NORSEC Activities : Newfoundland and CUNY

In 1972 Dr. Gerald Sider of the College of Staten Island and the GSUC began a series of anthropological field research trips to Newfoundland. This research was both ethnographic, focusing on the economic, social, and cultural organization of Newfoundland's outport villages, and archival, focusing on the processes of change at the village level from the early 19th century to the present. This work has led to several papers published in history and anthropology journals in England, Canada, Germany, and the US, and to a book, Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: a Newfoundland Illustration (1986, co-published by Cambridge UP and the Maison des Sciences de la Homme). This book is now being translated into Korean, and will be published in Seoul in 1999- as a direct result of the substantial numbers of Korean students attracted to work at the GSUC by Dr. Sider. Sider's work in Newfoundland also led to his membership in the anthropology and history group at the Max Planck Institut fuer Geschicthe in Goettingen, Germany- where his work is part of a continuing attempt to develop new methods for reconstructing and analyzing the daily life history of ordinary men and women in small communities. In 1998 Sider began a new project in Newfoundland with a grant from Memorial Univ. of Newfoundland. This research centers on the effects of the 1992 termination of the cod fishery on Newfoundland villages, based on a century long history of social and economic differentiation within these villages. This research continues in 1999 with grants from NEH and PSC-CUNY, expanding into a comparative analysis of how people cope with the closure of the cod fishery in Newfoundland with how people in the southern US have coped with the demise of tenant farming. We are now opening discussions with Memorial University of Newfoundland (which has an MA program in Anthropology) to expand cooperation and student exchanges.