Ethnographies of Place: the Historical Archaeology of Slumland
Alan Mayne
In a handful of innovative research projects, archaeologists and historians are probing within the forgotten local horizons of inner-city neighbourhoods that have hitherto been obscured by distorting slum stereotypes. Their focus is the urbanization spurt which, beginning in Britain late in the eighteenth century, transformed both the parent society and its New World territories during the following two centuries. Mary Beaudry probes beyond the slummer-epithets that cloud historical understanding of immigrant textile workers’ lives in Lowell, Massachusetts. Rebecca Yamin offers vignettes of working class life in New York City’s lower Manhattan, which fly in the face of Dickensian characterisations of Five Points as a notorious slum. Tim Murray challenges conventional historical representations of Melbourne’s Little Lon neighbourhood as one of Australia’s most infamous slums. Elizabeth van Heyningen describes similar research work being undertaken in Cape Town’s District Six. Such urban digs fascinate the general community. The excavations seem to bridge past and present. Modern cities have often been likened to palimpsests. And as a corollary, the integration of history and archaeology has frequently been urged in order to explore the hidden layers of this urban past. In practice, however, the material traces of past places have too often been erased, denied, and trivialised. Neighbourhoods have been bulldozed or selectively commemorated according to skewed taxonomies of historical significance. Memories of place have been lost or fragmented. In consequence, city dwellers today are sometimes said to live in a wilderness in both time and space without an abiding sense of their urban past. Too often, hopes for the effective integration of urban history and archaeology have been disappointed.
These paradoxes are highlighted by the misunderstandings which cloud public knowledge of central-city neighbourhoods that endured as centres of working class work and residence well into the twentieth century. The complexities of such places — their pastiche-like variety of social worlds (highlighted by John McCarthy’s discussion of late nineteenth-century Minneapolis), and their complex patterns of continuity and change through time — are obscured by the homogenising, universalising, and changeless qualities of the slum myth.
Slum stereotypes underpinned redevelopment schemes which, between the late-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, largely destroyed these neighbourhoods. Yet slums are constructions of the imagination: a stereotype that was fashioned by bourgeois entertainers and social reformers, and which obscured and distorted the varied spatial forms and social conditions to which it was applied. Historians, mesmerised by the dramatic intensity of the slummer caricatures that are embedded in the documentary record, have perpetuated this slum myth. Until recently, archaeologists have not demurred. Far from denying inequality, this symposium focuses upon the ignored material residues of inequality on the edges of mainstream history making. These vanished communities are remarkable for the quantity and range of their surviving material culture. Contextualising these data reveals socially-diverse neighbourhoods that were differentiated by social class, gender, race and ethnicity. By looking comparatively at the life traces of residents from actual neighbourhoods, rather than at the phantoms and caricatures of slum mythology, we have a firmer basis for exploring inequality in the modernising city.
papers:
Author 1 Author 2 Title
Beaudry Cultural space and worker identity in the Company City: Nineteenth Century Lowell, Massachusetts
Mayne Lawrence Ethnographies of Place S023MYN1
McCarthy Values and identity in the working class worlds of late nineteenth century Minneapolis
Murray Imaginary Landscapes: Reading Melbourne’s ‘Little Lon’
van Heyningen Malan Twice Renamed: Horsteley Street in Cape Town’s District Six, 1865-1982
Yamin Alternative Narratives: Respectability at Five Points