| Summary: | Located on Canada's east coast, the Island of Newfoundland has a cultural heritage that can be attributed in large measure to West Country English migratory fishermen who came to fish for cod beginning in the sixteenth century but did not settle in any appreciable numbers until the eighteenth century when they were joined by emigrants from Southern Ireland . Ignoring the Island 's interior and settling in over one thous and sites along the six thous and mile coastline, they established small fishing villages which were based largely on subsistence production of sea, coast and l and resources. Concomitant with the increasing interest of sociocultural anthropologists in the rural sectors of western nation-states, ethnographic field studies of Newfoundland outports were first undertaken in the 1960s. Since those studies focused on communities whose residents were of West Country English or mixed descent, the present study adds to the knowledge of Newfoundland 's distinctive culture by focusing on a specific outport, St. Shotts, whose residents are descendants of first and second generation southern Irish. This study adds to the existing corpus of work by focusing attention on the environmental setting, technology, ethnohistory, and social organization of the inshore cod fishery. This was made possible by extending the duration of the field study to seven summer fishing seasons (1967-73). The thesis begins with a history of cultural adaptations on the Island 's southeast coast, especially the outport adaptation, and then moves to an examination of the migration of the Irish to Newfoundland, their subsequent dispersal along the coasts, and adaptive adjustments. Attention is then focused on St. Shotts, an Anglo-Irish outport on the southern Avalon Peninsula. By collating oral and documentary source materials with direct observations, an ethnohistory of the community is constructed. This diachronic perspective facilitates an analysis of culture change and modernization, including both physical and organizational ...
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