Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century

Introduction

1 Introduction “Would you rather have present day or olden days?” Tradition and Transition in Kentucky Burley Tobacco Production Frequently over the past decade, I have heard Kentucky natives comment with sadness on the changing landscape of their home state: the countryside of childhood will soon be gone. The links between land and culture, sense of place, history, and identity have been widely acknowledged.1 According to Lucy Lippard, “The intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand—our land, our place, the local.”2 Such intersections, of course, are neither inherent in the land itself nor static. We form the ground on which we stand through our use of it and as we come to view it not just as land but as landscape. Gregory Clark argues, “Land becomes landscape when it is assigned the role of symbol, and as symbol it functions rhetorically.”3 It is precisely because landscapes symbolize something about who we are that shifting landscapes often result in feelings of loss. The source of the sense of loss expressed by so many Kentuckians is not the expected—the loss of land to the proliferation of subdivisions and “big-box” retail stores, although certainly many bemoan such development . This sense of loss follows observations that the tobacco fields are disappearing. It is difficult for many to understand the loss of tobacco—a crop that has come to symbolize addiction, disease, and a deceptive industry—as lamentable. However, this loss has vast economic and cultural consequences for farming communities, as well as for 2 Burley the state as a whole. Tobacco was once Kentucky’s largest cash crop, and although other types of tobacco are grown in the state, historically over 90 percent of the tobacco grown in Kentucky has been burley tobacco.4 The crop has been an important symbol of regional identity, and the changing landscape symbolizes a shift to a “brave new world”5 in which King Burley no longer reigns and the future is uncertain—both economically and symbolically. I came to this project thinking that it would somehow be possible to conduct research with tobacco farmers disconnected from tobacco products. I found that not only is that not possible but that the interconnections are central to the story. This book is premised on the idea that the stories of tobacco farmers and of burley tobacco in Kentucky must be understood not separate from but within the context of the changing meanings of the crop. In the interwoven process of collecting and interpreting the material that forms the basis of this book, I bring together my training as a folklorist with the theory and methods of the field of rhetoric , particularly the work of Kenneth Burke.6 In bringing the two together, not only do I view the performance of traditional cultural practices as persuasive and attempt to understand the rhetorical force of the usage of terms such as tradition and heritage, but I also investigate the interactions between the performance of cultural practices and public discourses about such practices. “Public discourses” have been examined in a range of fields, often involving questions of what constitutes public and how various media produce, sustain, change, or limit understanding of an issue. In his rhetorical reading of American tourist landscapes, Gregory Clark defines “public discourse” as “the ongoing process of inquiry and exchange that is sustained by people who constitute . . . community .”7 Clark understands public discourses not only as “tak[ing] the form of print and speech” but also as “experiences not immediately discursive at all.”8 My interest is in the emerging and evolving discourses surrounding tobacco farming in the context of other public discourses on tobacco, such as those related to smoking, health, and disease, as well as those related to farming more generally , such as increasing calls in recent years for the procurement and consumption of foods grown by local farmers. This requires an understanding of the historical conditions in which these multiple discourses have emerged and the ways in which they compete. Introduction 3 It also requires an understanding of the discourses of tobacco farmers. This book is the result of the collection of two kinds of data, broadly speaking. First, I rely on data that I gathered through ethnographic fieldwork primarily in central and northern Kentucky, the center of burley tobacco production. Research began on this project in 2005, with intensive fieldwork...