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  • Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America
  • Arlene Stein
Jennifer Sherman . Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 264 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-5905-0, $19.95 (paper).

Sociological and popular culture representations of rural poverty are relatively scant, the recent independent film Winter's Bone being a notable exception. This ethnography of a down-on-its heels logging community in a Northern California community gives us a window into this "other America"—the America of junk cars and refrigerators in front lawns, of widespread methamphetamine addiction, of family values, and love of the land.

By looking at how small-town Americans use everyday moral discourses to make sense of their lives—particularly in relation to having a job or not, being on welfare or not, Those Who Work, Those Who Don't also offers a profound analysis of American political culture. How do poverty and unemployment contribute to the evolution of specific conceptions of morality? What are the consequences of these moral conceptions and discourses, both for this community and for rural America more generally?

As a nation, Sherman writes, "we seldom acknowledge the degree to which our culture is built upon an extremely moralistic set of doctrines." Chief among these values, she argues, is the belief in the moral value of hard work and the doctrine of individual achievement. If middle-class Americans are hell bent on the latter, as Bellah et al.'s 1985 book, Habits of the Heart, suggested, rural Americans fuse a belief in individual achievement with a pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps ethos and frontier sense of possibility. At the same time, they rely on the kindness of those around them—family members, [End Page 672] neighbors, friends—to bail them out and to provide a cushion against the depredations of the market. Unlike the middle class, the rural poor tend to reject geographic mobility as a solution to economic fluctuations: why bother moving to an uncertain place in search of work, disconnected from one's support network and sense of intimate familiarity when the financial rewards for doing so are less than certain?

Sherman helps us to understand the enduring appeal of "traditional family values" and how they regulate the behavior of working class and poor people and lead them to take fairly conservative positions, positions that often go against their own self-interest—such as opposition to welfare. In relatively homogeneous communities like "Golden Valley," where there were few visible social divisions, these moral positions provide a sense of distinction and difference and therefore become centrally important. When I studied a community in central Oregon over ten years ago, a town that was very similar to the one Sherman documents, having also experienced tremendous job loss and dislocation due to the decline of the timber industry, I found much the same. In that town, Christian conservative activists organized a motley bunch of disgruntled residents, convincing them that their own insecurity was caused by a small, all but invisible group of community members who seemed both similar and different from them—gays and lesbians. Those Who Work, Those Who Don't, in contrast, documents one community at a relatively settled time, or at least one that seems untouched by moral entrepreneurs of the sort I met in Oregon. Perhaps that's why, for Sherman's respondents, ideologies play little role, and few Golden Valley residents speak about attending church, let alone a political meeting. Nonetheless, they share with my respondents in Oregon a very clear sense of right and wrong, and these conceptions often guide their lives and their choices.

For rural Americans, and perhaps for many poor and working class Americans, there is a fundamental tension between the individualistic and communal aspirations at work in here. They believe that individuals should work for what they get and that good people should help each other in time of need. Sherman's book helps us to understand how these enduring American values provide a foundation for conservative political ideologies. It also helps us to understand why the Christian right...

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