Page 101 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

90 GREEN FARM SCOUT CAMP

possess an idea of the product adequate to their requirements. In other words, the
project was not acceptable to the boys until positive results appeared and a
satisfactory outcome could be envisaged. Third, voluntarily or otherwise,
Scouters played a bigger substantive role in facilitating, even performing,
creative activity than one might have assumed. Fourth, the connotations of this
particular product of labour (which generally defines it as creative, as
enjoyment) concerned a phenomenon with no substantive connection with the
romance of the backwoods and the veldt, the territory of Baden-Powell, but a
good deal of similarity. The balloon represented the ‘frontier’ technology of the
early pioneers of aviation, in fact, the counterparts of the cowboy and the frontier
scout, who figure in the Baden-Powell romance. In general, the task of the Scout
leaders is to match the form of the activity with the imaginative life of their
members; in this case the boys were more attracted by the consumption of the
product, while the leaders were ready to fill the role of producers, in accord with
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the structure of avuncularity. The latter regularly comes into play when novel or
exceptional conditions arise for boys in the performance of work. However, the
project represents a cultural enterprise in which both are imaginatively engaged
—the celebration of a simple, practical mastery. This takes the form of a
handicraft object, whose patterning evokes a typical, youthful, masculine interest
in aviation. The simple immediacy of the method of production and consumption
is thus typically joined to a specific imaginative effect, which derives from the
repertoire of possibilities set up by the founding romance. Hence the concrete
and particular forms of task usually can be coherently linked to the structure of
the romance. In our terms, the simple immediacy of the method is here
associated with pioneer skills, while the imaginative effect draws on pioneer and
reconnaissance themes. It is the idea of the product or end-in-view that draws
spontaneous interest in Scout labour tasks.
It has been indicated that the particular concern of the symbolic activity here did
not coincide with the conventional backwoods form of Scouting. But there was
one activity at the camp that did call on the techniques and evoke the imaginative
connotations of the backwoods. This was the occasion when the whole troop
cooked a meal ‘backwoods-style’ (without utensils, that is). It was the
convention of backwoods cooking that made it necessary to leave the calor gas
stoves and to build a big fire in order to accommodate all the individual cooks—
for the technique lends itself to individual self-reliance. This feature again
provides a close mediating link between labour and product, because it is the
individual who cooks by himself, and what he cooks, in principle, he eats.
Everyone was therefore drawn into the activity. Little equipment is allowed in
the technique, so as to point up the ‘backwoods’ aura. The standard technique is
reminiscent of the barbecue: green sticks (used as skewers for grilling) and
aluminium foil (used as a cover for baking food) were the only items of
equipment. The position of responsibility that the leaders defined as their own
was illustrated by the fact that it was they who built up the fire and oversaw it,
not the PLs or the lads. Instruction in the technique of cooking, however, passed