On the Case: Explorations in Social History.

On the Case: Explorations in Social History. Edited By Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 369pp.).

In addition to an 'Introduction' and 'Afterword', there are fifteen substantive contributions to this collection, itself the result of a workshop that engaged a number of working social historians in reflection on the use of 'case files'. Case files are defined as 'records generated by political, social, legal, and other institutions entrusted with the task of categorizing and assessing certain populations, usually with the purpose of supervising, treating, punishing, servicing, and/or reforming individuals or groups deemed in some way deviants or victims' (3). For the most part, the contributors to the collection are concerned with using the documents generated by political and social administration to learn about those who were administered. Some seek to recapture 'lost voices', others are concerned with official documentary systems as sites of social struggles, and one contributor mainly describes the development and form of a set of records. Most contributors make at least some attempt to reflect on the s tatus of the case file as a form of evidence, although this is often done simply to preface an account of the use of it in empirical work.

On the one hand, then, the collection presents a series of research reports. We hear about attempts by nineteenth century church congregations to regulate cases of disharmony and about the fate of aboriginal veterans in post-war settlement schemes. We learn of reports of reactions of twentieth century psychiatric and women hospital patients to their institutionalization or treatment. We discover interesting things about some male murderers and some inmates of old age homes, about fragmented Mennonite immigrant families and recipients of mothers' allowances. The volume is quite successful in presenting an overview of contemporary case-based research in Canadian social history, even if the appeal of individual contributions will vary according to the substantive interests of readers.

On the other hand, the collection promises a sustained consideration of questions of theory and method arising out of the case file as a documentary form and an evidentiary source. Several positions on these matters are articulated, with varying degrees of sophistication, and one can see the potential for a lively and informative intellectual debate.

Unfortunately, this debate never takes place. For example, Eric Sager presents a sophisticated argument for a quantitatively-based social scientific approach to standardized case files, warning of the dangers of the pre-selection of proofs in practices of 'instancing', and also undertaking an ingenious thought-experiment to demonstrate the ways case files are constructed with particular purposes in mind. He argues a strongly realist line and his position seems to me to be open to criticism on a number of grounds, but none of the papers in the 'methods' section of the collection takes him up. Carolyn Strange presents an interesting discussion of the issue of 'multi-vocality' in capital case files, even if she seems to me to divert us to metaphysics by concluding that all we can reliably know about such cases (who did what to whom when and with what consequences) does not amount to 'the truth'. Steven Maynard has a number of enticing reflections to offer about the case file as a documentary form, but is repeat edly deflected from sustained analysis by his coincident substantive interest in tracking the emergence of the category of 'the homosexual', while Gregory Kealey's more modest attempt to demonstrate the provenance of the RCMP's state security files does not claim to be a theoretical reflection.

James W. St.G. Walker's essay on anti-Chinese legislation does provide a methodological counter to the Sager argument. Walker takes a single case, an instance, that of a Saskatchewan Chinese restaurant owner affected by racist legal provisions, and reads out from it in widening circles, making it intelligible by placing it in a larger nexus. The demonstrable connectedness of the instance to networks of power, social struggles and cultural practices is an effective counter to critiques of the instance as a low-level proof, but the editors have not seen Walker's as a 'methodological' essay, and he does not himself engage directly with Sager.

In their own contributions, neither of the editors grapples systematically with questions of theory or method. Wendy Mitchinson's account of hospital patients tends to 'read through' the case form to recover patients' voices and, while she is alive to power relations in medical encounters, she could tell us more about how the evidentiary form works to shape subjectivities and subject positions. Franca Iacovetta's titillating accounts of rebellious young girls having sex with boys in cars, drinking with men in hotel rooms, and coming into conflict with their families and the law are fascinating and raise major issues about autonomy, sexuality and moral regulation. Iacovetta attempts to place the instances she describes in a larger cultural and political-economic context and maintains that discourse and materialist analyses are not opposed to one another. Yet she appears to be citing instances without engaging in reflection on instancing. An explicit address to the issues raised by Sager would both strengthen her position and help provide continuity to this volume as a whole.

While I would have appreciated a more disciplined engagement with issues of theory and method and more dialogue among the contributors, On the Case seems to me to be based on an excellent premise and to deliver considerable matter for reflection.