I recall reading an autobiographical statement by the religious historian Martin Marty who quoted Schopenhauer, hardly one of my favorite thinkers, to the effect that we spend the first half of our lives writing its script and the second half interpreting it. Sadly, I guess, that means I’m in the interpreting, or better, re-interpreting, phase. As I understand it, my role in our upcoming team residency is to discuss economic representations in sociology and both academic and grassroots economic discourse in Appalachia. I’ve tried, but largely failed, to reinterpret myself as an economic sociologist for purposes of our gathering, frantically examining the weighty Handbook of Economic Sociology to see what my disciplinary colleagues have been up to recently. (More about that later.) More important to my work, however, has been my involvement in multi-disciplinary Appalachian studies. I chose to teach at the University of Kentucky, beginning 27 years ago, because of that university’s proximity to the Appalachian region. I helped to establish the university’s Appalachian studies program and its Appalachian Center, where currently I am a co-research director. I am a past-president of the Appalachian Studies Association and currently editor of the Journal of Appalachian Studies.
I came to my interest in Appalachia early, having grown up in coal communities of southern West Virginia. As a junior in high school, and the only male that year on the staff of the school newspaper, I was assigned the distasteful role of sports editor. Though now a college basketball fan, I hated reporting on games and, worse, writing profiles of the always-male “sports personality of the month”—articles about the same guys that, years before, had delighted in beating me up as I made the rocky transition from a small town elementary school to a big, county-seat junior high. Fortunately, once another male joined the staff at mid-semester, I was demoted from sports editor to book review editor (a new role created to ease my displacement). The first book I reviewed was Jack Weller’s Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. Written by a religious missionary who had worked for several years in churches in my home county, the book accounted for Appalachian poverty, and the author’s inability to bring about community uplift, by representing Appalachia as an isolated, region-wide subculture of poverty. Along with Harry Caudill’s equally problematic Night Comes to the Cumberlands, it remains among the most widely read and influential books on the region. Deeply troubled by that book and wanting to learn how to respond to it, I revisited it, and other literature on Appalachian culture and poverty, in a senior-year paper in high school and again in my masters thesis in sociology. The latter, published in the sociology journal Social Forces in 1974, combined an empiricist, cross-regional analysis of cultural attitudes in the South to challenge the notion of Appalachian otherness with a call for a critical social history of the region. Much of my work since then has addressed both of these themes, though hopefully not in an empiricist fashion.
Because so much that is assumed about Appalachia is mythical, and so little known about the region’s history, I have tried both to deconstruct essentialistic representations of the region and to contribute to the historical and comparative study of Appalachia and the American South. I first found my way out of positivist sociology by way of the Frankfurt school and Habermas. My understanding of discursive politics have been influenced by writers such as Gramsci, Foucault, Said, Stuart Hall, and Laclau and Mouffe, My approach to comparative/historical sociology came first by way of Barrington Moore along with Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene Genovese, and British marxists such as E.P.Thompson and Christopher Hill. (My first book, Planters and the Making of a “New South,” attempted to show that postbellum economic development and politics in the South could best be understand in terms of Barrington Moore’s model of a “revolution from above,” i.e., the “Prussian Road” to modernity.) I’ll briefly describe two recent works that represent my efforts at deconstructing/reconstructing accounts of Appalachian history.
In 1999, I published Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region with two scholars in American literature. In this book, we mobilized responses by Appalachian writers, activists, social scientists and humanities scholars to the remarkably stereotypical representations of Appalachia in Robert Schenkkan’s play The Kentucky Cycle. Performed on Broadway with more than seventy characters and winning the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this ambitious play of epic proportions covers two hundred years of history in Appalachian Kentucky in six and one-half hours on stage. Enacted from the standpoint of three interrelated families, two white and one black, the play narrates the endless cycles of violence and betrayal among them—and later, with corporate America—as they struggle over the possession of a small parcel of mountain land. Schenkkan intended his play as an impassioned criticism of the selfishness, corporate domination, and widening social inequalities of the Reagan-Bush years. Based on single day spent traveling in Appalachian Kentucky in 1981 where he encountered “extraordinary” poverty and environmental “ruin on a grand scale,” the playwright, in his own words, attempted to convey how “the poverty and environmental abuse” he witnessed there “were not simply a failure of economics” but “a poverty of the spirit; a poverty of the soul.” The closing words of one of the play’s characters state: “I dream about Hell. Hell is a place where you keep makin’ the same mistake over and over and nobody learns nothin’. It looked a whole lot like Eastern Kentucky.”
A twelve-page “Study Guide” published by the Kennedy Center to accompany The Kentucky Cycle’s performance there noted unequivocally that “Despite periods of stability, the inhabitants of eastern Kentucky lost control of their land to owners of timber and coal companies. They watched helplessly as the land became scarred and gutted. Poverty has threatened and diminished the lives of the greatest number of them.” An even more remarkably section, reproduced from materials distributed at a prior performance in Los Angeles, noted that it is “instructive to look at what happened to our first frontier (Appalachia) and consider the lessons that its unhappy history might teach us” including the fact that “eastern Kentucky never developed” until outside corporate forces brought “environmental devastation” to the mountains and “virtual economic enslavement” to its people.
Although it probably seems that I have veered too far off the autobiographical path, I mention The Kentucky Cycle at length, and our effort to mobilize a response to it from Appalachian scholar/activists, in order to convey a sense of how the economic history of the region has depicted for so long. One the one hand, its population has been represented as a cultural other, out of step with mainstream life. On the other hand, its economy has been pictured either as an empty space of backwardness waiting to be filled by capitalism, or, conversely, as a zone of total dependency and exploitation, a metaphor for all that is wrong with the American political economy. In either case, essentialistic representations have forced scholars not only to talk back to stereotypes but also, positively, to attempt to uncover instances of economic difference in the region.
Along with efforts to deconstruct the discourse of Appalachian otherness, I have tried to contribute to a critical social and economic history of the region. In 2000, Kathleen Blee and I published The Appalachian Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Here, we built on prior ethnographic research on “Beech Creek,” a well-studied subsistence farming community in Eastern Kentucky, as well as extensive surveys of Beech Creek people who had migrated to industrial cities of the Midwest. Both types of studies were carried out by earlier University of Kentucky sociologists between 1939 and 1965. We did so in order to provide a long-term view of class processes and impoverishment in Central Appalachia. For more years than I want to acknowledge, we used nineteenth and early twentieth century manuscript census records linked across households and generations, deeds, diaries, business records, civil and criminal court litigation, and other records to interpret commercial development and industrialization (including slave-based industry before the Civil War), household strategies of subsistence, and the development of the local state in Beech Creek and surrounding Clay County, Kentucky from 1800 to the present. We think this may be the longest longitudinal study of a rural U.S. population (one of the 20 poorest counties in the United States).
In the autobio/ethno-graphy that follows, I will suggest several Appalachian scholars who might contribute to further rounds of our discussion, as well as representations of the economy that I believe deserve further reflection. Among the latter, I will highlight the central sociological theme of economic embeddedness, Polanyi’s tripartite model of economic regulation, and the notion of multiple livelihood strategies. While pointing to the paramount role today of hegemonic struggles within civil society over definitions of “economies,” I will critique popular notions of community “assets” (including social and environmental “capital”) and discuss alternative representations of post-development which, at the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, we discuss under the rubric of “sustaining the global civic and environmental commons.”