Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intentional Peasants: The Unexpected Persistence of Homesteading in Appalachia

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

BCS 0703373 Michael Watts Jason Strange Intentional Peasants: the Unexpected Persistence of Homesteading in Appalachia Small-scale rural subsistence production is a vital, ongoing practice in many regions of the United States. Despite its prevalence, such contemporary homesteading has been virtually overlooked in both the popular media and in the academic literature. Contemporary homesteading is not a quaint and fading historical vestige; it emerges directly from current political, economic and cultural dynamics. Thus, it offers an excellent, and unused, window into numerous key social issues. Applying ethnographic and historical methods to an intensive case-study of homesteading in an Appalachian county in eastern Kentucky, this doctoral dissertation research project will examine two hypotheses. First, homesteading is pursued, in part, as a direct response to the impacts on working families of restructuring in local labor markets. While capitalist economic development has made widespread material prosperity possible, the concentrated property ownership intrinsic to capitalism has substantially precluded the realization of that possibility. The capitalist labor market increasingly confronts workers throughout the US, and particularly in eastern Kentucky, with the prospect of working long hours for declining wages, performing dull, repetitive tasks without benefits or job security. Homesteading is, in part, a strategy for limiting one's dependence upon this job market. It is, in short, an unrecognized form of labor activism. The second hypothesis begins from the observation that homesteaders in eastern Kentucky are divided into two sub-cultural groups, the country-folks and the back-to-the-landers. These two groups are local instantiations of a nationally prominent distinction between "hicks" and "hippies", right and left, or, more recently, red state and blue state. Even though it has been widely misunderstood, this is a real distinction that has played a key role in the electoral success of neo-liberal candidates and in the creation of a hostile policy climate for labor. The investigators will demonstrate that, as it occurs in eastern Kentucky, this sub-cultural distinction is not a product of rural or urban origins, family background, or socio-economic status, but of the preeminence of orality in one group and of active literacy in the other. Although overlooked, homesteading is precisely the kind of non-elite social action that critical social scholars have productively emphasized over the past several decades. As a disregarded social movement, homesteading provides an unparalleled opportunity to bring into view and understand 1) the impacts on working families of dominant political-economic trends, 2) how many rural families are responding to these impacts in creative and unexpected ways, as well as 3) the cultural foundations of a neo-liberal order in which many people are forced to turn to homesteading, while other avenues of resistance are foreclosed. This project will add a fundamental new chapter to research on the contemporary US and capitalist global modernity, opening novel terrain for innovative rural economic and social development policy. It may also help inform or reorient the social-justice efforts of civil society-based actors. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.