Read an Excerpt
The Poco Field
AN AMERICAN STORY OF PLACE
By Talmage A. Stanley
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03667-5
Introduction
The Places toward Which I Seem to Bend
The Poco Field: An American Story of Place is an effort to hear the stories, to understand the places at the edges of a particular family's history and photographs, and to gain a deeper understanding of Appalachian and American culture. This book is an endeavor to give voice to the experiences and histories that rest behind the silences and assumptions of middle-class American culture and the global economy. The Poco Field encourages a new vision of what it means to take seriously the whole way of life of a place and the people who daily define it. I demonstrate that it is possible and then explore what it means to undertake a critique of contemporary American culture from the complex perspective and experiences of middle-class persons in an Appalachian place, narrating a history of larger economic, political, and social forces and at the same time, in the same place, a "people's history." In so doing, The Poco Field challenges ideas of Appalachian exceptionalism, that Appalachia is somehow separate and distinct from America, countering ideas and images of Appalachia as metaphor for America. The Poco Field runs counter to many long-held and honored assumptions and understandings, and at the same time deepens and expands much of the current usages of place-based approaches and practices.
Not yet twenty-six years old, fresh out of seminary in 1986, I took an appointment in four rural churches in Wythe County, Virginia. In seminary, I received a thorough and careful education in the theology of community, in the importance of inclusive communities, in communities of faith, suffering communities, covenant communities, disciple communities, and the list could go on. I carried this with me when I went to Wythe County. In listening to my neighbors and learning from them, I was able to discern a wide distance between my training to think about community and my neighbors' understanding of it. In truth, what I learned about community as a seminary student had little bearing on how the communities in which I found myself practiced and experienced their interweaving. My training in community did not allow for the possibility of all manner of conflict, of political struggle, of social exclusion, of social change, of resistance to justice, of the death of communities, or of defeat. From many of my Wythe County neighbors, I learned that instead of communities, they spoke of themselves as being in that place. They often used the term "community," but they were talking of something more geographic, more social, and more dynamic than I was first able to understand.
In the years that followed, I came to understand that theologians, Chambers of Commerce, advertisers, politicians, planners, artists, scholars, essayists, novelists, and playwrights often spoke of community and used the term in the most positive and affirming ways possible. No one had one bad thing to say about community. Likewise, no one had anything historically or culturally specific to say about community either. Community had seemingly become a term that anyone could use for any purpose. With years of learning and reflection, I came to understand what my Wythe County neighbors had perhaps known—because of its particularity, because it acknowledges and owns the reality of social and cultural conflicts, place is a far better way to speak about some of what we mean by community with its avoidance of conflict.
The Poco Field begins from the observation that any place is the result of a prolonged interaction and interrelationship between three complex realities. The natural environment (topography, landscape, minerals, climate, and water supply, etc....) helps to determine the type of social relationships and economic systems produced in a specific place. The built environment is the human response to and appropriation of the land, climate, and other natural resources for subsistence, profit, and power. This constitutes the basis for social hierarchies and interactions in a place. Human culture and history, the whole way of life of a place, mutually interactive with the natural and built environments, constitutes the third element of place. Place is a social process, the product of human relationships lived out in a specific landscape, in the context of social and cultural forces and conflicts known in that place as well as in other places formed in analogous processes. Understanding place through the interconnection of oral histories, family stories, and photographs demonstrates that individual identities, family histories, social conflicts, global economics, local culture, social structures, art, politics, and the natural environment are all interwoven and inseparable. Because place is a social process, the human community, the citizens of a place, bear responsibility for continuing and sustaining this interweaving, but also have the potential to destroy, to render broken and torn the place interwoven over a long, long history. These insights make clear that place is always more complicated, more political, more conflicted than what many people have in mind when referring to community and "sense of place." Because place is largely the continuing result of the interaction between human culture and the physical environment, every place is defined by deep conflicts of persons, institutions, and processes, both local and global.
In Saltville, Virginia; Keystone, West Virginia; Sea Island, South Carolina; Manhattan, Kansas; Burlington, Vermont; in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York; in New Orleans' lower Ninth Ward; and in hundreds of other American localities, citizens concerned about the future of their communities are learning that education, questions of identity, public policies, politics, and cultural analysis undertaken from the perspective of the place are central to building enduring, sustainable communities. Citizens are also learning that the choice for this place-based work requires intellectual, civic, and moral skills that often are not part of the educational process or the development of citizens. Instead, American middle-class culture, in the main, conveys messages and lessons of moving on, of going where the most money is, or the best education is, or the most stylish shopping. One's place, however central to one's identity it may be, is of secondary importance to social status, economic success, professional advancement, and full access to consumer goods. These lessons of placelessness go to the root of who we are as Americans. Corporations also enact this when the resources of a particular place are depleted or no longer needed, operations are closed, support withdrawn, responsibility denied, and the corporation moves on to the next fashionable or valuable place. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if citizens have access to the world's consumer goods, their place is of little value, and places are interchangeable. Little does it matter that consumer goods often work to obliterate or obscure that communities have died and are dying, or that our prospect for full participation in the decisions and policies that affect our places is lost. Fast-food restaurants, national chain stores, and strip malls at an Interstate exit are becoming the standards by which communities judge their success and individuals measure their well-being.
Because individual lives and the collective life of particular places carry in them history and the global issues of the time, family stories and local histories make clear that these tendencies are part of the very fabric of the varied American cultures, traceable in American history from its beginnings, shaping who we are and how we think both of ourselves and of the practice of citizenship. However, these changes and processes acquired intensity and new force in the twentieth century, particularly in the decades after 1945. In these years, one among the many tensions for Americans became on one hand commitment or connection to a place. On the other hand, there is the expectation that to move ahead, to fulfill one's destiny, to continue to lay claim to an idealized American Dream, one must always be willing to move on to claim the opportunities America is believed to offer.
Citizens working for sustainable communities are also often finding that the same family stories and local histories that point to tensions and losses can also point the way in building new, democratic futures in a place. For citizens engaged in this work, the concepts and methodologies of cultural studies prove helpful. Moreover, the stories of families and places are giving new relevancy to the concepts and ideas of cultural studies, moving us beyond jargon and passing trends, demonstrating the power of cultural theory to help us understand our lives and to question long-held assumptions.
However, much more is needed to equip us for the important work of building stronger communities. We must have a clear idea of the difference between working for a community and working for a place. We need a precise understanding of what constitutes placesgeographically, geologically, historically, socially, culturally. We need a working and growing acquaintance with the dynamic interconnection between place and identity and the long-term political, social, and cultural importance of place. There must be for us a deepening and broadening awareness that the cultural and social processes that have brought us to this point are so common as to be embedded in one way or another in all families' stories and all places' histories.
This requires a scholarship, educational practice, and civic life theoretically and practically grounded in specific places. Understanding American culture from the perspective of particular places, especially many Appalachian places, becomes a definitive political act by using the usually unrecorded, lived experiences of places to make connections between personal stories and local histories and the events and social practices of larger cultural and social history. Taking a place's perspective to understand our lives and times helps create the conditions of possibility in which people can think and act in new ways, supporting the emergence of new social structures and practices. The interdisciplinary practice of focusing on particular places and lives to tell American stories can contribute to the work of enabling young Appalachians and persons from other regions to see their places and families in new ways, not so much as something to escape, but as a source of identity and strength, informing the practice of a daily, engaged citizenship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Poco Field by Talmage A. Stanley Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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