This post is the first in a new category which I’m calling WIP – short for a work in progress.
This blog, ultimately, is about what can be learnt from the history of a small island, Bowen Island, in British Columbia, Canada, at this particular time in the 21st century. And it’s a one-woman project, a project I’m fitting in, and turning my attention to, as and when I can. That means it’s episodic, gradual, and iterative – I’m organising this space as I create its content.
Hence WIP…
I’m a knitter, amongst other things, and that shorthand is instantly understood in that community – knitterly bonding often happens over questions about your WIP backlog!
Rest assured though this post (and series) is not about knitting. It’s about this blog itself, as an evolving work in progress. A place to put contextual notes, background clarifications and things I’m working and thinking through, as I work on the larger project(s) that this blog represents.
What is that project?
if you are a return visitor, you will already have noticed some changes to the blog – part of the “spring cleaning” that is going on. In the page noting who I am, I discuss my background as a historian, and this project for me is fuelled by that identity.
I have 40 plus years experience growing up and living in a very particular community, Bowen Island, in British Columbia, a small gulf island, a 15 minute ferry ride from Vancouver. In those 40 years, the island has changed tremendously, in ways that reflect much larger social and political dynamics. Some of those are local, some regional, some provincial, some are global.
The experience I had most recently, detailed in the posts I’ve written so far, with Municipal staff, Council, and the opportunistic impetus that saw the foundation of Riley’s Cidery, all of those things open up consideration of larger issues and of possible futures.
the way in
My way into considering those issues and futures is by using the skills I have.
In the first place, that is the ability to use a historian’s focus – establishing, carefully, attentively, detail and fact, looking at records and the construction of events, showing the slow accretion and action of the actual, in all its contingent and often overdetermined messiness, before getting to or considering large conclusions.
Unlike a traditional historical account, however, I am using a medium, and a method, which allows me to work though, write through, think through, events and facts, in a provisional and gradual way. I find this a fascinating and personally engrossing experiment.
It is an experiment informed by my skills, but also by my experience, and my knowledge, and my own preoccupations. It is not an experiment that I know will produce a predefined result. I want to see where this goes. And I’ll keep working on it until I lose that curiosity.
I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan.
Antonio Gramsci
Only a naïve and superficial sense of academic orthodoxy would still claim that there is somehow an entirely objective and disinterested place, a high peak of disinterested pure objectivity, from which the historian, or any other meaning or story maker, proceeds. At the same time, that doesn’t invalidate the value of attempting to establish fact and historical truth. At the very least, we need to hold to the attempt to determine and maintain a base ground of empirical reality to have any chance at all of building a decent and just world.
In this project, I am also working through what it means to have been
- a participant
- an acted upon subject
- an informed analyst
in the place – Bowen Island – and the time containing the series of events I describe. And of what that means for who we can be as citizens, a political and social agents, in the world. That too is a fascinating experiment.
And this is informed by my own long history on and lived knowledge of Bowen Island.
island as imaginary
One of the things that has struck me more and more over time is just how powerfully island residents inhabit an imaginary, often far more deeply and profoundly than they inhabit a real, complex, materially determined geographical place. The conflict this creates has real consequences, consequences Bowen Island is facing.
That, or rather those, imaginaries, because they vary, have a force and explanatory hold on people on the island that is exceptionally strong. In part, an island just has a romantic and felt field of meaning and signification that is both unique and very powerful. One of the major seams of signification for islands is a complex of ideas and feelings around uniqueness, apartness, escape, bounded and secured being, cohesion, all of which are very potent.
I think they are particularly potent, and in fact become more and more concentrated, when you have a large and ever increasing population of second-home owners, and/or retirees to the island from elsewhere. These groups are people whose “real” adult lives – that is, the life of work, and everydayness, striving and material survival – were and are not defined by island life. Island life is a fantasy space, a getaway, a place to temporarily inhabit worlds of myth, or comforting visions of oneself that may bear little resemblance to the rougher edged quotidian realities.
And what has also struck me more and more over time is the ways in which this realm of imagination has and is being increasingly commodified, and reduced to almost cartoonishly simple terms, exemplified by a supposedly unifying and explanatory brand identity, or the rhetorical cliches of realtors, tourism boosters, and others who, ultimately, are seeking to extract value or profit for themselves from the communal labours of a host of others.
I was a child when I moved to Bowen. I think the experience of growing up in a place offers a profoundly different perspective than that of adults who choose a place to live. Those adult choices, especially for the wealthy, often demand conformity to, or treat the world as, a mirror for their already created sense of the world and themself. And that created sense can be, and again, especially for the wealthy, often is based less on material circumstance and more on preserving privilege and self-sustaining fantasies about the inevitability of conditions which serve them very well.
As a child, you discover and notice and learn what a place is, before you can create or sustain fictions or narratives in which to live your life. And for me, one of the ironies of the experience I’ve had is that my political, social and citizenly self – the self that is so offended and dismayed by what I experienced – was in large part formed by this place.
Bowen Island, over 40 years, has offered a rich education in the multiple, shifting, socially and economically determined meanings of place.
coming up:
potential topics and themes in this WIP:
- the political development of Bowen Island Municipality
- its place in the larger political world
- socio-economic change and population growth
- the very particular type of gentrification experienced on Bowen Island
- the uses and abuses of philanthropy
- the politics of land use in BC
- alienation and authenticity
