I arrived at Chuck Yeager Airport (Chuck not only had the “right stuff,” he was from WV) around 2pm yesterday. By 2:15pm, I was in a hip little coffee shop called Moxy, in downtown Charleston. Within 30 minutes, one of my best childhood friends met me, even though I had only let her know that I would be in town, by e-mail, earlier yesterday morning. My friend, who grew up in a “holler” in McDowell County, is now an insanely successful pediatric dentist in Charleston.
After getting to catch up over a bite to eat, I was back on the road to The Holiday Inn in Barboursville, a small town that happens to boast the largest shopping mall in the state. After settling to the hotel, I ran out for some meds to battle my cold that continues to persist. Later, I had dinner at the hotel bar and watched Stanford get sent home from the tourney.
After dinner, I met my first ASA conference attendees, a couple from Union College in Kentucky.
The conference started in earnest at 11am. There were too many concurrent sessions. I had no clue how to choose which to attend. I started with the Appalachian Law Center session, which included a discussion about black lung and whistle blower protections for miners concerned about the safety in the mines. The woman sitting next to me was a professor at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA. My brother received his law degree from there as a member of the first graduating class in 2000. However, she didn’t start teaching there until 2001.
I left that session a little early to go see the end of the Doc Watson Family Story book session presented by Roy Andrade from East Tennessee State University. I’m glad I caught the end of his presentation, if for no other reason than to know that this storybook exists.
From there I headed to the coal camp documentary organized by the University of Kentucky. However, it was not exactly what I had in mind, plus all of the content is online and I can view it whenever I choose. Barbara Kingsolver’s sister, Ann, and her students were responsible for the content. From there I stopped by a session about Rising Appalachia, a musical/performance art duo (as far as I could tell) and a paper picking apart all of the symbolism in one of their music videos. That was also a little too specific for me.
I ran out of that session to one about movie representations of the hillbilly stereotype. The paper I arrived for was about Wrong Turn I and Wrong Turn II, both about upper-middle class out-of-towners passing through West Virginia when they take a “wrong turn” and end up in a remote area of the hills where the local in-bred mutant cannibals (Wrong Turn I) or the local toxic waste produced mutants (Wrong Turn II) hunt the college-age prepsters. The paper specifically looked at reviews of the movies to see how this media representation of the “hillbilly” was perceived. What I found most interesting is that the social commentary in the film was, for the most part, lost on most that reviewed it. A very nice commentary on the papers presented in this session was given by an English professor from Hobart and William Smith College, just right down the road from Colgate.
My last session of the day was a plenary session led by a percussive dancer and a musicologist-turned-storyteller from Shepherd University. Their presentation was more of a discussion as they addressed the hillbilly stereotype. They introduced a new “super Appalachian” stereotype or what I would call the wanna-be-hillbillies. These are folks steeped in the old traditions (and proud of it) more so than people that would have lived in Appalachia when these traditions were more a part of life.
The conversation included a discussion of preservation of traditions and Appalachian heritage and the potential for the evolution of these traditions, sometimes as part of the preservation. Are such evolutions allowed? Would changes to folk dances be welcomed or considered to lack authenticity? And, as far as nostalgia goes, why are so many folks nostalgic for the “good ole days?”
My thought about this has to do with the loss of the mountaineer lifestyle/culture. The freedom of the wilderness and subsistence on the land shifted as the mineral companies entered the scene and sent the men into the mines. As mountaineers were sold on consumerism, their older simpler lifestyles gave way to ones in which money bought things that were once unnecessary or undesirable. Add in a flood of immigrants with their own cultural traditions and the local culture would at least be watered down as all groups would move in even the smallest of ways towards assimilation.
In the end, I think this assimilation is the key to the nostalgia we all feel for the old traditions. A cultural heritage was lost not because of a truly conscious choice, but because the economy and influence of the coal companies would have forced a drastic change in lifestyle for many. And this would have been for the “good times” when employment was easy to come by (ignore whether the terms of that employment were fair or beneficial to the workers and their families). Later, as the mines required fewer and fewer workers and the merciless wave of poverty rolled through the hills and valleys of Appalachia, media representations of the poor, backwards, downtrodden hillbilly created or imposed an identity on the region. An identity many would seek to distance themselves from. I would argue that this distancing due to external forces, is part of the loss of cultural traditions in the mountains. And, it is responsible for the extreme nostalgia for this place held by many of its displaced children.
The war on poverty and the images of Appalachia disseminated around the globe helped the region to move away from its traditions. Since this cultural loss is, in a sense, imposed by the views of outsiders, the reaction of the locals to distance themselves from their traditions is an act of assimilation. It is this act of assimilation and, perhaps, the regret associated with it, that explains some of the strong desire many have for recapturing the “lost” traditions. Traditions that shouldn’t have been lost in the first place. And, I think this is why so many long for the truest, purest representation of the culture. It has to be authentic!!
Ready for Day Two!
The Hillbilly Astrophysicist 