Paradise : class, commuters, and ethnicity in rural Ontario / Stanley R. Barrett.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Paradise concentrates on the transformed class system of one community in rural Ontario. In a comparison of the decade following the First World War and the 1980s, Stanley R. Barrett analyses the changing face and structure of a town as it has had to adapt to modern social and economic realities.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Barrett (Univ. of Guelph and author of two other books on the anthropology of community) turns his attention to the rural Ontario town of his birth and early childhood, the name of which he disguises as "Paradise." He intends a comparison of the town in the 1920s and the 1980s that focuses on stratification and class, migration patterns, and ethnicity. His clear and convincing analysis of the interactions of these three processes demonstrates how their development from one period to the next produced social changes that made Paradise in the 1980s very much a mirror image, though writ small, of its larger urban counterparts. Stratification was more subtle and class blurred. In and out migration disrupted social assumptions and created ethnic diversity, which involved the physical and social marginalization of newer arrivals--Africans and Asians. Bartlett is remarkably frank about his research methods and assumptions. His discussion of fieldwork technique and his critical approach to his conceptual assumptions provides a welcome appendix. This valuable study is weakened, however, by its scanty index, which lacks subject classifications. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty.