Kinship and landscape at Squam Lake, New Hampshire.

Abstract

This work investigates how a disproportionate number of families at 6,300 acre Squam Lake have maintained ownership of single properties for six or more generations, despite many pressures favoring dissolution. These include exorbitant property taxes, difficulties negotiating management, in-law incompatibilities, and changes in cultural expectations. The study regards the properties as 'campsteads', an amalgam including old rustic cabins, six generation family stewardship, family compounds of islands and/or forested land, and an open landscape surround. The central hypothesis is that the types of intimate experiences which old rustic camps afford their indwellers are instrumental in the camp's own preservation and bequeathal. Campstead experience is described using Wilhelm Dilthey's scheme. Also, the concept of morphogenesis, developed by Margaret Archer in critical realism, is used to analyze the diachronic relation of agents to structures, showing that the current trend in private land conservation stems, through the medium of campsteads, from Victorian era `rustication', itself part of the Colonial Revival. The study develops the phenomenology of campstead experience into the concept, 'reexperience', capturing the secular rituals and intentionality involved in campsteaders' developing place attachment. Eighteen months of field research, including three summer seasons, yielded a complete lake survey that uncovered seventy-one rustic camps predating 1920, out of which were discovered twenty-one families with continuous ownership, the several earliest dating from the 1880s. Data collection used detailed vernacular architecture data sheets for the seventy-one camp buildings, a complete internal and external photographic record, and complete genealogies for the twenty-one target families, all of whom trace descent from apical ancestors. Many interviews were taped, properties traversed with owners, and family and local functions attended. Theoretical products of the study include a test of Jack Goody's observation that ancestor 'cults' are expected where immovable property is inherited by kin who must share its management, a test of house society theory, and a test of Pascal Boyer's theory of religion, that ancestors are widely perceived as closer to nature and therefore to incontrovertible Truth. Finally, the study develops the 'ontic principle' which links the phenomenology of experience to human-world relations as realized in evolution.