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In the absence of any external restraints in the isolated oUlpons, family and religion
functioned as core institutions. both assuring social and moral control. The whole
organization of life revolved around the economic subsistence of the community. In the
last century, more than nine tenths of the labour force was engaged in the fishery, which in
certain communities up to twenty years ago constituted the community's primary activity.
In this activity, the extended family was the basic unit of production: a father fished with
his sons, and grown up sons with their brothers. 1 For the sake of preserving the father­
sons working unit or "crew" and its capital, men cuslOmarily settled within their own
communities when they married.2 The religious. social, and occupational homogeneity of
outpOrt communities proouced stability and traditionalism. Their centuries old reliance on
fish as the single economic resource. domination by merchant capitalism, and primitive
fishing methods created an economic and social system resisting change, and all
contributed to maintaining them into a "pre-industrial" age up until recent decades.
Orality was the prevalent mooe of communication in "pre-literate" Newfoundland,
and, as in other such cultures, nurtured typical conceptions of expanded time and
contractile space. These cultures show what Harold Innis calls "a time bias," i.e. an
overemphasis of the time concept. Such a notion of time perceives past, present and fUlUre
in continuity, but dichotomizes space into known and unknown territories. Mircea Eliade
explains that this conception opposes the inhabitants' own "world" to the unknown
"otherworld:"
Ce qui characterise les socictes traditionnelles, c'est I'opposition qu'cHes
sous-entendent entre leur territoire habite et I'espace inconnu et
indetermine qui I'entoure: Ie premier, c'est Ie "Monde" (plus
preciscment:"notre monde"), Ie Cosmos; Ie reste, ce n'est plus un
Cosmos, mais une sorte d"'autre monde," un espace etranger, chaotique,
peuple de larves, de demons, d"'etrangers" (assimiles, d'ailleurs, aux
demons et aux fantomes).3
In oral socicties, thus, time is perceived as "continuous" and space as,"discontinuolls."
Peter Narvaez proposes that these nOlions are tacitly enforccd by NeW"foundland vcrbal
traditions. 4 Legends about fairies and ghosts, personal experience narratives, tragic sea
I Faris, Cal 88·96; Firestone 47.
2Sce Firestone, 8rolJzers.
3Mircca Eliade, Le sucre et Ie profane (1957; Paris: Gallimard, 19(5).
4Narv5cz has pcrceptively applied and iltustrated these conceptualizations with regard to
Newfoundlllnd traditional society in "Folklore" and "Newfoundland Berry Pickers 'in the
Fairies': The Maintenance of Splltial and Temporal Boundaries through Legendry," Lore &
Language fl.1 (1987): 15-49.