Bob's Dissertation Proposal, Part II

Again, any and all comments and criticisms are welcome and indeed, encouraged.
_________________________________________________________

My dissertation will be the result of interdisciplinary research, including archival, oral historical, archaeological, and ethnographic investigations. The research will engage with and attempt to bring together several disparate themes of recent scholarship in both anthropology and history, including the creation and contestation of the boundaries of community; local memory, identity, and heritage; and the materiality of social practices. As such, the dissertation will be an example of “archaeology” in two different senses: both in the traditional meaning of archaeology (the anthropological study of past cultures through the excavation and analysis of material remains) as well as French social theorist Michel Foucault's version of "archaeology" (the systematic examination of the genealogy of some social phenomenon; in this case, the creation and contestation of community identity in a working-class neighborhood).[1] Specifically, the dissertation will address how material practices, both mundane and spectacular, have been vital instruments in the ongoing struggle between the local working class and various groups of “outsiders” over the definition of and values attached to community in Hampden-Woodberry. By “material practices,” I mean to include a broad array of social phenomena, including production and consumption, theatrical performance and the performances of everyday life, and the strategic uses of public and private space. I propose to examine documents, public performances, local landscapes, and the artifacts of everyday life all together as material manifestations of this struggle.

In addition to an introduction, a theoretical chapter, and a conclusion, I plan to include five chapters in the dissertation. Each chapter will address a specific arena in which community identity has been forged and contested (the workplace, the public sphere, the domestic sphere, and the economic sphere), as well as the social categories that have shaped these struggles (class, race, gender, and religion). The chapters will be organized more or less chronologically beginning with the 1870s, with some necessary temporal overlap between topics. Each chapter, however, will explore some aspect of the materiality of insurgent practices used in the struggle over community identity.

. . .

In my dissertation, then, I will explore the various material strategies (the production and consumption of artifacts, spaces, landscapes, and representations) that have been deployed in the creation and contestation of different identities, or subjectivities, in Hampden-Woodberry. These subjectivities include those based on race, class, gender, and religion. The relationships between these different subjectivities (within both individuals and larger groups) have played a central role in the definition of and struggles over local citizenship in Hampden-Woodberry.

[1] See Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Cambridge, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) for an excellent example of this dual approach to archaeology.

Bob's Dissertation Proposal

Hi folks,

Over a month after I promised it, here is the first exceprt from my own dissertation proposal. Although Dave and I have been working together on Hampden archaeology for three years, our dissertations are going to be very different, for a variety of reasons (but mostly due to the different Ph.D. programs we're in, as well as the fact that we need to be able to distinguish ourselves as scholars in order to get jobs). I'll skip the historical background section and begin with an excerpt that explains my general approach to interpreting Hampden history. Any comments are more than welcome.
___________________________

I believe that a common thread can be found running throughout each of the major periods of Hampden-Woodberry’s past: the theme of “insiders” versus “outsiders.” Specifically, working-class residents of the neighborhood have expressed, both verbally and through their actions, a consistent will to keep “outsiders” away, or at least to diminish their influence within the community. During the late 19th century the outsiders were ethnic and racial minorities, whereas by World War I the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills Co., owned by a New York-based conglomerate, had taken over that role. After the mills began heading south, the newly independent petit bourgeois initiated a sustained effort to rewrite the community’s history, erasing the working class and nearly erasing the mills from the scene in an attempt to fill the power vacuum left by the mills’ departure. By the 1980s, the local working class community began fighting back, but once again against racial and ethnic outsiders rather than the local middle class. With the onset of gentrification, an outside middle class gained ascendancy but not without protest by working-class community “insiders.”

Furthermore, these localized actions (by both working-class community members and outsiders) represent instances of what anthropologist James Holston has called “insurgent citizenship.” According to Holston, insurgent citizenship consists of both grassroots mobilizations and practices of everyday life that work to subvert dominant agendas and contest the form of substantive citizenship (defined as the array of civil, political and social rights that are available to individuals within a polity or local community in varying degrees). Some individuals try to expand their claims to substantive membership in a given community, while others try to erode these claims. Insurgent citizenship is at “the intersection of these processes of expansion and erosion;” it is an activity in which both elite and subaltern groups engage. Thus, insurgent movements “create new kinds of rights, based on the exigencies of lived experience, outside the normative and institutional definitions of the state and its legal codes.”[1] The history of Hampden-Woodberry, then, can be seen as a history of insurgent citizenship in which the local working-class, which traces a cohesive and homogenous community identity to the late 1800s, has battled with a series of outsiders over the rights, duties, and values associated with local citizenship.

Hampden-Woodberry presents both advantages and obstacles as a case study in American working-class history. The local working community has maintained a closed, homogenous identity for well over 100 years, managing to retain a racially white, ethnically Anglo-Saxon character while most other industrial communities across the nation were continually reshaped by successive wages of immigration and internal migration. In this sense, Hampden-Woodberry is somewhat unique. On the other hand, local workers have been affected by and engaged with many historical developments that had similar impacts in other industrial communities: the shift from paternalistic industrial capitalism to corporate monopoly capitalism; the movement for industrial democracy; deindustrialization; desegregation; and gentrification. By examining the interaction of local struggles with these broader developments while simultaneously understanding the unique aspects of Hampden-Woodberry’s history, I hope to make a significant contribution to the study of localized forms of community identity and belonging in American working-class communities.

[1] James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in James Holston, editor, Cities and Citizenship (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 167-170.