentence in two different ways. The problem here is complex and manifold. First of all, let it be reminded (if needs be) that a literal rendition of the last clause would seem extremely strange, not to say absolutely agrammatical, in French: (?) Malgré une grande ressemblance avec l’Argus Brun, ces deux espèces ne résident pas dans les mêmes régions des îles britanniques : l’Argus de l’hélianthème se rencontre uniquement au nord de l’Angleterre et l’Écosse. (?) Bien que son apparence soit similaire à celle de l’Argus brun, ces deux espèces se distinguent de par leur localisation dans les Îles britanniques, l’Argus de l’hélianthème n’étant présent qu’au nord de l’Angleterre et l’Écosse.

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32 Such a phrasing seems particularly unidiomatic because “l’Angleterre et l’Écosse” do not form one single unit, such as in “Trinité-et-Tobago”, for instance. And even if the two nouns were conceptually linked, the addition of a particle would still be necessary. (One indeed would say “le courant passe au large de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse”, even if there is only one sea). Here, the repetition or inclusion of a particle after “et” is made compulsory in French. It is considered a grammatical rule. The question is whether this grammatical impediment is purely arbitrary, or whether there is (as I suppose) an underlying reason for it. I believe that this feeling of nonsensicality arises from a certain form of ambiguity in the syntax of the last clause in French, due to the limited anaphoric range of “et”. As stated earlier, my hypothesis is that “et” calls the reader’s mind backwards to the closest element of same syntactic nature, which here happens to be “l’Angleterre”. In this perspective, “l’Angleterre et l’Écosse” would tend to be considered first, and interpreted — in French but obviously not in English — as a single block in the reader’s mind, subordinated to “au nord de”, where the node of the stemma is “de” [i.e. in the north of England/Scotland alike]. Since the two countries are next to each other, and Scotland is de facto in the north of England, such a phrasing would seem quite puzzling (“au nord de l’Écosse” alone would be a more straightforward way to say it). If this interpretation is rejected — as it should naturally be — then the other possible interpretation is that the node of the stemma is “au nord” [i.e. in the north of England as well as in the north of Scotland] which does not make any sense in terms of insect behaviour, as we have seen. In both cases, therefore, the interpretation is somewhat absurd. In the English original sentence, indeed, the node of the stemma happens to be “found only in”, so that the last occurrence of “and” attaches “Scotland” to “found only in”. However, in French, the mind — as it does in English — would need to travel three times backwards into the sentence (1: l’Angleterre ˃ 2: nord de ˃ 3: au ) in order to retrieve the right element for interpretation (which, I have said, defies French idiomaticism). It is therefore necessary in French to clarify the logical link. In the first rendition (Aquitaine Traduction), the translator witfully clarified the link by adding the locative particle “en”, which clearly draws the mind back to the verb “se rencontre”, thus allowing for the right interpretation. In the second rendition (A4 Traduction), the translator mistakenly interpreted the stemma (as being “in the north of England and the north of Scotland”), but what is interesting to observe is that clarification of the syntax was necessary here in French, despite the interpretative mistake at the core, whereas the same kind of ambiguity seems to be tolerated in English. I believe this not due to an arbitrary need to repeat the particle “for its own sake”, but to the very function of “et”. In other words, my claim is that the need for the repetition of the particle “de” is only symptomatic of an underlying cognitive problem, related to the use of “et”. One might indeed reply to this latter analysis that, in one case or another, independently of meaning or interpretation, it would be necessary to write “au nord de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse” for the sentence to be grammatical in French, which is quite true. That even if we conceptually consider England and Scotland as one and the same land, a rendition by “au nord de l’Angleterre et l’Écosse” does not work, which again is very true. However, the interesting point is that simply adding “de” would not settle the matter. Such a phrasing would be so ambiguous in French that nobody would understand it. Its apparent grammaticality does not, therefore, make it idiomatic. In this regard, the translation by A4 Traduction (that chose “et de”) is doubly mistaken — both because it is factually wrong (it translated the wrong meaning), but even that wrong meaning is awkwardly translated,

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since the French reader will still hesitate between two interpretations. As it stands, “au nord de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse” could either mean, in French, a. “in the north of England-Scotland” and b. “in the north of England and in the north of Scotland”. To capture this nuance, a (more) proficient translator would probably have rendered a. with “au nord de l’ensemble formé par l’Angleterre et l’Écosse” (if such had been the true meaning) and b. with “dans le nord de l’Angleterre et dans celui de l’Écosse” (if such also had been the meaning). So we see here that the translation problem does not lie with the repetition — or absence thereof — of the particle “de” in itself, but altogether with the anaphoric range of “et”, of which the repetition of “de” is but a symptom (and not a cure, at least not in this sentence). Even a correct, grammatical rendition as “au nord de l’Angleterre et de l’Écosse » (such as was produced by our guinea-pig translator) does not work. It is not idiomatic. In his/her wrong translation, the addition of “de” was only an unsuccessful attempt to make sense — by this pseudo- lengthening — of a cognitive pattern of sentence-making which is totally alien to the French mind. In this perspective, the translation mistake is extremely meaningful per se.

33 Now, let us turn to the second example: ** On emerging from their eggs, Peacock larvae build a communal web near the top of the plant and from which they emerge to bask and feed and are usually highly conspicuous. Translation 1(Aquitaine Traduction): Lorsqu’elles éclosent, les larves de Paon du jour tissent une toile qu’elles partagent, à proximité du sommet d’une plante. De là, elles peuvent sortir pour se réchauffer au soleil et se nourrir. Elles sont en général très facile (sic) à repérer. Traduction 2 (A4 Traduction): Lorsqu’elles sortent des œufs, les larves de Paon du jour tissent une toile près du sommet de la plante où elles viennent d’éclore afin de se reposer au soleil et de se nourrir, ce qui les rend généralement bien visibles.

34 In the original sentence, the problematic trunk is of course “and of which” for the kind of syntactic ambiguity that it establishes. What is, indeed, the referent of “which”? From a purely logical point of view, the referent could be either (1) the plant; (2) the top of the plant; (3) or even a communal web. Since there is, factually, no difference between the three (the location remains almost the same), this kind of syntactic vagueness— made possible by the broad anaphoric range of “and”—does not seem to break the reader’s expectancies in English. In French, however, the same degree of vagueness/ ambiguity would not be tolerated. Drawing from the second translation (A4 Traduction), let us try to produce a more “literalistic” version in order to illustrate this idea: (?) Lorsqu’elles sortent des œufs, les larves de Paon du jour tissent une toile près du sommet de la plante et d’où elles émergent afin de se reposer au soleil et de se nourrir, ce qui les rend généralement bien visibles.

35 Straightforwardly enough, such a sentence would sound extremely awkward/ nonsensical in French. The conjunction “et” would here bind up the two verbs “tissent” (une toile) and “emergent” (from “où”). Whence the interpretative problem, due to the fact that the precise nature of this “où” needs to be clarified; and, as it happens, the very fact that “plante”, “sommet de la plante” and “toile” are all located at almost exactly the same spot, establishes the (logical) possibility of a triple stemma that French — as I have hypothesized — will try to avoid, even though the general meaning of the sentence is in no way affected by “et d’où”. In other words: the French writer, in such a case as this, needs to interpret the meaning for his/her sentence to be felt as idiomatic.

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We can see indeed that in the first translation (Aquitaine Traduction), the use of “de là” (which could also have been “et de là”), through the choice of a straightforwardly locative adverb, clearly links the verb “peuvent sortir” to the noun “sommet” (also a locative word). Had the interpretation rather borne on “la plante”, we may have expected to find “(et) de celle-ci”, for instance. In the second translation (A4 Traduction), the use of “où” (with no coordinating conjunction) unambiguously shows that the referent is “la plante”.

36 In the two translated sentences, therefore, one can clearly observe that a single stemma has been (re)established in order to comply with the rules of French idiomaticism.

General Conclusion

37 It is a well-known fact — amongst practicing translators, at the very least — that the (seemingly) most “basic” words are often the very ones that lead to mind-puzzling translation problems. I hope to have shown that the French conjunction “et” is one of these. According to traditional grammar, the only constraint or limit pending upon “et” is the fact that it must bind together two words, phrases or clauses of same syntactic nature or function. Although this is perfectly true, this limitation is clearly not the only constraint affecting coordinated constructions in French — there is also a psychological/cognitive aspect to the phenomenon of coordination. This cognitive aspect is the following: (1) the use of “et” implies that the logical or semantic link expressed by this means is straightforward to interpret from the context or co- text; (2) which implies that “et” tends to draw the reader’s mind backwards to the closest interpretable element of same syntactic nature or function; (3) with the limitation of a threefold backward (analytical) movement of the mind. In light of this, it seems manifest that such a specific type of constraint, far from being random or arbitrary, originates from the very nature and functioning of the human mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Antoine, Gérald. La Coordination en français [tome 2]. Paris : Éditions d’Artrey, 1958 [republished by Caen Minard 2001, ‘reprint érudition poche’], 2001.

Berman, Antoine. La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.

Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Online Dictionary. “And”. http://dictionary.cambridge.org [accessed 23 January 2014]

Dick, Simon C. Studies in Functional Grammar. London: Academic Press, 1980.

Geeraerts Dirk, and Hubert Cuyckens. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford : Oxford UP, 2010.

Guillemin-Flescher, Jacqueline. Syntaxe comparée du français et de l’anglais : problèmes de traduction. Paris: Ophrys, 1986.

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Halliday, M. A. K, and Rugaiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. “English language series.” London: Longman, 1976.

Hoarau, Lucie. Étude contrastive de la coordination en français et en anglais. “Linguistique contrastive et traduction,” Paris : Ophrys, 1997.

Lapaire, Jean-Rémi, and Wilfrid Rotgé. Linguistique et grammaire de l’anglais. “Amphi 7.” Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991.

Lapaire, Jean-Rémi. “Coordination et cognition”. Études anglaises 58 (4) 2005: 473-494. DOI: 10.3917/etan.584.0473

Ladmiral, Jean-René. Traduire : théorèmes pour la traduction. “Tel.” Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française. “Et”. http://gr.bvdep.com [accessed 23 January 2014]

Quirk, Randolph. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman, 1972.

Steven Cheshire’s British Butterflies (pragmatic website dealing with the various species of butterflies living in the UK). http://www.britishbutterflies.co.uk [accessed 23 January 2014]

Tesnière, Lucien. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1959.

Vinay, Jean-Paul and Jean Darbelnet. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. “Bibliothèque de stylistique comparée.” Paris: Didier, 1977.

Zemmour, Joachim. De la polysyndète anglophone à l’hypotaxe francophone : problèmes de traduction. PhD dissertation, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 2012.

NOTES

1. Although any (professional) French translator knows about this “rule of thumb”, no official treatise or study seems to state it officially, interestingly enough. 2. For instance, Le Grand Robert de la langue française gives the following definition of ‘et’: “Conjonction de coordination qui sert à lier les parties du discours, les propositions ayant même fonction ou même rôle, à exprimer une addition, une liaison, un rapprochement“ (my emphasis). Similarly, in Le Bon Usage, Maurice Grevisse considers that: “les éléments coordonnés sont souvent de même nature et de même fonction“ (§ 265). He also argues that: “il est loin d’être rare, dans la langue parlée et dans la langue littéraire, que l’on coordonne des éléments de natures différentes, mais de fonction identique” (my emphasis). For further references, please refer to the selective bibliography at the end. 3. I am referring here to a concept explained by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens in their introductory text to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (2007), where the two linguists claim that “Cognitive Linguistics is cognitive in the same way that cognitive psychology is: by assuming that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind" (Geeraerts and Cuyckens 5). 4. The text, available at: http://ukbutterflies.co.uk, was then sent to two different translation agencies in France, one in Bordeaux (Aquitaine Traduction) and the other one in Paris (A4 Traduction). Each of them sent the text to an independent translator, who was not aware of the experimental character of the translation and was therefore ignorant of the fact that his or her work was being observed and analyzed. 5. The concept of “stemma”, invented by Tesnière, is a graphic representation of the sentence in which all connections, both visible and invisible (that is, both linguistically marked and

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unmarked), are pictured in the form of vertical lines between words and/or clauses. This complex system has been simplified for the purpose of this article.

ABSTRACTS

This experimental study is a synthetic presentation of a series of “rules” relative to the construction of complex sentences in French, specifically with regards to the use of coordinated structures. It is an adaptation of part of my PhD dissertation, whose subject was the translation of “polysyndeton” from English into French, observed from a “pragmatic” perspective as defined by Jean-René Ladmiral. As a translatologist, my approach is neither that of a linguist, nor that of a literature scholar, but that of a researcher mainly interested in the pragmatics of translation. It is not, therefore, set within any exclusive theoretical framework, especially as far as linguistics is concerned (translatology being, by its very nature, an interdisciplinary field). The primary aim of this doctoral research was to achieve a better understanding of what is traditionally—but often too vaguely—called “idiomaticism”, more especially as regards the French language. Throughout the article, the concept of “idiomaticism” has been described as a series of “thought patterns” that have an influence on the syntax of the French sentence, without being a formal (i.e. grammatical) constituent of it. These “rules” or “tendencies” could be particularly useful for learners of French as a foreign language.

Cette étude expérimentale présente, de manière synthétique, une série de « règles » relatives à la construction de la phrase complexe en français, en s’attachant plus spécifiquement à l’usage des structures coordonnées. Il s’agit d’une adaptation d’une partie de ma thèse doctorale portant sur la traduction de la « polysyndète » de l’anglais au français, menée dans une optique « pragmatique » tel que ce concept a été défini par Jean-René Ladmiral. En tant que traductologue, l’approche qui est la mienne n’est ni celle d’un linguiste, ni celle d’un spécialiste en études littéraires, mais bien celle d’un chercheur intéressé principalement par la pragmatique de la traduction. À cet égard, ce travail ne se place dans aucun cadre théorique — et en particulier, linguistique — exclusif (la traductologie étant, par nature, un champ pluridisciplinaire). Le principal objectif de cette recherche était d’aboutir à une meilleure compréhension de ce que l’on nomme traditionnellement — mais de façon trop floue — l’« idiomatisme », notamment en ce qui concerne la langue française. Tout au long de l’article, le concept d’« idiomatisme » a été décrit comme étant une série de « tendances de l’esprit » ayant une certaine influence sur la syntaxe de la phrase française, mais sans qu’elles en soient des constituants formels (c’est-à-dire, grammaticaux). Ces « règles » ou « tendances » pourraient s’avérer particulièrement utiles pour les étudiants de FLE.

INDEX

Mots-clés: stylistique française, coordination, idiomatisme, grammaire, pragmatique, traduction Keywords: French stylistics, coordination, idiomaticism, grammar, pragmatics, translation

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AUTHOR

JOACHIM ZEMMOUR Joachim Zemmour has worked as a literary translator since 2009. He specializes in what is traditionally known as “speculative fiction” (fantasy literature, science fiction, supernatural fiction). In 2012, he defended a PhD dissertation on the subject of polysyndeton (in the field of translation studies), under the direction of Pr. Nicole Ollier, at Bordeaux Montaigne University. He then taught for three years at Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University, before moving to the University of Perpignan (UPVD) in 2017. Recently, Joachim Zemmour translated Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Le Livre du Cygne, in the French translation), an Aboriginal fantasy and social science fiction novel, for Actes Sud (2016), as well as Ceridwen Dovey’s Animals, a collection of short stories in which the main characters are all animals, for Héloïse d’Ormesson (2016). Contact: joachim.zemmour [at] hotmail.fr

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