An interdisciplinary research, public-policy, and social-planning orientation emergent in the mid-1990s, “cultural sustainability” draws upon perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, historic and regional geography, and natural environment conservation. Reinforcing collective sense of place and established identity are among central perspectives that dovetail with what folklorists recognize as efforts in cultural conservation. Implications for economic development, public vs. private interests, preservation initiatives, tourism, and so forth, complicate such matters.
The author, who self-identifies both as cultural anthropologist and folklorist, presents a detailed ethnographic case study begun in 1996 in her home community of Lambertville, New Jersey, with detailed focus on adjacent and privately owned Lewis Island, a mile long and site of the Lewis Fishery, the latter founded in 1888 and the sole remaining traditional haul seine (i.e., net-pulling) fishery on the nontidal Delaware River, north of Philadelphia. The Lewis Fishery, today, is no longer a viable commercial business involving the migratory American shad each spring. Instead, in all-volunteer and gender- and age-inclusive activities that include a two-day Shad Fest first held in 1981, descendant members of the extended Lewis family, along with others, participate in limited harvest and data collection that includes counting, measuring, weighing, and catch-and-release. There is also an abundance of storytelling that involves processes of narrative stewardship and cultural sustainability. The account builds upon the author’s extensive participation-observation in all of the activities, now up to five days each week March to May. The descriptive and interpretive results of the overall treatment are richly informed by the author’s extensive bibliographic familiarity with theoretical framework scholarship and several comparative, but differing, folk tradition inquiries elsewhere.
A self-reflexive preface establishes the author’s credentials, theoretical orientations, and methodologies, this followed by a chapter on Lambertville and fishery practices on Lewis Island. Lambertville provides a setting in which concerns for historic continuities and sustainabilities amidst change have pushed and pulled against one another for generations. Today, Lambertville is a history-minded community that includes a mix of gentrification, families with roots in the area, and newcomers who represent a variety of ethnic groups. Lewis Island and the Lewis Fishery connect to Lambertville via a gated footbridge, with public access for recreation, sightseeing, and heritage-oriented events subject in large part to ecological concerns and private ownership policy. There are in this book black-and-white photographs that depict built structures, scenes, and persons mentioned in the account.
“The Lewis Fishery is a place that creates stories, and stories, in turn, create the place” (4). Charlie Groth identifies a series of oral-narrative types that in talk often weave together among fishing crew members and in conversational outreach to visiting tourists, journalists, and others: everyday discourse about lifestyle related to Lewis Island, the fishery, and connections with the community of Lambertville; personal experience narratives; anecdotes involving local insiders and visitor outsiders with connections to the fishery; seasoned tales about Lewis Island hauls and traditions; and core “Big Stories” that emphasize continuities in an ethos of tenacity, interpersonal accessibility, civility, and conservation of longtime Lewis Island practices and environmental resources that promote a spirit of well-being. The author devotes chapters to each of these storytelling varieties, emphasizing that each instance contributes to a glue that welds together past with present, present with past. Awareness of, and participation in, the processes and specifics of such storytelling, along with commitment to its perpetuation, constitute central features of “narrative stewardship.” At the Lewis Island Fishery, the result is reinforcement of sense of place, sense of belonging, and perspectives on a local heritage shaped by natural environment circumstances that have included highly variable Delaware River and shad migration conditions.
This is a very timely and important book in current-day folkloristic studies in the ways that it contributes to applications of interdisciplinary “applied folklore” theory and case-study research scarcely broached, arguably even conceived, fifty years ago. Groth’s observations and arguments in the concluding chapter, especially, support such a contention. There was a time when the author’s treatment might have been quite satisfactory as an account of occupational heritage, vernacular oral narrative in contexts of particular regional environmental setting, place particulars, shared group expression, and locally valued, traditional practices. Charlie Groth obviously saw opportunity in findings and interpretive framework for a greater reach.
In concluding pages the author steps back somewhat from Lewis Island particulars and offers considerations for narrative stewardship and cultural sustainability attentiveness elsewhere. Groth earlier in the treatment generally tends to avoid discussion of positional issues of politics, local planning policy, and economic viabilities. At end, however, she expresses at some length personal concerns about “teletronic communication technologies” and “technology-induced social upheaval similar to that of the industrial age” (194) that threaten interpersonal storytelling in humanistic ways, and quality of life.
While close reading will reveal overlaps in theoretical underpinnings and wordings found from chapter to chapter, they afford reinforcements of main contentions and should prove useful if chapters are read selectively, and separately, for teaching purposes and reference in the public sector.
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[Review length: 821 words • Review posted on April 10, 2020]