Between History and Tomorrow

The first edition of this work, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge University Press, 1986), published before the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing, focused on the inshore, small-boat, village-based cod fishery that flourished from the early 19th century to the mid-20th, when it increasingly gave way to a factory-based, open ocean, deep-sea trawler fishery. The purpose of the first edition was to use the village fishery as a doorway into the logic of merchant capital. In its general features, merchant capital was both the fundamental form of economic, political, and social organization in Newfoundland and more--it was the predominant political-economic form for much of the world.

Since the moratorium, the situation in rural Newfoundland has become so stark, and the multiple and discordant histories that are being shaped so divergent, pulling people apart from one another even within families, that it provides a chance to see history happening: to people, to communities, and to capital. The spaces that are developing between those who are and those who are not making it since the demise of the cod fishery are vast, and the struggles of people to survive and to succeed in the new situation are meeting with highly diverse outcomes. They enable us to see how both difference and inequality are made, how they are transformed, how they are used, and how people living within, and necessarily also against, these new inequalities reshape the world more profoundly than they seem to have first intended. To introduce the conceptual framework for that task is the special purpose of this second edition.