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The Palgrave Handbook of
Institutional Ethnography
Edited by
Paul C. Luken · Suzanne Vaughan
The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography
Paul C. Luken · Suzanne Vaughan
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook
of Institutional
Ethnography
Editors
Paul C. Luken Suzanne Vaughan
University of West Georgia Arizona State University
Carrollton, GA, USA Phoenix, AZ, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-54221-4 ISBN 978-3-030-54222-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1

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 In memory of
Alison I. Griffith
 Acknowledgments

As the saying goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This is no less the
case for a book project about the work people are doing using institutional
ethnography as their mode of inquiry investigating the social. We are indebted
to many people.
The book emerged out of a dinner during the 2018 World Forum of Soci-
ology, International Sociological Association meetings in Toronto, Canada,
attended by current/past officers and members of the Thematic Group on
Institutional Ethnography (TG06; now a Working Group). From this begin-
ning they provided invaluable advice about the intellectual joys and hurdles
of editing such a large volume. We are grateful for their encouragement and
ultimate contributions to this project including recruiting contributors to this
handbook.
From the participants in this project we have learned immeasurably: about
the potential of institutional ethnography to show us “how things happen
as they do,” about the diversity of institutional ethnographic work done in
various countries, about the struggles we all have faced in maintaining epis-
temological and ontological commitments as we incorporate other methods
or frameworks, about how transnational/global relations organize education,
the environment, and indigenous and human rights, about how public sector
management regimes across different countries and service arenas organized
frontline work, and about activists efforts to bring about change within their
communities. Most importantly, the contributors to this volume made us
students again by encouraging us to re-read some key texts (The Everyday
World as Problematic (1987) Texts, Facts, and Femininity (1990), The Concep-
tual Practices of Power (1990), Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People
(2005)) and make new discoveries about institutional ethnography. We thank
you.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume was made possible by the invisible work of many reviewers who
participated by reading, commenting on, talking about, and editing enumer-
able chapters several times over. We extend a special thanks to an interna-
tional group of scholars and community activists doing institutional ethnog-
raphy who generously participated in the review process and provided critical
eyes on topics with which we were not entirely familiar. Many of the reviewers
are part of a network of researchers who meet regularly (except during the
2019–2020 World Pandemic) as part of the Institutional Ethnography Divi-
sion of Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Working Group
on Institutional Ethnography of the International Sociological Association.
Thank you to our reviewers and consultants: Dottie Broaddus, Marie Camp-
bell, Kathryn Church, Linda Wright DeAguero, Marjorie DeVault, Timothy
Diamond, Tonia Freeman, Colin Hastings, Helen Helwig, Herb Hughes, Liza
McCoy, Eric Mykhalovskiy, Janet Rankin, Brian Richardson, and Kevin Walby.
We thank Mary Al-Sayed, Commissioning Editor Palgrave Macmillan, for
reaching out to us about the potential for this handbook and swiftly ushering
our proposal through the review process. Madison Allums, Assistant Editor,
has tirelessly answered our questions weekly as we prepared this volume. We
thank them both.
Finally, we raise a glass of wine in toast to Dorothy E. Smith, whose mentor-
ship, intellectual engagement and friendship, has inspired us all. We thank you
for helping us change our sociology.
 Contents

1 Institutional Ethnography: Sociology for Today 1

Paul C. Luken

Part I Exploring Historical and Ontological Foundations

2 Elements of an Expansive Institutional Ethnography:

A Conceptual History of Its North American Origins 11
Marjorie L. DeVault

3 Materialist Matters: A Case for Revisiting the Social

Ontology of Institutional Ethnography 35
Liza McCoy

4 Teaching Institutional Ethnography as an Alternative

Sociology 47
Eric Mykhalovskiy, Colin Hastings, Leigha Comer,
Julia Gruson-Wood, and Matthew Strang

5 Exploring Institutional Words as People’s Practices 65

Dorothy E. Smith

Part II Developing Strategies and Exploring Challenges

6 Mapping Ruling Relations: Advancing the Use of Visual

Methods in Institutional Ethnography 81
Nicole K. Dalmer

ix
x CONTENTS

7 Discovering the Social Organization of Perinatal Care

for Women Living with HIV: Reflections from a Novice
Institutional Ethnographer 99
Allyson Ion

8 IE and Visual Research Methods: An Open-Ended

Discussion 121
Morena Tartari

9 And Then There Was Copyright 141

Suzanne Vaughan

10 Invoking Work Knowledge: Exploring the Social

Organization of Producing Gender Studies 157
Rebecca W. B. Lund

11 Teaching Institutional Ethnography to Undergraduate

Students 175
Kathryn Church

Part III Explicating Global/Transnational Ruling Relations

12 Using Institutional Ethnography to Investigate

Intergovernmental Environmental Policy-Making 193
Lauren E. Eastwood

13 Regulating the Duty to Consult: Exploring the Textually

Mediated Nature of Indigenous Dispossession in Chile 213
Magdalena Ugarte

14 Transnational Power Relations in Education: How It

Works Down South 237
Nerida Spina and Barbara Comber

15 The Struggle for “Survival” in Contemporary Higher

Education: The Lived Experiences of Junior Academics
in Taiwan 259
Li-Fang Liang and Yu-Hsuan Lin
 CONTENTS xi

Part IV Making Change within Communities

16 Building Change On and Off Reserve: Six Nations

of the Grand River Territory 283
Susan Marie Turner and Julia Bomberry

17 Mapping Institutional Relations for Local Policy Change:

The Case of Lead Poisoning in Syracuse New York 309
Frank Ridzi

18 The Institutional Analysis: Matching What Institutions

Do with What Works for People 329
Ellen Pence

Part V Critiquing Public Sector Management Regimes

19 Professional Talk: Unpacking Professional Language 359

Ann Christin E. Nilsen

20 Frontline Interpretive Work of Activating the Americans

with Disabilities Act 375
Erik D. Rodriguez

21 Contested Forms of Knowledge in the Criminal-Legal

System: Evidence-Based Practice and Other Ways
of Knowing Among Frontline Workers 397
Nicole Kaufman and Megan Welsh

22 Public Protection as a Ruling Concept in the Management

of Nurses’ Substance Use 423
Charlotte A. Ross

23 Producing Functional Equivalency in Video Relay Service 447

Jeremy L. Brunson

Part VI Bringing Together Different Approaches and

Perspectives

24 Using Composites to Craft Institutional Ethnographic

Accounts 465
Michael K. Corman
xii CONTENTS

25 Attending to Messy Troubles of the Anthropocene

with Institutional Ethnography and Material Semiotics:
The Case for Vital Institutional Ethnography 483
Karly Burch

26 Institutional Ethnography for Social Work 505

Gerald de Montigny

27 Institutional Ethnography and Youth Participatory Action

Research: A Praxis Approach 527
Naomi Nichols and Jessica Ruglis

Index 551
 Notes on Contributors

Julia Bomberry is the Clanmother of the Turtle Clan, Cayuga Nation,

mother to a beautiful daughter and grandmother to two wonderful grand-
sons. Julia has been a staff member for 27 years at Ganohkwasra Family
Assault Support Services, whose vision statement reads “with Ganohkwasra
(love among us) we bury our weapons of violence to create a safe and caring
community for all generations.” Julia is the Manager of Therapeutic Services
and oversees the Community Counselling Supervisor, Outreach Services
Supervisor, and Sexual Violence Healing Centre. She is a graduate of the Child
& Youth Program, Mohawk College, and Bachelors and Masters of Social
Work Programs, Ryerson University.
Jeremy L. Brunson has research interests in the broad area of the sociology
of interpreting. He has published and presented about video relay service,
educational interpreting, invisible labor deaf people perform, professionaliza-
tion of sign language interpreting, and ethics. He was awarded The Irving
K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies in 2009. He was
also named a Fulbright Specialist in 2017 and spent 6 weeks in Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia helping to establish the country’s first formal Interpreter Preparation
Program.
Dr. Karly Burch is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Otago’s
Centre for Sustainability. Karly’s research interests are in the fields of science
and technology studies (STS), environmental sociology, and the sociology of
agriculture and food. She has a deep passion for collaborative and transdis-
ciplinary research. Through her research, Karly addresses questions of social
and environmental justice both present and emerging within socio-technical
projects and controversies. She is currently working on the MaaraTech Project,
a multi-year transdisciplinary project to collaboratively design artificial intelli-
gence and robotic technologies for use in orchards and vineyards in Aotearoa
New Zealand.

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kathryn Church is Associate Professor in the School of Disability Studies at

Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Her research fuses ethnographic studies
of participation, work and learning with arts-informed approaches to creating
and communicating knowledge. As an ally of the psychiatric survivor move-
ment, she is participating in the emergence of Mad Studies. Serving two terms
as program director left her with a lively interest in managerial ruling.
Barbara Comber is a Research Professor in the School of Education at the
University of South Australia. Her research interests include teachers’ work,
critical literacy, place-conscious pedagogy, and social justice. She has conducted
longitudinal ethnographic case studies and collaborative action research with
teachers working in high poverty and diverse communities. Her research exam-
ines the kinds of teaching that make a difference to young people’s literacy
learning trajectories and what gets in the way. Her ongoing research explores
transdisciplinary curriculum development and pedagogies of reconnection.
Books include Literacy, Place and Pedagogies of Possibility (Comber, 2016)
and Literacy, Leading and Learning: Beyond Pedagogies of Poverty (Hayes,
Hattam Comber, Kerkham, Lupton & Thomson, 2017).
Leigha Comer is a Ph.D. candidate at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her
work focuses on chronic pain, the social organization of opioid use for chronic
pain management, and medico-legal responses to the “opioid crisis.” Her past
research includes an exploration of medical school curricula and how medical
students are taught to diagnose, treat, and conceptualize chronic pain. Leigha’s
doctoral research is being supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Dr. Michael K. Corman, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the
Department of Social, Cultural, and Media Studies at the University of the
Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Corman’s teaching and research
interests include a variety of topics that intersect with the sociological study
of health, illness, and society. Dr. Corman’s research has appeared in Perspec-
tives on Medical Education, Social Theory & Health, Symbolic Interaction, The
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Qualitative Health Research, the Inter-
national Journal of Educational Research, Families in Society: The Journal of
Contemporary Social Services, and the International Journal of Social Sciences
and multiple edited book volumes. He has recently published a book by
the University of Toronto Press entitled, Paramedics on and Off the Streets:
Emergency Medical Services in the Age of Technological Governance.
Nicole K. Dalmer, M.L.I.S., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Depart-
ment of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada).
With a background in Library and Information Science, Nicole often works at
the intersection of information and care, studying how aging in place contexts,
changes in information availability, and evolving family responsibilities shape
who is able and who is expected to be informed in care relationships. Other
ongoing projects include an international collaboration examining the impact
of digital infrastructures on feelings of connectedness in later life as well as
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

an investigation into the role of public libraries in mitigating older adults’

experiences of social isolation.
Gerald de Montigny retired after teaching social work for 34 years, 5 years at
University of Manitoba in Thompson, MB and 29 years at the School of Social
Work at Carleton University. Dorothy Smith was the supervisor for both his
M.A. and Ph.D. thesis at OISE in Toronto. Through Smith and IE he was able
to bridge sociological study of socially organized practices with social workers’
mundane local accomplishment of extra-local institutional orders. Gerald lives
in Ottawa, Ontario.
Marjorie L. DeVault is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Syracuse Univer-
sity, and now lives in Brewster, MA. She has written extensively on qualita-
tive and feminist research methodologies, especially institutional ethnography.
Her books include Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring
as Gendered Work; Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research; and an
edited volume, People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New
Economy.
Lauren E. Eastwood is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the State
University of New York, College at Plattsburgh. She teaches a range of courses
including environmental sociology, international development, sociological
theory, introduction to social justice, and introduction to environmental
studies. Dr. Eastwood has conducted extensive research on nongovernmental
participation in the negotiation of environmental policy through the UN. In
addition, she has been engaging in research related to civic responses to fossil
fuel extraction and infrastructure, as well as the increasing criminalization of
anti-fossil-fuel activism.
Julia Gruson-Wood has a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from
York University and is completing a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in
the area of Gender, Family and Health at the University of Guelph. She is
completing her first book, Remaking Therapy, Reshaping Autism which will
be published by University of British Columbia Press.
Colin Hastings is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University.
His research blends the sociology of health, socio-legal studies, and media
studies. He is the author of studies about community-based HIV educa-
tion, media representation of HIV criminal non-disclosure cases, and key
trends and patterns in HIV criminalization in Canada. Colin’s dissertation
project was an institutional ethnographic study of how news stories about HIV
criminalization are produced in Canada.
Allyson Ion, M.Sc., Ph.D. is currently a Lecturer in the School of Social
Work at McMaster University. Allyson has worked and volunteered in the HIV
sector since 2001 contributing to community development, education, and
research initiatives including community-based HIV research in the areas of
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

women, peer support and mothering. Allyson’s doctoral research used institu-
tional ethnography to investigate the health services that women living with
HIV utilize during pregnancy, childbirth and early postpartum.
Nicole Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ohio University. Her
research examines citizenship, punishment, the civic sector, and the institu-
tional arrangements that facilitate and limit social inclusion for people with
criminal records. In her newest project, “Governing through Collaboration,”
she is conducting research on the history of Ohio’s drug policy particularly as
it was shaped through relationships between state agencies and religious orga-
nizations. She has published in Law & Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society,
and Theoretical Criminology. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Li-Fang Liang is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology in
National Dong-Hwa University, Taiwan. As a feminist sociologist, she is inter-
ested in the ‘invisible work’ mostly done by women. Her current research
investigates how Indonesian migrant live-in care workers and their families that
are left/stay behind collaborate with each other to exchange care and sustain
relationships in a transnational context. In particular, she examines how the
use of information and communication technologies changes the form of care
as well as the idea of family and distance.
Yu-Hsuan Lin is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Soci-
ology in Nanhua University, Taiwan. Her research interests center on the
sociology of gender, institutional ethnography, and the structural transfor-
mations of higher education under the influence of new managerialism. Her
previous work examined how performance indicators as a new form of manage-
rial technique have been implemented at universities and how they changed
academics’ working processes/practices. Her present research explores how
academic mothers creatively negotiate work demands and family expectations
through what she terms “intellectual mothering”.
Paul C. Luken is Associate Professor Emeritus in Sociology, University of
West Georgia. He is a founder of the Institutional Ethnography Division of
the SSSP and the Thematic Group (now Working Group) on Institutional
Ethnography of the ISA. With Suzanne Vaughan he published studies of
housing in Social Problems, Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociology and
Social Welfare, and Housing and Society. They are completing a manuscript on
changes in the social institution of housing in the US. He currently resides in
Villa Rica, Georgia, USA, where he has begun investigating the social relations
shaping the work of voting.
Rebecca W. B. Lund is a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research,
University of Oslo. She uses and develops Instutitonal Ethnography for
exploring social relations in knowledge production within and beyond the
university, with a particular interest in how relations of inequality become
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

manifested in epistemic orientations She is currently the Editor-in-Chief

of NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research and recently
published the edited book Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region
at Routledge. She publishes in journals such as Gender, Work and Orga-
nization, Gender and Education, and Organization: The Critical Journal of
Organization, Theory and Society.
Liza McCoy is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary
in Canada. She has been learning, teaching and doing institutional ethnog-
raphy for more than thirty years. Her research interests, past and present,
include photographic representation, accounting, health care, immigration,
and social dance.
Eric Mykhalovskiy, Ph.D. is a Professor of Sociology at York University,
Toronto, Canada. While he has published on a range of topics, a recurring
focus of his research is the social organization of the public health response
to the HIV epidemic. He is the co-editor of Thinking Differently about
HIV/AIDS: Contributions from Critical Social Science, UBC Press, 2019)
and of Health Matters: Evidence, Critical Social Science, and Health Care in
Canada, University of Toronto Press (2020). He is a senior editor of the
Canadian Journal of Public Health and a board member of the Canadian
HIV/AIDS Legal Network.
Naomi Nichols engages in research activities and publications that span the
areas of youth homelessness; youth justice; alternative education and safe
schools; inter-organizational relations in the youth sector; “youth at risk;”
and community-academic research collaborations. She is an Associate Professor
of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Community-Partnered Social
Justice at Trent University. In 2014, the University of Toronto Press published
her first book: Youth Work: An Institutional Ethnography of Youth Homeless-
ness, and in 2019. The University of Toronto Press released Nichols’ second
book: Youth, School and Community: Participatory Institutional Ethnographies.
Ann Christin E. Nilsen holds a Ph.D. in sociology and is associate professor
at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Norway.
She is currently one of the coordinators of the Nordic network of institutional
ethnography. Her research interests include childhood and families, gender,
early intervention, professional work, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is
one of the editors of the book Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region,
published by Routledge. Her research appears in a number of international
journals, as well as in diverse journals and books in Norwegian.
Ellen Pence, Ph.D. founder and first Executive Director of Praxis Interna-
tional, worked for over 30 years to end gender-based violence before she
passed away in 2012. She was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Insti-
tutional Analysis and worked extensively to address institutionally-generated
inequities in the criminal and civil legal systems, the child welfare system,
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and supervised visitation. She received numerous awards including the 2008
Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award. She authored two books, five educa-
tional curriculums, three manuals and over a dozen scholarly articles on
institutional change and advocacy on behalf of battered women and their
children.
Frank Ridzi, Ph.D., M.P.A. is Vice President for Community Investment at
the Central New York Community Foundation, Associate Professor of Soci-
ology at Le Moyne College and President of the Board of Directors for
the Community Indicators Consortium. Frank has helped to launch and lead
community initiatives in areas such as increasing community literacy, reducing
lead poisoning and addressing poverty and economic inclusion. His writ-
ings have appeared in such places as the Journal of Applied Social Sciences,
the Journal of Organizational Change Management, and Review of Policy
Research.
Erik D. Rodriguez, Ph.D. is the Program Director for Sociology at Gwin-
nett Technical College, Georgia, USA. He recently completed his Ph.D.
at Syracuse University and will soon publish his dissertation, titled, Time,
Schedules, and the College Student with ADHD.
Dr. Charlotte A. Ross is a registered nurse and registered psychiatric nurse,
nurse researcher, and nurse educator. She is a faculty instructor in the Baccalau-
reate of Sciences in Nursing, Health Sciences Faculty at Douglas College in
Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. Her clinical background and teaching
activities are in mental health and treatment of substance use problems. Her
research areas include nurses’ health, mental health, and substance use.
Dr. Jessica Ruglis engages in work that centers on participatory, critical
race/ethnic, social justice, feminist, and inclusive approaches to research
and teaching in the areas of public education, public health, justice, and
youth development. Professor Ruglis’ research program is organized around
three main axes: (1) Contexts and institutions of youth development, (2)
Social determinants of health (SDH) and education, (3) Participatory and
community engaged approaches to research, policy and professional training
(e.g., participatory action research, PAR; youth participatory action research,
YPAR; community based participatory research, CBPR; community engaged
participatory action research, CEPAR; participatory policymaking).
Dorothy E. Smith is Professor Emerita, Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education/University of Toronto and Adjunct Professor in Sociology at the
University of Victoria. She has published numerous papers and several books:
with Sarah David (Ed.) Women and Psychiatry: I’m Not Mad, I’m angry
(1975); The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987); Texts,
Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (1990); The Concep-
tual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (1990);Writing the
Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations (1999); Institutional Ethnography:
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

A Sociology for People (2005); with Alison Griffith, Mothering for Schooling
(2005): an edited collection of studies, Institutional Ethnography in Practice
(2006); and with David Livingstone and Warren Smith, Manufacturing Melt-
down: Reshaping Steelwork (2010). In 2019 she was awarded the Order of
Canada for her work in Institutional Ethnography.
Nerida Spina is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the Queensland
University of Technology in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests
centre around the sociology of numbers, education policy, social justice and
equity. She has a particular focus on the datafication of education and its effects
on teachers, students and communities. Nerida also researches the everyday
experiences of precariously-employed academics. She examines the effects of
this growing form of employment on people who work in universities, and on
the research they undertake.
Matthew Strang (ABD Sociology, York University) is a Research Associate at
the Institute for Better Health, Trillium Health Partners. His work combines
the sociology of health, illness, and medicine with social justice. He has co-
published articles on shame and prejudice in PREP use and using virtual reality
as a tool to teach medical professionals about empathy. He is an Adjunct
Faculty in Health & Society, and Human Rights & Equity Studies, York
University. His dissertation is an institutional ethnography of living organ
donation. He is keenly interested in the body and emotional work that living
organ donors do to be donors.
Morena Tartari is, currently, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at
the Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp, Belgium. After she
worked for several years as a legal psychologist and researcher in the public and
private sector, in 2012, she completed her Ph.D. (Sociology) at the Univer-
sity of Padua, Italy. From 2014 to 2019, she was contract lecturer-in-charge
of Sociology, Sociology of Communication, Sociology of Cultural Processes,
Health and Sociology at the University of Padua.
Susan Marie Turner lives in Guelph, Canada. She studied with Dorothy
Smith at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
(OISE/UT). Her dissertation developed IE graphical mapping in an investi-
gation of land use planning, winning OISE/UT’s 2004 Outstanding Thesis of
the Year Award. Her work with numerous community groups won the 2010
Society for the Study of Social Problems Institutional Ethnography Division
Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award. She gives IE mapping training and
has given IE workshops with Dorothy at OISE/UT since 2009.
Magdalena Ugarte is an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning
at Ryerson University, where she teaches social planning, planning theory,
and policy. Her research examines the role of planning, policy, and law in
the dispossession of certain communities, particularly Indigenous peoples and
immigrants. She also explores possibilities for intercultural collaboration in
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

contexts marked by structural power imbalances—such as settler colonialism

and forced migration. She holds a M.A. (Political Science) from Memorial
University and a Ph.D. (Planning) from the University of British Columbia.
Magdalena’s current work with Mapuche partners in Chile engages with
questions of Indigenous planning and law.
Suzanne Vaughan is an Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the
School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, USA,
and was co-founder and is secretary/treasurer of the ISA IE Working Group.
She and her co author, Paul Luken, have published a number of substantive
articles on homeownership, childrearing, retirement housing, independence
in old age, and methodological articles about institutional ethnography. They
are writing a book based upon the oral housing histories of women which
explicates the ways in which ordinary work of people in the housing industry
transformed housing in the US over the twentieth century.
Megan Welsh is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs at San
Diego State University. Her current research examines the health and sani-
tation needs of people experiencing homelessness and the criminalization of
poverty. Her published work appears in Feminist Criminology, the Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography, and Qualitative Sociology. She received her Ph.D.
in Criminal Justice from the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York.
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Alice’s information world 87

Fig. 6.2 Marge’s information world 88
Fig. 6.3 Sylvia’s information world 89
Fig. 8.1 Me at the desk 130
Fig. 8.2 Me at the one-way mirror 130
Fig. 8.3 Me explaining the role of CCTV 131
Fig. 8.4 A CCTV’s technical error 131
Fig. 13.1 First page of Supreme Decree 66 (DS66) Source Government
of Chile [2014]) 220
Fig. 13.2 Article 13 of Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling (2008) (Source
Government of Chile [2008]) 222
Fig. 13.3 Selective intertextual relations shaping the regulation
of the duty to consult in Chile 225
Fig. 13.4 The duty to consult and the social organization of state
planning with Indigenous peoples 231
Fig. 16.1 Where a victim reports 294
Fig. 16.2 Policing standards at the scene 296
Fig. 16.3 No fit 298
Fig. 16.4 The Crown’s work 299
Fig. 16.5 Mapping, discovery, and working with texts 300
Fig. 16.6 The map used at the final gathering 301
Fig. 17.1 Map of the initial institution that did not prevent lead
poisoning 314
Fig. 17.2 Mapping of revised institution evolving to prevent lead
poisoning 316
Fig. 17.3 Policy progress 320
Fig. 18.1 Institutions of social management 331
Fig. 18.2 Eight methods institutions use to coordinate worker’s actions
(Source Pence & Sadusky, 2005) 339
Fig. 18.3 Sequential layout of the key points in a criminal court case 348
Fig. 18.4 Detailed map highlighting the sentencing stage of a criminal
court case 351

xxi
xxii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 18.5 Specific steps of conducting a misdemeanor pre-sentence

investigation 352
Fig. 27.1 Youth development as social practice 538
Table 18.1 Identifying problems and solutions in the writing
of a pre-sentence investigation 354
 CHAPTER 1

Institutional Ethnography: Sociology for Today

Paul C. Luken

Over dinner at a meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association in 1996,

Dorothy Smith mentioned that just before coming to the United States she
read John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. I had never read it, but then, a budding insti-
tutional ethnographer, I was motivated to get the book. It was first published
in 1930, and the preface describes a young man who is walking city streets
at night. He is alone but very attentive to the people around him and his
“muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs” (Dos Passos, 1960, p. v). At first he
seems like an unemployed man who is struggling to survive during the Great
Depression, but later we learn that he does not want a job. He wants all jobs
and more: “One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not
enough” (p. v), we are told, and we realize that it is the knowledge, not the
work itself, that he is seeking, that he is listening for.
I have read this preface many times, in part because Dos Passos is a
wonderful writer, but also because the wanderer reminds me of so many people
who have come to study and practice institutional ethnography (IE). Many,
myself included, were not satisfied with the sociology or women’s studies
orientations that they learned in graduate school, and Smith’s feminist alter-
native sociology provided us with the direction that we needed. Others were
drawn to institutional ethnography’s grounding in the everyday world with
its commonplace and often hidden struggles. When we found institutional
ethnography, we found what we were looking for.

P. C. Luken (B)
University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA
e-mail: pluken@westga.edu

© The Author(s) 2021 1

P. C. Luken and S. Vaughan (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook
of Institutional Ethnography,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-1_1
2 P. C. LUKEN

I am also attracted to the preface of U.S.A. because of its final paragraph in

which Dos Passos transitions from the man (small hero/ethnographer?) to a
description of the United States:

U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some

aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a
chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and
written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old
newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins
in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and
hills. U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A.
is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the
letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly
U.S.A. is the speech of the people. (p. vi)

To borrow a phrase from the title of an old rhythm and blues song (Brown,
1966), “this is a man’s world” that Dos Passos sketches, although I am certain
women appeared on the screens in the theaters and some may have placed their
own annotations in the history books. Matters of interest to men dominated,
and how that domination could occur and where it would be evident was in
the speech of the people, in varieties of discourse. But what are the connections
of speech, of language, to the endeavors that Dos Passos alludes to—busi-
ness, economics, law, media, education, politics, labor, and war—and what are
the consequences of these connections? That is the province of institutional
ethnography.
Now, as I write this introduction, there is a new discourse that appears ubiq-
uitous. You recognize the words and phrases—facemask, pandemic, shelter in
place, self-quarantine, disinfectant, social distance, confirmed cases, wash your
hands for 20 seconds, lockdown, ventilators, stay safe—as part of the vocab-
ulary of the COVID-19 discourse. You altered many of the patterns of your
everyday life—the people you see, the work that you do, how you forage for
food, what you eat, how much you drink—as you and others are affected by
this discourse, as you take it up in your actions. To the best of my knowledge
I have not come into contact with the virus that causes COVID-19 (and I
hope you have not either), but we have been unable to avoid the COVID-19
discourse. It extends beyond any particular speech acts or texts to all forms
of communication. The discourse is not tied to any place or to any particular
social institution. The language of COVID-19 is the new vernacular.
Many of the authors of the chapters in this handbook were still finishing
their essays when the COVID-19 discourse became dominant in their lives.
These authors are largely university faculty or advanced graduate students.
Through emails I learned that some were having trouble finding opportu-
nities to write because their children’s schools were closed and the kids were
at home; they became engrossed in the work of childcare and homeschooling.
Many were also changing their university courses from face-to-face to online
formats, and for several this was their first foray into distance education.
 1 INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: SOCIOLOGY FOR TODAY 3

They were, in some instances, cut off from colleagues and the technology that
their workplaces offered. Some, even when they had the time to write, said
they found it difficult to concentrate and that frustration compounded the
problem. As diverse as their experiences may be, I am confident there is some-
thing that they have in common. They know that we will need institutional
ethnography to understand the social ramifications of the pandemic.

Purpose and Organization

Smith’s early books are collections of articles she produced while developing
what came to be known as Institutional Ethnography. These articles, along
with her instruction, provided the basic ideas that her students had to work
with while producing their theses and dissertations at the University of British
Columbia and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the
University of Toronto. The research projects became outstanding pieces of IE
that were worked into publications in various forms. Since that time there
has been considerable development of IE, and it is impossible to keep up
with everything that is being produced. Nonetheless, significant research was
undertaken in the 1980s because the core ideas had already been developed.
For this reason, I highly recommend that students of IE return to Smith’s
early collections: The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology;
Text, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling; The Concep-
tual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge; and Writing the
Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. They contain all that one needs to
engage in institutional ethnography.
As evidence of the value of these early writings, look to some of the
books, chapters, and articles written by Smith’s students and other institutional
ethnographers decades ago. In Campbell and Manicom’s 1995 collection
Knowledge, Experience and Ruling Relations: Essays in the Social Organization
of Knowledge you will find excellent institutional ethnography at a time when
the link of Smith’s work to the field of the sociology of knowledge was clearly
evident. Timothy Diamond’s landmark book Making Gray Gold: Narratives
of Nursing Home Care (1992) is an outstanding experience-based account of
the regulation of the work done by both nursing assistants and the residents
of nursing homes. George Smith’s groundbreaking article “Political Activist
as Ethnographer” (1990) details how he used institutional ethnography while
working as a political activist and how he used confrontation as a technique to
discover ruling regimes work.
The chapters in this handbook are all original works and they are intended
to extend rather than substitute for the existing institutional ethnography liter-
ature produced by Smith, her students, and other scholars over the past thirty
years. The handbook serves as a comprehensive guide to the alternative soci-
ology that began in Vancouver, Canada, as a “sociology for women” and
grew into a “sociology for people” with global reach. Institutional ethnog-
raphy provides the tools to discover the social relations shaping the everyday
4 P. C. LUKEN

world in which we live; and it is widely utilized by scholars and social activists
beyond sociology, in such fields as education, nursing, social work, linguistics,
health and medical care, environmental studies, and other social service-related
endeavors. Covering the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of
institutional ethnography, along with recent developments, and current areas
of research and application, this handbook is suitable for both experienced
practitioners of institutional ethnography and those who are exploring this
approach for the first time.
This handbook is divided into six parts and, while we hope readers find
the arrangement useful, we recognize that the problems inherent in catego-
rization are here as well. First there is the problem of overlap. Many of the
chapters could easily fit into multiple sections. Second, nothing in institutional
ethnography demands that we organize the materials as we have. We settled
on the schema we did because we felt that it covers basic and enduring topics
along with those that have arisen more recently. We also felt that this orga-
nization would be appropriate for novice as well as experienced institutional
ethnographers. We hope that this plan works for you.
Part I: “Exploring Historical and Ontological Foundations.” These chapters
provide readers with a basis in how institutional ethnography has developed,
how its theory (of knowing) contrasts with other theories, and institutional
ethnography’s use of theory. The chapters by Marj DeVault and Liza McCoy
provide a basis for understanding the underlying premises of institutional
ethnography and how they guide research, its conceptual development, and
possibilities for extension to new areas. Eric Mykhalovskiy and graduate
students explore the situation of institutional ethnography as alternative soci-
ology, its relationship to theory and to other research approaches, to politics
and to critique. Dorothy Smith’s chapter shows the value of the generalizing
capacities of institutional language to institutional ethnographers as it is taken
up in the process of defining actions as institutional.
Part II: “Developing Strategies and Exploring Challenges” continues the
instructive mode elaborated in Smith’s Institutional Ethnography as Practice
(2006) and Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnography (2014) with
chapters describing challenges and opportunities encountered in the process of
producing research studies—copyright issues, mapping and visual approaches,
reflexivity, institutional capture, among others. Readers can learn about the
challenges they might contend with in the course of a research project. The
challenges of teaching institutional ethnography to undergraduates are also
discussed.
The four chapters in Part III: “Explicating Global/Transnational Ruling
Relations” examine issues from standpoints on different continents, yet the
problematics connect with discourses established by national and multinational
organizations connected through professional and governmental networks.
This section illustrates the ways in which ruling operates transnationally. The
chapters demonstrate how particular people are caught in extensive, global
 1 INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: SOCIOLOGY FOR TODAY 5

social relations. This section is valuable in showing institutional ethnogra-

phy’s contribution to making visible how global ruling works and how remote
ruling standpoints can be inserted into locally made decisions. The knowledge
gained through these investigations can be used to critique aspects of global
development.
Part IV: “Making Change within Communities” consists of three chap-
ters that use institutional ethnography differently from one another in order
to identify problems in their settings and to develop strategies designed to
improve the existing textually-mediated social relations and, ultimately, the
lives of people. For activist-oriented institutional ethnographers, they illustrate
the value of a sociology that (1) begins in and remains in the everyday world
and (2) is flexible enough to allow for innovation and adaptation to specific
settings. Susan Turner and Julia Bomberry utilize collaborative mapping with
a Haudenosaunee First Nations community in Canada to explore police
investigations and services for Indigenous victims of sexual violence. Frank
Ridzi develops maps of relations that establish and maintain unsafe housing
conditions (lead-based paint). These are then used for advocacy and for phil-
anthropic interventions that make a difference to the subjects in his research.
Ellen Pence and Praxis International’s institutional analysis approach was
designed to improve institutional responses to gender-based violence. The
chapter describes how a team of community-based professionals can investigate
work practices and policies and make systemic change in these areas.
The chapters in Part V: “Critiquing Public Sector Management Regimes”
cover a wide variety of dilemmas faced by workers and clients in contempo-
rary public institutions, a theme previously taken up by Griffith and Smith
and associates (2014). In these chapters we learn how students with disabil-
ities in the United States are burdened with additional work because of the
institutional policies that are purported to assist them, how forms of knowl-
edge grounded in evidence-based practices are both produced and resisted by
workers in the criminal justice system in the United States, how regulatory
practices in Canada related to substance use by nurses often caused problems
rather than diminished potential dangers, and the documentation of functional
equivalency undermines the work of sign language interpreters. The area of
public management has attracted a great deal of interest by institutional ethno-
graphers, and this sociology excels at examining how people’s work lives are
formed to fit the administrative demands of institutions, often at the expense
of their clients.
The most controversial section of this handbook might be Part VI:
“Bringing Together Different Approaches and Perspectives,” since it takes up
some challenging issues among institutional ethnographers. Is one still doing
institutional ethnography if one supplements it with other sociological theory
or other research practices? While the claim is made that institutional ethnog-
raphy is not an “orthodoxy,” can it be combined with other approaches that
conflict with its ontological and epistemological commitments? Do those who
say that institutional ethnography is insufficient really know all that IE has to
6 P. C. LUKEN

offer? Should consistency be important to those social and political activists

who see political value in using objectified forms of knowledge? If one’s aims
are broader than those of institutional ethnography, is it appropriate to shift
in and out of IE?
In order to write institutional ethnography that will give readers a clear
understanding of work processes and the social relations shaping them,
Michael Corman proposes the use of composite accounts built from the data
collected rather than the words and actions of any set of particular individuals.
Karly Burch proposes vital institutional ethnography, a combination of IE and
material semiotics, as a worthy approach to the study of ruling relations in the
Anthropocene. This would allow scholars to discover the textually-mediated
ruling relations in which their subjects are embedded while also examining
other human and more-than-human involvements that contribute to our expe-
riences of the messes we are in. Gerald de Montigny presents transcriptions
of talk using conventions of conversation analysis in order to preserve the
morphology of talk. This approach, he argues, allows us to see talk as more
than words; rather, it remains an embodied social exchange which reveals
socially organized practices. Naomi Nichols and Jessica Ruglis, maintaining
compatibility with the ontological and epistemological stance of institutional
ethnography, undertake techniques of Youth Participatory Action Research in
order to engage youth as part of their research team. They argue that this
combination can enhance critical analysis. It is doubtful that the chapters in
this part will bring institutional ethnographers to consensus, nonetheless, they
raise issues and suggestions that are worthy of discussion and debate.

Sociology for Today

While I was collecting signatures on a petition to form a Division on Institu-
tional Ethnography within the Society for the Study of Social Problems, one
supporter, someone familiar with institutional ethnography but not a practi-
tioner, commented, “This division will spend the first five years trying to figure
out what it is.” I understood the remark to be a slight criticism of institutional
ethnography, but it did not irritate me. I was happy to hear that he thought
the IE Division would last for five years. (That was in 2003 and the division is
still going strong.) I also knew that institutional ethnography is not a fixed and
finalized set of ideas and practices1 and so, yes, we would be figuring it out
for some time to come. Furthermore, the conditions under which we work
change as well and we must adapt to new circumstances.
Two years ago I was investigating political practice from the ground up by
taking up the work myself. I was going door-to-door canvassing for a candi-
date for the US Congress, joining meetings of the county Democratic Party,
attending fundraising dinners, and serving as an observer at my county elec-
tions office for the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. I was also a
poll worker, a clerk working 14-hour days whenever there was an election.
 1 INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY: SOCIOLOGY FOR TODAY 7

Two days from now, the time I am writing this introduction, there will
be an election. I have not canvassed, attended Democratic Party meetings,
or observed at the elections office, and I will not be assisting voters who
show up on Tuesday to cast their ballots. COVID-19 has disrupted my work,
my research. Phonebanking has replaced canvassing, the county Democrats
no longer meet, and neither does the board of elections. Voters will not be
required to wear masks, the incidence of COVID-19 cases is increasing in this
area, I am 70 years old and under a stay-at-home order; therefore, I sadly
opted out of poll work. Anyone who was engaged in fieldwork when the
pandemic occurred is probably having similar problems. Fortunately, I also
have a network of ethnographers with whom I can plot alternative avenues for
my investigations. And I am mindful that Dos Passos also had to deal with a
pandemic, and he was quarantined in 1918 because of the flu; so I will borrow
from him as I close this introduction.
IE is an alternative sociology founded by Dorothy E. Smith. IE is a scientific
method with feminist origins that always starts with real people’s situations
and always keeps the researcher as an active participant in the discoveries. IE
is a growing literature describing how ruling operates through texts. IE is a
compass used to create maps of social relations. IE is a dedicated network of
scholars and activists. But mostly IE is doing the work.

Note
1. “What we all want, and cannot have, is the ideological equivalent of a Forever
stamp, the assurance that our version of enlightenment will withstand the passage
of years, without requiring ungainly supplementation” (Appiah, 2020, p. 19).
When he writes “we,” Kwame Anthony Appiah is referring to grand scholars or
those who hope to be grand scholars. I think this statement is widely true, yet
Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography must be regarded as an exception. It
was always a collective project, what she sometimes calls “the work,” influenced
by feminist activists, her graduate students, and others who took up “the work”
as well.

References
Appiah, K. A. (2020, May). The defender of differences. The New York Review of
Books, 67 (9), 17–19.
Brown, J. (1966). It’s a man’s man’s man’s world. On It’s a man’s man’s man’s world.
Campbell, M., & Manicom, A. (Eds.). (1995). Knowledge, experience and ruling rela-
tions: Essays in the social organization of knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Diamond, T. (1992). Making gray gold: Narratives of nursing home care. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Dos Passos, J. (1960). U.S.A. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
8 P. C. LUKEN

Griffith, A. I., & Smith, D. E. (Eds.). (2014). Under new public management: Insti-
tutional ethnographies of changing front-line work. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Smith, G. W. (1990). Political activist as ethnographer. Social Problems, 37 (4), 401–
421.
Another random document with
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honor. The offence which provoked this assault is not even hinted at,
though it may have arisen from the troubled state of public affairs.
Captain Praa was a man of influence and dignity in the community,
an exiled Huguenot, of remarkable skill in horsemanship and arms.
In spite of all this, it appears probable that the sentiment of the
community was in sympathy with the two turbulent assaulters and
batterers, for they were fined only six shillings and three pounds
respectively. They threw themselves on the mercy of the Court, and
certainly were treated with mercy.
There are, however, few women-criminals named in the old Dutch
and early English records, and these few were not prosecuted for
any very great crimes or viciousness; the chief number were brought
up for defamation of character and slander, though men-slanderers
were more plentiful than women. The close intimacy, the ideal
neighborliness of the Dutch communities of New York made the
settlers deeply abhor all violations of the law of social kindness. To
preserve this state of amity, they believed with Chaucer “the first
vertue is to restraine and kepen wel thine tonge.”
The magistrates knew how vast a flame might be kindled by a
petty spark; and therefore promptly quenched the odious slander in
its beginning; petty quarrels were adjusted by arbitration ere they
grew to great breaches. As sung the chorus of Batavian women in
Van der Vondel’s great poem:—

“If e’er dispute or discord dared intrude,

’Twas soon by wisdom’s voice subdued.”

In spite, however, of all wariness and watchfulness and patience,

the inevitable fretfulness engendered in petty natures by a narrow
and confined life showed in neighborhood disputes and suits for
defamation of character, few of them of great seriousness and most
of them easily adjusted by the phlegmatic and somewhat dictatorial
Dutch magistrates. In a community so given to nicknaming it seems
strange to find such extreme touchiness about being called names.
Suits for defamation were frequent, through opprobrious name-
calling, and on very slight though irritating grounds. It would certainly
seem a rather disproportionate amount of trouble to bring a lawsuit
simply because you were called a “black pudding,” or a verklickker,
or tale-bearer, or even a “Turk;” though, of course, no one would
stand being called a “horned beast” or a “hay thief.” Nor was “Thou
swine” an offensive term too petty to be passed over in silence. The
terrible epithets, spitter-baard and “Dutch dough-face,” seem to
make a climax of opprobriousness; but the word moff was worse, for
it was the despised term applied in Holland to the Germans, and it
led to a quarrel with knives.
I wish to note in passing that though the Dutch called each other
these disagreeable and even degrading names, they did not swear
at each other. Profanity was seldom punished in New Amsterdam,
for practically it did not exist, as was remarked by travellers.
Chaplain Wolley told of “the usual oath” of one Dutch colonist,—the
word “sacrament.”
The colonists were impatient of insulting actions as well as words.
Sampson said in “Romeo and Juliet,” “I will bite my thumb at them,
which is a disgrace to them if they bear it;” so “finger-sticking” was a
disgrace in colonial times if unresented, and it was actionable in the
courts. The man or woman who pointed the finger of scorn at a
neighbor was pretty sure to have the finger of the law pointed at him.
The curious practice of the Dutch settlers alluded to—the giving of
nicknames—may be partly explained by the fact that in some cases
the persons named had no surname, and the nickname was really a
distinguishing name. These nicknames appear not only in the
records of criminal cases, but in official documents such as the
patents for towns, transfers of estates, civil contracts, etc. In Albany,
in 1655 and 1657, we find Jan the Jester, Huybert the Rogue,
Jacobus or Cobus the Looper, squint-eyed Harmen, the wicked
Domine. On Long Island were John the Swede, Hans the Boor,
Tunis the Fisher. In Harlem was Jan Archer the Koop-all (or buy-all).
In New York, in English days, in 1691, we find Long Mary, Old Bush,
Top-knot Betty, Scarebouch. These names conveyed no offence,
and seem to have been universally adopted and responded to.
 It would appear to a casual observer glancing over the court-
records of those early years of New York life under Dutch
supremacy, that the greater number of the cases brought before the
magistrates were these slander and libel cases. We could believe
that no other court-room ever rang with such petty personal suits; to
use Tennyson’s words, “it bubbled o’er with gossip and scandal and
spite.” But in truth slander was severely punished in all the colonies,
in New England, Virginia, Pennsylvania; and it is not to the detriment
of the citizens of New Netherland that they were more sharp in the
punishment of such offences, for it is well known, as Swift says, that
the worthiest people are those most injured by slander.
The slander cases of colonial times seem most trivial and even
absurd when seen through the mist of years. They could scarce
reach the dignity of Piers Plowman’s definition of slanders:—

“To bakbyten, and to bosten, and to bere fals witnesse

To scornie and to scolde, sclaundres to make.”

To show their character, let me give those recorded in which

Thomas Applegate of Gravesend, Long Island, took an accused part.
In 1650, he was brought up before the Gravesend court for saying of
a fellow-towns-man that “he thought if his debts were paid he would
have little left.” For this incautious but not very heinous speech he
paid a fine of forty guilders. The next year we find him prosecuted for
saying of a neighbor that “he had not half a wife.” Though he at first
denied this speech, he was ordered “to make publick
acknowledgement of error; to stand at the publick post with a paper
on his breast mentioning the reason, that he is a notorious,
scandalous person.” This brought him to his senses, and he
confessed his guilt, desired the slandered “half a wife” to “pass it by
and remit it, which she freely did and he gave her thanks.” Next
Mistress Applegate was brought up for saying that a neighbor’s wife
milked the Applegate cows. She escaped punishment by proving
that Penelope Prince told her so. As a climax, Thomas Applegate
said to a friend that he believed that the Governor took bribes. The
schout in his decision on this grave offence said Applegate “did
deserve to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron;” but this
fierce punishment was not awarded him, nor was he banished.
When the tailor of New Amsterdam said disrespectful words of the
Governor, his sentence was that he “stand before the Governor’s
door with uncovered head, after the ringing of the bell, and to declare
that he falsely and scandalously issued such words and then to ask
God’s pardon.”
The magistrates were very touchy of their dignity. Poor Widow
Piertje Jans had her house sold on an execution; and, exasperated
by the proceeding, and apparently also at the price obtained, she
said bitterly to the officers, “Ye despoilers, ye bloodsuckers, ye have
not sold but given away my house.” Instead of treating these as the
heated words of a disappointed and unhappy woman, the officers
promptly ran tattling to the Stadt Huys and whiningly complained to
the Court that her words were “a sting which could not be endured.”
Piertje was in turn called shameful; her words were termed “foul,
villanous, injurious, nay, infamous words,” and also called a
blasphemy, insult, affront, and reproach. She was accused of
insulting, defaming, affronting, and reproaching the Court, and that
she was in the highest degree reprimanded, particularly corrected,
and severely punished; and after being forbidden to indulge in any
more such blasphemies, she was released,—“bethumped with
words,” as Shakespeare said,—doubtless well scared at the
enormity of her offence, as well as at the enormity of the magistrate’s
phraseology.
The notary Walewyn van der Veen was frequently in trouble,
usually for contempt of court. And I doubt not “the little bench of
justices” was sometimes rather trying in its ways to a notary who
knew anything about law. On one occasion, when a case relating to
a bill of exchange had been decided against him, Van der Veen
spoke of their High Mightinesses the magistrates as “simpletons and
blockheads.” This was the scathing sentence of his punishment:—
“That Walewyn Van der Veen, for his committed insult, shall
here beg forgiveness, with uncovered head, of God, Justice,
 and the Worshipful Court, and moreover pay as a fine 190
guilders.”
This fine must have consumed all his fees for many a weary
month thereafter, if we can judge by the meagre lawyers’ bills which
have come down to us.
Another time the contumacious Van der Veen called the Secretary
a rascal. Thereat, the latter, much aggrieved, demanded “honorable
and profitable reparation” for the insult. The schout judged this
epithet to be a slander and an affront to the Secretary, which
“affected his honor, being tender,” and the honor of the Court as well,
since it was to a member of the Court, and he demanded that the
notary should pay a fine of fifty guilders as an example to other
slanderers, “who for trifles have constantly in their mouths curses
and abuses of other honorable people.”
Another well-known notary and practitioner and pleader in the
busy little Court held in the Stadt Huys was Solomon La Chair. His
manuscript volume of nearly three hundred pages, containing
detailed accounts of all the business he transacted in Manhattan, is
now in the County Clerk’s Office in New York, and proves valuable
material for the historiographer. He had much business, for he could
speak and write both English and Dutch; and he was a faithful,
painstaking, intelligent worker. He not only conducted lawsuits for
others, but he seems to have been in constant legal hot water
himself on his own account. He was sued for drinking and not paying
for a can of sugared wine; and also for a half-aam of costly French
wine; and he was sued for the balance of payment for a house he
had purchased; he pleaded for more time, and with the ingenuous
guilelessness peculiar to the law said in explanation that he had had
the money gathered at one time for payment, but it had somehow
dropped through his fingers. “The Court condemned to pay at
once,”—not being taken in by any such simplicity as that. He had to
pay a fine of twelve guilders for affronting both fire inspector and
court messenger. He first insulted the brandt-meester who came to
inspect his chimney, and was fined, then he called the bode who
came to collect the fine “a little cock booted and spurred.” The Court
in sentence said with dignity, “It is not meet that men should mock
and scoff at persons appointed to any office, yea a necessary office.”
He won one important suit for the town of Gravesend, by which the
right of that town to the entire region of Coney Island was
established; and he received in payment for his legal services
therein, the munificent sum of twenty-four florins (ten dollars) paid in
gray pease. He kept a tavern and was complained of for tapping
after nine o’clock; and he was sued by his landlord for rent; and he
had a yacht, “The Pear Tree,” which ran on trading trips to Albany,
and there were two or three lawsuits in regard to that. He was also a
farmer of the excise on slaughtered cattle; but, in spite of all his
energy and variety of employment, he died insolvent in 1664. The
last lawsuit in which Lawyer Solomon had any share was through a
posthumous connection,—the burgher who furnished an anker of
French wine for the notary’s funeral claimed a position as preferred
creditor to the estate.
A very aggravated case of scorn and resistance of authority was
that of Abel Hardenbrock against the schout de Mill. And this case
shows equally the popular horror of violations of the law and the
confiding trust of the justices that the word of the law was enough
without any visible restraining force. Hardenbrock, who was a
troublesome fellow, had behaved most vilely, shoving the schout on
the breast, and wickedly “wishing the devil might break his neck,”
simply because the schout went to Hardenbrock’s house to warn his
wife not to annoy further Burgomaster De Peyster by unwelcome
visits. Hardenbrock was accordingly seized and made a prisoner at
the Stadt Huys “in the chamber of Pieter Schaefbanck, where he
carried on and made a racket like one possessed and mad,
notwithstanding the efforts of Heer Burgomaster Van Brught, running
up to the Court room and going away next morning as if he had not
been imprisoned.” It was said with amusing simplicity that this cool
walking out of prison was “contrary to the customs of the law,” and a
fine of twenty-five florins was imposed.
For serious words against the government, which could be
regarded as treasonable, the decreed punishment was death. One
Claerbout van ter Goes used such words (unfortunately they are not
given in the indictment), and a judgment was recorded from each
burgomaster and schepen as to what punishment would be proper.
He was branded, whipped on a half-gallows, and banished, and
escaped hanging only by one vote.
All classes in the community were parties in these petty slander
suits; schoolmasters and parsons appear to have been specially
active. Domine Bogardus and Domine Schaets had many a slander
suit. The most famous and amusing of all these clerical suits is the
one brought by Domine Bogardus and his wife, the posthumously
famous Anneke Jans, against Grietje von Salee, a woman of very
dingy reputation, who told in New Amsterdam that the domine’s wife,
Mistress Anneke, had lifted her petticoats in unseemly and extreme
fashion when crossing a muddy street. This was proved to be false,
and the evidence adduced was so destructive of Grietje’s character
that she stands disgraced forever in history as the worst woman in
New Netherland.
Not only were slanderers punished, but they were disgraced with
terrible names. William Bakker was called “a blasphemer, a street
schold, a murderer as far as his intentions are concerned, a defamer,
a disturber of public peace,”—the concentration of which must have
made William Bakker hang his head in the place of his banishment.
They were also rebuked from the pulpit, and admonished in private.
Perhaps the best rebuke given, as well as a unique one, was the
one adopted by Domine Frelinghuysen, who had suffered somewhat
from slander himself. He had this rhyme painted in large letters on
the back of his sleigh, that he who followed might read:—

“Niemands tong; nog neimands pen,

Maakt my anders dan ik ben.
Spreek quaad-spreekers: spreek vonder end,
Niemand en word van u geschend.”

Which, translated into English, reads:—

 “No one’s tongue, and no one’s pen
Makes me other than I am.
Speak, evil-speakers, speak without end,
No one heeds a word you say.”

The original Court of the colony was composed of a Director and

his Council. In 1656, in answer to complaints from the colonists, the
States-General ordered the election of a board of magistrates, in
name and function like those of the Fatherland; namely, a schout,
two burgomasters, and five schepens. The duties of the
burgomasters and schepens were twofold: they regulated municipal
affairs like a board of aldermen, and they sat as a court of justice
both in civil and criminal cases. The annual salary of a burgomaster
was fixed at one hundred and forty dollars, and of a schepen at one
hundred dollars; but as these salaries were to come out of the
municipal chest, which was chronically empty, they never were paid.
When funds did come in from the excise on taverns, on slaughtered
cattle, the tax on land, the fees on transfers, etc., it always had to be
paid out in other ways,—for repairs for the school-room, the Graft,
the watch-room, the Stadt Huys. It never entered the minds of those
guileless civic rulers, two centuries ago, to pay themselves and let
the other creditors go without. The early city schout was also schout-
fiskaal till 1660; but the proper duties of this functionary were really a
combination of those pertaining now to the mayor, sheriff, and
district-attorney. In the little town one man could readily perform all
these duties. He also presided in Court. An offender could thus be
arrested, prosecuted, and judged, by one and the same person,
which seems to us scarcely judicious; but the bench of magistrates
had one useful power, that of mitigating and altering the sentence
demanded by the schout. Often a fine of one hundred guilders would
be reduced to twenty-five; often the order for whipping would be set
aside, and the command of branding as well.
Sometimes justice in New York was tempered with mercy, and
sorely it needed it when fierce English rule and law came in force.
Felons were few, but these few were severely punished. A record of
a trial in 1676 reveals a curious scene in Court, as well as an
astonishing celerity in the execution of the law under English rule
and in the English army. Three soldiers stole a couple of iron pots,
two hoes, a pair of shears, and half a firkin of soap. They were tried
in the morning, confessed, cast into “the Hole” in the afternoon, and
in the evening “the Governor ordered some persons to go to the
prisoners and advise them to prepare for another world, for that one
of them should dye the next day.” On the gloomy morrow, on
Saturday, the three terror-stricken souls drew lots, and the fatal lot
fell to one Thomas Weale. The court of aldermen interceded for him
and finally secured his reprieve till Monday. The peaceful Dutch
Sunday, darkened and shocked by this impending death, saw a
strange and touching sight.
“In the evening a company of the chiefe women of the City,
both English and Dutch, made earnest suite to the Governor
for the Condemned man’s life. Monday in the morning the
same women who came the last night with many others of the
better sort, and a greater number of the ordinary Dutch
women, did again very much importune the Governor to spare
him.”
These tender-hearted colonists were indorsed and supplemented
by the petition of Weale’s fellow-soldiers in the garrison, who
pleaded the prisoner’s youth and his past usefulness, and who
promised if he were pardoned never to steal nor to conceal theft. As
a result of all this intercession, the Governor “graciously” granted
pardon.
This promise and pardon seem to have accomplished much in
army discipline, for thereafter arrests for crime among the soldiery
were rare. Five years later a soldier was accused of pilfering.
“The Court Marshall doth adjudge that the said Melchoir
Classen shall run the Gantlope once, the length of the fort:
where according to the custome of that punishment, the
souldiers shall have switches delivered to them, with which
they shall strike him as he passes between them stript to the
waist, and at the Fort-gate the Marshall is to receive him, and
there to kick him out of the Garrison as a cashiered person,
 when he is no more to returne, and if any pay is due him it is
to be forfeited.”
And that was the end of Melchoir Classen.
Gantlope was the earlier and more correct form of the word now
commonly called gantlet. Running the gantlope was a military
punishment in universal use.
Another common punishment for soldiers (usually for rioting or
drinking) was riding the wooden horse. In New Amsterdam the
wooden horse stood between Paerel Street and the Fort, and was
twelve feet high. Garret Segersen, for stealing chickens, rode the
wooden horse for three days from two o’clock to close of parade with
a fifty-pound weight tied to each foot. At other times a musket was
tied to each foot of the disgraced man. One culprit rode with an
empty scabbard in one hand and a pitcher in the other to show his
inordinate love for John Barleycorn. Jan Alleman, a Dutch officer,
challenged Jan de Fries, who was bedridden; for this cruel and
meaningless insult he too rode the wooden horse. In Revolutionary
days we still find the soldiers of the Continental Army punished by
riding the wooden horse, or, as it was sometimes called, “the timber
mare;” but it was probably a modification of the cruel punishment of
the seventeenth century.
A sailor, for drawing a knife on a companion, was dropped three
times from the yard-arm and received a kick from every sailor on the
ship,—a form of running the gantlope. And we read of a woman who
enlisted as a seaman, and whose sex was detected, being dropped
three times from the yard-arm and tarred and feathered.
These women petitioners for Soldier Weale of whom I have told,
were not the only tender-hearted New Yorkers to petition for “mercy,
that herb of grace, to flower.” During Stuyvesant’s rule his sister,
Madam Bayard, successfully interceded for the release, and thereby
saved the life, of an imprisoned Quaker; and in September, 1713,
two counterfeiters were saved from the death penalty by the
intervention of New York dames. We read, “Most of the gentlewomen
of the city waited on the Governor, and addressed him earnestly with
prayers and tears for the lives of the culprits, who were accordingly
pardoned.” When two sailors rioted through the town demanding
food and drink, and used Carel Van Brugh so roughly that his face
was cut, they were sentenced to be fastened to the whipping-post,
and scourged, and have gashes cut in their faces; the wife of Van
Brugh and her friends petitioned that the sentence should not be
carried out, or at any rate executed within a room. Doubtless other
examples could be found.
The laws of New Netherland were naturally based upon the laws
and customs of the Fatherland, which in turn were formed by the
rules of the College of XIX. from the Imperial Statutes of Charles V.
and the Roman civil law.
The punishments were the ordinary ones of the times, neither
more nor less severe than those of the Fatherland or the other
colonies. In 1691 it was ordered that a ducking-stool be erected in
New York on the wharf in front of the City Hall. The following year an
order was passed that a pillory, cage, and ducking-stool be built.
Though scolds were punished, I have never seen any sentence to
show that this ducking-stool was ever built, or that one was ever
used in New York; while instances of the use of a ducking-stool are
comparatively plentiful in the Southern colonies. The ducking-stool
was an English “engine” of punishment, not a Dutch.
The colonists were astonishingly honest. Thieves were surprisingly
few; they were punished under Dutch rule by scourging with rods,
and usually by banishment,—a very convenient way of shifting
responsibility. Assaults were punished by imprisonment and
subjection to prison fare, consisting only of bread and water or small
beer; and sometimes temporary banishment. There was at first no
prison, so men were often imprisoned in their own houses, which
does not seem very disgraceful. In the case of François de Bruyn,
tried for insulting and striking the court messenger, he was fined two
hundred guilders, and answered that he would rot in prison before he
would pay. He was then ordered to be imprisoned in a respectable
tavern, which sentence seems to have some possibility of mitigating
accompaniments.
 In 1692 it was ordered in Kings County that a good pair of stocks
and a pound be made in every bound within Kings County, and kept
in sufficient repair. In repair and in use were they kept till this century.
Pillories too were employed in punishment till within the memory of
persons now living. The whipping-post was really a public blessing,
—in constant use, and apparently of constant benefit, though the
publicity of its employment seems shocking to us to-day. The public
whipper received a large salary. In 1751, we learn from an
advertisement, it was twenty pounds annually.
Some of the punishments were really almost picturesque in their
ingenious inventions of mortification and degradation. Truly it was a
striking sight when “Jan of Leyden”—a foul-mouthed rogue, a true
blather-schuyten—was fastened to a stake in front of the townhouse,
with a bridle in his mouth and a bundle of rods tied under each arm,
and a placard on his breast bearing the inscription, “Lampoon-riter,
false accuser, defamer of magistrates.” Though he was banished, I
am sure he never was forgotten by the children who saw him
standing thus garnished and branded on that spring day in 1664. In
the same place a thief was punished by being forced to stand all day
under a gallows, a gallows-rope around his neck and empty sword-
scabbard in his hand, a memorable figure.
And could any who saw it ever forget the punishment of Mesaack
Martens, who stole six cabbages from his neighbor, and confessed
and stood for days in the pillory with cabbages on his head, that “the
punishment might fit the crime;” to us also memorable because the
prisoner was bootlessly examined by torture to force confession of
stealing fowls, butter, turkeys, etc.
He was not the only poor creature who suffered torture in New
Amsterdam. It was frequently threatened and several times
executed. The mate of a ship was accused of assaulting a sheriff’s
officer, who could not identify positively his assailant. The poor mate
was put to torture, and he was innocent of the offence. The assailant
was proved to be another man from whom the officer had seized a
keg of brandy. Still none in New Amsterdam were tortured or pressed
to death. The blood of no Giles Corey stains the honor of New
Netherland.
 Sometimes the execution of justice seemed to “set a thief to catch
a thief.” A letter written by an English officer from Fort James on
Manhattan Island to Captain Silvester Salisbury in Fort Albany in
1672 contains this sentence:—
“We had like to have lost our Hang-man Ben Johnson, for
he being taken in Divers Thefts and Robbings convicted and
found guilty, escaped his neck through want of another
Hangman to truss him up, soe that all the punishment that he
received for his Three Years’ Roguery in thieving and stealing
(which was never found out till now) was only 39 stripes at the
Whipping Post, loss of an Ear and Banishment.”
We have the records of an attempt at capital punishment in 1641;
and Mr. Gerard’s account of it in his paper “The Old Stadt-Huys” is
so graphic, I wish to give it in full:—
“The court proceedings before the Council, urged by the
Fiscal, were against Jan of Fort Orange, Manuel Gerrit the
Giant, Anthony Portugese, Simon Congo, and five others, all
negroes belonging to the Company, for killing Jan Premero,
another negro. The prisoners having pleaded guilty, and it
being rather a costly operation to hang nine able-bodied
negroes belonging to the Company, the sentence was that
they were to draw lots to determine ‘who should be punished
with the cord until death, praying the Almighty God, the
Creator of Heaven and Earth, to direct that the lot may fall on
the guiltiest, whereupon’ the record reads, ‘the lot fell by
God’s Providence on Manuel Gerrit, the Giant, who was
accordingly sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead as
an example to all such malefactors.’ Four days after the trial,
and on the day of the sentence, all Nieuw Amsterdam left its
accustomed work to gaze on the unwonted spectacle. Various
Indians also gathered, wondering, to the scene. The giant
negro is brought out by the black hangman, and placed on the
ladder against the fort with two strong halters around his
neck. After an exhortation from Domine Bogardus during
which the negro chaunts barbaric invocations to his favorite
Fetich, he is duly turned off the ladder into the air. Under the
 violent struggles and weight of the giant, however, both
halters break. He falls to the ground. He utters piteous cries.
Now on his knees, now twisting and groveling on the earth.
The women shriek. The men join in his prayers for mercy to
the stern Director. He is no trifler and the law must have its
course. The hangman prepares a stronger rope. Finally the
cry for mercy is so general that the Director relents, and the
fortunate giant is led off the ground by his swarthy friends,
somewhat disturbed in his intellect by his near view of the
grim King of Terrors.”
Up to February 21, 1788, benefit of clergy existed; that is, the plea
in capital felonies of being able to read. This was a monkish privilege
first extended only to priestly persons. In England it was not
abolished till 1827. The minutes of the Court of General Quarter
Sessions in New York bear records of criminals who pleaded “the
benefit” and were branded on the brawn of the left thumb with “T” in
open court and then discharged.
As the punishments accorded for crimes were not severe for the
notions of the times, it is almost amusing to read some fierce
ordinances,—though there is no record of any executions in
accordance with them. For instance, in January, 1659, by the
Director-General and Council with the advice of the burgomasters
and schepens it was enacted that “No person shall strip the fences
of posts or rails under penalty for the first offence of being whipped
and branded, and for the second, of punishment with the cord until
death ensues.” It is really astonishing to think of these kindly Dutch
gentlemen calmly ordering hanging for stealing fence-rails, though of
course the matter reached further than at first appeared: there was
danger of a scarcity of grain; and if the fences were stolen, the cattle
would trample down and destroy the grain. Later orders as to fences
were given which appear eminently calculated to be mischief-
making. “Persons thinking their neighbors’ fences not good, first to
request them to repair; failing which to report to the overseers.” In
1674 all persons were forbidden to leave the city except by city-gate,
under penalty of death; this was of course when war threatened.
 The crime of suicide was not without punishment. Suicides were
denied ordinary burial rites. In Dutch days when one Smitt of New
York committed suicide, the schout asked that his body be drawn on
a hurdle and buried with a stake in his heart. This order was not
executed; he was buried at night and his estates confiscated. When
Sir Danvers Osborne—the Governor for a day—was found dead by
his own act, he was “decently interred in Trinity churchyard.”
Women in New York sometimes made their appearance in New
York courts, as in those of other colonies, in another rôle than that of
witness or criminal; they sometimes sat on juries. In the year 1701,
six good Albany wives served on a jury: Tryntje Roseboom, Catheren
Gysbertse, Angeneutt Jacobse, Marritje Dirkse, Elsje Lansing, and
Susanna Bratt. They were, of course, empanelled for a special duty,
not to serve on the entire evidence of the case for which they were
engaged.
Many old records are found which employ quaint metaphors or
legal expressions; I give one which refers to a custom which seems
at one time to have been literally performed. It occurs in a
commission granted to the trustees of an estate of which the debts
exceeded the assets. Any widow in Holland or New Netherland could
be relieved of all demands or claims of her husband’s creditors by
relinquishing all right of inheritance. This widow took this privilege; it
is recorded thus:—
“Whereas, Harman Jacobsen Bamboes has been lately
shot dead, murdered by the Indians, and whereas the estate
left by him has been kicked away with the foot by his wife who
has laid the key on the coffin, it is therefore necessary to
authorize and qualify some persons to regulate the same.”
There was a well-known Dutch saying which referred to this
privilege, Den Sleutel op het graf leggen, and simply meant not to
pay the debts of the deceased.
This legal term and custom is of ancient origin. In Davies’ “History
of Holland” we read of a similar form being gone through with in
Holland in 1404, according to the law of Rhynland. The widow of a
great nobleman immediately after his death desired to renounce all
claim on his estate and responsibility for his debts. She chose a
guardian, and, advancing with him to the door of the Court (where
the body of the dead Count had been placed on a bier), announced
that she was dressed wholly in borrowed clothing; she then formally
gave a straw to her guardian, who threw it on the dead body, saying
he renounced for her all right of dower, and abjured all debts. This
was derived from a still more ancient custom of the Franks, who
renounced all alliances by the symbolic breaking and throwing away
a straw.
In other states of the Netherlands the widow gave up dower and
debts by laying a key and purse on the coffin. This immunity was
claimed by persons in high rank, one being the widow of the Count
of Flanders.
In New England (as I have told at length in my book, “Customs
and Fashions in Old New England,”) the widow who wished to
renounce her husband’s debts was married in her shift, often at the
cross-roads, at midnight. These shift-marriages took place in
Massachusetts as late as 1836; I have a copy of a court record of
that date.
I know of but one instance of the odious and degrading English
custom of wife-trading taking place in New York. Laurens Duyts, an
agent for Anneke Jans in some of her business transactions, was in
the year 1663 sentenced to be flogged and have his right ear cut off
for selling his wife, Mistress Duyts, to one Jansen. Possibly the
severity of the punishment may have prevented the recurrence of the
crime.
After a somewhat extended study and comparison of the early
court and church records of New England with those of New York, I
cannot fail to draw the conclusion—if it is just to judge from such
comparisons—that the state of social morals was higher in the Dutch
colonies than in the English. Perhaps the settlers of Boston and
Plymouth were more severe towards suspicion of immorality, as they
were infinitely more severe towards suspicion of irreligion, than were
their Dutch neighbors. And they may have given more publicity and
punishment to deviations from the path of rectitude and uprightness;
but certainly from their own records no fair-minded person can fail to
deem them more frail, more erring, more wicked, than the Dutch.
The circumstances of immigration and the tendencies of
temperament were diverse, and perhaps it was natural that a
reaction tending to sin and vice should come to the intense and
overwrought religionist rather than to the phlegmatic and prosperous
trader. In Virginia and Maryland the presence of many convict-
emigrants would form a reasonable basis for the existence of the
crime and law-breaking which certainly was in those colonies far in
excess of the crime in New Netherland and New York.
I know that Rev. Mr. Miller, the English clergyman, did not give the
settlement a very good name at the last of the seventeenth century;
but even his strictures cannot force me to believe the colonists so
unbearably wicked.
It should also be emphasized that New Netherland was far more
tolerant, more generous than New England to all of differing religious
faiths. Under Stuyvesant, however, Quakers were interdicted from
preaching, were banished, and one Friend was treated with great
cruelty. The Dutch clergymen opposed the establishment of a
Lutheran church, and were rebuked by the Directors in Holland, who
said that in the future they would send out clergymen “not tainted
with any needless preciseness;” and Stuyvesant was also rebuked
for issuing an ordinance imposing a penalty for holding conventicles
not in accordance with the Synod of Dort. Many Christians not in
accordance in belief with that synod settled in New Netherland.
Quakers, Lutherans, Church of England folk, Anabaptists,
Huguenots, Waldenses, Walloons. The Jews were protected and
admitted to the rights of citizenship. Director Kieft, with heavy
ransoms, rescued the captive Jesuits, Father Jogues and Father
Bressani, from the Indians and tenderly cared for them. No witches
suffered death in New York, and no statute law existed against
witchcraft. There is record of but one witchcraft trial under the
English governor, Nicholls, who speedily joined with the Dutch in
setting aside all that nonsense.
 CHAPTER XIII
CHURCH AND SUNDAY IN OLD NEW YORK

Sunday was not observed in New Netherland with any such rigidity
as in New England. The followers of Cocceius would not willingly
include Saturday night, and not even all of the Sabbath day, in their
holy time. Madam Knight, writing in 1704 of a visit to New York,
noted: “The Dutch aren’t strict in keeping the Sabbath as in Boston
and other places where I have been.” This was, of course, in times of
English rule in New York. Still, much respect to the day was required,
especially under the governing hand of the rigid Calvinist
Stuyvesant. He specially enjoined and enforced strict regard for
seemly quiet during service time. The records of Stuyvesant’s
government are full of injunctions and laws prohibiting “tavern-
tapping” during the hours of church service. He would not tolerate
fishing, gathering of berries or nuts, playing in the street, nor gaming
at ball or bowls during church time. At a little later date the time of
prohibition of noise and tapping and gaming was extended to include
the entire Sabbath day, and the schout was ordered to be active in
searching out and punishing such offenders.
Occasionally his vigilance did discover some Sabbath disorders.
He found the first Jew trader who came to the island of Manhattan
serenely keeping open shop on Sunday, and selling during sermon
time, knowing naught of any Sunday laws of New Amsterdam.
And Albert the Trumpeter was seen on the Sabbath in suspicious
guise, with an axe on his shoulder,—but he was only going to cut a
bat for his little son; and as for his neighbor who did cut wood, it was
only kindling, since his children were cold.
And one Sunday evening in 1660 the schout triumphantly found
three sailors round a tap-house table with a lighted candle and a
backgammon-board thereon; and he surely had a right to draw an
inference of gaming therefrom.
And in another public-house ninepins were visible, and a can and
glass, during preaching-time. The landlady had her excuse,—some
came to her house and said church was out, and one chanced to
have a bowl in his hand and another a pin, but there was no playing
at bowls.
Still, though he snooped and fined, in 1656 the burgomasters
learned “by daily and painful experience” that the profanation of “the
Lord’s day of Rest by the dangerous, Yes, damnable Sale or Dealing
out of Wines Beers and Brandy-Waters” still went on; and fresh
Sunday Laws were issued forbidding “the ordinary and customary
Labors of callings, such as Sowing, Mowing, Building, Sawing wood,
Smithing, Bleeching, Hunting, Fishing.” All idle sports were banned
and named: “Dancing, Card-playing, Tick-tacking, Playing at ball, at
bowls, at ninepins; taking Jaunts in Boats, Wagons, or Carriages.”
In 1673, again, the magistrates “experienced to our great grief”
that rolling ninepins was more in vogue on Sunday than on any other
day. And we learn that there were social clubs that “Set on the
Sabbath,” which must speedily be put an end to. Thirty men were
found by the schout in one tap-huys; but as they were playing
ninepins and backgammon two hours after the church-doors had
closed, prosecution was most reluctantly abandoned.
Of course scores of “tappers” were prosecuted, both in taverns
and private houses. Piety and regard for an orderly Sabbath were
not the only guiding thoughts in the burgomasters’ minds in framing
these Sunday liquor laws and enforcing them; for some tapsters had
“tapped beer during divine service and used a small kind of measure
which is in contempt of our religion and must ruin our state,”—and
the state was sacred. In the country, as for instance on Long Island,
the carting of grain, travelling for pleasure, and shooting of wild-fowl
on Sunday were duly punished in the local courts.
I do not think that children were as rigid church attendants in New
York as in New England. In 1696, in Albany, we find this injunction:
“ye Constables in eache warde to take thought in attending at ye
church to hender such children as Profane ye Sabbath;” and we
know that Albany boys and girls were complained of for coasting
down hill on Sunday,—which enormity would have been simply
impossible in New England, except in an isolated outburst of Adamic
depravity. In another New York town the “Athoatys” complained of
the violation of the Sabbath by “the Younger Sort of people in
Discourssing of Vane things and Running of Raesses.” As for the city
of New York, even at Revolutionary times a cage was set up on City
Hall Park in which to confine wicked New York boys who profaned
the Sabbath. I do not find so full provisions made for seating children
in Dutch Reformed churches as in Puritan meeting-houses. A wise
saying of Martin Luther’s was “Public sermons do very little edify
children”—perhaps the Dutch agreed with him. As the children were
taught the Bible and the catechism every day in the week, their
spiritual and religious schooling was sufficient without the Sunday
sermon,—but, of course, if they were not in the church during
services, they would “talk of vane Things and run Raesses.”
Before the arrival of any Dutch preacher in the new settlement in
the new world, the spiritual care of the little company was provided
for by men appointed to a benign and beautiful old Dutch office, and
called krankebesoeckers or zeikentroosters,—“comforters of the
Sick,”—who not only tenderly comforted the sick and weary of heart,
but “read to the Commonalty on Sundays from texts of Scripture with
the Comments.” These pious men were assigned to this godly work
in Fort Orange and in New Amsterdam and Breuckelen. In Esopus
they had meetings every Sunday, “and one among us read
something for a postille.” Often special books of sermons were read
to the congregations.
In Fort Orange they had a domine before they had a church. The
patroon instructed Van Curler to build a church in 1642; but it was
not until 1646 that the little wooden edifice was really put up. It was
furnished at a cost of about thirty-two dollars by carpenter
Fredricksen, with a predickstoel, or pulpit, a seat for the magistrates,
—de Heerebanke,—one for the deacons, nine benches and several
corner-seats.