The Search For Community In Appalachia

The Search For Community In Appalachia by Ronald D Eller In recent years we Americans have expressed growing concern about the decline of community in our land. ' Such diverse writers as Simone Weil, Christopher Lasch, Peter Berger, Wendell Berry and a host of others have lamented the individualizing tendencies of modern culture and have called for a revival of the mediating structures that bind our society.2 The "Roots" phenomenon of the 1970s reflected as much a desire for connectedness in our present lives as it did a desire to rediscover our ancestors, and recently Robert Bellah and his associates have renewed the debate over our national character with their best-seller, Habits of the Heart.1 Even President Reagan has found political fuel in our collective anxiety, calling for a "rebirth of the American community" as a prerequisite to "the rebuilding of America." We in Appalachian studies should be doubly interested in this debate since the search for community has been central to our work in the region for many years. No theme has been stronger in our literature than the effort to understand the Appalachian character and to explain the nature of the mountain community. If we agree with John Stephenson that Appalachian studies is as much a social movement as an academic enterprise, then that movement itself emerged out of our collective concern for the survival of the mountain community.4 From another perspective, it is our common search for roots and for meaningful relationships in a rootless society that brings us all together as the Appalachian studies community. Yet I wonder how much of our use of the term community is rhetorical—like that of some political leaders who campaign on The above is a revised version of the author's keynote address at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Boone, North Carolina, March 21, 1986. 45 behalf of family and community and then legislate for those policies which destroy them. How much do we really know about community in Appalachia? How much are we really committed as scholars and individuals to the obligations which community implies? Is community even possible in our selfcentered world? If so, what role should Appalachian studies play in the rebuilding of community in the mountains and in the nation as a whole? Certainly no aspect of mountain life has been so frequently studied and yet so misunderstood and maligned as the Appalachian community. In fact, for over a hundred years observers of mountain life have denied the existence of community altogether in our region. Emma Bell Miles, who was otherwise a perceptive observer, wrote in 1905 that "there is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together, man to man, as friends, but not as a body of men..."5 Writers from that time to the presentincluding Horace Kephart, Samuel Tyndale Wilson, James Watt Raine, Jack Weiler, Rupert Vance, Thomas R. Ford and many others—have continued that traditional view. Jack Weiler summarized the attitudes of most when he wrote in 1965 that the mountaineers "have no community life as such or life outside their very limited family group.... They are virtually impossible to organize into groups and are traditionalistic in the extreme."6 Given this perceived absence of community, John C. Campbell concluded that the dominant trait of the mountaineer was independence , "independence raised to the fourth power.... Heredity and environment," he wrote, "have conspired to make him an extreme individualist."7 Campbell devoted an entire chapter in his classic book to the individualism of the southern highlanders, and almost every writer since has found individualism to be one of the most powerful determinants of the mountain character. According to the received literature, the mountaineer is the extreme individualist who cares nothing for cooperation and has no commitment to community beyond what he can get out of it for himself. This notion of mountain individualism has provided grist for the theoretical mill of those who would see the region as uncivilized, backward, barbaric or degenerate. It has become the popular symbol of the mountaineer in cartoons and the media, and has been used to explain everything from labor violence to stream pollution. In fact, the origins...