Rituals of Halloween mischief and the governance of urban space in Vancouver, 1910s-1970s


Bonar Buffam, University of British Columbia

On the 31st of October 31, 1932, The Vancouver Sun reported on a local Halloween bomb plot that the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) had foiled by confiscating a significant number of explosive devices in the basement of a home in Shaughnessy Heights, a wealthy residential neighborhood. According to the VPD, the six youth who were arrested for this plot had ‘an elementary knowledge of chemistry and had made the bombs in preparation for their Halloween pranks’. The day after Halloween local papers ran stories about multiple incidents of mischief, vandalism, and ‘obstructive’ behaviour that occurred in particular pockets of the city. Along one of the main avenues in Kerrisdale, another wealthy neighborhood southwest of Shaughnessy, youth erected barricades with an auto chassis, ash cans, and fallen trees, obstructing law enforcement’s efforts to disband large unruly gatherings of youth. While some observers likened this kind of mischief to a youthful rite of passage, the extent of the vandalism renewed conversations amongst residents and municipal authorities about how to facilitate more orderly Halloween festivities, conversations that recurred at different yearly intervals well until the 1960s. In this paper I examine local episodes of Halloween mischief that occurred between the 1910s and 1970s to explain how they reflect changes in public ritual and urban governance. Using archival research, I track the contingent spatial and temporal dimensions of such seasonal rituals as they were detailed in local newspapers and the documentation of municipal authorities. Following critical theorists of religion and secularism, my paper stresses the expressive and inscriptive qualities of these rituals, specifically their capacity to recreate and redraw the relations of power that characterize public places. By attending to where and how this mischief was staged in Vancouver, it illustrates how these rituals reflect particular orientations to the disposability of common space and the vulnerability of marginalized populations. Particular attention is paid to years when these rituals were animated by anti-Asian sentiments and culminated in collective acts of racial violence against the homes and businesses of Japanese and Chinese residents. My paper is also concerned with how civic responses to Halloween mischief reflect broader changes in urban governance, particularly control over nocturnal social activities. On the one hand, I engage the literature on night studies to explain how mischief served as a basis for law enforcement to establish and negotiate its jurisdiction over some seasonal rituals of Halloween as well as the night as a distinct temporal realm of (dis)order. On the other hand, I consider how municipal authorities, leisure clubs, and fraternal organizations staged Halloween events and parties to provide young people a more supervised context for their holiday activities. Finally, this paper tries to explicate the varied and intersecting orientations to time that are at play in these contingent rituals of Halloween mischief, including the temporalities of nighttime, seasonality, calendrical time, and historical change. Through such attention to the social conditions and coordination of time, my analysis reveals how different, sometimes competing temporalities of repetition and change have been formative of urban contexts like Vancouver as well as the collective dimensions of public ritual(s).

This paper will be presented at the following session: