PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   VISIONS OF JAMES STREET NORTH PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   Title Page ARTS IN THE CITY: VISIONS OF JAMES STREET NORTH, 2005-2011 By VANESSSA E. SAGE, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Vanessa E. Sage, September 2013 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   ii Descriptive Note McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2011) Hamilton, Ontario (Anthropology) TITLE: Arts in the City: Visions of James Street North, 2005-2011 AUTHOR: Vanessa E. Sage, B.A. (Waterloo University), B.A. (Cape Breton University), M.A. (Memorial University of Newfoundland) SUPERVISOR: Dr. Ellen Badone NUMBER OF PAGES: xii, 231 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   iii Abstract I argue in this dissertation that aestheticizing urban landscapes represents an effort to create humane public environments in disenfranchised inner-city spaces, and turns these environments into culturally valued sites of pilgrimage. Specifically, I focus on James Street North, a neighbourhood undergoing artistic renewal in the post-industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the arts scene on James Street North, my thesis claims that artistic activities serve as an ordinary, everyday material response to the perceived and real challenges of poverty, crime and decay in downtown Hamilton. Aesthetic elaboration is a generative and tangible expression by arts stakeholders of their intangible hopes, desires, and dreams for the city. People’s hope, desires and dreams, however, are not all the same. Debates about the space use on James Street North generally take the form of pro-city revitalization versus anti- gentrification. These responses, I argue, are ultimately tied to, and concerned with, larger questions about the authenticity of place. Further, the authenticity of place is tied to a nostalgic yearning for a past that is symbolically associated with ‘country’ ideals of a close-knit community and a place of respite and renewal away from the ‘city.’ The aestheticization of this particular urban landscape, that was repeatedly imagined, reinforced, and performed during my fieldwork, is an attempt to humanize and democratize the street and the city rather than dehumanize and colonize it. Further, the street itself, in becoming tied to the hopes and desires of people, has taken on an almost sacred quality. As such, James Street North, as a destination to which people journey, and as a place in which both personal and social transformation occurs, is likened to a site of secular pilgrimage. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   iv Dedication To the girl who sat on a rock by a shore of the Atlantic Ocean in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia and believed in herself enough to dream. And to James Street North, another space for dreaming… PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   v Acknowledgements I write these acknowledgements as extended dedications with a heart full of gratitude. This program was a crucible for me, and I was very fortunate throughout the process to have been inspired, lifted and supported by all of you. First, I acknowledge, all those who gave me their time to talk about their lives on, and connections to, James Street North. This work is yours. To Dr. Ellen Badone for your patience, consistency, and kindness. This project would not have been completed without your encouragement. I cannot tell you how much I have appreciated working with you on this project. To Dr. Nancy Buchier and Dr. Celia Rothenberg for your support and help as thoughtful committee members. To Christine White, my mother, for your love and advice throughout this entire process. You raised me to value creativity and recognized that the questions I was asking about the world were anthropological. To Caelen Salisbury White for sitting through many conversations about my dissertation when we could have been shopping for vintage clothes. Thank you for always just wanting the best for me. You are a kick-ass sister. To Todd Pettigrew for always seeing my Buddha nature. Thank you for reading and re- reading drafts, for simply talking through ideas with me, and for not letting me give up. “A finished dissertation is a good dissertation.” “To begin is half the work.” To Mandy Koolen. Our conversations about Hamilton, and your encouragement that I write about my own journey and sense of conflict within the city, helped shape the project. Thank you for seeing a writer of place in me. To Emily Porth. You witnessed a personal growth and saw beauty in my tears. You wrote to me once that our friendship is “a magical dance of spirit” and that we are two wanderers made family. Thank you. To Laura Reid. Your friendship during the final stages of the writing uplifted me. Thank you for sacred sage and eagle feathers. You reminded me that this work is connected to something much greater. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   vi Thank you to: the Otonabee River, Cape Breton, Cap Rouge, Pleasant Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, Blackett Street, The Tate Modern, Wearyall Hill, Glastonbury Tor, Hamilton and James Street North. These are places that have all challenged me and taught me invaluable lessons about how to see and be in the world. Thank you fellow graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Thank you for all that I’ve learned from you, and, most importantly, for the fact that we’ve been through something together that is very special and that no one else will ever be able to share in quite the same way. I also acknowledge the support that the scholarships I received from McMaster University, the Department of Anthropology, and the Ontario government (Ontario Graduate Scholarship) helped me complete my graduate studies when I could not have done otherwise. Thank you to Stephanie Seagram, Jeremy Frieburger and The Cossart Exchange for creating such a great place to work and think. Thank you to Dave Kuruc for giving me the opportunity to write for H Magazine and for lending me books (and patiently awaiting their return), and to Ian Jarvis and Hamilton Artists’ Inc. for allowing me to volunteer. Thank you also to Chrissy Poitras and Kyle Topping at Spark Box Studios, where I spent a productive and relaxing month in Picton, Ontario writing a draft. ~ Finally, I thank Stacy Maskell, my partner. Your encouragement, enthusiasm and support have meant the world to me. There really are no words to express my gratitude. Thank you for cups of tea, healing journeys, and a shoulder to lean on during this process. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   vii Table of Contents Title Page ............................................................................................................................. i Descriptive Note ................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. v Table of Contents .............................................................................................................. vii List of Illustrations .............................................................................................................. x 1. Entrances ......................................................................................................................... 1 Preface ............................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction: Arts in the Gritty City ............................................................................... 7 Pilgrimage to Here ........................................................................................................ 10 “This is not a street (Ceci n’est pas une rue) ............................................................. 10 Pilgrimage to Here .................................................................................................... 13 Pilgrimage and Turner’s Influence on Pilgrimage Studies ....................................... 16 Pilgrimage on James Street North ............................................................................. 19 Ethnographic Standpoints: Methodology ...................................................................... 24 Community Involvement .......................................................................................... 25 Interviews and Ethics ................................................................................................ 26 Dialogic Reflexivity: Ethnography as a Process and a Product ................................ 30 Ordinary Generative Moments, Materiality and The City ............................................ 38 Affect and Sensual Objects ....................................................................................... 38 Material Culture and Materiality ............................................................................... 41 The City ..................................................................................................................... 45 Found Collage ........................................................................................................... 51 2. Hamilton, (Post) Industrial City & “The Street that Built the City” ............................. 56 Location: Hamilton ....................................................................................................... 57 James Street North: “Small Town Atmosphere in a Major City” ................................. 75 James Street North: Creativity Materialized ................................................................. 89 3. James Street North, Contradictory Imaginations .......................................................... 98 Sidewalk Ballets: Sustainable Collective Civic Pride ................................................... 99 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   viii Contradictory Imaginations: Gentrification ................................................................ 102 The Far Future Pushing Closer ............................................................................... 105 SOS: Fear and all Eyes on the Street ...................................................................... 110 New Frontiers .......................................................................................................... 114 “Contemplating the Gritty Core” ................................................................................ 119 Living Culture: Hope for the Creative ........................................................................ 120 Revitalization, Growth, Hope and Loss ...................................................................... 123 4. Gendered and Sexualized Spaces: The Hood, the Bad and the Ugly ......................... 127 Not A Pretty Site: A Generating Force ....................................................................... 128 Review: The Hood, the Bad and the Ugly .............................................................. 128 Not A Pretty Site: Quiet Realization ........................................................................... 133 Not a Pretty Site: Perpetual Victimization .................................................................. 135 Not A Pretty Site: “The Truth Has a Face” ................................................................. 138 Not A Pretty Site: Responses and Reactions .............................................................. 141 Not a Pretty Site: Sex Work ........................................................................................ 146 Discussion ................................................................................................................... 152 5. Creative Spaces: Where Business and Bohemians Meet in the City .......................... 154 Community Debate 1: Can the Arts Save Hamilton? ................................................. 155 “If a place gets boring ................................................................................................. 155 Community Debate 2: “What is James Street North?” ............................................... 167 Community Debate 3: “To the Footsoldiers of Gentrification” .................................. 173 Discussion: Creative Cities or Gentrified Spaces ....................................................... 181 6. Exits: Visioning James Street North ........................................................................... 189 Industrially Quaint ...................................................................................................... 191 Pastoral Ideals ......................................................................................................... 191 Tourism and Authenticity ........................................................................................... 195 Nostalgic Travel ...................................................................................................... 196 Authenticity Wars ................................................................................................... 197 The Past Accelerated or a “History of the Future” ..................................................... 201 Dreams of a Better Life ........................................................................................... 201 Present Hopes .......................................................................................................... 201 If James Street North Could be Anything?... .............................................................. 203 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   ix Concluding Thoughts .................................................................................................. 208 Epilogue ...................................................................................................................... 209 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 211 Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 211 Primary Sources .......................................................................................................... 224 Appendices ...................................................................................................................... 228 Interview Guide ........................................................................................................... 228 Consent Form .............................................................................................................. 229 Visions of James Street North in Hamilton, Ontario .............................................. 229 Deconstructed Abstract ................................................................................................... 231 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   x List of Illustrations Found Collage. .................................................................................................................... 2 Inside the Tate Modern. .................................................................................................... 11 Looking to the River Thames. ........................................................................................... 11 Art Installation by Grace Loney. ....................................................................................... 11 King Street West. ............................................................................................................... 11 Pumpkins, Squash and Cabbage for Sale ......................................................................... 38 Hamilton Skyline 1 ............................................................................................................ 57 Hamilton Skyline 2 ............................................................................................................ 57 Webster’s Falls ................................................................................................................. 60 Hiking Trail ....................................................................................................................... 60 Bayfront Park 1 ................................................................................................................. 60 Bayfront Park 2 ................................................................................................................. 60 CNR Tracks ....................................................................................................................... 63 The Old CNR Railway Station, Now LIUNA Station ........................................................ 63 “Courage, Hope and Dreams” Statue in Immigration Square ........................................ 63 Signs of Decay Still Felt in the Downtown Core .............................................................. 67 James Street and King Street ............................................................................................ 67 James Street North just past King Street .......................................................................... 67 North End on James Street North ..................................................................................... 69 North End Homes .............................................................................................................. 69 Fisher’s, North End Bar .................................................................................................... 69 King Street just past James Street, South and West .......................................................... 70 Irving’s, James Street North ............................................................................................. 75 Morgenstern’s, James Street North .................................................................................. 75 The Old Row Houses in 2010. ........................................................................................... 77 Pride Parade ..................................................................................................................... 78 Mardi Gras 1 ..................................................................................................................... 78 Mardi Gras 2 ..................................................................................................................... 78 Two Views of the Hamilton City Centre at York and Wilson ............................................ 79 72 James Street North. ...................................................................................................... 80 Old Federal Building. ....................................................................................................... 80 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   xi Lister Block ....................................................................................................................... 80 “Arcade,” Lister Block ..................................................................................................... 80 Scaffolding on the Lister Block ......................................................................................... 81 Tivoli Yard ......................................................................................................................... 82 The John Weir Foote VC Armouries ................................................................................. 83 Christ’s Church Cathedral ................................................................................................ 83 Vasco Da Gamma Futebal Clube ..................................................................................... 84 Lighthouse Fish Market .................................................................................................... 85 World Cup Fans ................................................................................................................ 85 Ventura’s Portuguese Restaurant ..................................................................................... 85 Wild Orchid Portuguese Restaurant ................................................................................. 85 St. Mary’s Church, ............................................................................................................ 86 Money Wreath, .................................................................................................................. 86 Marching Bands, ............................................................................................................... 86 Virgin Mary Float, ............................................................................................................ 86 Cedar and Flowers on Church Steps, ............................................................................... 87 Ola Bakery ........................................................................................................................ 88 Hamilton Artist’s Inc. ........................................................................................................ 90 HIStory + HERitage ......................................................................................................... 90 The Print Studio ................................................................................................................ 90 James North Art Collective ............................................................................................... 91 This Ain’t Hollywood ........................................................................................................ 91 Holiday Maker’s Market, .................................................................................................. 91 White Elephant .................................................................................................................. 91 Bike Hounds ...................................................................................................................... 92 Mixed Media ..................................................................................................................... 92 “Tin Men,” August 2009 Art Crawl .................................................................................. 92 Busker Crawl on James Street North ................................................................................ 92 Person with TV on Head ................................................................................................... 93 Film Projected on the Leon Furs Building ....................................................................... 94 Art By David Hind on the Leon Furs Building ................................................................. 94 Changing Moon Projected on the Dominion Building, Supercrawl. ................................ 94 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   xii David Hind Art on the Tivoli Building, Supercrawl ......................................................... 95 Sidewalk Painting 1, Supercrawl ...................................................................................... 95 Sidewalk Painting 2, Supercrawl ...................................................................................... 96 Sidewalk Painting 2, Close Up, Supercrawl ..................................................................... 96 Making Art on the Street, Supercrawl ............................................................................... 97 Chalk Art on the Street, Supercrawl ................................................................................. 97 Hotel Hamilton before Renovations 1& 2 ....................................................................... 105 Hotel Hamilton During Renovations .............................................................................. 105 Chandelier Inside the Mulberry Street Coffeehouse ....................................................... 106 Hotel Hamilton After Renovations 2. .............................................................................. 108 Hotel Hamilton After Renovations 2. .............................................................................. 109 Bricked in Window in Hotel Hamilton ............................................................................ 109 Second Floor of Hotel Hamilton ..................................................................................... 109 Hotel Hamilton, Old Bills Framed for Art Crawl ........................................................... 109 Collapsed Building, Next to the Lister Block .................................................................. 116 Downtown Building, ........................................................................................................ 116 Alleyway on James Street North, .................................................................................... 116 Gore Park Fountain, 1860 .............................................................................................. 117 Painting of Gore Park Fountain. .................................................................................... 117 “Wasted Words. Lasting Legacy.” ................................................................................. 117 Century Exhibit at Mixed Media ..................................................................................... 117 Renovating the Old Dominion Building .......................................................................... 118 Old Signage on James Street North ................................................................................ 118 Gutted Apartment 1 & 2 .................................................................................................. 118 “Sex Workers Are Members of Our Communities” ........................................................ 151 Art Gallery of Hamilton Window .................................................................................... 155 PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   1 1. Entrances Gallery: Arts in the City: Visions of James Street North, 2005-2011. Exhibit Description: Art on James Street North is an ordinary everyday material response to the perceived challenges of poverty, crime and decay in downtown Hamilton, Ontario; it is a generative and tangible expression by arts stakeholders of the intangible hopes, desires and dreams for the city. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   2 XV All the hope gone hard. That is a city. The blind houses, the cramped dirt, the broken air, the sweet ugliness, the blissful and tortured flowers, the misguided clothing, the bricked lies the steel lies, all the lies seeping from flesh falling in rain and snow, the weeping buses, the plastic throats, the perfumed garbage, the needled sky, the smogged oxygen, the deathly clerical gentlemen cleaning their fingernails at the stock exchange, the dingy hearts in the newsrooms, that is a city, the feral amnesia of us all. --Dionne Brand, poem from Thirsty (2002:24) Found Collage. James Street North, Hamilton, Ontario (April 26, 2008) PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   3 Preface James Street North in Hamilton Ontario is a street I have been fascinated by since I first stepped onto it in 2005 for an autumn Art Crawl with new friends in the department of Anthropology at McMaster University. A group of us went religiously that year to these monthly evening events when the galleries and shops opened their doors on the second Friday of every month. We looked at all the art, ate the free food the galleries put out, bought little things at Mixed Media (the local art supply store), and danced to the bands that sometimes performed in conjunction with the art shows. It was a place I felt free to wear my fedora and where I bonded with my new friends. I remember about eight to ten galleries (but I wasn’t counting back then) and a few shops that opened for Art Crawl. There were huge sections of the street where there were no galleries but we had a little map on a flyer that told us that if we kept walking north we’d find places like You Me Gallery at the edge of Barton and James Streets. In the following years, James Street North became a place I went to get my hair cut, a place I got my first tattoo, a place I walked to and walked down in Pride parades, and a place where I bought almost every journal I wrote in for years. I didn’t move to the street until my fieldwork was ‘officially’ over but the move extended the fieldwork by a year. I’ve gone through a lot of personal changes since that first time stepping onto the street to now, the summer of 2013, and so has the Street. When I think of James Street North now, after years of studying it, living on the edge of it, and in the midst of it, I think of: uneasy hopes, change, debate over change, and clashing communities struggling to find voice amidst the competing noises of the street. I would hazard a guess that if you PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   4 were to ask most Hamiltonians who don’t live on, or around it, what they think of James Street North, they would say something about art, or voice concern about their safety, or would mention a memory from their youth when the downtown was booming. Or they might not care. Hamilton is a geographically and socially divided city. The downtown core (of which James Street North is an extension) has become the focus of debate over the future of the city, and it is often metaphorically likened to its heart. However, this metaphor does not speak to all of Hamiltonians’ experiences or concerns for their city. Metaphors are a luxury, and the ‘heart’ of Hamilton is not necessarily experientially located at the intersection of King Street and James Street for those living anywhere outside of the downtown core. Still, the story of Hamilton gets told and retold throughout time, and recently a big story about the future health and wealth of the city has been focused on James Street North and the arts that seem to be booming there. I’ve been torn for a long time about not just how to tell a story about a few city blocks in Hamilton, Ontario but why it needs to be told. Why does it matter and how can it serve others both within and outside the academic and Hamilton communities? This thesis is an academic work within the discipline of anthropology so it must contribute to, and speak within, certain disciplinary concerns. It discusses the lives of Hamiltonians so it also must speak to the diverse needs of that community. But it also touches upon matters beyond both of these boundaries. This thesis is about a certain facet of one part of one street in a Canadian city, and yet what took place within these limits speaks to interdisciplinary and wider community audiences. It is a story of place making and of visioning a narrative out of place. Therefore, I write an ethnography, a story, of visions. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   5 As I will show in this ethnography, some have told a story of James Street North that focuses on gentrification by highlighting social and economic inequalities so that others might be galvanized to be aware of, and care more about, the lives of everyone living and working on the street, not just the arts and business stakeholders. Others have told a story that focuses on the creative class as a way to attract new businesses, new artists, and new citizens to Hamilton in the hopes of making it bigger and better. What is contained within these pages is an uneasy story that lives in contradiction. It will, without doubt, not be what you expect. Further, this ethnography has grown and changed as my understanding of the arts on James Street has changed. Like Tsing tells her readers in the introduction to Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), there are certain stories that I will not tell. I will not write a dressed up, cleaned up version of James Street North with the main aim of promoting it or Hamilton, nor will I tear down individuals or their efforts on James Street North in the name of social activism. Already, I dangerously position myself outside of these two very different points of view on the Street and stand on the verge of alienating both, yet I do not do this to say that either way of seeing James Street North is wrong or misguided. In fact, the very idea that there are two ways of visioning James Street North, or that these views are mutually exclusive, is misguided. In fact, the best possible outcome of this work would be that people might understand each other, and the worlds they are a part of, a little better by reading my ethnography. I believe that my social position as a kind of insider/outsider is absolutely necessary for these potential new understandings to take place. Therefore, my hope is to PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   6 offer a multi-sensual, multiple-voiced narrative so that James Street North, in all its contradictions, can come to life within these pages. Truthfully, I want Hamilton to succeed. I want it to do so in the most ethical and responsible ways it can, and I deeply hope for a James Street North where diversity can continue to live and thrive and where everyone can gain from open and respectful dialogue. This is a story of hope and despair, authenticity and tourism, memory and nostalgia, and loss, change and growth. It is a story of a different kind of aesthetic (where the beautiful and the ugly, the gorgeous and the grotesque meet). And it is a story of struggle and art. Of celebration and art. This story is not unique and yet it is uniquely placed in Hamilton. It matters because this story is not new. It matters because people everywhere struggle to find their places, to imagine and make their place in the world. They struggle against each other when there might be other options. The story of James Street North matters because what we make of the places that matter to us gets translated and transported across time and space in ways unimaginable. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   7 Introduction: Arts in the Gritty City Hamilton, Ontario has a reputation: gritty, tough, dirty, steel-town, smog-filled, Toronto’s lesser neighbour, and “the arm-pit of Ontario.” It is a city that is frequently dismissed by residents and non-residents alike. Yet, as a major port and stop along the historic Great Western Railway line, it has been a regional, national and transnational hub since its founding in 1816, and is currently the ninth largest city in Canada, and the third largest city in Ontario, with a population of just over half a million. Hamilton has endured several periods of growth and decline (both financial and industrial), maintaining a long- standing rivalry with Toronto for resources, status, and prestige. Hamilton is known as a “steel town” because of the role steel and other heavy manufacturing industries played in its development. The steel mills, along with the working-class image that they evoke, continue to loom large not only in Hamilton’s reputation but also in the social imaginations of what Hamilton is and might become. However, a new discourse is forming around Hamilton as a post-industrial city and creativity is, for some, a source of hope for the city. James Street North, a major downtown street in Hamilton, is a place that, at first glance, seems to exemplify the very grittiness for which the city is currently known. Hamilton’s growth and decline is reflected in the development of James Street North. The street was once a financial hub and main transportation route in the city yet poverty and crime there can be severe. Abandoned buildings and boarded up shops are part of the social landscape. The street has real and visible signs of decay that both affect people who live in the neighbourhood and influence social imaginations of Hamilton itself. In recent PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   8 years, however, James Street North has also become home to a growing arts community, and the arts have come to embody hope for a revitalized street, neighbourhood and city. Galleries, a monthly art crawl, a summer art market, as well as several artists’ studios, projects and centres have all recently been established. I ask how the bourgeoning arts scene on James Street North emerges out of, makes use of, and reacts to the materiality of the street itself. Why has James Street North become the centre of this new arts scene? Does the very grittiness and decay of the street inform the decisions of artists and galleries to locate there? Do the arts actually inject new creativity into the street, the city and the lives of its people? Finally, how do efforts at revitalization, concerns over displacement and feelings of loss that are part of the social fabric of the street connect to people’s hopes, fears and dreams? In critical social and cultural theory, cities have become key sites in which to understand how people are affected by social forces such as: modernity, deindustrialization, globalization and transnationalism (Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999, de Certeau 1984, Harvey 2003, Lefebvre 1996, Marcuse and van Kempen 2000, Sassen 2002). In contemporary anthropological theory these forces have productively been studied through an emphasis on open, mobile, contested, and varied forms of everyday practices within urban centres (Amin and Thrift 2002, Appadurai 1996, Low 1999, Haraway 1991, Latour 1993, and Massey, Allen and Pile 1999). James Street North is an optimal place to explore these themes because of its place in Hamilton’s rich history and Hamilton’s status as a major Canadian city where such mobilities, flows, and circulations between and among people and things appear. They PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   9 appear not only in Hamilton’s historical shifts but also through the myriad embodiments of these shifts in the city’s everyday materiality. I approach the arts on James Street North as one such embodiment in the everyday life of a street. Therefore, this ethnography examines the textured and layered materiality of James Street North, and the arts scene that currently calls this particular street home, in order to illuminate how people embody and imbue places with meaning. For Tuan (1977), an influential social geographer, place “is an object in which one can dwell” (12), and it is in these places of dwelling where people “try to embody their feelings, images, and thoughts in tangible material” (17). As such, I argue in this ethnography that art on James Street North is an ordinary everyday material response to the perceived challenges of poverty, crime and decay in downtown Hamilton, Ontario; it is a generative and tangible expression by arts stakeholders of the intangible hopes, desires and dreams for the city. Further, I argue that this response is ultimately tied to, and concerned with, larger questions about the authenticity of place. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   10 Pilgrimage to Here “This is not a street (Ceci n’est pas une rue) When you face the sun, close your eyes, and watch the coloured lines dance. Follow them, follow the heat and you’ll get there like I did (Taussig 2004:ix). Shadows on concrete. Steps. The river Thames and St. Paul’s Cathedral just in sight but out of focus. A streetlight pole looms above: growing out of the sidewalk, floating in the air. Sewers are eyes for feet. The street materializes before me as impressions of rooms upon rooms, and of artist upon artist, hang in my head. The sculptures, paintings, and media installations all confront me with a different vision of the world. Memories of Frida Kahlo’s tortured images, her smallness next to Diego Rivera,1 her striking eyes, and the quiet penetration of her face move me. In August of 2005 I stepped out of the Tate Modern in London, England and found that the way I saw the world had changed. My engagements with environments, particularly urban ones, have never been the same since. Without being aware of it, the hours spent scratching my head and staring in awe at the art performed a kind of spell. Kahlo’s collected work was what brought me to the 1 The painting I am referring to here is: “Frida and Diego Rivera” or “Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera,” 1931. Oil on canvas, 100 x 79 cm. San Francisco (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, Gift of Albert M. Bender. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   11 old power station the Tate Modern is housed in but I left with so much more than the experience of viewing her art.2 There is a “sweet ugliness” in cities that I found that day; a sense of marvel that remains when I pass the crushed coffee cups, the cigarette buts and the vomit that tend to litter the streets where I live in downtown Hamilton, Ontario. Inside the Tate Modern. From the Turbine Hall looking up at the seven floors and over eighty galleries. (August 15, 2005). Looking to the River Thames. From Southbank near the Tate Modern St. Paul’s Cathedral is in the frame on the left. (August 15, 2005). Art Installation by Grace Loney. Looking onto James Street North. Near James Street North. (July 22, 2010) King Street West. (April 22, 2008). 2 Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron began converting the closed down Bankside Power Station in 1995. Tate Modern opened its doors to 120 000 visitors on May 12, 2000. The project cost £134 million and its size is 371 520 square feet. The Tate Modern is located in Southwark on the south bank of the River Thames (Nixon et al.:2001:3). PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   12 The ways in which my life has intersected with my work are varied and deeply personal. My life and intellectual trajectories have led to an interest in how people relate to, make and are made by the places in which they live or find meaning in. I began my academic career by studying topics within the sub-discipline of anthropology of religion. I studied: Buddhist youth within the Western social landscape, pilgrimage in Glastonbury, England, and the crop circle3 movement as a new religious movement based upon crop circle enthusiasts’ interpretations of the English countryside as a space for the sacred. Through these projects, I developed an interest in questions relating to space and the ways in which people make sense of and use symbolic and sacred landscapes as a basis for, among other things, social critique. I also became very interested in how memory operates in spaces, and how presents, futures and pasts meet in the materiality of people’s surroundings. Further, this work also spurred an interest in the relationship between the country and the city. Influenced by Leo Marx (2000 [1964]) and Raymond Williams (1982 [1973]), I looked into how people devised and made sense of concepts like “nature” and was especially intrigued by how nature exists in urban and built environments as well as in the country (Cronon 1995). David Harvey’s (2003) work on historical Paris introduced me to the way lives are structured by the way things are built and by those who have the 3 In the 1980s, crop circles in English fields attracted international media attention, and researchers struggled to discover their origins. Despite the fact that their appearance has been dismissed as a hoax, crop circles have continued to provoke lively interest. Currently, crop circle enthusiasm is a significant social phenomenon, evidenced in the hundreds of books, video productions, websites, tours, and conferences dedicated to the subject. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   13 economic and social power to build things. These scholars were the first to shape my ideas about the city. Through my previous studies of seemingly extraordinary places, I became increasingly interested in how the ordinary and the extraordinary meet, and where meaning lies in the seemingly very ordinary and urban environments that so many people inhabit in the contemporary world. This led me to Hamilton. To the ordinary city in which I lived. Pilgrimage to Here Loss, mourning, the longing of memory, the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it, the fear of observing too coldly or too distractedly or too raggedly, the rage of cowardice, the insight that is always arriving late, as defiant hindsight, a sense of utter uselessness of writing anything and yet the burning desire to write something, are the stopping places along the way (Behar 1996:3). Hamilton is not my home but I chose to live there at three very different times in my life. It has served as a temporary home that I kept coming back to. I have struggled with what to write about my process and experience during this research. To say the least, I have gone through a difficult personal, creative and intellectual transformation since entering the PhD program at McMaster University in Hamilton a month after visiting the Tate Modern in 2005. Despite times of difficulties and ambivalence I have been invested and active in the city. I have changed and changed again in this city: making connections and losing them, finding space and re-inventing it, hurting and loving again and again. Life in this city at once found me whole and fragmented. There are stories I can tell that hold together and then there are those that I can’t and don’t—no cohesion, only passing moments that I can’t describe or hold onto. At times I was immobilized and PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   14 frustrated by Hamilton. It was not an easy city for me. I must admit sometimes all the hope went hard. This personal process has informed larger questions that come to bear on this work: what happens if you lose faith in the place that you live? How do you tell a story of a place when all you see is grey? What spaces can be created for those who feel conflicted, silenced or alienated? How might a work of this kind show the “feral amnesia of us all,” which is alluded to in the Dionne Brand poem (2002) that begins this work? How do you show contradiction? I did not go away for fieldwork. I did not find myself in a place I did not know struggling to communicate in a foreign language as many anthropologists stereotypically do. Instead, I stayed “home” at a time in my life when I was actually restless to leave. This decision also meant that I had to learn how to balance my work and home life in a way I might not have had I gone somewhere completely different for fieldwork. I stayed home at a time I felt lost. My journey was one of staying, of living where I lived, and of finding what I was once looking for in the extraordinary places I used to study right here in the everyday life of the place where I lived. Writing this ethnography has been a kind of pilgrimage for me: a pilgrimage of staying, a pilgrimage to here. This project is an ethnography of urban change on James Street North as it relates to a bourgeoning arts scene, and I was often asked why I was doing this project during the research. When a gallery owner and artist, who worked on James Street North, asked me this question in September 2009, I replied that the arts have always been at the forefront of my life. I write and come from an artistic (and academic) family: one of my uncles PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   15 makes his living as the sole Federal Government Sculptor in Canada, my other uncle is an accomplished classical guitarist, their mother, my grandmother, spent much of her life painting and singing, and my mother, as a young woman, danced and did theatre (a place I also spent a very good portion of my life). It was interesting to reflect on the fact that the arts have been part of my life for as long as I can remember and it was significant because I realized that, even as a scholar, the arts are always present for me in ways I don’t always understand or am conscious of. We talked about the important role art can play in our society, how neither of us separate our work from our lives, and we further discussed the value of art and the way in which art and scholarship can bring awareness to the general public about a variety of social issues. I told him I felt like I was at the beginning of a very interesting journey and I had no idea where it would lead! He said: “That’s very exciting!” and I left excited. Another acquaintance asked me the same question about the rationale behind my project around the same time. On that occasion I couldn’t articulate the reasons but I knew it was important that I do the project. I told her of my love of pilgrimage and about my conflicting feelings about Hamilton as my new found home. She said: “you’re on a pilgrimage to here!” On an external level I study the arts on James Street North but this does not say enough. Ethnography is a journey in which you enter into something new and are transformed by it. This is what Behar is referring to when she begins her chapter “The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart” by saying that: “Loss, PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   16 mourning, the longing of memory, the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it… are the stopping places along the way (Behar 1996:3). Pilgrimage and ethnography are both processes in which the individual and the larger social world are transformed by the pilgrim’s (or the ethnographer’s) relationship to the time and space they move through. Voyé (2002), for example, describes pilgrimage as the “materialization of the efforts the individual has to make to give himself or herself meaning” (124). My ethnographic pilgrimage to and through Hamilton connects to the social time and space of James Street North in a very particular way. However, the voyage itself (i.e. the movement in and through place) is, I believe, shared with the research participants. For at its heart this project is really about the potentials that particular locations, and activities in those locations, hold for people. Pilgrimage and Turner’s Influence on Pilgrimage Studies Pilgrimage is born of desire and belief. The desire for solutions to problems of all kinds that arise within the human situation. The belief is that somewhere beyond the known world there exists a power that can make right the difficulties that appear so insoluble and intractable here and now. All one must do is journey (Morinis 1992:1). Why am I writing about pilgrimage in relation to James Street North? What I felt as an ethnographer on a pilgrimage to here is a powerful clue, to a deeper pattern and experience felt by others on the street. Furthermore, in doing this research, I realized there are significant commonalities found in all of my field sites to date: in each case, I have found a deep sense of meaning and connection within the material spaces in which people travel to and through. It is easy to see these connections when looking at a site such as PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   17 Glastonbury, England, which is literally in the pilgrimage-making business, or in a crop circle, where people travel great distances to hunt, tour, and simply be within the crop circles. This section will explore the anthropological scholarship on pilgrimage and then go on to discuss pilgrimage in relation to secular travel as well as the importance of place for James Street North. … In his introduction to the collection Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage, Alan Morinis (1992) provides a succinct definition of pilgrimage, stating that: “pilgrimage is a journey undertaken by a person in a quest of a place or a state that he or she believes to embody a valued ideal” (1992:4). In this simple, yet rich, definition of pilgrimage we find two key components that relate to James Street North: the journey to a place (or a state) and the embodiment of valued ideals. Before returning to Morinis’ definition, however, I begin by discussing the influence of Victor Turner on pilgrimage studies. In anthropology, Victor and Edith Turner’s (1978) work is still highly influential, even if controversial. Turner, generally considered a symbolic anthropologist, was trained in the British structural-functionalism school. His work on rites of passage divides these rituals into three stages: separation, margin or liminality, and aggregation. Moreover, Durkheim’s assertion in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995, originally published 1915), that we imagine our world as being split between the “sacred” and the “profane” is also echoed in the work of Turner. In fact, Durkheim’s PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   18 work on religious festival, which he saw as a “social unifier and moral regenerator,” has been very influential in pilgrimages studies (Eade and Sallnow 1992:3). Other approaches to pilgrimage, influenced by Marx, have explored “the generation and maintenance of ideologies which legitimize domination and oppression” within these pilgrimage “cults” (Eade and Sallnow 1992:4). Still focusing on the structural elements of pilgrimage, Turner viewed pilgrimage, like rites of passage, as anti-structural (Morinis 1992:8; Eade and Sallnow 1992:4). This anti-structural narrative follows a basic pattern: pilgrims, in “separating” themselves from the ordinary social structure in which they live by going on a pilgrimage, enter into a period of liminality where they are essentially structurally invisible (i.e. they lose their ordinary statuses and are anonymous). In so doing they enter into collective liminality, or communitas, which involves a sense of equality and connection or togetherness. The pilgrimage ritual then is the means by which a religious community experiences a sense of unity and harmony that overshadows the existing hierarchical and other distinctions (Turner and Turner 1978). Eade and Sallnow, commenting on Turner, add: Pilgrimage, in other words, to the degree that it strips actors of their social personae and restores their essential individuality, is the ritual context par excellence in which a world religion strives to realize its defining transcultural universalism; for to reach the individual is to reach the universal (1992:4). Turner’s focus on liminality gives us important clues about the dynamics of the ordinary cultural world, especially within specific religious traditions. However, his model has also been criticized. According to Eade and Sallnow, Turner’s theory “prejudges the complex character of the phenomenon but also imposes a spurious homogeneity on the practice of pilgrimage…” (1992:5). Morinis adds: “pilgrimage was PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   19 found to be a highly individualistic practice in which a person sought to establish direct contact with his deity, in contrast to the group event emphasized in Turner” (1992:8). The focus instead, in the work of other scholars, is on heterogeneity, process and experience. Within this context there is also a focus on “competing religious and secular discourses” (Morinis 1992:9). Pilgrimage on James Street North In every major religion there are important sites of pilgrimage and routes along which faithful pilgrims journey. These can include: important birthplaces of religious figures, sites of revelation (as in Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment), or places with a rich historic significance, such as the Holy Land. While pilgrimage studies have traditionally been concerned with religious pilgrimage and religious pilgrims, more recently, anthropologists and religious studies scholars have been extending the concept of pilgrimage to apparently “secular” destinations. Doss (2008) and King (1993) have analysed journeys to Graceland, for example, as pilgrimage. Peter Jan Margry’s edited volume, Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred (2008) sets an important precedent for looking at alternative, non-religious sites as pilgrimage destinations. The authors in the volume write about political, musical, sports, and cemetery pilgrimage sites from all over the world. Sites such as Jim Morrison’s grave (Margry 2008) and an annual motorcycle pilgrimage for Vietnam veterans (Dubisch 2008) are explored. While Margry is uneasy with the idea of secular pilgrimage and, instead, defines religion more broadly in order to look at the “religious dimensions of the PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   20 sites where a secular person is remembered” (36) the volume still deals seriously with secular sites as places where pilgrimages take place. It is important to understand religion to encompass the social collectivity, following Durkheim, and the quest for meaning, following Geertz (1973). Adopting this approach, as Badone and Roseman do (2004), we can understand pilgrimages to sites such as Graceland or the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, as well as the monthly journey to an Art Crawl on James Street North as being: … travel in search of authenticity or self-renewal [which] falls under the rubric of the sacred, collapsing the distinction between secular voyaging and pilgrimage (2004:2). One example of a secular pilgrimage that works very well is Jennifer Porter’s article, “Pilgrimage and the IDIC Ethic: Exploring Star Trek Convention Attendance as Pilgrimage” (2004). Porter begins with Morinis’ view of pilgrimage as a journey to a place or state that embodies a valued ideal in order to show how for Star Trek fans, a shared, cultural commitment to Gene Rodenberry’s ethic of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination makes attending Star Trek conventions a sacred journey. She concludes that: The boundaries of pilgrimage can readily encompass such secular journeys and that such journeys need not have a spatial centre in order to represent for participants the meaningful pursuit and active embodiment of cultural ideals (2004:173). Porter’s argument about pilgrimage occurring in “de-centred” space is an important one, especially when looking at alternative and secular sites. However, for James Street North it is the place itself that draws people to it. In this way, James Street PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   21 North fits well within Turner’s theories about the role of place in pilgrimage. Badone and Roseman state: Through the journey to a distinct holy place, the pilgrim is separated from the rule-governed structures of mundane social life, becoming both geographically and socially marginal. Turner (1974) argues that pilgrimage centres are frequently found in peripheral locations distinct from centres of political and economic influence. Thus the pilgrimage shrine is spatially liminal…” (2004: 3-4). We see this statement hold true for James Street North. Historically, the street was geographically central, while currently it is socially marginal. It is a place where Turnerian communitas as well as “divisiveness and discord” (Eade and Sallnow 1991:5) are both performed. James Street North can be seen as located, in the interstices of social structure: among the poor, outcasts, and those like artists and religious virtuosos who consciously remove themselves from some of the constraints of society (Badone and Roseman 2004:3). Visits to James Street North are like doing fieldwork at home, like a mini-pilgrimage, or mini-vacation – they don’t take you far away or for a long time, but they take you into a liminal space. If tourism is a kind of search for authenticity, renewal, the exotic, and redemption, then James Street North also provides these qualities. The search for authenticity that occurs on James Street North also occurs in travel to the ‘Other,’ in the form of the ‘exotic,’ or the ‘untouched’ natural world where one of the hoped for outcomes is a sense of “redemption.” The perceived redemptive quality of travel to the “Other” still holds great symbolic power for individual travellers. In my view, people on James Street North express a definite sense of, and value in, the removal of “some of the constraints of society” for people. This removal of constraints is not only apparent in arts stakeholders’ personal decisions and choices of PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   22 alternative lifestyles but also in the ways in which people travel to the street. James Street North has become a location in which: Modern individuals respond to their routinized work lives by regularly seeking out the inverse in leisure activities…these individuals embark on journeys that are primarily quests for an ‘authenticity’ that is missing in their everyday lives (Badone and Roseman 2004:6, discussing Graburn 1977, 1989 and MacCannell 1976). I argue that, even within an urban setting, it is possible to find alternative locations that provide the “inverse” to a deep sense of urban alienation. On a busy modern downtown street, such as James Street North, people seek out and find what would typically be sought and found in historic and rural settings. Like Simon Coleman’s “heritage pilgrims” in Walsingham, England (2004), visitors to James Street North also “invoke the ideal of a past that can be imagined and to take on material and spatial form” (2004:52). According to Nelson Graburn, As urban alienation leads to the “search for more ‘authentic’ experiences for people seeking connectedness and community, imagining it is found in ‘simpler, gentler’ lifestyles…in rural cultures” (Badone 2004:183 citing Graburn 1995:197). James Street North may not be a “gentler” setting but it is a place in which people seek out authentic experiences and respite from a climate of post-industrial urban alienation. The work of Martha Radice, an anthropologist who studied four multiethnic neighbourhoods in Montreal, is also relevant here because, in her discussion concerning cosmopolitanism, authenticity and Othering are central themes. Here, she writes about commodified cosmopolitanism, a kind of “place-marketing” strategy, in her field sites: …commodified cosmopolitanism in my street study might involve the sale of exotic food, music, clothes, and the like, where the transaction is seen as inauthentic, either because the seller or the goods are not ‘really’ of that PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   23 culture or because the buyer buys in order to show off his or her knowledge of those goods (2009:151-152). And: This gradual construction and dissemination of the myth of cool, cosmopolitan Mile End doubtless contributes to the continuing residential and commercial gentrification of the neighbourhood (2009:152). On James Street North, I argue that the search for authenticity does involve what Radice identifies as a kind of constructed “coolness,” but that there is also subtle, but nonetheless tangible, connection to the streetscape that develops among visitors and residents over time. In fact, Radice concludes her discussion of cosmopolitanism by stating that even in what appears to be a ‘superficial inter-ethnic exchange in the sphere of consumption” there are also more “personal” or “consequential spheres of action” taking place (2009:153-154). If “place equals space plus meaning; individuals and groups make places relevant and meaningful through their actions and ideas” (Radice, 2011:13) then James Street North is a place where meaning-making is on overdrive. It is a space of place-marketing, travel to the Other, respite, redemption, celebration and conflict. And while, pilgrimage is not a word that comes up often, nor do people on the street define themselves as pilgrims, James Street North has become a major site in Hamilton in which people experience almost sacred meaning. So, just as a pilgrimage may be ‘made’ in major pilgrimage sites and not necessarily ‘felt’, I argue, a pilgrimage can be felt without being ‘made.’ People for whom the street holds importance place within it the values of a new sense of community and economy for Hamilton. It holds hope and nostalgia in equal measure in the very bricks, graffiti, and concrete of the street. It is a place to which people PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   24 relocate and travel from both within the city and without. For those who are committed to the arts scene on James Street North, the street embodies an almost sacred sense of the possibility of personal and social transformation. Ethnographic Standpoints: Methodology My ethnographic research began in February 2009, and continued for approximately twenty-two months. I moved onto James Street North nine months before the end of fieldwork but lived a fifteen-minute walk away from the street before that. To understand, and bring to life, people’s experiences on James Street North, and how those experiences inform other aspects of their lives, I conducted over a hundred open-ended interviews and approximately thirty semi-structured interviews with arts scene stakeholders between May 2009 and April 2010. In addition to interviews and “hanging-out” on the street listening to how people talk about Hamilton and James Street North, I attended events, walking-tours, dinners and public discussions that related directly to either James Street North or the arts in Hamilton. Throughout this entire process I supplemented the analysis of interviews and field data by working with and analyzing materials such as: photographs, visual art, video, websites, blogs, online photo sharing, maps, postering and graffiti related to the arts on James Street North. When I talk about the arts scene on James Street North I am generally referring to a loose and shifting group of people who use the street for creating, displaying, and PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   25 consuming the visual arts. However, other creative outlets, such as film and music, as well as businesses that cater to this group, are also an important part of the “scene.” Community Involvement I volunteered at Hamilton Artist’s Inc. once a week from August 2009 to February 2010, and helped with their annual Sin Circus event in 2009 and with a panel discussion on sex work that Hamilton Artist’s Inc. and the Worker’s Art and Heritage Centre collaboratively organized in February 2010. I also wrote articles for H Magazine (a local monthly arts and culture paper) from August 2009 until March 2010. I joined H.A.N.D. (Hamiltonians Against Neighbourhood Displacement) in its initial phases, and before it was named H.A.N.D., from October 2009 until December 2009. I left for several reasons, the most important being that privacy at meetings was very important to its members and I could not, in good conscience, attend as an anthropologist given the stress they put on privacy. Further, I could not agree with their manifesto in its entirety (a requirement for membership) and learned that questioning basic assumptions was not possible. The group’s purpose was political action and mine was intellectual exploration. While the two do not necessarily work at odds, and they do not for many people, in my case, and in this situation, I felt they did. When I write about this phase in the research it will be about the group’s public actions and not their private meetings. I have taken great pains to use only data about H.A.N.D. that I discovered in public interactions where any member of the public could have gained the same information by paying attention. Further, while the meetings at H.A.N.D. were private the fact that this group existed was not. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   26 In addition, I joined The Cossart Exchange, a creative business incubator in downtown Hamilton, from August 2010 until August 2011 and worked with them to help make connections with the McMaster University community by co-organizing a career event for graduate students. My decision to join The Cossart Exchange, while connected to the research, was a personal choice; I was no longer interviewing at the time, and everyone involved was aware of my project. Although I do write about Hamilton Artist’s Inc., H Magazine, H.A.N.D., and The Cossart Exchange in later chapters I do not feel that my involvement with any of these organizations or groups compromised my academic freedom or honesty and I ask that the reader not assume particular allegiances or intellectual stances as my thoughts on the issues that have arisen during the research are complex, changing and open to further development. Throughout the writing phase I continued to live on James Street North, attend events and informally talk to people. The street continued to be a major source of inspiration for the writing process. The descriptions I have included in this thesis are inspired by field notes and living on the street while writing the ethnography. Interviews and Ethics While in the early planning stages of the research I had hoped to also explore how the arts scene was experienced and understood by people not directly in the arts scene. The majority of my interviews, however, were with people linked to the arts. This was due to three factors. One, there are a lot of people who have a connection to the arts on James Street North and I wanted a good cross section of that population. Two, I found it PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   27 difficult to break into the other groups (such as the Portuguese community) on the street early on, and this influenced the direction I took. Three, I needed to make the data manageable. I realized while doing the research that in order to do justice to those not identifiably involved in the arts I would have to do another study to fully explore and understand the arts’ impact on the neighbourhood. The impact the arts are having on those populations will need to be explored further in future projects. I interviewed people with whom I came into contact while conducting participant observation in public places on the street, people who were recommended to me (i.e. snowball sampling), public figures and business owners who I contacted through an email introduction, and, on rare occasions, those who contacted me wishing to be interviewed. I worked to reduce a sense of obligation or pressure for an interview by not approaching friends. Although some of those I interviewed slowly became friends, I made a choice during fieldwork to avoid making the arts scene my main social network. Participants were given a letter of consent (see appendix) that discussed the harms, risks and benefits of participating in the study. Given the nature of qualitative research, it is possible that a research participant may disclose information in which they feel vulnerable, exposed, or at psychological or social risk. I believe, however, that this research did not expose participants to more than minimal risk because I did not ask them about personal issues beyond what they might have been asked and/or talked about in their everyday public lives. For my interviewees, the benefits of participating, however, included the reflexive opportunity to talk about their involvement in the arts, the place in which they live, and PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   28 what the city and the street mean to them. This opportunity to reflect is valuable for people as they make sense of their experiences. Additionally, participation in the study allowed for the furthering of intellectual and social knowledge about Hamilton, Ontario, and helped expand understanding of Canadian city life, in general, and Hamilton’s place in larger global contexts, in particular. I have voluntarily been interviewed for four social science projects, and as such, have first-hand knowledge about what the interview experience can bring up for a research participant. This knowledge has made me sensitive to how participants may feel vulnerable during and after an interview. Participants were informed that they could withdraw at any point in the research process (none chose to withdraw) and no compensation was given. In order to protect privacy I took care to make participants aware that they would be given pseudonyms and that identifying information that they shared with me would be removed from the ethnography and any additional publications that may come out of the research. However, in order to respect human dignity, I also gave participants the choice as to whether they wanted to have pseudonyms and identifying information removed or if they wanted to be identified. The reason for this is that for some, participation may mean they want to receive recognition.4 Therefore, I felt it was important to give them this choice. The majority of participants chose to be identified. Given the very interrelated and public nature of the arts in Hamilton and on James Street North it is possible that participants could be identified by readers of this work. I 4 The AAA ethics document discusses this issue. See Part III, Section A, clause 3 of “The Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association” (American Anthropological Association 1998). PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   29 have chosen a combination of ways to deal with privacy. First, public documents, art shows, events, websites, articles and public Facebook pages (i.e. public groups accessible to everyone on the Internet) are treated as public and therefore individuals are identified. However, in the cases of public events that many community members attended, only presenters or panellists are identified, not audience members because the presenters and panellists more willingly and consciously put themselves in a public position with the chance of being quoted. Second, I have respected the participant’s request to be identified or not identified as best I can. However, while participants may have chosen to be identified, they may not have been aware of how their comments could influence others or indirectly reveal others’ identities, so I have also been careful not to identify people in those cases. Third, in the case when parts of interviews are clearly private or very sensitive, I have taken care to disguise the speaker or write in more general terms. Of those I interviewed: twelve were financially invested (that is they either own businesses or make a living on James Street North), three were spokespeople for organizations located on James Street North, eight were artists, two were city officials, two grew up on James Street North as children, and five others were either interested in James Street North or part of the arts scene. Some people fell into more than one category. For example, a financially invested participant might also be an artist. Further, eighteen were men and fourteen were women, three were openly gay or lesbian, all were of European descent and employed, and their ages ranged from the mid-twenties to the mid-sixties. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   30 Generally, interviews took place either in the participants’ workplaces or at downtown coffee shops or restaurants. All but five of the interviews were digitally recorded, and when recording was not permissible or possible due to noise or location I took careful notes. Each interview was between forty minutes to two hours with an average of just over an hour. While I had an interview guide (see appendix), each interview was unique to the person with whom I talked. My aim was to give participants free range to discuss matters that were relevant to them. The basic structure of the interviews, however, involved talking about Hamilton, then James Street North, then the arts in Hamilton, and finally about the interviewee’s involvement in the arts on James Street North. I wanted to understand James Street North in the context of its place within Hamilton and was primarily interested in social and spatial dynamics. I have no doubt that someone with a different background would produce a very different study than this one. Dialogic Reflexivity: Ethnography as a Process and a Product I am not an objective observer and this ethnography has significant elements of reflexivity. When I first fell in love with anthropology I was primarily concerned with how people experienced their worlds. I wanted to find a way to evoke a sense of the world as it is and, in doing that, discover ways to meet diverse experiences with a sense of understanding rather than judgement. This approach does not lend itself well to explanatory frameworks nor to ideological political action. This kind of ethnography is still, however, a choice with consequences. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   31 I take as a starting point cultural anthropologist William Rodman’s first line of “When Questions are Answers”: This is what I think happened….What follows is a fiction, but it’s as true a fiction as I can write based on my own experience on the island and the information available to me (1991:421). I write a fiction as true as a fiction can be, but I write it based upon the encounters I have had with the people, places and things that were part of my field site. However, those encounters have been coloured by my positions within Hamilton and elsewhere. My choice to include myself in the narrative (in this fiction) is a feminist and a personal choice. As Behar (1996:21) observed of herself in the academy as a Chicana woman on the borders, I have found that as a lesbian, also on the margins, my “anthropological mask” has been “peeling off” for some time. I cannot look at the world in any other way. Revelations of self are risky for an academic (Behar 1996:11) but the journey an anthropologist takes is one that is filtered through the self for good or ill. However, as Behar poignantly argues, we also need to have a: keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world, and more particularly, the topic (1996:13). As a small example, every time I dropped my partner’s hand while we walked past the groups of Italian and Portuguese men that hang around outside on James Street every day, or when I looked away or politely smiled at the daily calls of “Hi Bella” or whistles I received, my position in the world impacted how I engaged, was excluded, or chose not to engage, with the Street, and in effect this project. Further, a decision I made PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   32 several years ago to leave the queer community I was once engaged in also impacted this work and my relationship to Hamilton itself. However, it is important to note these reflections about my engagements do not travel only one way. I note immediately what Rodman calls an “Other side to reflexivity:” The people we study study us, even in the moments we do not study them. We are not just observers observed; we are interpreters interpreted….This is an Other side to reflexivity, one crucial to understanding the dialogics of encounters in field research, and one that anthropologists have only begun to explore (1991:432). Ethnography is both a process and a product; a dialogic doing and a describing. “It is an awful prospect, giving up one’s cloak of academic objectivity” (Behar 1996:11) but we ask our respondents to open themselves up to us. They are vulnerable in this process as well (Behar 1996:21). This ethnographic work we do is, I dare to coin the term, a process of dialogic reflexivity. As an ethnographer, I already stood in a particular location in relation to those I studied. This was not collaborative research where those for whom the research is about and impacts determined research goals, questions and results. It was ethnographic research where during fieldwork I made decisions about how I would get involved (or not) in political and other actions that were taking place in the field site. My position as an ethnographer provided me with the ability to talk to people who weren’t necessarily talking to each other, and I actively valued and protected this stance. I did not want to form opinions and allegiances that would be sources of alienation. However, other people can, and possibly did, interpret my choices as a source of alienation. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   33 While it may seem like there is a great deal of control, autonomy and distance in these methodological choices, I do believe that ultimately the research participants directed this research in many ways. Their concerns, and how and what they did and talked about, to a large extent, became what I became concerned about. No amount of reading or planning, for example, could have prepared me for stepping into fieldwork on the arts scene to find myself spending six months on the issue of sex work. My next point of entry into this discussion is a theoretical consideration of the construction of narratives, and how ways of knowing, being, and acting in the world are constituted. I find especially useful archaeologist Rosemary Joyce’s Bakhtinian exploration of how archaeology (both the doing and the writing) is a multi-voiced project involving a dialogue between the site or text, the individual actor or author, and the “weight of what has traditionally been thought and ‘known’” (2002:6-7). Within this framework the stories that we tell matter because they are dialogic; they have ethical effects in the world (2002:14). We must accept responsibility for them. Joyce further argues that Bakhtin’s notion of “total context” is necessary because it accounts for “the total speech context” and situates differing voices in a dialogue instead of reducing them and evaluating them as separate acts (2002:31). Yet the dialogue matters: “it shapes ongoing social reality” (Joyce quoting Bakhtin 2002:31). This argument helps in that it does not “other” arts stakeholder’s claims nor does it necessarily privilege specialist knowledge over non-specialist knowledge. I include several passages of community dialogue in the ethnography in order to look at the dialogue without giving one voice more weight than others. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   34 Ethnography has the double meaning of writing and doing. Also, neither is ethnography a “simple process of transcription of what is on the ground” (Joyce 2002:5,7). Even more so than archaeology, ethnography is dialogic. I entered the field with both conscious and unconscious assumptions and understandings about what I was doing. Furthermore, the “field” was not a simple site. Not only was it not a bounded or homogenous cultural field, it was part of “politicized, culturally relative, historically specific, local and multiple constructions” (Rodman 2003:205). Again, those I encountered were in dialogue with me, and the discipline with which I am associated. In entering the field as both an insider (a creative person studying the arts) and an outsider (an academic), and as a subject and an object informed the way in which I work, how people related to me, and how I analyzed what appeared to be (and of course never was) neutral data. “What follows is a fiction” (Rodman 1991:421, cf Clifford 1986). Neutrality is not an option. Like Harding, who worked on American Baptists, I found “there is no such thing as a neutral, ‘participant-observer’ position, no place for an ethnographer who seeks ‘information’ (1987:171). Distance is also not an option. In fact, some feminists have suggested that it is not desirable to do “value-free” research; that not only is it impossible to “uncover ‘facts’ and the ‘truth’,” it is not moral or practical either. There is always the danger of being exploitative and working against the interests of the people whom you study (Wolf 1996:4). However, as I have found, the interests of the people are not homogenous and working for or against them is not a straightforward task. Nor does one group or individual have a single voice. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   35 In projects that attempt to show “how many voices clamour for expression” (Clifford 1986:15) there is still a sense that the voices are whole, and that, for example, the record of an interview (or personal narrative) can still represent a voice (even if only partially). What happens when these voices inhabit spaces of irony (absurd gaps between action and expectation), paradox (seeming falsities), and contradiction (inconsistencies and ill-logic)? People, in many ways, do not live their lives according to logic, and what one thinks, says or does at one moment may not be true for that same person at another moment. Anthropologists are increasingly concerned with polyvocality, heterogeneous dialogues, contestations, frictions, and cultures as diffused and borderless (see for example, Bakhtin 1981, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Marcus 1995, Tsing 2005). This kind of work involves not only how anthropologists theorize communities and cultures but also the very ground on which they work, the places in which they stand, and their willingness to be mutually vulnerable. Feminist ethnographers have also suggested ways of imagining and doing fieldwork in line with these trends. Some have recommended that you do work that you are passionate about (Wolf 1996:5), that you experiment with writing in order to be accountable to your subjects and to “accord greater voice and recover their agency” (Brettell 2006:75), and, finally, to think about disidentification, multiple positioning, intersubjectivity, and partiality rather than universality “as a basis for knowledge claims” (Visweswaran 1997:593, 613; Wolf 1996:5,14). Visweswaran asks that, in the case of gender, that it: PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   36 not be the endpoint of analysis but rather [the] entry point into complex systems of meaning and power….Gender is perhaps best understood as a heuristic device and cannot be understood a priori, apart from particular systems of representation (1997:616). While this ethnography is about a city contradictorily imagined through the lens of arts stakeholders, gender has also impacted this work significantly: in the dialogic processes that helped create the product. During an interview with a James Street North gallery owner I was asked if I ever challenged people. I said that I generally didn’t directly challenge people but that I did try to ask challenging questions. I told him that what mattered to me in the research process was what mattered to the people I spoke with and all of their divergent, connected and disconnected viewpoints. I always knew, however, that I would have to go away and produce an ethnography that would form conclusions and that I would be, for the most part, doing that alone. I have struggled in the writing with trying not to represent people or groups as singular, as objects, or as bits of data. I do not want to simply do lip service to contradictions while my methods and theories work to smooth everything out. This engagement is partly inspired by Haraway’s explorations of irony and cyborg in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” where the cyborg is, among other things, “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformations” (1991:150). It is also influenced by the work of Edith Turner and other anthropologists who have attempted to come to terms with an anthropology of experience, where anthropologists actively engage with extraordinary experiences, and are, perhaps non-apologetically, changed by them. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   37 In Edith Turner’s (2006) review of “the study of spirit experience” within anthropology, she shows how anthropologists have been struggling for over half a century to find a way to validate, within the larger discipline, such an anthropology of experience. Goulet and Young (1994) also point out that even though the emic, that intimate insider’s perspective, has been an important foundation of anthropology, “emic views are not considered as serious alternatives to Western scientific conceptions of reality” (10). Rationalist approaches have generally dominated (Goulet and Young 1994:300), even though the radical empiricist phenomenology and informed subjectivity of Jackson (1989) works against notions of the detached observer still dominating as an “ideal” (Turner 2006:51). Similarly, Turnbull (1990) says that we need “a technique of participation that demands total involvement of our whole being” (51), and Stoller (1984) argues against “ethnographic realism” in favour of a subjectivity where: the world of the field cries out silently for description and the anthropological writer, using evocative language, brings life to the field and beckons the reader to discover something anew (42). The work that follows is, therefore, the condensation of at least three positions: the experiences, thoughts and opinions of the research participants, my particular stance in the world, and how the broader academic literatures speak to the issues that are explored in the ethnography. I turn to these literatures now. PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   38 Ordinary Generative Moments, Materiality and The City Pumpkins, Squash and Cabbage for Sale James Street North (October 21, 2010) In order to unpack the ideas discussed so far, and approach the embodied shifts in materiality I have eluded to, anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s work on Ordinary Affects (2007) and the “Generativity of Emergent Things” (1993) is useful. I will then move on to trace and track some of the genealogies of material culture and urban studies. 5 Affect and Sensual Objects Stewart’s work explores generative moments. These moments, she argues, have the potential to impact and open up possibilities for how people imagine their worlds and themselves. Generative moments are moments that happen every day and influence how we relate to each other and our environments. They occur in a: wild mix of things—technologies, sensibilities, laws of power and money, daydreams, institutions, ways of experiencing time and space, battles, dramas, bodily states, and innumerable practices of everyday life (1993:1016). 5 See also Brian Massumi (2003), who discusses the importance of being open to the moments of affect in which we allow ourselves to affect and be affected by others in order to allow for transformative “transition[s], however slight” (212). PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   39 These generative moments of affect, which she terms “cultural poesis,” not only have the potential to show what is possible but to also show what is built up, what decays, what remains and what is lost. Her writing: follows leads, sidesteps, and delays, and it piles up, creating layers on layers, in an effort to drag things into view, to follow trajectories in motion, and to scope out the shape and shadows and traces of assemblages that solidify and grow entrenched, perhaps doing real damage or holding real hope, and then dissipate, morph, rot, or give way to something new (1993:1016). 6 Stewart makes the important observation that moments of affect happen in ordinary life and are hence accessible. She states, building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), that: ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences. They’re things that happen (2007:3). Stewart’s ethnographic writing gestures at the speculative (rather than the representational), in order to evoke a sense of curiosity in her readers as she “tracks” the movements of objects through embodied experiences (1993:1029). De Certeau also questions the usefulness of “representations of society” and “its modes of behaviour,” advocating instead for questions of making and doing, for which he says poesis (a way to “invent, create, and generate”) is well suited (1984:xii). Seremetakis’ view on objects is similar to Stewarts’ view of affect. For example, Seremetakis (1994) argues that studies in material culture should deal seriously with sensory experience, and that they should primarily be: 6 Further, in her ethnography A Space at the Side of the Road (1996) she also and talks about “heaping detail upon detail” (1996:21). PhD  Thesis  –  V.  E.  Sage      McMaster  University  –  Dept.  of  Anthropology   40 concerned with how intrinsic perceptual qualities of objects express their sensory history, and how this salience can motivate and animate their exchange and shared consumption (134). An example of doing sensory history is found in the way she traces the life of Aphrodite’s peach – a peach that was once found in Greek markets but has since been replaced by other “tasteless” peaches due to European Economic Community (EEC) market trends and restrictions. Seremetakis says that the loss of the peach “is a double absence; it reveals the extent to which the senses are entangled with history, memory, forgetfulness, narrative and silence” (S