Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place

Anuppiriya Sriskandarajah, Anuppiriya Sriskandarajah

• Verlag: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789733419
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Children's Studies in Sociology

How do children and youth create, negotiate, change spaces and places, and assert their rights to space? Taking a socio-spatial approach, this international collection based on empirical research examines how space relates to and informs the social construction of children and youth. Examining the spaces used by children and youth in many different contexts, including neighbourhoods, community centres, schools, public streets, the natural environment, orphanages, early education classrooms, homes, borders, this collection exists at the intersection of the new sociology of childhoods and new materialism. Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place explores three main themes, how children navigate real and imaginary borders, how space constitutes belonging, meaning-making, and representation, and how space informs learning and identities.

PART I

NAVIGATING IMAGINED AND REAL SPATIAL BORDERS

CHAPTER 1

PUBLIC SPACES AS LOCI OF EDUCATION AND IDENTITY BUILDING. PAUL MAERKY AND THE LIVES OF MESSENGERS AND APPRENTICES IN GENEVA’S HOROLOGICAL DISTRICT, 1871–1876

Diana Volonakis

ABSTRACT

In Mémoires of a cabinotier (Memoir of a watchmaker), a 60-year history of the Genevan watch manufacture (1931), the author Paul Maerky recalls his early years apprenticing in Saint-Gervais, Geneva’s horological district, better known as La Fabrique. Located in the heart of Geneva on the right bank of the river Rhone, the Saint-Gervais district established itself as a major Swiss center of horological production spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maerky’s autobiography is a lively and detailed account of apprenticed life in Saint-Gervais from 1871 to 1876. Drawing from this narrative source, this chapter discusses the Saint-Gervais apprenticeship system as a multisited educational phenomenon, whereby public spaces are conceptualized as an extension of the workshop or the habitual locus of horological knowledge and skill acquisition. This case study of the Saint-Gervais horological craft community in the 1870s analyzes the manner in which youthful apprentices interact with public spaces. Through the physical exploration of the district and its various educational loci, apprentices acquire spatial and relational knowledge. This chapter also discusses the metaphorical meanings assigned to places and their educational function within the context of nineteenth century watchmaking apprenticeship, during which apprentices undertake a metaphorical quest which takes them from childhood into adulthood as full-fledged members of the Genevan watchmaking community. In addition, this case study discusses the function of practical jokes as social mechanisms that regulate youth’s interaction with public spaces. As alternative educational loci, public spaces serve threefold educational functions: (1) to federate an otherwise heterogeneous working-class population around a common identity delineated by known physical and cultural boundaries; (2) to promote apprentice autonomy and foster distrust vis-à-vis outsiders; and (3) to create the setting for youth socialization through play or conflict. This chapter comments on alternative educational loci as relayed by Paul Maerky’s memoir, which include the streets, public fountains, the road to school, and eateries.

Keywords: Youth history; apprenticeship; juvenile agency; practical joke; Paul Maerky; watchmaking

Nestled in South-Western Switzerland, the city of Geneva is a global watchmaking hub, of which brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin are sought after by the status-conscious global elite. Despite a history of tireless trade competition, whereby the United States, Japan, and most recently Hong-Kong challenged Swiss horological supremacy, and notwithstanding the contemporary cutting-edge allure of the smartwatch, Genevan timepieces remain among the world’s most highly coveted luxury items. Since the craft’s sixteenth century inception to the late nineteenth century, the Genevan watchmaking craft community congregated within the physical limits of Saint-Gervais, a focal point of Swiss watchmaking and a bustling working-class district located in the heart of the city. A relentless brouhaha wafted up from its public squares and cobble-stoned streets, up to the high windowed upper-floor workshops where men, women, and youth hunched over workbenches and laboured over watch parts with steady hands and an eye for detail. The district and its dwellers come to be simply known as La Fabrique, that is, The Manufacture.

Historiographical consensus situates the emergence of the Genevan watchmaking industry in the mid-sixteenth century, as French State-sanctioned restrictions on religious rights precipitated the massive displacement of Huguenots to the bordering independent Genevan Republic. Refugeed French artisans provided the decisive impetus toward the development of the industry (Babel, 1916), which was further spurred on by the Genevan Reformation. Under the spiritual and political leadership of John Calvin, anti-sumptuary laws prohibited jewellery, which was denounced as sinfully ostentatious and equated to idolatry. As pocket-watches escaped the scope of religious legislation, Genevan jewelers, metal workers, engravers, and guilders allied themselves to the budding watchmaking enterprise to guarantee their livelihoods. Ironically therefore, in enacting a legal framework sanctioning unchristian vanity, Calvin unwittingly laid the groundwork for what would become one of the world’s most iconic luxury industries. Over the following two centuries, Saint-Gervais not only rivaled, but outproduced, major European horological centers such as Paris and London. In 1758, Jean Jacques Rousseau marveled at the urban spectacle unfolding in Geneva, urging acquaintances to “visit the Saint-Gervais district. All the watchmaking of Europe seems centred there!” (D’Alembert, 1759, p. 524).

Having achieved independence in 1813, the Genevan Republic formally integrated the Swiss Confederation in 1815. As of the 1820s, mechanized English textile factories defeated the Genevan calico painting industry, leaving the watchmaking enterprise to function as Geneva’s foremost catalyzer of economic growth (Binz et al., 1986; Oris, Ritschard, & Ryczkowska, 2006). The industry prospered from 1830 to 1845. According to a contemporaneous survey (Franscini, 1848), 4,130 individuals – equal to 7% of the canton’s total population – laboured in La Fabrique, and in total 7,258 persons were said to be economically dependent on La Fabrique – equal to 12% of the canton’s total population. The craft comprised a heterogeneous working-class community. Output efficiency relied on the division of labour or the assignment of various parts of the manufacturing process to different workers. Linder (2008) refers to La Fabrique as demonstrating the characteristics of an urban dispersed industry, which called upon the concurrent efforts of specialist artisans including toolmakers, fitters, jewelers, engravers, guilders, etc. Each workshop constituted a self-governing unit, answering only to its Master craftsman and proprietor. While maintaining their respective autonomy, the craft community valued solidarity in their quest to achieve a common economic outcome. The industry was unable to withstand market volatility resulting from economic disruption and political uncertainty affecting Europe from 1845 to 1847. Thereafter, the Genevan government supported the modernization of its watchmaking industry. Timepieces, once constructed by hand in Saint-Gervais workshops, were to be produced in new factories through mechanized means of production (Perroux, 2006). This marked the beginning of the decline of La Fabrique. By the beginning of the twentieth century, factory production had almost entirely supplanted workshop labour in the Swiss horological sector.

Despite its multiplicity of professions and workshops, Saint-Gervais artisans shared a common working-class status and a shared source of income. Based on common characteristics of class, livelihood, and a collective professional attachment to a determined geographic space, craft protagonists are held to represent a community of practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) define a community of practice as a group engaged in processes of information and experience sharing for personal and professional gain. One such process of intergenerational knowledge transmission is craft apprenticeship. The Genevan watchmaking guild regulated the modalities of workshop-based watchmaking training as of 1601. Youth typically exited schooling at age 12 and began to apprentice in a sub-craft of watchmaking in the Saint-Gervais district. Under the tutelage of Masters, apprentices not only acquired knowledge and manual skills, they were also introduced to Saint-Gervais’ urban, working-class lifestyle. As of 1824, local authorities supported the creation of the Genevan watchmaking school to facilitate the transition from preindustrial workshops to factory production. Its student body rose from 200 in 1842 to approximately 800 in 1879 (Fallet & Simonin, 2010). By the beginning of the twentieth century, the watchmaking school had almost entirely supplanted craft-based apprenticeship as the primary educational pathway to the horological professions. This constituted one of the myriads of ways in which the treatment and experience of childhood underwent change following industrialization.

A major difference between craft apprenticeship and school-based horological training is the multiplicity of educational loci in Saint-Gervais. Young apprentices were set to roam the city streets to acquire knowledge, skills, values, and behaviours. In exploring craft education as a multisited phenomenon, this study takes as its case study the historical district of Saint-Gervais in the 1870s. The study echoes the place-bound nature of young lives as enunciated by Nayak (2003) and considers the neighborhood as a major site of relevant analysis. The case comprises a unique and insular craft community and urban space characterized by heterogeneous cultures, understandings, and identities within a broader national tendency toward homogenizing economic and cultural processes. Keeping with a major paradigm guiding the field of spatial studies, this chapter approaches the city streets of Saint-Gervais from a subjectivist perspective: space is not only an external object but also a semiotic entity replete with meaning. This chapter considers the articulation of social structures with semiotic phenomena, in discussing apprenticeship as both a physical and metaphorical quest requiring youth to navigate spaces imbued with symbolic meaning. La Fabrique is at once a physical entity as well as an intangible, metaphorical landscape, a hidden world wherein children embark on the path to adulthood. Interrogating metaphorical meanings of space is to explore the connotative field of a society, its world view. By focusing on how and where a community brought up their children, it is possible to understand how a society understood itself, its youth, as well as its relationship to space. This chapter sets the study of the metaphorical meanings of space against the historical backdrop of preindustrial societies, wherein childhood is shaped by spatial experience, and the search for identity is integrated into the educational itinerary of apprenticeship.

This study discusses practical joking as the social mechanism that mediates apprentices’ interaction with alternative educational loci. In other terms, practical jokes provide the apprentice with the impetus to explore the public space, albeit under deceitful pretenses. Maerky’s narrative provides multiple, lively accounts of the practical jokes played upon watchmaking apprentices by the craft community, as well as on each other. The practice no doubt aimed to provide lively entertainment and a welcome distraction from the tedium of the daily workload. But Maerky’s narrative brings to light that trickery and deceit also served the educational purposes of transmitting knowledge and regulating relationships within the Saint-Gervais professional watchmaking community. The interdisciplinary field of humour studies has explored the role of joking cultures within social groups in creating systems of knowledge, beliefs, behaviours, and customs. According to Bourdieu, a joke is

[…] the art of making fun without raising anger, by means of ritual mockery or insults which […], presupposing a great familiarity, […] are in fact tokens of attention and affection, ways of building up while seeming to run down, of accepting while seeming to condemn […]. (1984, p. 183)

Empirical research has highlighted the pervasiveness and functions of joking relationships in organizations. Humour and horseplay have been recorded in the context of educational institutions such as schools and industrial shop-floors (Hearn, 1985; Linstead, 1985b; Pollert, 1981; Westwood, 1984), in which humour is said to operate as a means of mitigating boredom or downplaying the hazards associated with work (Burns, 1953; Radcliffe-Brown, 1965; Wilson, 1979). Pitt (1979) asserts that humour in the shop-floor serves to structure collective culture and foster a sense of belonging. The centrality of joking to a working-class group culture that values non-conformity and masculinity has been made clear by Willis (1979). Coser (1959) and Goffman (1961) contend that practical jokes establish and perpetuate a hierarchal power structure and managerial control. As such, humour is discipline in disguise, a stance echoed by Palm (1977) who warns against a romanticized vision of working-class, shop-floor culture, emphasizing the underlying physical and symbolic violence inherent to practical joking. Linstead (1985a) takes an opposing stance in contending that organizational humour ...