Margaret Critchlow Papers, 1980-2002 (MSS 794)

Margaret Critchlow was born in 1947 and grew up in Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay. She attended private school in southern Virginia where she demonstrated early interest in political activism by protesting segregation at school. Critchlow went on to study political science at Goucher College in Maryland. In 1967 she met William Rodman, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who introduced her to both anthropology and Melanesia. She first travelled to Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), assisting Rodman in his research, from 1969-1971. Among her introductory fieldwork was a genealogy collection, surveying elderly women of the area.

In 1972 Critchlow moved to Hamilton, Ontario for Rodman's tenure at McMaster University and began pursuing her masters degree in 1974. She was mentored by Dr. David Counts, an expert in socioeconomic anthropology of New Britain. Critchlow's master's thesis "Spheres of Exchange in a Northern New Hebridean Society" is based on her observations on Ambae Island in Vanuatu during their research expedition in 1970-71.

Critchlow conducted her doctoral fieldwork from 1978 to 1979, surveying land holdings in Longana, Ambae Island, Vanuatu. Her doctoral thesis "Customary Illusions" explored the use of mystifications in land possession and productivity. After receiving her doctorate, Critchlow taught at the University of Waterloo. She returned to Vanuatu in 1982 on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SHRCC) grant and studied consumer behavior. Her research focused on the social construction of space, such as the dynamics of constructed space and landscape and their effects on concepts like power and culture. She also conducted evaluative photo elicitation research in Ambae on assessing the quality of a potential living space.

In 1985, Critchlow studied CUSO's (Canadian University Service Overseas, currently known as CUSO International) involvement in fisheries development on the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. This was an evaluation research-based project, focusing on the impact of development. She published Deep Water: Development and Change in Pacific Village Fisheries (1989) based on this research.

During the moratorium on expatriate researchers in Vanuatu lasting from 1985-1994, Critchlow studied non-profit rental cooperative housing in Canada and produced, along with with Matthew Cooper, the book New Neighbours: A Case Study of Cooperative Housing in Toronto (1992). Critchlow also published "Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality" in American Anthropologist (September 1992), one of her most frequently cited works.

In 1993 Critchlow began researching Houses Far from Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides, and co-edited along with Jan Rensel Home in the Islands: Housing and Social Change in the Pacific which explores houses as socially-constructed containers which reflect and influence their inhabitants' values and behavior. Critchlow conducted oral history interviews along with Will Stober, a Birmingham-born historian with extensive experience researching colonial life and administration in the New Hebrides, of British and French ex-colonial civil servants and officials. The interviews were primarily conducted in the United Kingdom and probed for information about the qualities of the houses and memories connected to their houses.

Critchlow returned to Vanuatu in 1995, examining the old colonial homes and their current state and usage by the locals. The cumulative work of the interviews and fieldwork resulted in Houses Far from Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides published in 2001. Also in 2001, Critchlow convened a workshop funded by SHRCC, interviewing twenty-one Ni-Vanuatu women who were former domestic workers ("house-girls"). The women gave testimony of their time working under British, French, Chinese, and Vietnamese masters. Critchlow subsequently received a Rockefeller fellowship in 2002 to write about her findings. House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu was published in 2007.

In addition to her teaching and research, Critchlow was the President of the Canadian Anthropology Society from 1993-1994 and in 2017 was awarded the Weaver-Tremblay Award from the Society.

In 2010, she established the Canadian Senior Cohousing Society, a non-profit development company and cohousing advocacy group. Construction was completed in 2016 and the Harbourside Cohousing became the first senior-oriented co-housing property in Sooke, British Columbia, where Critchlow lives today.

[Biographical information compiled from: La série « Les Possédés et leurs mondes » est une production de la revue Anthropologie et Sociétés et du Département d'anthropologie de l'Université Laval, en partenariat avec la revue Anthropologica et la Société Canadienne d'anthropologie (CASCA). September 28th, 2016 (Sooke, Canada)]

Margaret Critchlow and William Rodman Papers. MSS 795. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.

Additional materials created by William Rodman and Margaret Critchlow may be found in their online collection of photographs.