Observing the Outports: Describing Newfoundland Culture, 1950–1980 by Jeff A. Webb (review)

Though not clear from the title, this is essentially a history of Newfoundland studies undertaken by those employed by, or connected, to Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) in the Departments of English, History, Sociology and Anthropology (later split in two), and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, along with the administrative structure of the university that defined and promoted Newfoundland and later, though too a much lesser extent, Labrador studies. Most of the sources come from written correspondence between members of the university. While Jeff Webb did do interviews with some of those covered in the book or with those who had connections to them, these appear as a much more limited source for Webb than do those from written archival sources. While, in many cases, those involved in the research from 1950 through 1980 are no longer available for such interviews, one does feel that there could have been more use made of these sources.

The first chapter of the book covers the production of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (DNE) and the work of key individuals in the Departments of English and Linguistics. The goal of this project was to capture the distinctive langage of what was assumed to be an isolated folk society, before it was engulfed by North American uniformities of speech that would come with modernization and increased outside contacts. Webb shows that the DNE gained both international academic acceptance and wide popular acceptance in Newfoundland. It also served as the foundation for the creation and growth of Newfoundland studies as a serious (and government-supported) field of study.

His second chapter covers the Department of History at MUN. The central task for the first professional, "scientific" historians of the Newfoundland studies movement was to "provide a way to reject the mythologies" that had been constructed by the major nineteenth-century historians, particularly Daniel Woodely Prowse, and repeated (albeit with variations) up through the 1960s and 1970s. But, for those unfamiliar with Prowse, there is only passing discussion of his main themes – the mythologies – of a nineteenth-century whiggish nationalist. Those mythologies – "conflict theory," "retarded colonization," and so on – continued to dominate popular and political conceptions of Newfoundland's place in the history of the British Empire and Canada as well as those working within academic Newfoundland studies outside of history.

The third chapter covers the formation and growth of the Department of Folklore, the first and only of its kind in English Canada. Not surprisingly, the department, like those individuals working on the same terrain in the Department of English (and out of which the Department of Folklore was formed) was based on the underlying logic that outport Newfoundland (the term for rural communities) was a rich source of folklore because it was an isolated, peasant society only recently touched by the forces of modernization and North American consumer culture. Folklore was popular among local Newfoundland undergraduates as well as in the international academic audience. However, many locals were less happy with being "exoticized" by mostly non-Newfoundland social scientists. Much of the chapter is also concerned with the publication of Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland, the first publication of the collaborative work in Newfoundland studies by those working in, or linked to, the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the end of the 1960s. This work combined chapters by those in English, folklore, and anthropology in ways that became common in Newfoundland studies in that period.

The fourth chapter looks at the contribution of anthropologists in the study of Newfoundland and (to a significantly lesser extent) the Labrador communities. It also looks at the foundation of the ISER, which was instrumental in directing and funding non-Newfoundland/Canadian graduate students to study local communities. Seven doctoral fellowships were given to graduate students from, mostly, American universities. Five of these were to study Newfoundland outports, while one of the students was sent to study in a Labrador community and one was sent to...