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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Imagining Difference

Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town

Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC – a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations of age, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. Her starting point is a popular local legend about an indigenous curse cast on the valley and its residents in the nineteenth century. Successive interpretations of the story reveal a complicated landscape of memory and silence, mapping out official and contested histories, social and scientific theories as well as the edicts of political discourse. Cursing becomes a metaphor for discursive power resonating in political, popular, and cultural contexts, transmitting ideas of difference across generations and geographies.

348 pages | © 2005

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology


Table of Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface: Knowing Who Your Neighbours Are

Introduction: Ideas Make Acts Possible

Part One: Politics of Cursing

1. Conversations among Europeans and Other Acts of Possession

2 Látkép Ansicht View B??: Constructing the “Foreign”

3 “The Story As I Know It”

Part Two: Imagining Difference

4 A Moment of Silence

5 Getting Rid of the Story

6 Development, Discovery, and Disguise

7 One Step Beyond

Epilogue: Waiting

Notes

References

Index

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