In the late 19th century, an English entrepreneur arrived on the B.C. frontier eager to learn the whereabouts of coal seams in the area. In exchange for this knowledge he courted and promised to marry an "Indian Princess." After receiving the information, he jilted the woman and submitted the first coal syndicate application for the Elk Valley. Indigenous people cast a curse on William Fernie, on the region and its residents. They would suffer from fires, floods and famine. This narrative forms the backbone of my dissertation. It is deeply ingrained in expressions of local identity, tied to personal histories and ideas of social justice. Ktunaxa traditionalists officially lifted the curse in a public ceremony in Fernie in 1964. I trace how participants speak about this event and the legend across generations and within shifting ideological contexts. Cursing is an important theme throughout this work. It implies the power that stories have to carry and construct meanings about who people are. My dissertation is an ethnography of ideas about human difference generated and transmitted through time and through narratives. Fernie, B.C. is currently transforming from a predominantly working-class resource-based town to an internationally recognized destination ski resort. I trace images, legends and theories as powerful narrative resources in the contexts of colonialism, war, immigration, labour strife, natural disaster, treaty-making and development for tourism. Folklore, mass media, scholarly theories and political discourses propagate narratives about human difference shaping the ways that people are imagined. Although rephrased and sometimes disguised, fundamental forms of race, gender, class, nationality, religion, age, locality and sexual preference remain intact. In Part I, I look at ideas of difference perpetuated in hegemonic discourses during three overlapping time periods. More contemporary taxonomies of difference appear in Part II. Ideas are transmitted across generations, they are evident in public performances and in narratives of place and space. Through participants' accounts I examine intersections between personal expressions and official narratives.

In the late 19th century, an English entrepreneur arrived on the B.C. frontier eager to learn the whereabouts of coal seams in the area. In exchange for this knowledge he courted and promised to marry an "Indian Princess." After receiving the information, he jilted the woman and submitted the first coal syndicate application for the Elk Valley. Indigenous people cast a curse on William Fernie, on the region and its residents. They would suffer from fires, floods and famine. This narrative forms the backbone of my dissertation. It is deeply ingrained in expressions of local identity, tied to personal histories and ideas of social justice. Ktunaxa traditionalists officially lifted the curse in a public ceremony in Fernie in 1964. I trace how participants speak about this event and the legend across generations and within shifting ideological contexts. Cursing is an important theme throughout this work. It implies the power that stories have to carry and construct meanings about who people are. My dissertation is an ethnography of ideas about human difference generated and transmitted through time and through narratives. Fernie, B.C. is currently transforming from a predominantly working-class resource-based town to an internationally recognized destination ski resort. I trace images, legends and theories as powerful narrative resources in the contexts of colonialism, war, immigration, labour strife, natural disaster, treaty-making and development for tourism. Folklore, mass media, scholarly theories and political discourses propagate narratives about human difference shaping the ways that people are imagined. Although rephrased and sometimes disguised, fundamental forms of race, gender, class, nationality, religion, age, locality and sexual preference remain intact. In Part I, I look at ideas of difference perpetuated in hegemonic discourses during three overlapping time periods. More contemporary taxonomies of difference appear in Part II. Ideas are transmitted across generations, they are evident in public performances and in narratives of place and space. Through participants' accounts I examine intersections between personal expressions and official narratives. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

We are constantly surrounded by language, which affects our view of ourselves and the world around us. Children are especially affected by their language environment and will often adapt their speech to fit in among their friends. Nowadays it seems like cursing and insults has become more common among young students in the school environment, which worries us. This study presents our research on what we call problematic language, it is specified on students in middle school and their experience of the use of curses and insults around them. Our research was done by qualitative interviews with both students and teachers as the aim was to get different perspectives on how the students are affected. We have chosen to take the social perspective of language in our study together with the perspectives of previous research in the field of offensive language. What we discovered was that the students have a different view of the language use than teachers do. How words are perceived is very individual, it depends on the situation and the relations to those around. What is clear is that students get affected by their language environment and therefore need support and guidance in order to understand the effects of problematic language use. With this study we intend to bring awareness and knowledge that can benefit a healthy language environment for students in school and after school care

This dissertation concerns the narrative and theological role of divine vengeance and saintly cursing in the saints’ Lives of England and Ireland, c. 1060-1215. The dissertation considers four case studies of primary material: the hagiographical and historical writings of the English Benedictines (Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Eadmer of Canterbury, and William of Malmesbury), the English Cistercians (Aelred and Walter Daniel of Rievaulx, John of Forde), the cross-cultural hagiographer Jocelin of Furness, and the Irish (examining key textual clusters connected with St. Máedóc of Ferns and St. Ruadán of Lorrha, whose authors are anonymous). This material is predominantly in Latin, with the exception of the Irish material, for which some vernacular (Middle Irish) hagiographical and historical/saga material is also considered. The first four chapters (I-IV) focus discretely on these respective source-based case studies. Each is framed by a discussion of those textual clusters in terms of their given authors, provenances, audiences, patrons, agendas and outlooks, to show how the representation of cursing and vengeance operated according to the logic of the texts and their authors. The methods in each case include discerning and explaining the editorial processes at work as a basis for drawing out broader patterns in these clusters with respect to the overall theme. The fifth chapter (V) frames a more thematic and comparative discussion of the foregoing material, dealing with the more general questions of language, sources, and theological convergences compared across the four source bases. This chapter reveals in particular the common influence and creative reuse of key biblical texts, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and the Life of Martin of Tours. Similar discussion is made of a range of common ‘paradigms’ according to which hagiographical vengeance episodes were represented. In a normative theology in which punitive miracles, divine vengeance and ritual sanction are chiefly understood as redemptive, episodes in which vengeance episodes are fatal can be considered in terms of specific sociological imperatives placing such theology under pressure. The dissertation additionally considers the question of ‘coercive fasting’ as a subset of cursing which has been hitherto studied chiefly in terms of the Irish material, but which can also be found among the Anglo-Latin writers also. Here it is argued that both bodies of material partake in an essentially shared Christian literary and theological culture, albeit one that comes under pressure from particular local, political and sociological circumstances. Looking at material on both sides of the Irish Sea in an age of reform, the dissertation ultimately considers the commonalities and differences across diverse cultural and regional outlooks with regard to their respective understandings of vengeance and cursing.