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The Traveling Show Menace: Contested Regulation in Turn-of-the-Century Ontario

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Tina Loo  and
Carolyn Strange
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Abstract

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The authors apply recent work on regulation to anthropological analyses of community. In Ontario, Canada, the Provincial Police, community leaders, and the traveling show industry itself regulated shows, albeit to different ends and through different means. For rural Ontarians, invoking the law to combat crooked American carnivals articulated and reinforced local and national identity. Distinctions between insiders and outsiders were amplified because circus folk were quintessential others—itinerants and even “freaks.” Unlike most outsiders, however, carnies reveled in their difference and saw through the moral hypocrisy of regulation.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , 1995 , pp. 639 - 667
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

A version of this article was presented at the Social Science History Association Conference, Atlanta, 13–16 Oct. 1994. We thank Fred Dahlinger, Jr., of the Circus World Museum and Archives, Baraboo, WI, for his assistance and the anonymous reviewers of the Review for helpful comments.

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