Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (review)

Hill Folks explores interrelationships between shifting images of the Ozarks and historical circumstances. The book opens with a sketch of the beginnings of white settlement in the region, with particular attention to the ways images of the region's topography and ecosystems attracted settlers throughout the nineteenth century. The first three chapters explore how the area developed as a culturally distinct region, with thorough and engaging discussions of economic enterprises, transportation systems, religion, and social life.

The book's second section explores continuity and change following the turn of the nineteenth century. During this era, nineteenth-century semisubsistence farming was replaced by an economic base established through twentieth-century industries such as logging, mining, raising cash crops, and tourism. Two important consequences of these historical changes were the migration of residents from the area and the creation of the stereotypical Ozarker image in the popular media. Blevins critiques the image that the region was populated by subsistence farmers living in remote hollows or isolated mountain cabins and debunks other pernicious stereotypes about Ozark life.

In the section titled "Endings and Traditions," Blevins discusses the region from the post-World War II era to contemporary times, further challenging the highly romanticized but also ridiculous and degrading images of rural communities. Although honestly assessing social problems such as poverty and the Ozarks' lack of educational resources and social services, Blevins argues that the contemporary region is not especially different from other rural communities. He demonstrates how representations of Ozarkers in comic strips, movies, and tourist attractions are rooted in a nostalgic sense of tragic loss over rural community life coupled with condescending attitudes about rural southerners. Blevins provides ample ways in which this ambivalence is played out in tourists' and newcomers' varied interests in the region. The sense of nostalgia about the region, he argues, is often related more to an interest in pristine landscapes than to a sympathetic interest in rural people, while the sense of disdain comes from an ambivalent desire to exoticize rural people and their traditional culture while valuing wilderness landscapes.

The argument that folklorists can contribute to mythmaking and stereotyping is a familiar one, and an important facet of Blevins's critique. The history of the discipline demonstrates how early folklore scholarship was embedded within cultural assumptions that exoticized and denigrated people even when folklorists were arguing that their scholarship supported and affirmed traditional life. Blevins conscientiously demonstrates how folklore scholarship and public presentations of folklore have been complicit in creating and perpetuating inaccurate and degrading images of the Ozarks.

As a contribution to new formulations of folklore theory, Blevins's critique is flawed by dated ideas about the discipline and practice of folklore. He characterizes folk culture, for example, as comprised of traditional expressive forms that were "the products of an inward-looking, enclosed, unself-conscious people." He follows up his characterization of folklore by adding that "folk arts were not performance arts" (pp. 258-9). These types of statements become a problem if readers assume that Blevins's characterization of folklore represents contemporary thinking in the discipline. Most folklorists would object to the way that Blevins historicizes folk traditions by placing them into the past. Folklorists have criticized the characterization of folklore as an expression of "unself-conscious people" for decades, and performance-centered approaches provide fascinating ways of looking at folklore, including material folk culture, as performance arts.

Folklorists' public programming should continue to address ways in which culture has been brokered by hucksters who do not share their interests in using folklore scholarship to create a better understanding of a region's history and culture. There is a great need for more public presentations in the Ozarks by contemporary folklorists who recognize how the disciplinary baggage of folklore scholarship can serve to exoticize and marginalize a region, even when folklorists use research methods and theories in the service of loftier goals. Blevins has provided an important addition to...