by Pauline Greenhill
University of Winnipeg
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As a researcher with 35 years of experience with oral history and, disclosing my personal involvement frankly, Alison Marshall’s research collaborator, I found Stephen Grandpre’s review of Marshall’s The Way of the Bachelor: Early Chinese Settlement in Manitoba (Vancouver, UBC Press, 2011) problematic. Though the review begins with a good synopsis of the book’s contents, its conclusion descends to a polemic showing a poor understanding of critical historiography’s practices since at least the 1980s. I trust that Manitoba History readers will consult Bachelor themselves, and judge its merits with a better recognition of current scholarship than this reviewer’s. Here are my concerns.
First, Grandpre seems puzzled that despite Marshall’s (correct) assertion that her book is not only “a record of racial discrimination and tasteless prejudice,” it nevertheless contains “extensive discussion of experiences of just this kind” (Grandpre 39). Surely any accurate record of the history of Chinese experiences in Canada must address such crucial issues.
Second, he asserts that “Marshall relies on oral interviews” “[d]ue to the lack of extensive primary sources” (Grandpre 39). At least since Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition (1961), the fallacy of oral testimony as a source of last resort and necessarily inaccurate (with the generally unexamined corollary of print documents as fundamentally truthful and authentic) must be set aside. Grandpre’s “major concern” about “the lack of reliable documentation” (40) illustrates unfamiliarity with ethical principles enjoining that research consultants’ names and identifying information must not be disclosed without their express consent. Marshall should be congratulated for earning the trust of the individuals and communities she worked with, not vilified for practicing necessary ethical discretion.
Third, Grandpre calls Bachelor “far more impressionistic than explanatory” (40) suggesting again his lack of sophistication in historiographic discourses. At least from Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), historians recognise that their own positions and ideologies affect the history they write, and that a conventional, apparently simple, linear account is by no means unbiased. Grandpre also objects to Marshall’s use of “I,” a practice which frankly recognises that history (like other scholarship) derives from the individual who writes it, as well as from the sources s/he encounters. Grandpre’s own use of “one,” in “[o]ne cannot ignore the feeling that...” (40) betrays that even he cannot avoid his own subjectivity; he simply chooses to couch it as if it were general and shared, not his own personal position.
Fourth, dismissing Bachelor as “anthropological” (Grandpre 40) posits anthropology and history as antithetical, and ignores their productive interplay in works by notable historians like Natalie Zemon Davis, and luminary anthropologists like James Clifford. Their inflected accounts, like Marshall’s, foster critical thinking about both disciplines.
Finally, the presumption that “prosaic theories and terms (such as ‘social heat’ and ‘homosociality’)” would be “incomprehensible to” (Grandpre 40) Marshall’s Chinese community research consultants--in essence, that all members of a sociocultural collectivity lack academic background--betrays the reviewer’s own narrow worldview.
Page revised: 12 April 2014
