ARE you a pilot, diver, fisherman or a boat designer, builder, sailor or racer? Do you have Bermudian ancestors who made a living at sea, were lost at sea or were involved with maritime immigration, trade, transport, tourism or ecology? The preceding questions are but a smattering of those Bermudian PhD candidate Charlotte Andrews is hoping will draw participants to her maritime heritage study. This week the Cambridge University academic met with Mid-Ocean News reporter Heather Wood and photographer Glenn Tucker, to talk about the progress she is making with her fieldwork and her hope that the Annual Exhibition in the Botanical Gardens will help her advance it.

Q: What do you hope to achieve at the Annual Exhibition?

AThe intention is two-fold. First, I’m hoping to recruit (participants for my research). Most of the people I’ve already inteviewed are people that I’ve approached but I’m also interested in self-identified informants who might contact me because they feel they have strong maritime connections. I feel it could be interesting in terms of giving me more scope and perspective from different sorts of people.

The second (aim) is to tell people about what I’m doing and why, which is part of the responsibility for doing this sort of research in Bermuda. I will have a tent set up there today and tomorrow and I’m inviting the public to stop by and learn more about my research and informally share their maritime interests and memories.

Q: Exactly what are you doing?

B> I’m working on my PhD following a Master’s (degree) I did at Cambridge (focusing on) heritage management and museum studies. It was a more practical degree but if you got through it, you had the opportunity to start research, which is really open to anything you want.

What I’m doing is analysing heritage as a social phenomena and as a concept. What is heritage? We talk about it in quite generic terms - in terms of what we want to save, what we want to continue or sustain for future generations. There’s a need for detailed qualitative research that explores heritage - or how people use the past in and for the present - within specific places and circumstances.

So, being Bermudian and having some background knowledge, I had the opportunity to conduct a study here.

Q: What’s the focus of the study?<$>A: I’d worked as curator at the Bermuda Maritime Museum for five years so I obviously had some background there and what I’m doing is looking at Bermuda through a maritime lens. It’s still very broad, but I think that’s part of the beauty of it - that maritime heritage here is extremely diverse. It gives you access to a whole range of different people within the community.

It offers connections to different aspects of our history because maritime associations run throughout it. Maritime heritage has a connection not just to the Maritime Museum, but to other institutions as well.

However, the idea is that my work starts from the ground up from the community, from the “grassroots” understandings and experiences of individuals and families. I ask questions which lead to the ideas I’m looking to explore, but ultimately, I want the theory that I’m trying to help develop to emanate or come from peoples’ experiences - from their interpretation and their communication to me within interviews or through activities that they might participate in.

I want my work to really come from that (as) it might influence how policy or management is developed here within the heritage sector, and particularly within museums. <

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Q: What led you here? Not many people grow up saying I want to be a researcher, a scientist.

A: Nor did I. I feel as if my life is a bit like my research. It’s been a long, sort of winding road. You come to places that you definitely don’t expect. I actually was a dancer for many years. I trained in that and my whole dream was to be a prima ballerina. Suffice to say, that was not the longest of careers, but I learned a lot. I particularly loved having a real focus on something; seeing that if you keep chipping away, new things are revealed. I had the opportunity to go to college. I studied anthropology, mainly because it didn’t require me to choose amongst all the amazing academic windows that suddenly opened up for me and I also started becoming really interested in Bermud

Q: You had a sudden awakening?

A: <$>I’m Bermudian but I spent quite a bit of my childhood in the States. I actually didn’t grow up here. When I came back to Bermuda as a young adult I really was like a sponge soaking up this whole community and tapping into my own Bermudian heritage. When I finished university I was given - I just call it an opportunity of a lifetime. I found myself at the Maritime Museum in the role of curator. I was totally green and I had very steep learning curves.

At that time they had just finished the restoration of Commissioner’s House and the idea was to fill it with new exhibitions. I had the chance to help develop that with the staff and an array of community curators and I really think that was what just opened my eyes to the profound cultural diversity of Bermuda and the layers of different histories here. I was there for five years and returning to school presented the opportunity to take my understanding of heritage in Bermuda and museum practice to the next level.

Q: Do you think that to some degree Bermudians are losing appreciation for the island’s history, the heritage that makes it unique

A:<$> In my interactions with people and the interviews I’ve done so far, people are extremely concerned. There are terms that are thrown around a lot and a genuine nostalgia for certain things which are considered lost, so there’s sort of a low morale in that sense.

But then when you talk to people, and they express their concerns or express their own heritage connections you see the extent to which they are sustaining heritage. But in sustaining it, they’re not keeping it static, they’re transforming it, making it their own.

There’s a sense that everything is dwindling.

There’s an assumption that young people are deficient of an appreciation for the past. But I’m interviewing different generations, people of all ages and I don’t think there’s a deficiency there or any sort of narrowing.

Sure there are challenges and there are big concerns and we really need — particularly at the institutional and government levels — strong policy to preserve and to conserve both our tangible and intangible heritage.

But I think that heritage is not something that’s finite, it’s not something we’re going to run out of. It’s always renewing itself. Within individuals and families and neighbourhoods, it’s so strong. It’s been an exciting privilege for me to meet one-on-one with people. It’s been very heartening as well because I think often when you’re working with heritage institutions and museums, you’re aiming to protect and preserve or collect because you you don’t want the heritage to be lost or to die. There’s an understandable sense of urgency, and sometimes frustration, because we are seeing things being lost, so heritage agencies need to work to counter those real effects. But on the other hand, there is a lot being created.

So in my work I’m trying to shy away from that deficiency model and assume that people have these connections and that they’re worthy of study and they’re profoundly interesting. I’m continually trying to grow my own curiosity to see the many different connections to heritage that are out there.

Q: What methodology are you using

A: <$>My work is ethnographic, which means that my research is based on fieldwork here in Bermuda. I have two primary methods. One is participant observation, which means attending different events going on in the community.

I started my fieldwork in January and in the past couple months I’ve attended a variety of events like the Pilot Darrel commemorative celebration, the slave trade abolition commemoration at Commissioner’s House, a gathering of the families involved in the Figurehead Memorial for Bermudians lost at sea, Sea Cadets training exercises and learning expeditions aboard The Spirit ofrmuda<$>.

I’ve observed these events and conducted some informal interviews. I’m finding that sometimes there’s a bit of a quid pro quo — for me to be involved or make a contribution — and that actually just adds to what I’m able to learn from the experience. I also conduct in-depth interviews which I’d describe as semi-structured. I ask certain types of questions to cover what I want theoretically but I also try to give my interviewees freedom to go in the direction they want and to communicate what is important to them.

Particularly as a museum and heritage professional, I don’t want to impose my ideas of what heritage is on someone else although I do direct the interviews to some extent and probe my interviewees to get at their deeper levels of meaning.

Q: Are people finding heritage a difficult topic to talk ut?

>A: <$>Interviews involve verbal communication, but heritage isn’t something people always express through words. It’s something they experience and they often experience it non-verbally. So I’m finding that people are communicating — and it’s something I’m encouraging — how they perform heritage, how it’s embodied.

Objects or material culture also plays an important role. Although you don’t want to over privilege the object as museums sometimes tend to because they’re often working from their collections, objects are really used by people make meaning and to sustain it. It is a sort of a non-verbal thing and so what I do in the interviews is try to get people past words, to have them speak to me by showing me photographs or things, or even taking me to places that are significant for them.

Q: How did you determine that your candidates are appropriate subjects for what you were trying to achieve?

A: It’s certainly very organic and I think this is one of the advantages of being a local researcher, particularly one who had experience up at the Maritime Museum. When I was there I worked on some specifically oriented maritime exhibits but also learned a lot through my regular curatorial work and in interacting with the donors who came in.

So I had some existing contacts from the Museum and my own local knowledge and contacts. But I also wanted to access unknown pockets of the community. I’ve been able to do this quite easily through word of mouth about people or chasing down informants through stories, histories or objects. Boats have been an especially good way to reach inmants.

Q: Are you ever daunted by the vastness of your subject?

A: Sometimes it feels like I am all over the place — and I am, from piloting, to fishing, to sailing, to shipwrighting, and so on. I considered, because maritime heritage is so huge, that maybe I should restrict it and just look at piloting for instance, which could be the entire PhD. People have written extensively already on some of these aspects of the history or the culture but in talking to people I found they often didn’t fit neatly into one category.

There are often multiple maritime connections making it very difficult just to keep in one place which I think it enriches the work. And it’s important to remember that I’m not trying to make claims about maritime history or give a complete account of local maritime culture. Instead I’m using maritime heritage as a vehicle to explore what heritage is, or how people use the past to make meaning in their lives and the community. Although my work will become a record, I’m not a historian, I’m not an archaeologist, I’m an anthropologist trying to explore how people use the past to make meaning.

Q: Have you considered the responsibility that you’ve taken on? That this will become a record for Bera?

A:<$> There is a responsibility there, but the flip side of being a local researcher is an over concern. You worry about long-term accountability. But on the other hand I think this is a big opportunity for me to grow as a budding scholar, to think independently, to see that research has value in its own right and not feel entirely confined by what I think it will contribute. I worry about that. It’s a real issue.

But I think the issue of local intellectual capacity, the opportunity to contribute and debate in an honest, open way, is hopefully something that my work — through my writing — will speak to. We have all sorts of researchers coming to Bermuda contributing different things. I think that being local has advantages and disadvantages but I think that encouraging local research — and I’ve certainly had a lot of support, both from the Bermuda Maritime Museum in giving me an extended leave of absence and the Bank of Bermuda Foundation Sir John Cox Scholarship — is important. There is a heightened accountability there and as a local researcher you have to learn to not be overly concerned with that so that you do grow intellectually, while also really trying to take on that extra responsibility.

Q: Should people approach you at the Annual Exhibition, what should they expect? What’your a <$>

A:<$> I’ll be available to answer questions about my research and am especially interested in speaking to people with strong connections to the sea, whether they be connections to maritime culture today or our maritime traditions and history. I’m also hoping to find out about any maritime events and activities going on in the community to add to my research schedule.

The Annual Exhibition is a good venue to access a cross-section of the community and different generations. Also, I’ve been focusing on people who have quite explicit, or strong maritime connections in that they’re mariners today or they have a very articulated family history. But it might be cool there to see if there’s a greater range of people in the community with maritime connections, so I welcome really anyone interested to stop by at the Annual Exhibition or contact me on my e-mail cea34@cam.ac.uk or by telephon234-6127.

Q: When do you expect to finish?<$>

A:<$> I’m conducting my Bermuda field work throughout most of this year and then I’ll be analysing and writing up the qualitative data I’ve collected. It’s an interesting process. I record my interviews, using both audio and video, if interviewees consent to that.

But my fieldnotes are definately my most important recording device. I have little black notebooks filled with jottings and scribblings about what my informants say or express. I also make notes about how I’m taking in the situation, how I feel, how I’ve interpreted what I’ve learned. I try to reflect on my interviews and notes soon after they’re conducted because the memories of that fieldwork moment and experience do fade. I analyse the data to some degree as I go along here in the field but will analyse things more formally later.

I will no doubt spend many nights next year burning the midnight oil in Cambridge trying to accurately tell the story of this fantastic experience of exploring your own country. I’ve been meeting so many people that, as a specific type of Bermudian, I would never have had contact with. It’s a huge privilege and, on a personal level, I think a pretty amazing thing to get out of your comfort zone and to access some of the different pockets of society and variety of life experiences here.

My informants so far have been amazingly open and forthcoming and I value the trust they place in me when sharing their maritime connections and memories. Hopefully, I can recruit a few more informants with maritime connections at the Annual Exhibition and by getting the word out about my research here.