Lachance, Paul

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

248 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY From its inception the Survey was concerned with more than a geological survey of the Province and later of the Dominion. It also became involved in a range of fields other than geology, including ordinance surveys, botany, zoology, anthropology and archaeology. It is because of this broad range of investigations with the resulting wealth of information, observations and collections that a museum of natural history was built under the aegis of the Geological Survey. Thus the Victoria Memorial Museum, now the National Museum of Canada, was completed in 1912. It is an indication of the stature of the Geological Survey of Canada that it has always been able to attract a very high calibre of scientist, and this, despite its traditional and incomprehensibly low salary scale. The workers have not come merely from conventional field geology but in the last fifty years they have also come from other areas of geology, particularly geochemistry and geophysics. The result has been that the Survey has maintained a leading role in a great variety of fields within geology. In telling The Story of the Geological Survey of Canada, Morris Zaslow has succeeded admirably. Through this necessarily lengthy book one gets a clear and often very involving insight into this 130 year old institution. My principal reservation about the book arises from the lack of an obvious readership. This point is well illustrated by the weight of the book. At 2.17 kg it presents distinct problems in determining when and to some extent by whom it can be read. It cannot have been intended for the general public because it is not written as a popular history and the excellent line drawings and reproductions are perhaps too somber for a coffee table book. Nor can it have been intended for the general geological community because, though many of us have worked for or have had contact with the Survey, the book is too detailed to maintain our interest. The book is possibly of most use as a starting point in a study of the relationship between the government and one of its agencies. Unfortunately, because it is a chronicle it only provides glimpses of the relation of the Geological Survey and its larger context - the events and times of Canada. The writing of the history of the Geological Survey of Canada has been long overdue, many myths have developed in its absence, and the choice of Morris Zaslow as its author could not have been more appropriate in view of his long interest and previous work in the story of the exploration of Canada. * * * Q.H.J. GWYN, Universite de Sherbrooke. RANDALL MILLER and THOMAS MARZIK, eds. -Immigrants and Religion in Urban America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977. Six of the essays in this anthology deal with varieties of ethnic Catholicism, in Czech, Italian, Irish, German, Polish and Slovak urban communities respective-ly. The seventh focuses on Jewish garment workers in Philadelphia at the end of the 19th century. The eighth contrasts the acculturating role of Armenian Protestant churches to the stubborn traditionalism of their Orthodox counter-parts. Nothing is said to call into question the commonly observed pattern of development from the "ethnoreligions" of first-generation immigrants to absorption of later generations into a larger post-ethnic Catholic or Jewish or Protestant church; but the majority of essays do stress the strength of the counter-current. COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 249 Much attention is given to the resistance of ethnic churches to "Americaniza-tion", · and in particular to the conflicts in the Catholic church between national parishes and an Irish-dominated hierarchy. As Randall Miller claims in his introduc-tion, the anthology contributes to a critique of the assimilationist interpretation of American immigration history. The shared perspective of the contributors does not preclude different find-ings, for example, on the nature of ethnic religion. Rudolph Vecoli evokes the occult, practices such as "dragging tongue" (a form of penance) and feste (fes-tivals) as features of an Italian folk Catholicism. Although superstition and magic are characteristic of folk religion everywhere, the clergy may well have been less successful in extirpating them in the Mezzogiomo than elsewhere in Europe, precisely because of the contadini" s hostility to the Church as an oppressive land-lord. Vecoli's claim that Italian peasants transferred an "ancient religious culture" from the Old to the New World, where it was rejected by the American Catholic Church to its "great loss", contrasts with Josef Barton's account of the Czech experience. As transition to a market economy shattered traditional village life in Bohemia, Barton argues that communal religious behavior expressing the inter-dependence of households in the village gave way to new types of collective ex-pression based on ties between family groups. Far from being an ancient religious culture, he depicts immigrant religion as the product of transformations already evident in the country of origin, indeed as a response to the same pressures which were driving large numbers to emigrate. Statistics cited in several essays indicate considerable variation in the pro-portion of immigrants of an ethnic group belonging to, not to mention participating in, an ethnic church. Robert Mirak counts ten Orthodox and as many Protestant churches in 1916 for an Armenian population of 65,000 scattered across the United States. Jay Dolan estimates that only 40 to 60 percent of German Catholic im-migrants regularly attended Mass in the 1850s. On the other hand, William Galush cites the calculation that over 70 percent of even third- and fourth- generation Polish-Americans have had some parochial schooling. Indices of membership and participation for the other groups would have been useful. Individuals to be found in the most visible ethnic institutions are not necessarily representative of their immigrant group. The large proportion of individuals outside the ethnic church in the groups studied by Mirak and Dolan raises the question of which categories of an immi-grant population are, in fact, active in the church. Is it the least or the most up-wardly mobile? On the one hand, one would expect the expense of schools, rectories and all the other paraphernalia of the parish to be quite a drain on the limited resources of the immigrant. On the other hand, perhaps it is those who can afford the drain who support these institutions. As Mark Stolarik proposes, comparison of Protestant and Catholic elements within the same ethnic group might help to determine to what extent Catholic attitudes restricted social mobility. His argument that Magyarization fostered among Slovaks an antipathy to public education, leading them to stress in the parochial schools which they established in America "moral upbringing" at the expense of an "up and out" conception of social mobility, also indicates the importance of looking for more specific factors in the experience of each group. Maxwell Whiteman mentions the erosive effect of the occupations of East European Jews in the Philadelphia garment industry on traditional religious prac-tices, for example, working on Saturday on respect for the Sabbath. He recounts the inroads of anarchist organizers and a strike of 1890 in which Sabato Morais (a rabbi of Italian birth in a Sephardic synagogue) played an ultimately futile role 250 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY as intermediary between the employers (mostly German-Jewish) and the workers (East-European Jews). Though he is insufficiently critical towards the anti-anarchist bias of his sources, he at least includes labour as a dimension of the immigrant experience. The other contributors generalize about ethnic religion as a form of community imposed from below against the anonymity and exploitation encounter-ed in American cities. Obviously, the labour movement represents another re-sponse and another form of community. That it may also represent an alternative is to be seen from the antagonism between Rabbi Morais and the anarchist organ-izers and the willingness of the Jewish workers to listen to the anarchists rather than to him. In general, the essays are provocatively argued and well documented from research in the ethnic press, parish records, directories and field work on the groups treated. If the anthology raises more questions than it answers, that is a measure of the utility of the comparative perspective which it affords . * * * Paul LACHANCE, University of Ottawa. MARK NATHAN CoHEN. - The Food Crisis in Prehistory. Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. Still another 'model' in the ongoing attempt to explain the 'why' of incipient agriculture as an 'economic strategy'! This book is not a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees, indeed it is really not about trees at all, rather the attempt to paint a wood not from looking at trees but, at most, at the mir-rored reflections of the shadows of the fragments of trees - the attempt to advance a hypothesis (model), not by autopsy of the evidence itself but by refining previous hypotheses (models), with an occasional glance at the evidence by recourse to studies of studies, or, as the author aptly puts it, by "heavy use of secondary or even tertiary sources" (p. viii). The key to the model is the "coincidence between the end of the era of territorial expansion and the beginning of the period of rapid economic intensification as defined by the emergence of broad-spectrum economies and then farming" (p. 12), in other words, population growth. No documentation is pro-vided to show that territorial expansion had come to an end ! This population pressure, and resultant agriculture, is not, however, confined to one, or even several, regions, indeed there is "a general and synchronous worldwide adoption of an agricultural economy (p. 10)", agriculture being achieved "simultaneously on a worldwide basis". The time-span is 8000 years - which seems to presage, indeed require, a new dictionary definition of synchronous and simultaneous. The hypothesis is undergirded by six central propositions, most of which have little or no reference to the evidence itself. They are: 1) "agriculture is not a single unified concept or behavior but an accumulation of techniques used to increase the range or density of growth of particular resources" (p. 15); those who do not become agriculturalists, do so not out of ignorance but out of lack of need; 2) "agriculture is ·not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base"; indeed, it has "only one advantage over hunting and gathering: that of providing more calories per unit of time and thus of supporting denser populations"; 3) "human societies 

RANDALL MILLER and THOMAS MARZIK, eds. — Immigrants and Religion in Urban America.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/38883/35288

RANDALL MILLER and THOMAS MARZIK, eds. — Immigrants and Religion in Urban America.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)