What do you think?
Rate this book
The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia
The use and abuse of the idea of the "Simple Life" in tourism promotion and the massive dissemination of folk images are analysed in depth. McKay examines how Nova Scotia's cultural history was rewritten to erase evidence of an urban, capitalist society, of class and ethnic differences, and of women's emancipation. He sheds new light on the roles of Helen Creighton, the Maritime region's most famous folklorist, and Mary Black, an influential handicrafts revivalist, in creating this false identity. McKay also looks at the infusion of the folk ideology into the art and literature of the region. McKay puts the folk concept into contemporary and international contexts by drawing on Marxist notions of political economy, Gramscian models of cultural production and hegemony, and Foucaultian structuralism. The Quest of the Folk will be of interest to folklorists, cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone with an interest in the local history of the Maritimes or Maritime regional identity.
392 pages, Paperback
First published August 29, 1994
3 people are currently reading
67 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 12, 2023
This was a surprisingly interesting book that I read for comps. I was not familiar with Ian McKay before reading this, but glad someone on my comps committee recommended him to me. McKay cited many left theorists early on in this book, and after following up on this, I found out McKay is a prolific historian of the Canadian left and I hope to read more of his work in the future.
He basically demonstrates in this book that Maritime folk identity was carefully crafted and dictated from above by a class of elite outsiders who enacted a form of Gramscian hegemony to further its own class interests and perpetuate a form of neo-nationalism and antimodernism, while often benefiting off the backs of poor rural folks whose stories and craft work were transformed into commodities in service of a capitalism very accommodating to the tourist gaze. He traces the work of women who worked as folk music compilers and tastemakers in maritime handicrafts, whose projects worked to hide the urban and capitalist character of Nova Scotia in place of a bucolic and slower-paced traditional society that preserved some imagined notion of a pure past:
“The place of praxis in Marx's thought, however, mitigated an élitism which in Folk theorists, with their often violently mournful and backward-looking sense of cultural decay, could run unchecked. The most élitist of the Folk theorists deprived the living human beings among the peasants of all creativity and transformed them into mere vessels of national essence, bearers of cultural treasures whose true value they themselves could never understand. A conservative vision of cultural entropy allied easily with an equally conservative sense of the cultural inferiority of the unlettered Folk. It was in the name of this vivid sense of history as entropy that so much energy could be spent in the search for pristine origins and in spinning out fantasies about what the true “Folk culture” must have been like before its sad decline. If the young Marx's “essences” were inherently dynamic, containing with themselves their own opposites, those of the conservative Folk theorists were inherently static and timeless.”
As far as I remember McKay does not comment upon Indigenous crafts in this book, but I think the insights of this book are very conducive to thinking about how capitalism exploits the artistic traditions and craftwork of Indigenous peoples as well, in different but also comparable ways. McKay draws on three major theoretical resources in this book, each of which are intimately related to the other:
“Reflecting on the three theoretical currents that have structured this study — Marxian political economy, contemporary cultural studies, and neo-Gramscian theories that attempt to synthesize them both in a new understanding of how modern culture works — I conclude this book by showing how the crisis of the concept of the Folk represents some surprising opportunities for progressive cultural change.
In a now classic (if still controversial) 1984 article, the literary critic Frederic Jameson made the important suggestion that postmodernism represents the cultural logic of late capitalism…
Aesthetic production today, Jameson argued, has been integrated into commodity production generally: “The frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” As Jameson suggests, the culture of consumption, far from being inconsistent with Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism, in fact constitutes the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” particularly Nature and the unconscious. For the cultural logic of this epoch he reserves Plato's conception of the “simulacrum” — the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. The “culture of the simulacrum” comes to life, writes Jameson, “in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced,” and the image itself becomes the final form of commodity reification.”
And in another place McKay again attempts to explain his book’s attempt to bring together Marxist and Foucauldian analysis (which was a common theme in many of the books on my comps list, and was something I was made interested in as an undergrad student, though I am glad theoretical currents are leaning away from Foucault now, though faculty I encounter are still very wedded to Foucauldian theory):
“The position from which I have written this study, and which commends itself to me as the most promising for future academic and political work, represents an attempt to reconcile these two positions — Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy — by combining their strengths in a third, neo-Gramscian framework. I have used this neo-Gramscian framework throughout this book. It might prove useful in other attempts to think through alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” advisedly, because (as Stuart Hall has remarked) “the purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain — to produce a more adequate knowledge of — this historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.”
Over the past two decades the Marxian approach has made tremendous gains in its analysis of the Maritimes, and it seems unlikely that a genuinely counter-hegemonic reorganization of regional culture could avoid drawing heavily on this body of theory and evidence. Within this perspective, “ideology” is traditionally a negative term — a word that designates a systematic distortion of reality that strengthens the ruling class by confirming its economic and political privileges. This is surely part of what is going on in Innocence, which has enriched a legion of gift-shop owners, advertisers, and tourism developers.”
McKay appeals to Stuart Hall to justify his turn to Foucault:
“As Hall suggests, Foucauldian insights into the workings of power/ knowledge can be incorporated into a neo-Marxist approach without necessarily committing the researcher to accepting a self-refuting relativism or abstention from active politics. It is necessary to go beyond the enraged critique of the Folk as bourgeois ideology to a more sophisticated analysis of how this network of things and words actually worked as a body of applied social thought. In particular, such valuable work on the constitution of subject-positions could be brought into relationship with the Gramscian concept of hegemony, because Gramsci, an orthodox Marxist in many respects, nonetheless made a decisive and irrevocable break with both culturalism and economism. Transforming such hypotheses as that of direct translation into politics of the economic needs of the capitalist class, or that of the predominant place of coercion and force in cementing capitalist control over a pliant state, Gramsci opened the way to a far different sense of how power works in a modern capitalist state. By focusing attention on those components of the dominant culture that require the consent of subordinates, Gramsci suggested a culture in constant process, where the state of play between the classes can be changed very rapidly. Against the closed and complete world of essentialist antimodernism, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony stressed incomplete- ness and unevenness, the overlapping and confusion of identities, and (by inference) the non-reducibility of the cultural to the economic. Thus, to go back to our question, “Why go beyond the folk?” the neo-Gramscian might answer — and in my opinion this answer is better than that of either the classical Marxist or the poststructuralist theorist - “Constructed as a subject-position within a new hegemonic framework in the 1920s, the concept of the Folk was and remains a powerful obstacle to the formation of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, without which a new, profoundly emancipatory politics of class, gender, and racial equality is inconceivable.”
A neo-Gramscian approach which has learned from but not capitulated to critical theory can, in resisting the temptations of economistic and culturalist reductionisms, help us understand both the power and fragility of ideologies in a fragmented and fragmenting postmodern world.”
I basically inserted the theoretical sections of the book here. Most of the book is not focused on theory, but is far more preoccupied with empirical history. The two are not always well integrated. The theory mostly serves as bookends, but I think it perhaps was necessary. It would have felt repetitive to keep returning to theoretical elaborations throughout the book. I wanted to finish with two excerpts of particular interest to me, which are more empirical in nature. The first is a hilarious story about Lillian Burke, one of the elite tastemakers and overseers of folk handicrafts:
“A carpet of hundreds of square feet would occupy ten women working for weeks or even months on end. As was so often the outcome of the scientific redesign of work, conception and execution were separated: conception of the carpets took place in New York, while the rugs were executed in Chéticamp [Cape Breton, Nova Scotia]. Burke would send precise design instructions from her New York gallery, leaving nothing to accident or to the untutored aesthetic choices of her workers. (Burke knew rather little about the actual techniques of making the carpets.) If, having seen finished carpet on the floor, Burke was displeased with some nuance, even one she herself had earlier desired, the colouring would have to be redone. As Anselme Chiasson notes in his fascinating study of the process, Burke would stand on a chair to acquire a good view of the large carpets together, and, indicating a particular person and a particular carpet, would remark, “A little more pinkish there” or “a little more yellowish here.” To make a carpet a “little more pinkish” meant an immense amount of work: it had to be replaced in the frames, the wool with the unsatisfactory tint had to be removed, and other wool had to be tinted to the desired colour and crocheted once again back into the carpet. Small wonder that the exasperated craftswomen would, after Burke had left the room, mock her with their own versions of “A little more pinkish there,” “Yellowish here and there.’”
The second excerpt I wanted to share, and perhaps the most interesting thing I encountered in this book, was about one of the folklorists this book focuses on, Helen Creighton, and her anticommunist politics which involved asking the RCMP to investigate Pete Seeger for his communist beliefs:
“Perhaps the most revealing and important single document from Creighton’s career as a definer of cultural commonsense was written as part of her intervention against leftist influences in folklore in 1960. Creighton attempted to have the RCMP investigate Pete Seeger, and expressed grave concerns about the political leanings of Edith Fowke, whom she sought to discredit.
Any dispute between two professionals in the same small field is, of course, susceptible to a variety of readings. One might, for example, emphasize personal rivalry. This was probably an element in the Creighton—Fowke controversy of 1960. Creighton’s attitude towards Fowke was hardly warm by the late 1950s. Creighton and Fowke came from opposite ends of the country and had different ways of thinking about society. Fowke had grown up in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. She was not a Communist, but she did have an interest in the left, and had been involved in experiments in socialist education on the Prairies. Unlike Creighton, she was interested in songs of industrial protest, which she thought were rather thin on the ground in Canada. Nonetheless she highlighted the extent to which traditional songs in Canada, including those of the east, raised social issues: “A Crowd of Bold Sharemen” was about fishermen who went fishing for cod and turned on their captain when he refused to share the cod livers; and Larry Gorman’s famous songs were often (in her eyes) satirical attacks on employers.”
He basically demonstrates in this book that Maritime folk identity was carefully crafted and dictated from above by a class of elite outsiders who enacted a form of Gramscian hegemony to further its own class interests and perpetuate a form of neo-nationalism and antimodernism, while often benefiting off the backs of poor rural folks whose stories and craft work were transformed into commodities in service of a capitalism very accommodating to the tourist gaze. He traces the work of women who worked as folk music compilers and tastemakers in maritime handicrafts, whose projects worked to hide the urban and capitalist character of Nova Scotia in place of a bucolic and slower-paced traditional society that preserved some imagined notion of a pure past:
“The place of praxis in Marx's thought, however, mitigated an élitism which in Folk theorists, with their often violently mournful and backward-looking sense of cultural decay, could run unchecked. The most élitist of the Folk theorists deprived the living human beings among the peasants of all creativity and transformed them into mere vessels of national essence, bearers of cultural treasures whose true value they themselves could never understand. A conservative vision of cultural entropy allied easily with an equally conservative sense of the cultural inferiority of the unlettered Folk. It was in the name of this vivid sense of history as entropy that so much energy could be spent in the search for pristine origins and in spinning out fantasies about what the true “Folk culture” must have been like before its sad decline. If the young Marx's “essences” were inherently dynamic, containing with themselves their own opposites, those of the conservative Folk theorists were inherently static and timeless.”
As far as I remember McKay does not comment upon Indigenous crafts in this book, but I think the insights of this book are very conducive to thinking about how capitalism exploits the artistic traditions and craftwork of Indigenous peoples as well, in different but also comparable ways. McKay draws on three major theoretical resources in this book, each of which are intimately related to the other:
“Reflecting on the three theoretical currents that have structured this study — Marxian political economy, contemporary cultural studies, and neo-Gramscian theories that attempt to synthesize them both in a new understanding of how modern culture works — I conclude this book by showing how the crisis of the concept of the Folk represents some surprising opportunities for progressive cultural change.
In a now classic (if still controversial) 1984 article, the literary critic Frederic Jameson made the important suggestion that postmodernism represents the cultural logic of late capitalism…
Aesthetic production today, Jameson argued, has been integrated into commodity production generally: “The frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” As Jameson suggests, the culture of consumption, far from being inconsistent with Marx's analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism, in fact constitutes the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, “a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas,” particularly Nature and the unconscious. For the cultural logic of this epoch he reserves Plato's conception of the “simulacrum” — the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. The “culture of the simulacrum” comes to life, writes Jameson, “in a society where exchange-value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced,” and the image itself becomes the final form of commodity reification.”
And in another place McKay again attempts to explain his book’s attempt to bring together Marxist and Foucauldian analysis (which was a common theme in many of the books on my comps list, and was something I was made interested in as an undergrad student, though I am glad theoretical currents are leaning away from Foucault now, though faculty I encounter are still very wedded to Foucauldian theory):
“The position from which I have written this study, and which commends itself to me as the most promising for future academic and political work, represents an attempt to reconcile these two positions — Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy — by combining their strengths in a third, neo-Gramscian framework. I have used this neo-Gramscian framework throughout this book. It might prove useful in other attempts to think through alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” alternatives to the present conservative status quo. I use “might” advisedly, because (as Stuart Hall has remarked) “the purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain — to produce a more adequate knowledge of — this historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that we may transform it.”
Over the past two decades the Marxian approach has made tremendous gains in its analysis of the Maritimes, and it seems unlikely that a genuinely counter-hegemonic reorganization of regional culture could avoid drawing heavily on this body of theory and evidence. Within this perspective, “ideology” is traditionally a negative term — a word that designates a systematic distortion of reality that strengthens the ruling class by confirming its economic and political privileges. This is surely part of what is going on in Innocence, which has enriched a legion of gift-shop owners, advertisers, and tourism developers.”
McKay appeals to Stuart Hall to justify his turn to Foucault:
“As Hall suggests, Foucauldian insights into the workings of power/ knowledge can be incorporated into a neo-Marxist approach without necessarily committing the researcher to accepting a self-refuting relativism or abstention from active politics. It is necessary to go beyond the enraged critique of the Folk as bourgeois ideology to a more sophisticated analysis of how this network of things and words actually worked as a body of applied social thought. In particular, such valuable work on the constitution of subject-positions could be brought into relationship with the Gramscian concept of hegemony, because Gramsci, an orthodox Marxist in many respects, nonetheless made a decisive and irrevocable break with both culturalism and economism. Transforming such hypotheses as that of direct translation into politics of the economic needs of the capitalist class, or that of the predominant place of coercion and force in cementing capitalist control over a pliant state, Gramsci opened the way to a far different sense of how power works in a modern capitalist state. By focusing attention on those components of the dominant culture that require the consent of subordinates, Gramsci suggested a culture in constant process, where the state of play between the classes can be changed very rapidly. Against the closed and complete world of essentialist antimodernism, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony stressed incomplete- ness and unevenness, the overlapping and confusion of identities, and (by inference) the non-reducibility of the cultural to the economic. Thus, to go back to our question, “Why go beyond the folk?” the neo-Gramscian might answer — and in my opinion this answer is better than that of either the classical Marxist or the poststructuralist theorist - “Constructed as a subject-position within a new hegemonic framework in the 1920s, the concept of the Folk was and remains a powerful obstacle to the formation of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics, without which a new, profoundly emancipatory politics of class, gender, and racial equality is inconceivable.”
A neo-Gramscian approach which has learned from but not capitulated to critical theory can, in resisting the temptations of economistic and culturalist reductionisms, help us understand both the power and fragility of ideologies in a fragmented and fragmenting postmodern world.”
I basically inserted the theoretical sections of the book here. Most of the book is not focused on theory, but is far more preoccupied with empirical history. The two are not always well integrated. The theory mostly serves as bookends, but I think it perhaps was necessary. It would have felt repetitive to keep returning to theoretical elaborations throughout the book. I wanted to finish with two excerpts of particular interest to me, which are more empirical in nature. The first is a hilarious story about Lillian Burke, one of the elite tastemakers and overseers of folk handicrafts:
“A carpet of hundreds of square feet would occupy ten women working for weeks or even months on end. As was so often the outcome of the scientific redesign of work, conception and execution were separated: conception of the carpets took place in New York, while the rugs were executed in Chéticamp [Cape Breton, Nova Scotia]. Burke would send precise design instructions from her New York gallery, leaving nothing to accident or to the untutored aesthetic choices of her workers. (Burke knew rather little about the actual techniques of making the carpets.) If, having seen finished carpet on the floor, Burke was displeased with some nuance, even one she herself had earlier desired, the colouring would have to be redone. As Anselme Chiasson notes in his fascinating study of the process, Burke would stand on a chair to acquire a good view of the large carpets together, and, indicating a particular person and a particular carpet, would remark, “A little more pinkish there” or “a little more yellowish here.” To make a carpet a “little more pinkish” meant an immense amount of work: it had to be replaced in the frames, the wool with the unsatisfactory tint had to be removed, and other wool had to be tinted to the desired colour and crocheted once again back into the carpet. Small wonder that the exasperated craftswomen would, after Burke had left the room, mock her with their own versions of “A little more pinkish there,” “Yellowish here and there.’”
The second excerpt I wanted to share, and perhaps the most interesting thing I encountered in this book, was about one of the folklorists this book focuses on, Helen Creighton, and her anticommunist politics which involved asking the RCMP to investigate Pete Seeger for his communist beliefs:
“Perhaps the most revealing and important single document from Creighton’s career as a definer of cultural commonsense was written as part of her intervention against leftist influences in folklore in 1960. Creighton attempted to have the RCMP investigate Pete Seeger, and expressed grave concerns about the political leanings of Edith Fowke, whom she sought to discredit.
Any dispute between two professionals in the same small field is, of course, susceptible to a variety of readings. One might, for example, emphasize personal rivalry. This was probably an element in the Creighton—Fowke controversy of 1960. Creighton’s attitude towards Fowke was hardly warm by the late 1950s. Creighton and Fowke came from opposite ends of the country and had different ways of thinking about society. Fowke had grown up in Lumsden, Saskatchewan. She was not a Communist, but she did have an interest in the left, and had been involved in experiments in socialist education on the Prairies. Unlike Creighton, she was interested in songs of industrial protest, which she thought were rather thin on the ground in Canada. Nonetheless she highlighted the extent to which traditional songs in Canada, including those of the east, raised social issues: “A Crowd of Bold Sharemen” was about fishermen who went fishing for cod and turned on their captain when he refused to share the cod livers; and Larry Gorman’s famous songs were often (in her eyes) satirical attacks on employers.”
September 7, 2015
McKay has carefully unpacked the ways that Nova Scotia has constructed for itself an image as a purer, simpler, more idyllic place populated by less complex idyllic people. He presents a cultural history that shows the production of a tourist culture based on invented 'traditional folk values' that obscure the province's urban society, capitalist way, and class, ethnic and gender differences and power relations. It is a fabulous analysis the significance of which extends well beyond Nova Scotia, or even Canada. Not easy to get hold of outside Canada – but thoroughly worth it.
January 6, 2016
A classic! McKay's central argument that popular notions of Nova Scoatians as a simple and idyllic people are wrong is compelling as is his focus on the capitalistic marketplaces that help construct these myths. Indeed, the book is full of many brilliant observations, though far too many are buried in thick, page-long paragraphs. And the book could have benefited from some prudential trimming. One chapters runs no shorter than 110 pages! Nonetheless, cultural historians will likely find it a compelling read.
August 11, 2020
In the pushback against modernist aesthetic, anti-modernism became the popular flavour, citing a more authentic and 'real' basis of existence in opposition to the 'inauthentic' modernism. McKay here offers up an argument that much of what is considered 'anti-modernist' (ie: the folk) is just as constructed and lacking in authenticity as that which practitioners claim to hate.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this and how useful McKay's arguments will be as I continue with my own research. This book is a definite must-read for anyone interested in exploring ideas of modernity and folk.
(Read for PhD comps)
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this and how useful McKay's arguments will be as I continue with my own research. This book is a definite must-read for anyone interested in exploring ideas of modernity and folk.
(Read for PhD comps)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews