Memory, Lived. Theory, Practiced?
critically engaging with the extraordinary mundane of Sapelo Island
bY, KATIE hAY
Memory, Lived.
“It seems the important parts of Sapelo’s culture are not so much things you look at but things you do.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I do it all.”
- Musings in a conversation between myself and descendent, franny bailey
Sapelo Island residents Lula Walker, Franny Bailey, Stephanie Grovner, and Katie Hay and Shuntisk Gaskins describe what Sapelo means to them and what living on Sapelo is like.
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Wednesday evening on Sapelo Island. I’ve been in the house all day and just need to get outside, so I hop on my bike and ride toward the South End. I take Airport Road, flying past the old airstrip, now a common space for deer, cacti, and the occasional lone bull, and inoperable except for emergency or bigwig helicopter landings. Go past Behavior Cemetery, briefly ride the North/South Autobahn (the longest stretch of paved road on the island), pass the University of Georgia Marine Institute, swing by the Reynolds Mansion (also fondly called the “Big House,” the “South End House,” or simply the “Mansion”), and then pick up the short stretch out to Nannygoat Beach. The tide is high, water rippling over the marshes separating me from the Sapelo Lighthouse.
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I stay at the beach long enough to not think about anything before realizing I’ve left my phone at the house. Sighing, I hop back on my bike and pedal home as quickly as I can. I’m sort of on a schedule - Wednesday nights, the folks in the community gather at Frank’s bar, The Trough, for a potluck supper started up by Maurice a few months ago. It “starts” at 7:30, meaning we’ll probably begin eating at 8. I don’t need to worry about being late. We’re on island time.
When I arrive on my bike, four or five kids are running around in the large dirt, shell, and grass yard playing with plastic swords, and it looks like every car on the island is here. I park my bike by painted blue picnic tables, goof around with the kids, and then make my way inside the tiny room where folks from around Sapelo will gather to eat ribs, chicken, pork sandwiches, red rice, and potato salad; catch up on the latest news; play cards and just act a fool with friends and family for the next two or more hours. Music plays and everyone shouts to be heard over the person next to them. Outside, the kids play around an impromptu fire pit, burning used paper towels and “cooking” clam shells on an old basketball. I sit at a table surrounded by other women, a few guys, and the occasional kid, who never stays longer than two minutes. Across the room, a group of guys plays Spades, a card game I have yet to master. Every so often, a new face will come in, prompting loud greetings and jests from most everyone in the room, or someone will depart, having to explain himself at least five times before being lovingly yelled at to “get gone already!” When I finally leave around 9:45, I bike home by the light of an almost-full moon, praying there are no bulls in the woods around me and hoping I can see the dirt road that leads to my house through the thick canopy of live oaks and pines.
This is my home: Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the coast of southeastern Georgia, largely owned and maintained by the state as wildlife refuge, hunting grounds, and preservation sites. Though the island is approximately the same size as Manhattan, the permanent population numbers only thirty to forty and is concentrated in the 434-acre Hog Hammock community on the south end of the island. Its history is lived through its people, Saltwater Geechee descendants of West African slaves brought to the Americas in the eighteenth century and earlier. Hog Hammock is the only privately-owned land on the island, apart from a small tract on the North End, and contains the island’s only store (the M&M Grab-all) and bar (the Trough), two churches, and a small public library.
It is in the mundane, ordinary routines, such as the weekly Wednesday night suppers described above, of Sapelo’s people that Sapelo comes alive. Through interviews with community members and self-reflections, presented here in recorded compilations, I sought to investigate what it is that makes Sapelo, Sapelo, and how the interactions of familiar folks in ordinary spaces enrich, memorialize, and continue producing their heritage as Sapelo descendants.
According to Stuart Hall (1997), “culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings” (2, quoted in Rose 2007: 1); essentially, culture is “a whole way of life” (Rose, 10) in which “place is both text and context” (Knox, 4). As I spoke with other Sapelo Island descendants and residents, descriptions of Sapelo very quickly shifted from single words like “peaceful” and “unique” to reflections on fishing during lunch breaks and the qualities of Sapelo’s people (see “Describing Sapelo”). Because my interviewees were mainly young women with young children, their thoughts on Sapelo deeply involved thinking about how their kids were growing up and what they wanted them to experience Sapelo’s culture, indeed, is a whole way of life. It cannot be contained in a few simple buzz words or experienced in a single pass around the island.
Nor can Sapelo be wholly described by the small sampling of people recorded here. As Till (2008) says, “individuals and groups experience memory as multisensual, spatial ways of understanding their worlds” (99) and “understand their pasts and possible futures through the relationships they and others have with place” (102). I approached this project seeking that one place in the community that embodied Sapelo, searching for the single location or common memory that summarized what Sapelo means to its people. However, the reality is that “cultural ‘realities’ and interpretations of events among individuals in the same group are often highly variable, changing, or contradictory” (Hayano 1979: 102, quoted in Anderson, 381), and places become culturally relevant through both collective and individual intimacy with them (Till, 108). It is the activities, the reminiscing, and the memory-making in the mundane spaces that preserves Sapelo. As Stephanie Grovner, one of my interviewees, an island descendent and good friend, put it, “That’s the best part of the island itself: getting to teach your child what you were taught by your parents, what your parents were taught by their parents.”
Knox (2005) describes “ordinary places” as “constantly under construction by people responding to the opportunities and constraints of their particular locality” (3). Nowhere was this more apparent to me than sitting with Franny Bailey, a young mother of two-year-old Aiden and one of the only members of her generation who chose to stay on the island once grown, in the small living room of her trailer in Hog Hammock. As we talked, her son Aiden ran around, watched cartoons, and eventually ended up playing outside in the dirt road in front of the house. Over the course of less than an hour, Shuntisk Gaskins and island resident Stephanie Grovner joined our conversation, Franny’s brother Alfie came into the house with his two kids looking for Franny, and Stanley dropped in briefly. Similarly, in the time I sat with island descendant Lula Walker, talking and playing with her great-grandson Bahari, Stephanie’s son, we were visited by community members Richard and Miss Mattie, affectionately known as “Sister.” On Wednesday nights at the Trough, people move fluidly through the space, stepping outside to smoke a cigarette or check on the kids, and within the space, shifting their seating from the bar to the card table to the chairs by the ice machine as the conversation and population changes. In and between each of these spaces, different generations express their version of Sapelo, whether the working and social life of twenty- and thirty-somethings mothers, the routine house calls of the retired, or the rowdy, messy mixing of the middle-aged, teenagers, and barely toddlers crammed in a tiny room. The intimacy of Hog Hammock is created not by remaining still or finding a particular place to settle but by constant mobility. Memories are constructed through “interior and exterior movements...through landscape, story, and ritual” (Till, 105), all of which meld together in the oxymoronic ‘peace and quiet’ of a community perpetually and energetically in flux.
Memory is spatially-situated in the public and private arena, the distinctions between which are often blurred on Sapelo where a yard or road is simultaneously a gathering place, parking lot, and playground; every screened porch has multiple chairs, couches, or benches and tables to invite the passersby to sit down and eat some of whatever you’ve got on the stove; and arriving unannounced in someone’s house is not necessarily out of the ordinary. Constrained by the ferry schedule, the lack of access to any store larger than the tiny M&M Grab-all convenience store, and the ability of your truck or bike to pass successfully through the dirt roads, Hog Hammock lives its past in the everyday “bumpily layered and mixed...stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion” (Lippard 1997: 24, quoted in Sharp, et. al., 1008). Knowledge of one’s culture past and present is, after all, “articulated with embodied codes and memories that ‘emerge as flashes’ not following a ‘logical-rational knowledge’” (Ylonen 2003: 565, quoted in Crang, 231).
The simultaneous transience and fixedness of the spaces on Sapelo mirrors the character of its people and thus memories. Memories are better remembered when located in certain spaces and places, and, because of Sapelo’s unique geography and history, these memorable spaces are not limited to traditional infrastructure, institutional projects, or constructed visual experiences like public art installations or museums. In fact, as I came to realize, confining Sapelo to even an interactive playground setting devoted to telling the “true” story of Sapelo’s people would be a disservice to Sapelo itself. Even public art “[aiming] to write people and history into the landscape rather than an aesthetic focused around property and heritage” (Sharp et. al., 1015) would miss the point of Sapelo’s people and history because the important aspects of Sapelo’s culture are not things you behold but activities you do.
When I arrive on my bike, four or five kids are running around in the large dirt, shell, and grass yard playing with plastic swords, and it looks like every car on the island is here. I park my bike by painted blue picnic tables, goof around with the kids, and then make my way inside the tiny room where folks from around Sapelo will gather to eat ribs, chicken, pork sandwiches, red rice, and potato salad; catch up on the latest news; play cards and just act a fool with friends and family for the next two or more hours. Music plays and everyone shouts to be heard over the person next to them. Outside, the kids play around an impromptu fire pit, burning used paper towels and “cooking” clam shells on an old basketball. I sit at a table surrounded by other women, a few guys, and the occasional kid, who never stays longer than two minutes. Across the room, a group of guys plays Spades, a card game I have yet to master. Every so often, a new face will come in, prompting loud greetings and jests from most everyone in the room, or someone will depart, having to explain himself at least five times before being lovingly yelled at to “get gone already!” When I finally leave around 9:45, I bike home by the light of an almost-full moon, praying there are no bulls in the woods around me and hoping I can see the dirt road that leads to my house through the thick canopy of live oaks and pines.
This is my home: Sapelo Island, a barrier island off the coast of southeastern Georgia, largely owned and maintained by the state as wildlife refuge, hunting grounds, and preservation sites. Though the island is approximately the same size as Manhattan, the permanent population numbers only thirty to forty and is concentrated in the 434-acre Hog Hammock community on the south end of the island. Its history is lived through its people, Saltwater Geechee descendants of West African slaves brought to the Americas in the eighteenth century and earlier. Hog Hammock is the only privately-owned land on the island, apart from a small tract on the North End, and contains the island’s only store (the M&M Grab-all) and bar (the Trough), two churches, and a small public library.
It is in the mundane, ordinary routines, such as the weekly Wednesday night suppers described above, of Sapelo’s people that Sapelo comes alive. Through interviews with community members and self-reflections, presented here in recorded compilations, I sought to investigate what it is that makes Sapelo, Sapelo, and how the interactions of familiar folks in ordinary spaces enrich, memorialize, and continue producing their heritage as Sapelo descendants.
According to Stuart Hall (1997), “culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings” (2, quoted in Rose 2007: 1); essentially, culture is “a whole way of life” (Rose, 10) in which “place is both text and context” (Knox, 4). As I spoke with other Sapelo Island descendants and residents, descriptions of Sapelo very quickly shifted from single words like “peaceful” and “unique” to reflections on fishing during lunch breaks and the qualities of Sapelo’s people (see “Describing Sapelo”). Because my interviewees were mainly young women with young children, their thoughts on Sapelo deeply involved thinking about how their kids were growing up and what they wanted them to experience Sapelo’s culture, indeed, is a whole way of life. It cannot be contained in a few simple buzz words or experienced in a single pass around the island.
Nor can Sapelo be wholly described by the small sampling of people recorded here. As Till (2008) says, “individuals and groups experience memory as multisensual, spatial ways of understanding their worlds” (99) and “understand their pasts and possible futures through the relationships they and others have with place” (102). I approached this project seeking that one place in the community that embodied Sapelo, searching for the single location or common memory that summarized what Sapelo means to its people. However, the reality is that “cultural ‘realities’ and interpretations of events among individuals in the same group are often highly variable, changing, or contradictory” (Hayano 1979: 102, quoted in Anderson, 381), and places become culturally relevant through both collective and individual intimacy with them (Till, 108). It is the activities, the reminiscing, and the memory-making in the mundane spaces that preserves Sapelo. As Stephanie Grovner, one of my interviewees, an island descendent and good friend, put it, “That’s the best part of the island itself: getting to teach your child what you were taught by your parents, what your parents were taught by their parents.”
Knox (2005) describes “ordinary places” as “constantly under construction by people responding to the opportunities and constraints of their particular locality” (3). Nowhere was this more apparent to me than sitting with Franny Bailey, a young mother of two-year-old Aiden and one of the only members of her generation who chose to stay on the island once grown, in the small living room of her trailer in Hog Hammock. As we talked, her son Aiden ran around, watched cartoons, and eventually ended up playing outside in the dirt road in front of the house. Over the course of less than an hour, Shuntisk Gaskins and island resident Stephanie Grovner joined our conversation, Franny’s brother Alfie came into the house with his two kids looking for Franny, and Stanley dropped in briefly. Similarly, in the time I sat with island descendant Lula Walker, talking and playing with her great-grandson Bahari, Stephanie’s son, we were visited by community members Richard and Miss Mattie, affectionately known as “Sister.” On Wednesday nights at the Trough, people move fluidly through the space, stepping outside to smoke a cigarette or check on the kids, and within the space, shifting their seating from the bar to the card table to the chairs by the ice machine as the conversation and population changes. In and between each of these spaces, different generations express their version of Sapelo, whether the working and social life of twenty- and thirty-somethings mothers, the routine house calls of the retired, or the rowdy, messy mixing of the middle-aged, teenagers, and barely toddlers crammed in a tiny room. The intimacy of Hog Hammock is created not by remaining still or finding a particular place to settle but by constant mobility. Memories are constructed through “interior and exterior movements...through landscape, story, and ritual” (Till, 105), all of which meld together in the oxymoronic ‘peace and quiet’ of a community perpetually and energetically in flux.
Memory is spatially-situated in the public and private arena, the distinctions between which are often blurred on Sapelo where a yard or road is simultaneously a gathering place, parking lot, and playground; every screened porch has multiple chairs, couches, or benches and tables to invite the passersby to sit down and eat some of whatever you’ve got on the stove; and arriving unannounced in someone’s house is not necessarily out of the ordinary. Constrained by the ferry schedule, the lack of access to any store larger than the tiny M&M Grab-all convenience store, and the ability of your truck or bike to pass successfully through the dirt roads, Hog Hammock lives its past in the everyday “bumpily layered and mixed...stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion” (Lippard 1997: 24, quoted in Sharp, et. al., 1008). Knowledge of one’s culture past and present is, after all, “articulated with embodied codes and memories that ‘emerge as flashes’ not following a ‘logical-rational knowledge’” (Ylonen 2003: 565, quoted in Crang, 231).
The simultaneous transience and fixedness of the spaces on Sapelo mirrors the character of its people and thus memories. Memories are better remembered when located in certain spaces and places, and, because of Sapelo’s unique geography and history, these memorable spaces are not limited to traditional infrastructure, institutional projects, or constructed visual experiences like public art installations or museums. In fact, as I came to realize, confining Sapelo to even an interactive playground setting devoted to telling the “true” story of Sapelo’s people would be a disservice to Sapelo itself. Even public art “[aiming] to write people and history into the landscape rather than an aesthetic focused around property and heritage” (Sharp et. al., 1015) would miss the point of Sapelo’s people and history because the important aspects of Sapelo’s culture are not things you behold but activities you do.
Franny Bailey and Stephanie Grovner share memories of Sapelo Island. (Button links to safe external site. To be active soon.)
Lula Walker reflects on growing up and some of her favorite places on Sapelo Island. (Button links to safe external site. To be active soon.)
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This realization is substantiated by the memories captured in the few short recordings I managed to gather before writing this piece. In “Reflections: A Younger Generation’s Take,” Franny and Stephanie both describe riding around the North End of the island and through the community. Stephanie recalls one evening when they “rode all around until we just couldn’t ride anymore. It was just the best thing in the world. Everybody in the old days like, ‘That’s what we used to do: just ride around and cruise.’ And, I mean, you can’t beat that.” The setting is a bus or truck, constantly in motion, ever present on Sapelo.
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For sixty-seven year-old Lula Walker (“Reflections: Lula Walker”), landmarks on the island like Cabretta Beach and Chocolate on the North End bring her contemplative peace, Behavior Cemetery connects her to her ancestors and her late husband George, and the annex of St. Luke Baptist Church, one of the two active (three total) churches on the island, brings her back to her days as a girl when the building was a Rosenwald school. Together we sat in her living room, keeping an eye on Bahari as he watched “Curious George” and spilled grapes all over the floor, musing about his fascination with the last clock Lula had bought George before he passed away. Smiling, hands folded in her lap, and rocking gently in her recliner, she told me, “I’d love for him (Bahari) to, you know, come back and just enjoy Hog Hammock, you know, enjoy the area that he growed up here on the island, you know, and, matter fact, the whole entire island to tell you the truth...but Hog Hammock should have a sentimental value.” For Lula, Hog Hammock is the heart of many memories but it cannot be considered out of the context of the entire island and all that comes with it.
Places are increasingly and constantly “reinterpreted, reimagined, designed, packaged, themed, and marketed” (Knox, 4), and Sapelo Island is no exception. Everyone acknowledges the changes in the community, as property leaves the hands of island descendants, older generations die out, and younger generations travel to “the other side” (the mainland) in search of jobs. Some are more optimistic than others, seeing the crop of toddlers now running amuck and young mothers like Stephanie and Franny who insist upon their boys getting the “full experience” of Sapelo (which, assumedly, would include continuing to be in the making of that culture). Others, like Franny, see the dwindling population and descendent-owned land as indicative of a dark future, especially when considering the importance of land to Sapelo’s memory. “Sapelo is growing,” Franny told me. “It’s growing from descendants selling their property, selling their land. It’s like, you fail to realize you have kids, you have grandkids of your own or whatever, and it’s like, what are you giving back to them? What are you giving them? You’re not giving them a piece of Sapelo...a piece of your home, land, town, or whatever. I guess, the money talks.” Land is important to preserving Sapelo’s culture, because Sapelo’s culture exists in the lived memory that is necessarily situated within and acted upon in the very specific context of Sapelo Island. If memory is “naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported” as Hayden (1997: 46) claims, then the loss of land is a very real threat to Sapelo descendants’ heritage. No one knows quite what lies ahead for Sapelo and its folks; in the meantime, however, we will continue to fish and gather and ride in rusty pickups down dirt roads because, as Stephanie said, “that’s our way of living.”
Places are increasingly and constantly “reinterpreted, reimagined, designed, packaged, themed, and marketed” (Knox, 4), and Sapelo Island is no exception. Everyone acknowledges the changes in the community, as property leaves the hands of island descendants, older generations die out, and younger generations travel to “the other side” (the mainland) in search of jobs. Some are more optimistic than others, seeing the crop of toddlers now running amuck and young mothers like Stephanie and Franny who insist upon their boys getting the “full experience” of Sapelo (which, assumedly, would include continuing to be in the making of that culture). Others, like Franny, see the dwindling population and descendent-owned land as indicative of a dark future, especially when considering the importance of land to Sapelo’s memory. “Sapelo is growing,” Franny told me. “It’s growing from descendants selling their property, selling their land. It’s like, you fail to realize you have kids, you have grandkids of your own or whatever, and it’s like, what are you giving back to them? What are you giving them? You’re not giving them a piece of Sapelo...a piece of your home, land, town, or whatever. I guess, the money talks.” Land is important to preserving Sapelo’s culture, because Sapelo’s culture exists in the lived memory that is necessarily situated within and acted upon in the very specific context of Sapelo Island. If memory is “naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported” as Hayden (1997: 46) claims, then the loss of land is a very real threat to Sapelo descendants’ heritage. No one knows quite what lies ahead for Sapelo and its folks; in the meantime, however, we will continue to fish and gather and ride in rusty pickups down dirt roads because, as Stephanie said, “that’s our way of living.”
Theory, Practiced?
"The so-called theory/practice divide is an artifact not of theoretical confusion or epistemological inadequacies, but of the alienated, contradictory social formation in which critical theory is embedded.
There is no theory that can overcome this divide, because, by definition, it cannot be overcome theoretically; it can only be overcome in practice."
- neil Brenner, "What is critical urban theory?"
“The goal is to enter and document the moment-to-moment, concrete details of a life… Our work seeks verisimilitude; it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is lifelike, believable, and possible.” |
According to Neil Brenner (2009), critical urban theory is marked by “its theoretical character, its reflexivity, its critique of instrumental reason, and its emphasis on the disjuncture between the actual and the possible” (198). Of particular interest to my project was his emphasis on “the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space” (Brenner, 198). Having grown up on Sapelo, I know the importance of spaces around the island and wished to investigate this area to which I am so personally connected from a theoretical, critical perspective.
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In spite of being from Sapelo Island, familiar with its people and culture, and excited about completing my first autoethnographic study, this project proved to be one of the most challenging I have yet undertaken. Initially, my approach to constructing interview questions, choosing interviewees, and piecing together my project was very theoretical and methodical. To put it simply, it was neat. Concise. Clean. I (erroneously) assumed that it would remain this way throughout the process. However, as Carolyn Ellis (1999) repeatedly tells Sylvia Smith in “Heartful Ethnography,” the real world is messy, contradicting, and forces anyone living in it to constantly re-evaluate their position within it, whether as an opportunistic Complete Member Researcher (CMR), vulnerable participant observer, or member of the Sapelo Island community.
As I spoke with community members and reflected upon these conversations, my research intention slowly became less of a well-synthesized goal and more of a fractured array of stories, experiences, and emotions that threatened to lead what Bourdieu describes as “the rather disheartening conclusion that all is in the final analysis nothing but discourse, text, or worse yet, pretext for the text” (Crang, 226). I possessed the theoretical framework and the experiential elements, both of which are vital to critical engagement, and, again, assumed these would align nicely for my final product. In spite of Ellis’ warning that engaging with family (or pseudo-family community members) is one of the hardest things we can do as autoethnographers “because now we’re not just talking about faceless, nameless, unidentifiable subjects” (Ellis, 681), I did not anticipate the difficulty of taking my theoretical lens and my interviewees’ narratives and trying to apply the former to the latter.
No action is apolitical, for as Harvey (1996) states, “There is a politics to place construction” (39); thus the ways in which “people invest places with social and cultural meaning” (Hayden, 78) is always political, whether recognized as such or not. My interviewees’ inability and my personal struggle to articulate the politics of our experiences on Sapelo does not render them invalid or suggest their absence. Neither does the non-urbane nature of our community bar it from being considered through the lens of critical urban theory. On the contrary, Sapelo Island and the experiences of its people are as legitimate a subject of critical study as any because of the place-specific production of knowledge and the historical and spatial specificity of the residents’ lifestyles. What Harvey claims, Leitner and Sheppard (2015) further substantiate: “Knowledge production is necessarily situated; all knowledge is initially local, shaped by the context through which it is produced… [This] process is politicized - certain local epistemologies may gain hegemonic status for reasons that have little to do with their universal validity” (3). In a similar vein, Paul Knox (2005) writes about the “interdependence between urban design and the social construction of place,” purporting that the latter is especially important in what he describes as “ordinary places - physical settings that do not have important landmarks or major symbolic structures” (1).
When we consider Sapelo as the “ordinary” setting for a very concentrated production - limited to generations of Saltwater Geechee residents on a geographically isolated barrier island - of very particular knowledge - such as knowing how to cast a net, make good gumbo, or navigate the North End without getting lost - Sapelo becomes the context for the text of these people’s lived history. However, Sapelo as an island, people, and culture also remains fixed in the larger context of race and class relations in the United States (past and present), the nature of Georgia’s barrier islands’ relationship to the mainland (consider, for instance, the Golden Isles a couple miles to the south), and relations between the state and local government and educational authorities. Living in the undeniably present yet hardly communicable politics of placemaking and active memorialization makes difficult analysis simultaneously broad and specific because the participants do not necessarily “seek ‘transcultural’ representation” but deal with struggles very local (Crang, 228).
Balancing the theoretical and the actual, the supposedly inherently nonpolitical with the supposedly inherently political, and the multiple positionality of every member involved in culture, memory, and knowledge production requires an incredible degree of self-reflexivity, a key ingredient in critical urban theory. In critical theory, reflexivity is both a “total rejection of any standpoint...that claims to be able to stand out of the contextually specific time/space of history” (Brenner, 202), and an acknowledgement of the need for commitment to “developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (Anderson, 373). Autoethnography in particular demands a lot from the researcher, who must be “willing to become a vulnerable observer” (Ellis, 675); visible in the text as “a full member in the research group” (Anderson, 373), if she exists as such (which I do); and must “orient to documenting and analyzing action as well as to purposively engaging in it” (380). Pushing my analysis beyond the superficial, surface goings-on while maintaining the integrity of my personal experience and the authenticity of others’ was particularly difficult. Labelling people I’ve worked with, babysat for, gone to the beach with, and grown up around as “interviewees” for the sake of this project felt strange, even though meeting with them in their living rooms (which is where my interviews took place) and chatting about Sapelo is a fairly commonplace undertaking. Scheduling to meet at specific times for purposes other than church, Ladies’ Nights and other gatherings, and catching the ferry is somewhat countercultural on Sapelo, as once you’re on the island, you’re living on “island time.”
Theory is messy but it is also safe. When we confine our musings and hypothetical interpretations or interactions to paper, we remain disconnected from that which has the potential to make us more than intellectually uncomfortable. In regards to theory, the spatial production of knowledge remains abstract, located in the very real yet mostly intangible spaces of our minds, classrooms, and published academic journals. Theory is also contextually specific and must be approached as such, albeit abstractly. However, like Sapelo, it exists within the larger frame of practice, one which by necessity is separate yet connected. After all, “the realm of practice...always already informs the work of theorists, even when the latter remains on an abstract level” (Brenner, 203). Just as I encountered and struggled with my multiple positionalities as researcher, student, friend, daughter, family member, theorist, and writer, so theory and practice must constantly fight and collaborate. According to Crang (2005), qualitative research of this nature “is often torn between a constructivist approach and a longing to convey a ‘real’ sense of the field” (225). Thus theory must occasionally step outside of its comfortable positionality as abstract cogitation and take up the equally messy but far more immediate position of on-the-ground practice. It is only when these disparate spaces collide that we find the truth and nuances of their relationship to one another.
As I spoke with community members and reflected upon these conversations, my research intention slowly became less of a well-synthesized goal and more of a fractured array of stories, experiences, and emotions that threatened to lead what Bourdieu describes as “the rather disheartening conclusion that all is in the final analysis nothing but discourse, text, or worse yet, pretext for the text” (Crang, 226). I possessed the theoretical framework and the experiential elements, both of which are vital to critical engagement, and, again, assumed these would align nicely for my final product. In spite of Ellis’ warning that engaging with family (or pseudo-family community members) is one of the hardest things we can do as autoethnographers “because now we’re not just talking about faceless, nameless, unidentifiable subjects” (Ellis, 681), I did not anticipate the difficulty of taking my theoretical lens and my interviewees’ narratives and trying to apply the former to the latter.
No action is apolitical, for as Harvey (1996) states, “There is a politics to place construction” (39); thus the ways in which “people invest places with social and cultural meaning” (Hayden, 78) is always political, whether recognized as such or not. My interviewees’ inability and my personal struggle to articulate the politics of our experiences on Sapelo does not render them invalid or suggest their absence. Neither does the non-urbane nature of our community bar it from being considered through the lens of critical urban theory. On the contrary, Sapelo Island and the experiences of its people are as legitimate a subject of critical study as any because of the place-specific production of knowledge and the historical and spatial specificity of the residents’ lifestyles. What Harvey claims, Leitner and Sheppard (2015) further substantiate: “Knowledge production is necessarily situated; all knowledge is initially local, shaped by the context through which it is produced… [This] process is politicized - certain local epistemologies may gain hegemonic status for reasons that have little to do with their universal validity” (3). In a similar vein, Paul Knox (2005) writes about the “interdependence between urban design and the social construction of place,” purporting that the latter is especially important in what he describes as “ordinary places - physical settings that do not have important landmarks or major symbolic structures” (1).
When we consider Sapelo as the “ordinary” setting for a very concentrated production - limited to generations of Saltwater Geechee residents on a geographically isolated barrier island - of very particular knowledge - such as knowing how to cast a net, make good gumbo, or navigate the North End without getting lost - Sapelo becomes the context for the text of these people’s lived history. However, Sapelo as an island, people, and culture also remains fixed in the larger context of race and class relations in the United States (past and present), the nature of Georgia’s barrier islands’ relationship to the mainland (consider, for instance, the Golden Isles a couple miles to the south), and relations between the state and local government and educational authorities. Living in the undeniably present yet hardly communicable politics of placemaking and active memorialization makes difficult analysis simultaneously broad and specific because the participants do not necessarily “seek ‘transcultural’ representation” but deal with struggles very local (Crang, 228).
Balancing the theoretical and the actual, the supposedly inherently nonpolitical with the supposedly inherently political, and the multiple positionality of every member involved in culture, memory, and knowledge production requires an incredible degree of self-reflexivity, a key ingredient in critical urban theory. In critical theory, reflexivity is both a “total rejection of any standpoint...that claims to be able to stand out of the contextually specific time/space of history” (Brenner, 202), and an acknowledgement of the need for commitment to “developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (Anderson, 373). Autoethnography in particular demands a lot from the researcher, who must be “willing to become a vulnerable observer” (Ellis, 675); visible in the text as “a full member in the research group” (Anderson, 373), if she exists as such (which I do); and must “orient to documenting and analyzing action as well as to purposively engaging in it” (380). Pushing my analysis beyond the superficial, surface goings-on while maintaining the integrity of my personal experience and the authenticity of others’ was particularly difficult. Labelling people I’ve worked with, babysat for, gone to the beach with, and grown up around as “interviewees” for the sake of this project felt strange, even though meeting with them in their living rooms (which is where my interviews took place) and chatting about Sapelo is a fairly commonplace undertaking. Scheduling to meet at specific times for purposes other than church, Ladies’ Nights and other gatherings, and catching the ferry is somewhat countercultural on Sapelo, as once you’re on the island, you’re living on “island time.”
Theory is messy but it is also safe. When we confine our musings and hypothetical interpretations or interactions to paper, we remain disconnected from that which has the potential to make us more than intellectually uncomfortable. In regards to theory, the spatial production of knowledge remains abstract, located in the very real yet mostly intangible spaces of our minds, classrooms, and published academic journals. Theory is also contextually specific and must be approached as such, albeit abstractly. However, like Sapelo, it exists within the larger frame of practice, one which by necessity is separate yet connected. After all, “the realm of practice...always already informs the work of theorists, even when the latter remains on an abstract level” (Brenner, 203). Just as I encountered and struggled with my multiple positionalities as researcher, student, friend, daughter, family member, theorist, and writer, so theory and practice must constantly fight and collaborate. According to Crang (2005), qualitative research of this nature “is often torn between a constructivist approach and a longing to convey a ‘real’ sense of the field” (225). Thus theory must occasionally step outside of its comfortable positionality as abstract cogitation and take up the equally messy but far more immediate position of on-the-ground practice. It is only when these disparate spaces collide that we find the truth and nuances of their relationship to one another.
(INCONCLUSIVE) conclusions.
"The truth is that we can never capture experience. field notes are one selective story about what happened written from a particular point of view at a particular time for a particular purpose."
- Carolyn Ellis, "Heartful Autoethnography"
Through the particular place of Sapelo Island, living community members connect with their past by living in the houses, walking the streets, clamming in the rivers, and making and telling stories like their ancestors before them. By engaging with the land, built environment (however unsturdy or rusted), and each other, they make and preserve memory. Their past, present, and possible futures manifest in the relationships they have with spaces private, communal, or often both. The significant relationship memory has to place applies to theory as well, though in appropriately more abstract sense. Knowledge production - cultural, academic, and social - is place-specific and requires us to step out of our comfort zone and engage with the stories and theories that dialectically and perpetually speak to and influence one another. We as researchers ought to critically engage with the nuances of our locale while experiencing the sociocultural context in which we live. It requires self-knowledge and reflexivity, vulnerability, and a willingness to get our hands dirty.
Sapelo is my home and a very intimate part of my identity. The stories gathered here are only the tiniest snapshot of what actually exists. As Carolyn Ellis (1999) tells us, “The truth is that we can never capture experience” (673); it can only be lived in the moment and remembered in fragmented, illogically organized bursts later on. The recordings I have here do not encompass the experiences of everyone on Sapelo but instead may be a point off of which the not-yet-gathered can jump. We cannot assume that theory captures the essence of what we practice, just as a plaque or collection of tales, images, and memorabilia cannot fully capture the essence of Sapelo’s history. Theory supplements practice supplements theory. Sapelo’s history is lived through its present people interacting with spaces that speak directly to its past. Ellis sums up my position and intention as both an intellectual and Sapelonian best: “Maybe I can both contribute to knowledge and help others - and myself - write a story we can live with” (1999: 679).
Sapelo is my home and a very intimate part of my identity. The stories gathered here are only the tiniest snapshot of what actually exists. As Carolyn Ellis (1999) tells us, “The truth is that we can never capture experience” (673); it can only be lived in the moment and remembered in fragmented, illogically organized bursts later on. The recordings I have here do not encompass the experiences of everyone on Sapelo but instead may be a point off of which the not-yet-gathered can jump. We cannot assume that theory captures the essence of what we practice, just as a plaque or collection of tales, images, and memorabilia cannot fully capture the essence of Sapelo’s history. Theory supplements practice supplements theory. Sapelo’s history is lived through its present people interacting with spaces that speak directly to its past. Ellis sums up my position and intention as both an intellectual and Sapelonian best: “Maybe I can both contribute to knowledge and help others - and myself - write a story we can live with” (1999: 679).
"Maybe i can both contribute to knowledge and help others - and myself - write a story we can live with."
my goal (as stated by Carolyn Ellis)
References
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