Cathy Stanton, lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, on Oct. 25 gave the second lecture of the "Taste of Tufts" series, discussing her ethnographic research in various areas of the National Park Service.
Stanton has done work with heritage tourism, historic sites and historic memory and consciousness. Before turning to the main subject of her lecture, she acquainted the audience with anthropological thinking. Stanton first defined a few terms that cultural anthropologists use to think about culture in 2013.
"We talk about participant observations, where you don't just go and look but you step into the picture, as opposed to standing on the outside and looking in," she said.
Stanton explained that this sometimes includes conducting interviews and mapping spatial relationships.
"The goal is to get a sense of what the place or the culture looks like from the inside and also a more analytical framework for thinking about it from the outside, so we're always on both sides of that fence," she said.
Inserting an anthropologist into an environment to conduct a study can change the results, Stanton said.
"I'm not just thinking about a group I'm studying or a report I'm writing, but I'm trying to think of a more holistic way of thinking of how my actions and my words are going to affect [the study]," she said.
After describing the difficulties inherent in an anthropologist's work, Stanton introduced one of her studies, centered in Salem, Mass.
"When you think of Salem, you think of witches and schooners from a particular time in history, but it was once the Polish neighborhood," she said.
This was when Salem had a large industrial presence, and Polish immigrants worked in the factories there. Many of them eventually moved to the suburbs, and the main social hall of Salem, called St. Joseph Hall, was incorporated into the National Parks in 1988. Stanton was called to perform research on the community surrounding the building.
"Part of this study was dealing with the fractious early politics and how that got solidified over time," she said.
One important finding of her research was that the Polish community in Salem practiced strategic essentialism: They seemed to become more Polish when they moved to America. Stanton said that, although the study had to be conducted carefully given the timeline, it is a classic example of salvage ethnography, or having the opportunity to talk to people before they pass away.
"There was one amazing 99-year-old woman. She was so smart and funny, and I interviewed her several times," Stanton said. "She died just before the report came out, but we had a lot of interviews with her."
Stanton described the end result of the work in Salem as feel-good research.
"People really thought that this research was putting something into visibility," she said.
Stanton then introduced her 2012 study on the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site. Originally, just the mansion itself was a National Park, but it eventually expanded to encompass the over 200-acre farm nearby.
"There were a lot of people in the Parks Service who just didn't want to deal with this farm," she said.
Stanton said she was hired to research the area because she was not a part of the Park Service and could provide unbiased judgment about how to incorporate the farm into the established agriculture system in Columbia County, N.Y. This year, she won the Excellence for Consulting award in the individual category from the National Council on Public History for her work.
Stanton's current study is located on Peddocks Island in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. In one of the island's three sections, or "heads," there is a sizable community of cottages - some having been there for over a century.
"[There is] not just one bureaucracy, but 10 bureaucracies to manage the 38 Harbor Islands," she said.
Peddocks Island, owned by the State Department of Conservation and Recreation, is one of the largest among the Harbor Islands.
"I am there at the behest of the National Park Service, but I am studying land owned by the state," Stanton said.
This occasionally causes complications, she said, since the National Park Service does not own any of the islands, only a few outposts.
"The state is the landlord, and the Park Service is there involved in the interpretation of the land," Stanton said.
The Park Service's goal in commissioning Stanton's research was to better understand the history of the Peddocks Island communities so that it can be more informed when managing the island. The study focuses on the culture of Middle Head, which can get complicated since culture is a process, according to Stanton.
"One of the things I was asked to do was document which cottage came from where," she said.
Stanton explained that this was difficult since there are three groups in the area. The first is a group of Portuguese fishermen, originally from Long Island, that settled in the Middle Head in the 1880s. The second is a group of people involved in the seasonal homes and hotels constructed in the 1870s and 1880s.
In 1897, the federal government starting building Fort Andrews on East Head - the same fort used to film "Shutter Island" (2010). The soldiers stationed at the fort eventually moved to Middle Head, which they tended to inhabit year-round. This provided a more grounding presence and made up the third main community found on the island, according to Stanton.
Along the way, she observed that these three groups were more connected than she had initially anticipated.
"When I was on Middle Head, someone once said to me early on, 'We're all related.' And I said, 'Yeah, yeah, sure,'" Stanton said. "But then I got looking and spent a lot of time this summer on Ancestry.com - which is strangely addictive - and finding even more connections than people knew about."
The more recent history of Fort Andrews involves a lapse in management from a private owner and then a buyout in 1970, when the state purchased the fort to create a Harbor Islands Park. Stanton believes this was not handled well.
"They just really didn't want to deal with the people and their cottages, so they attempted a mass eviction overnight of everyone from their cottages," she said. "And there was a huge uprising, as you can imagine, because these people have very deep-seeded attachments to this place."
The state initially assumed that the fort's inhabitants were remnants of communities gone by and could be pushed off of the land, according to Stanton. She will face political complications like this as she continues her research on Peddocks Island.
"My conclusion about is that ... it's a very place-bound sense of community," she said.
These conclusions, however, are not the kinds of answers that the state is looking for. If the people of Middle Head can present themselves as a traditional community with strong ties to the land, they have more of a chance of staying on the island, according to Stanton.
She believes that the work anthropologists complete is capable of producing substantial change.
"I have been doing this for 15 years now; we are creating stories that can be very compelling. If you can tell the story of a group in a compelling way, it can sometimes get the ear of management in a way that it wouldn't otherwise," Stanton said. "And that's the job of the ethnographers - to convey."
