Observing the Outports: Describing Newfoundland Culture, 1950-1980

by Jeff Webb

Overview

The years after Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada were ones of rapid social and economic change, as provincial resettlement and industrialization initiatives attempted to transform the lives of rural Newfoundlanders. At Memorial University in St. John’s, a new generation of faculty saw the province’s transformation as a critical moment. Some hoped to solve the challenges of modernization through their rural research. Others hoped to document the island’s “traditional” culture before it disappeared. Between them they created the field of “Newfoundland studies.”

In Observing the Outports, Jeff A. Webb illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations among scholars of lexicography, history, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and geography laid the foundation of our understanding of Newfoundland society in an era of modernization. His extensive archival research and oral history interviews illuminate how scholars at Memorial University created an intellectual movement that paralleled the province’s cultural revival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442628946
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	12/16/2015
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeff A. Webb is a professor and head of the Department of History at Memorial University.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Viewing the Universe Through Newfoundland Eyes: The Dictionary of Newfoundland English

Chapter Two: Writing History

Chapter Three: Herbert Halpert and Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland: Collecting Folklore

Chapter Four: Cat Harbour: Anthropologists in Outports

Chapter Five: Peopling of Newfoundland: Mapping Cultural Transfer and Settlement

Chapter Six: Communities in Decline: The Study of Resettlement

Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Raymond Blake

“Jeff Webb’s book is an innovative study of the scholars – historians, lexicographers, folklorists, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and others – who saw Newfoundland as a laboratory in which to study the process of modernization.”

Robert Mellin

“Observing the Outports is an invaluable overview of the history of research on Newfoundland’s outports at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A well-written comparative history of interdisciplinary research in Newfoundland, the book situates these developments in the context of national and international academic discourse.”

Editorial Reviews

‘ Observing the Outports is one of the most fascinating regional histories I have read in a long time… The book will be read by anyone interested in the study of regional culture and those interested in how interdisciplinarity can be developed within insular confines of the academy.’

—Richard MacKinnon, Canadian Historical Review vol 98:02:2017

“Jeff Webb’s book is an innovative study of the scholars – historians, lexicographers, folklorists, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and others – who saw Newfoundland as a laboratory in which to study the process of modernization.”

—Raymond Blake, Department of History, University of Regina

“Observing the Outports is an invaluable overview of the history of research on Newfoundland’s outports at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A well-written comparative history of interdisciplinary research in Newfoundland, the book situates these developments in the context of national and international academic discourse.”

—Robert Mellin, School of Architecture, McGill University

From the Publisher

'Observing the Outports is one of the most fascinating regional histories I have read in a long time... The book will be read by anyone interested in the study of regional culture and those interested in how interdisciplinarity can be developed within insular confines of the academy.'

Canadian Historical Review vol 98:02:2017 - Richard MacKinnon