Appalachia in Regional Context

Place Matters

Dwight B. Billings, Ann E. Kingsolver, Dwight B. Billings, Ann E. Kingsolver

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813179131, 9780813175324
• eBook ISBN: 9780813175348
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

1

“Placing” Futures and Making Sense of Globalization on the Edge of Appalachia

Ann E. Kingsolver

Comparative Spatial and Temporal Perspectives on How “Place Matters”

Regional studies programs—often beleaguered for political, economic, and epistemological reasons within universities—can constitute useful interdisciplinary communities for thinking critically about capitalist logic and practice.¹ And by further comparing perspectives across regions, it is possible to reflect on how “place matters” in studying capitalist globalization. I write as a cultural anthropologist; the central method in our toolkit is engaged listening. For the past thirty years, I have been listening to how people make sense of globalization and act on what they see as its effects on their lives and work. This long-term project in political economic and interpretive ethnography started in my home community of Nicholas County, Kentucky (Kingsolver 2011), with dissertation research between 1986 and 1989 and ongoing listening to how people saw livelihoods and identities affected by coming changes in the tobacco and textile industries that could be seen as related to all that gets glossed as “globalization.” I wanted to follow the way residents imagined the future over several decades; in some ways, then, this long-term project has been a history of the future on the edge of Appalachia.

Conversations in Nicholas County led me to do two comparative projects to explore facets of how people in particular places make sense of global processes. The first project was in Mexico and the United States and addressed how people situated differently by occupation, citizenship, ethnic and/or racial identity, class, gender, age, rural-urban status, and political perspectives interpreted the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA (Kingsolver 2001). I was interested in how people could have strong views about a 2,000-page document to which few had access, in how people attributed NAFTA with agency over their lives, and in the way that economic anxieties translated into xenophobia. California Proposition 187, later ruled unconstitutional, was passed in the same year as NAFTA (1994), and it constituted the beginning of the most recent wave of anti-immigrant legislation across the United States. Capitalist logic is integrally tied to the process of strategic alterity—or the selective devaluing of a group of people on the basis of racialization or national or cultural citizenship, for example, naturalizing their position as the non- or low-wage workforce and enabling the free marketeers to do business. Economic nationalism (see Frank 2000) and particular immigrant groups being selectively targeted for hate speech, violence, and anti-immigrant legislation have grown even stronger in the two decades since then.

Regions—whether multinational, urban-rural, or U.S. North-South—are often invoked in public discourse as uniform sites of tolerance or intolerance, sources of one another’s economic woes, or zones warranting protection or exclusion (Kingsolver 2010). Regional stereotypes demand constant contestation in order to render visible the diversity of views, voices, and histories within them (see Billings, Norman, and Ledford 1999). Those regional stereotypes are tenacious, though, and it can be difficult to break through them. Appalachians, for example, are often depicted in popular culture as homogeneous and isolated, when the region has been engaged deeply with the global economy for centuries through extractive industries, which in turn brought together very diverse labor forces that have shaped the identity of the region.

I took what I learned about capitalist logic and strategic alterity through conversations about NAFTA back to Nicholas County, and I thought about the non-wage and low-wage workforce that has facilitated the illusion of Jeffersonian independence for small-scale tobacco farmers, though farmer itself is not a stable identity category, except through stereotypes (Kingsolver 2015, 2007). Over the past two hundred years, there has been a succession of strategically “othered” workers in the burley tobacco fields of Nicholas and other Kentucky counties at the labor-intensive points in the production cycle, particularly setting, cutting, and hanging the crop. The first of those non-wage or low-wage workforces facilitating family farming was enslaved Africans, a captive immigrant labor force. I learned that one in six residents of Nicholas County at the time of its founding was an enslaved African—a history that had been all but erased by the time of my childhood, when we were taught in integrated schools that slavery had existed only in the flatlands of western Kentucky. That unpaid or low-paid workforce was replaced by those with other identities, also largely unacknowledged as part of what made tobacco farming possible on small farms in the county: immigrant workers from a number of nations in the nineteenth century, seasonal migrants from farther up in the mountains, women and children in farming households, non-cash kin and neighbor-based labor exchange networks, and most recently new immigrants from Latin America who have been hired through the H2A visa program and also outside that system.

The neoliberal capitalist logic of Milton Friedman (1962) and others emphasizes the free marketeer’s independence. That makes it difficult for a tobacco farmer to conceptualize, first, his or her dependence on low-wage or non-wage labor and, second, the fact that he or she is a worker for a global industry, taking on most of the risks of production, at that. My second transnational project compared explanations of globalization by those working in the tobacco industry in Kentucky and by those working in the tea industry in the mountainous region of Sri Lanka, where I interviewed people for seven months in 2004. This genealogy of a longer-term comparative project on interpretations of globalization is provided to explain the source of the later examples in this chapter. The discussion here is primarily of work in Kentucky, but I am engaged currently in a collaborative project in which participants across a number of global mountain regions who have been socially and economically marginalized are comparing notes and strategies.

Globalization can be used to refer to so many processes that it is like the air—everywhere, but hard to touch. Here is one of many working definitions that I find useful in talking with people about it: “Contemporary globalization is the increasing flow of trade, finance, culture, ideas, and people brought about by the sophisticated technology of communications and travel and by the worldwide spread of neoliberal capitalism, and it is the local and regional adaptations to and resistances against these flows” (Lewellen 2002, 7–8).

In all the conversations I have had with people about the processes glossed as globalization over the years, most have talked about it as having both positive and negative aspects. As Farhang Rajaee (2000, 96–97) puts it, “Globalization operates as a two-edged sword. It emancipates but also represses, and it brings together and unites but also divides and forms new hierarchies.” The time-space compression David Harvey (1991) discusses—or the global reach facilitated by new technologies—does not reach everyone equally, and we have seen neoliberal capitalist policies increase inequalities within and across nations rather than bringing equality through the free market, as Milton Friedman envisioned in Capitalism and Freedom. The ironies of unequal application of global communication technologies were expressed eloquently by Mr. Gowreesan, who lost his family in the 2004 tsunami that killed over 30,000 people in Sri Lanka: “A whole generation of ours has been wiped out. Why was no one able to foresee this huge disaster? They say it’s a global village and that the world has shrunk. But we didn’t know of something that happened over three hours ago. Is this the era of information? We were watching the cricket in New Zealand on the day of the incident. Yet we didn’t know about something important for us. Is this globalisation?” (TamilNet 2005).

It seemed unfathomable to him that there could be international broadcasting of a sports event but no advance news of the offshore earthquake that had rocked the coast of Indonesia hours before on December 26, 2004, and led to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean that resulted in almost 300,000 people missing or dead and over a million and a half being displaced. In Mr. Gowreesan’s community, anguish was further compounded by the fact that while men were gathered to watch the cricket match on television, it was disproportionately women and children who were lost to the tsunami; many had been gathering fish that were left on the sand by the initial out-sweep of ocean water that preceded the deadly tsunami wave.

Globalization, then, is no panacea, and neither is a counterfocus on the local. Arif Dirlik (1996, 22), advocating a “critical localism,” points out that the local should not be seen as an antidote to the global, but should be seen “as a site both of promise and predicament.” On the one hand, there are local movements to resist the disastrous effects of global capitalism, such as the Chipko environmental movement organized in India (Guha 1989). On the other, the local can also—Dirlik notes—“serve to disguise oppression.” In Kentucky, on the county level, for example, some repeated assaults might go unprosecuted for years because of the way power works in relation to social networks in the local justice system, and survivors may need to go to another jurisdictional level to get a hearing. Neither the local nor the global should be romanticized, nor perhaps seen in opposition to each other. Wilson and Dissanayake (1996, 7–8) have pointed out that global/local is not an either/or, but a “both/and.” Stuart Hall (1988, 27) has suggested that as the nation-state is waning, regions have simultaneously gone above and below “the nation-state, the national economies, the national cultural identities, to something new” that is both “global and local in the same moment.”

In relation to the focus of this book, how does “place matter” in thinking about the local and the global? Arturo Escobar (2001a, 141) notes that “place has dropped out of sight in the ‘globalization craze’ of recent years, and this erasure of place has profound consequences for our understanding of culture, knowledge, nature, and economy.” He critiques the way that the global/local construction associates the global “with space, capital, history and agency while the local, conversely, is linked to place, labor, and tradition—as well as with women, minorities, the poor and, one might add, local cultures” (Escobar 2001a, 155–156). Wanda Rushing (2009, 20–21) argues that “place mediates the impact of global and local processes” because it is “uniquely situated in networks of global relations and cultural flows, as well as embedded in local history and culture.” Rushing (2009, 18) further observes that “place itself is caught in the crossfire [between localization and globalization]. Both perspectives treat place more as a bystander than as an agentic player in social life.” Regional or place-based interdisciplinary studies can help us think about both space and time as contingent, socially constructed, and situated within power relations. Rushing argues that “place can be seen as a crucible of cultural, social, and political interactions that occur within global flows of trade, migration, and epidemics and not as a space of stasis. These interdependent processes connect real people and places to the past, present, and future while integrating the global and local, as well as the urban and rural, in positive and negative ways” (Rushing 2009, 188).

How does place matter as we talk about globalization? How do the workers going into factories in foreign trade zones in several different countries to handle the same pieces of cloth that will become a garment on the rack at a Walmart experience where they are? What smells, sights, and memories do they experience as they enter the factory that have to do with what place they are in? And how are those workers involved in negotiating place itself? Like Rushing, David Harvey sees place as constructed constantly and actively: “Places are constructed and experienced as material ecological artifacts and intricate networks of social relations. They are the focus of the imaginary, of beliefs, longings, and desires. . . . They are an intense focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings, and they are a distinctive product of institutionalized social and political-economic power” (Harvey 1996, 316).

Feminist critiques by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (1994), and J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2005) point out the way globalization has been mapped and discussed in traditional patriarchal imaginings from imperial conquest and ownership of colonial territories to current discussions of the penetration of capital into marginalized regions. What else has been naturalized with capitalist logic of globalization that might be recognized or contested if “place” is moved to the center of analyses? What about the environment? Marcel Proust (1948 [1896]) wrote, “We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees,” but how many people are listening? Where are the voices of the trees and streams in talk of globalization? Examples may be found in Chipko activists in India protecting long-term resources, and in Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Kentucky Rising activists speaking up on behalf of the water being polluted by mountaintop removal mining runoff and coal ash sludge, but, most often, consideration of the long-term, the social bottom line, and the environment lose out in global capitalist logic. How did it ever come to make sense that corporate rights to minerals under the land took priority over collective and individual rights to the trees and homes and farms on top of it?

The social and environmental consequences of resource extraction in Appalachia, and the redistribution of the economic gains from that activity, can be compared with the same processes in other regions. Tunde Agbola and Moruf Alabi (2003, 272), for example, write about the environmental destruction of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria through the extraction of oil: “Long term sustainable development cannot occur in a situation of deteriorating environmental circumstances.” The same point was made by Chico Mendes (1989) and other activists in the Amazonian rainforest. How do we think about accountability for a region’s natural and social resources and the possibility of even having a place to make plans about, through whatever development discourse prevails? Attention to place can facilitate the reexamination of capitalist logic through its constantly calling any logic or claim into question. Place is, as Dirlik (2001, 18) says, “the location . . . where the social and the natural meet, where the production of nature by the social is not clearly distinguishable from the production of the social by the natural.” And as Doreen Massey (1994, 5) reminds us, “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested, and multiple.”

Fellow residents of Nicholas County, Kentucky, who make theory just as everyone else does in order to navigate social life, taught me that place is a verb. We all “place” ourselves, others, actions, and ideas differently according to the social context (Kingsolver 1992). In the globalization literature, there is often reference to “local knowledge.” But local knowledge is not simple to contextualize when you take “placing” into account. “Insider” and “outsider” can be fairly fluid identities, but they can also be fixed in particular strategic moments. This can be seen at the national level as cultural citizenship expands and contracts with responses to political or economic crises (as when Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps, or antiimmigrant discourse and legislation ramps up), and it happens at the local level, as well. In Nicholas County, I have seen people and their ideas valued, devalued, localized, and distanced through intricate forms of “placing” the same person as an insider or outsider. Social science researchers as well as the researched, or those who collaborate with us, are “placed,” often as both insiders and outsiders, as Kirin Narayan has pointed out: “The loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those we study are multiple and in flux. Factors such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, or sheer duration of contacts may at different times outweigh the cultural identity we associate with insider or outsider status” (Narayan 1993, 671–672).

Here is an example of how placing matters, in terms of both people and ideas. Tom Hensley worked very hard in the 1980s to organize a regional food system across county lines in Kentucky; he spoke with farmers’ groups, chambers of commerce, Rotary Clubs, and anyone else who would listen. He lined up contracts with Kentucky Fried Chicken for locally produced chicken (most of theirs came from Georgia, it turned out) and cabbage for coleslaw, loans for vertically integrated vegetable processing plants, and locally controlled trucking for the regional food collective. He got the support of USDA representatives for what he called his Kentucky First campaign. But he never won support from fellow farmers in Nicholas County and surrounding counties because he and his ideas couldn’t be “placed” right—he was seen as an incomer, because he had been born in Harlan and married into Nicholas County, and one local textile worker told me that Tom just did not have the local political support needed to pull something like that off. I would add that that was partly because of how he could be placed in terms of the ways in which local class processes and political processes intersected. Tom Hensley’s Kentucky First campaign (arguably a forerunner of the current Kentucky Proud labeling) was an idea ahead of its time, and although he died before he could see them, he would be delighted to see the current attention to local food systems in Kentucky and the Kentucky Proud (kyproud.com) and Appalachia Proud labeling and marketing networks.

Tom Hensley wanted to organize agricultural producers into a collective that worked in this way:

What it amounts to, the way I had it planned, is for the producers, the truck drivers that go to get the chicken and the people in the factory mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Place Matters
• 1. “Placing” Futures and Making Sense of Globalization on the Edge of Appalachia
• 2. Transforming Places: Toward a Global Politics of Appalachia
• 3. Place, Autonomy, and the Politics of Hope
• 4. The Power of Place and the Place of Power
• 5. “There Are No Gay People Here”: Expanding the Boundaries of Queer Youth Visibility in the Rural United States
• 6. Gathering Wild Greens: Foodways Lessons from Appalachia’s Past
• 7. Buckwild Mad Men: Necropolitics and Masculinity in Appalachia
• 8. Reclaiming Place: Making Home
• 9. Somewheres on the Track: Place, Art, and Music in Eastern Kentucky
• 10. Teaching Region
• List of Contributors
• Index