Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy PDF
Preview Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy
Knowing Your Place Knowing Your Place Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy Edited by Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed Routledge New York & London Published in 1997 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, axon, OX14 4RN Copyright © 1997 by Routledge Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knowing your place: rural identity and cultural hierarchy / edited by Bar bara Ching and Gerald Creed p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-91544-9 (hc). - ISBN 0-415-91545-7 (pbk). 1. Sociology, Rural. 2. Rural conditions 1. Ching, Barbara, 1958-. II. Creed, Gerald, 1958-. HT421.K549 1996 307.72-dc20 96-28866 CIP Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. CONTENTS Preface vii Introduction ~ GERALD W. CREED AND BARBARA CHING Recognizing Rusticity Identity and the Power of Place 1 1 ~ AISHA KHAN Rurality and "Racial" Landscapes in Trinidad 39 2 WILLIAM J. MAXWELL "Is It True What They Say About Dixie?" Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rural/Urban Exchange in Modern African-American Literature 3 AARON A. FOX ''Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away?" Talk, Trash, and Technology in a Texas "Redneck" Bar 105 4 ~ MARC EDELMAN "Campesinos" and "Tecnicos" New Peasant Intellectuals in Central American Politics 131 5 ~ ELIZABETH A. SHEEHAN Class, Gender, and the Rural in James Joyce's "The Dead" 149 6 ~ BEATRICE GUENTHER The Roman du Terroir au Feminin in Quebec Guevremont's and Blais' Re-visioning of a Rural Tradition 171 7 DAVID MAYNARD Rurality, Rusticity, and Contested Identity Politics in Brittany 195 8 ~ SUSAN H. LEES The Rise and Fall of "Peasantry" as a Culturally Constructed National Elite in Israel 2I9 9 ~ MICHELE D. DOMINY The Alpine Landscape in Australian Mythologies of Ecology and Nation 237 Contributors Index PREFACE In the midst of their stirring manifesto against the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels begrudge this class one accomplishment: "It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as com- pared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." In spite of the vicissitudinous fortunes of Marxist theory, this perspective on place pervades contem- porary social thought. We will argue, instead, that the bourgeoisie is getting credit where none is due. The essays in this volume show how rural places and the people who identify with them retain their vitali- ty despite repeated claims to the contrary. We thus focus on rural places to challenge the urban gaze and its constant sightings of rural idiocy. But just as there is more than one place to know, there is more than one way to know places, and there are many ways to construct identities that are tied to place. An interdisciplinary collection of essays thus seems to us the best way to open a new approach to the subject of rural and urban places in the politics of identity. As Richard Handler noted in his review of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow (see American Ethnologist 19: 818-24), anthropologists have paid almost no attention to cultural hierarchies. Thus, even though many have studied rural people and places, they have generaly failed to rec- ognize the systematic devaluation of the rustic as a source of identity. While the disciplines of cultural studies and literary criticism have enthusiastically taken up the issue of cultural hierarchies and identity- construction, they focus primarily on urban contexts, ignoring rural culture altogether. Bringing together these approaches, then, forces us to recognize rusticity. The idea for this book grew out of a conversation between the edi- tors; it first took the form of a panel at the 1993 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. The panel, entitled "Constructing Cultural Hierarchies: Rural and Popular Distinctions," also included papers by Karen Frojen, Richard Handler, and Donna Kerner which could not be included in this book. Their analyses, how- viii Preface ever, were crucial to our evolving understanding of the issues discussed here, so we thank them for their inspiration. Additional papers were solicited from Marc Edelman, Aaron Fox, and William Maxwell. We are grateful to all the contributors for their encouragement, suggestions, and criticisms; we couldn't have done it without them. Kay Easson, Lesley Ferris, Allison Graham, Kevin Hagopian, Aisha Khan, Susan Lees, William O'Donnell, Susan Scheckel, and Elizabeth Sheehan provided excellent advice, as did our anonymous readers for Routledge. We know they saved us from various idiocies, rural and urban, although no doubt we persisted in some. We thank Marlie Wasserman for seeing the value of this book in its early stages, and Christine Cipriani for seeing it through the final stages. The English Department of The University of Memphis and the Anthropology Department of Hunter College pro- vided much material support. The Eugene Lang Junior Faculty Awards Program at Hunter also provided financial assistance. Michael Ching and Gene Oyler deserve a special place for their enthusiasm, patience, and encouragement. INTRODUCTION ,....., GERALD W. CREED AND BARBARA CHING Recognizing Rusticity Identity and the Power of Place ESSENTIAL secrets of power often lurk in the last place where you would think to look. Finding them is inevitably difficult, but the value of seeking lies in the possibilities for self-determination that these secrets promise. We thus propose looking in the places that are culturally the most remote: in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere, in the backwaters of this country and many others, in a word, in the countryside. While the forces of (post)modernity insistently direct our attention to city life, no degree of "development" can obliterate the continuing economic importance and cultural distinctiveness of the countryside, where food is produced and human life sustained. As Raymond Williams wrote in The Country and the City, If we are to survive at all, we shall have to develop and extend our working agricultures. The common idea of a lost rural world is then not 2 Knowing Your Place only an abstraction of this or that stage in a continuing history. ... It is in direct contradiction to any effective shape of our future .... It is one of the most striking deformations of industrial capitalism that one of our most central and urgent and necessary activities could have been so displaced ... that it can be plausibly associated only with the past or with distant lands. (197T 300) Williams was inspired to write his book because he knew the coun- try/city distinction from personal experience, and he believed that the attendant tension was "for many millions of people a direct and intense preoccupation" (1973: 3). Indeed, more than twenty years after Williams made this observation, the experiential significance of the rural/urban distinction still holds. In 1995, urban America took a new look at the "heartland" through the ruins of the Oklahoma City bomb- ing and found it more threatening than threatened-the home of des- perate rural militia with expansionist agenda. Two years earlier in China, the ranking Communist Party official told participants in an 'i\gricultural Work Conference" that increasing rural/urban differen- tiation was threatening the country's political and social stability (BBC World Service, October 19, I993). Political events in eastern Europe seem to bear out the Chinese leader's warnings: post-communist elec- tions throughout the region reveal uncompromising rural/urban polarities (Creed I993; I995). In the former Yugoslavia, Misha Glenny suggests that the battle for Sarajevo was not a nationalist conflict, but rather "a struggle between the rural and the urban, the primitive and the cosmopolitan, and above all, between chaos and reason" (I992: 38). As these examples suggest, the rural/urban distinction underlies many of the power relations that shape the experiences of people in nearly every culture. Not surprisingly, then, many cultural activities operate to keep people in their places even in the face of global demo- graphic and economic dislocations such as rural to urban migration and industrialization. Consequently, the rural/urban distinction signi- fies far more powerfully than physical appearances suggest; inhabi- tants of areas where town and country seem nearly indistinguishable may nevertheless elaborate a difference through extensive cultural
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