MURDER AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION IN 19TH CENTURY PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

The transformational possibilities of an island's culture are both shaped and constrained by its totalised physical boundary, helping to create a culture composed paradoxically of both intimacy and separation. Cultural construction occurs through a dialectic between symbolic systems that are put at risk through practice and thus subject to change. Island inhabitants preserve the social and physical boundaries imposed by geography because boundaries make it tolerable to live at close quarters in a community over many years. The policing of borders thus engenders a culture that promotes collectivity and elides whatever contests it. The unsolved rape and murder of Ann Beaton in May of 1859 in Rear Settlement, Prince Edward Island significantly problematised the isolated Scots culture of which she was a part and prompted its followers to construct new narratives that were one step in their integration into the larger Island society. Responses to the murder were, and have continued to be, apparently designed to circumvent evidence and to develop explanatory narratives that did not endanger the community.