Campsteading : family, place, and experience at Squam Lake, New Hampshire / Derek Pomeroy Brereton.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pt. 1. Campstead experience. To camp: Boating out to "main camp" on Hoag Island ; Of bungalows and colonization ; Arriving at Long Point ; Essaying links between wayfinding, place attachment, campstead preservation, and experience ; On re-becoming one's self -- In camp: Campstead "ana" and the shaping of experience ; Of objects and adventures ; Daydreaming with the grain ; Preliminary summary : experience and morphogenesis ; Landscape preference and sustainable systems ; Evolution and campstead experience ; Campstead games and person-place imbrication ; The descendants of Murray Mason McGuire throw a feast ; Further toward the nature of experience -- About camp: Natural sources ; Americanness is rooted in nature ; American transcendentalism and old camps ; Seeking to restore authenticity ; Descending from Nirvana ; Campstead as key symbol -- Out of camp: Experience in motion ; Experience in place ; Place attachment and open spaces ; Of movies and taxation ; Coda : ancient cries -- pt. 2. Campstead ethnology: Innate virtue ; Differential fortune ; The production of "houses" and "founding ancestors" ; Archer's model of practice and morphogenesis ; The campstead manifestation of the house ; The co-presence of ancestral generations ; Of ancestors and family trees ; Chapter summary -- Experience and realist anthropology : building on John Dewey's model: Why philosophy? ; The necessity of experience ; The centrality of experience in human adaptation ; Anthropological ontology ; The elements and nature of experience ; Reduction of Dewey's ten chapters ; Structures of experience ; Dewey's discussion of experience as the ground of humanness and philosophy ; The necessity of Dewey's experiential naturalism ; Closing with the philosophy of social science ; Conclusion : summary of this book's triple intent ; Coda : absent cries -- Appendices. One trail of person-place associations : cousins and chickens, Connie and Cass -- A geological précis of the Squam region -- An archaeological précis of the Squam region -- The old stone walls of New Hampshire -- Natural information: the critique of culturism (I) -- Experience and worth: the critique of culturism (II) -- On the nature of thoughts and things -- Transitive and intransitive in human affairs -- On learning and liberty: human exploration, ontic liberty, and campstead place attachment -- My summer of 1963 at Crane Point Lodge -- Winter scenes -- For the Pratt campstead centennial.

The campstead is an American institution. After the Civil War, with neo-colonialism, environmentalism, and arts-and-crafts on the rise, some families sought rural locations for rustic camps. There they raised their children in the summertime. Around Squam Lake, after some eight generations, twenty-one such camps remain in these families. The Squam area thus becomes a natural place to study relationships of persons and places, families and landscape, and humans and the world. Our present concerns for environmental stewardship, open space protection, and core values instead of consumerism, make this a good time to revisit the simple American Campstead. Rustic camping itself revisited aspects of the American frontier. Just as the western frontier was disappearing, some families resorted to remnants of the first frontier among mountains and lakes of the Northeast. Through campsteads, these families preserved elements of the frontier ethos. Campsteads facilitate particular experiences involving nature and family. Brereton investigates campstead experience, and through it the nature of human experience generally. This book is the first detailed account of campsteading, the first application of critical realism in anthropology, and the first anthropological use of John Dewey's evolutionary model of experience. Building on Dewey, the author further analyses experience into its levels, orders, and features.