Rural Community in the Appalachian South (review)

Book Reviews Beaver, Patricia Duane. Rural Community in theAppalachian South. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Notes, bibliography, index. 182 pp. $18.00. "Oh no! Not another Appalachian community study!" This was my first reaction when presented with the task of reviewing Pat Beaver's Rural Community in the Appalachian South. In manuscript, this study was awarded the University Press of Kentucky's Appalachian Award in 1985. Still, I approached the book with caution bordering on suspicion. The Appalachian community study has been around for a very long time. It has been with us at least since the 1920s, despite Emma Bell Miles declaration in 1905 that Appalachia had no sense of community. John C. Campbell 's classic, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921) has elements of a community study in it, as does James Watt Raine's Land of the Saddlebags (1924). The first professional sociologist to attempt the task of the study of Appalachian community was probably J. Wesley Hatcher, who wrote a piece entitled "Appalachian America" for W. T. Couch's Culture in the South (1934, pp. 374-402). James S. Brown began his Beech Creek Studies in the 1940s. Then Marion Pearsall's Little Smoky Ridge began in 1959 what became a fad of community studies: Elmora Matthews (1965), Jack Weiler (1965), John Fetterman (1967), Rena Gazeway (1969), John Stephenson (1968), and others, including David H. Loof (1971) and Robert Coles (1967), which were as much community studies as studies of the characteristics of Appalachian children. So now comes Pat Beaver's study! One can be excused perhaps, for fearing that this was just another study plowing the same ground, and a study that might not add very much to our knowledge. But this one is different, and is, in my view, genuinely helpful in giving us significant handles on the elusive Appalachian community. First of all, this study gives us a good sense of context and process. Beaver does not present Appalachian community as something apart and frozen in space and time. Though there is some confusion in Beaver's first chapter about whether she is speaking of the three Western North Carolina communities she has chosen to study or of the whole counties involved, her treatment emerges early with a strong sense of historical background. And subsequent chapters clearly present her communities in the process of change. She never presents them or the people in them as atrophied entities. Some in the social sciences may object to her methodology. She never carefully explains how she worked. Nor are there graphs or any statistics. Only generalizations with supporting individual case studies. Anecdotes? Perhaps. But I for one found her approach fascinating. Her narrative reads very well, and is more understandable to the nonsocial scientist than interpretations of numerical data. These pages are loaded with individual cases—anecdotes if you wish. But I found them clearly illustrative of the points the author was trying to make. And on several occasions , Beaver shows a warm kind of "genius" for getting at the heart and soul of the matter with an insightful illustration. Perhaps Pat Beaver's best chapter is the one on "Sex Roles and the Life Cycle." The way she treats child care, the expectations of 86 children, discipline, the growing-up process, the choice of mate, the establishment of new family units, and the problems associated with the care of the elderly, all ring remarkably true. Yet "modernization" has modified mountain tradition, and Beaver has given us a clear sense of what industrialization has done to and for her communities, as both men and women have found jobs away from the traditional farm. A shortcoming which has been noticed by some I have spoken with, is Beaver's complete lack of any treatment of mountain religion. She does ignore the role of the church in the Appalachian community! Her particular three communities may not have had strong churches, though that would be unusual in Appalachia's "most religious area" of Western North Carolina. Beaver devotes a whole chapter to "Foreigners," or those who have moved into her communities since 1960. First came the "summer folk," then the "back-to-thelanders ." And both brought...