In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes by Edward Slavishak
  • Andrew Crooke
Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes. By Edward Slavishak. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 212. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2539-9.)

How have visitors to the Appalachian Mountains obtained a working knowledge of its terrain and inhabitants? Why have they conceptualized this region, recorded its details, and conveyed their findings in intricate ways? Edward Slavishak explores such questions in Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes. Situated at the crossroads of environmental history, critical regionalism, and visual studies, this masterful book synthesizes these fields to assess the approaches of several Appalachian interlopers. Slavishak’s case studies of preservationists, planners, hikers, anthropologists, and photographers convincingly demonstrate that specialists proved themselves to their peers by gaining and displaying on-the-ground expertise through formidable, marginalized landscapes.

In a superb introduction, Slavishak not only acquaints readers with these highland sojourners, all of whom sought to avert the label “tenderfeet” while pursuing their projects, but also argues against simplistic dichotomies between city and wilderness, outsiders and insiders, artificial and authentic representations (p. 5). Resisting a scholarly impulse to emphasize “the cultural and environmental perversion” of Appalachia by shortsighted if well-intentioned “intervenors,” Slavishak concentrates instead on their idiosyncratic motivations, their particular routines, and their “‘will to improve’” themselves and their surroundings, an analytical term he borrows from anthropologist Tania Murray Li (p. 10). They accentuated the region’s isolation and difference because they “shared the belief that the Appalachian Mountains offset the familiar, anodyne life of industrialized, commercialized, and urbanized America,” yet they were productively reflexive about their experiences of remoteness, their ardor for the outdoors, their interactions with rural dwellers, and their creative role as place makers (p. 3).

Proving Ground is organized sensibly with regard to its subjects’ chronology, geography, and degree of detachment from or engagement with locals. The first three chapters focus on travelers who avoided encounters with people in [End Page 947] favor of immersion in nature. Chapter 1 scrutinizes J. Horace McFarland’s advocacy for civic beautification and scenic preservation during the early twentieth century. McFarland was an enthusiast of what he called “sightliness” and “woodsiness,” and he embraced cars and cameras to navigate northern Pennsylvania and capture picturesque views near his Eagles Mere retreat, which was both tied to and far from his home in the state capital of Harrisburg (p. 45). Shifting from aesthetics to pragmatics, in chapter 2 Slavishak portrays Benton MacKaye as one of the most magnetic “visualizers” or “revealers”—MacKaye’s own words for regional planners—of the 1920s and 1930s (p. 59). Deviser of the Appalachian Trail, this New Englander aimed to protect the mountain range from development and to cultivate, in MacKaye’s own words, “indigenous” outlooks that might mitigate metropolitan “entanglement” through “neo-recreation” (p. 56). In the same decades that MacKaye worked, founders of hiking clubs along the border of North Carolina and Tennessee put his plan into action by embedding themselves in the Great Smoky Mountains and confronting “The Stern Grip of Circumstance” as they blazed trails, climbed ridges, snapped pictures, and enjoyed the “kinesthetic value” of “[a]chieving a state of flow” (pp. 70, 100).

Slavishak’s last two chapters consider individuals who advanced their careers by establishing rapport with the impoverished residents of coal country in eastern Kentucky. Starting fieldwork there in 1959, medical anthropologist Marion Pearsall practiced a distinctive brand of participant observation and action research. She understood that “healthways” were linked to “roadways” in isolated neighborhoods and thus that improved mobility would precede social change (p. 129). Visiting the same area in 1964, art photographer William Gedney was fascinated by its “rural rhythms” and “patterns of circulation” epitomized by automobiles and junk piles (p. 137). His inconspicuous style documented “the ‘ruts’ that people wear into their everyday environment” and communicated “the feel of specific places” via compact “topographical and material” images (pp. 144, 149). Foremost among Slavishak’s many fine attributes is his ability to contextualize and analyze such photographs, a skill he exhibits throughout this diligently researched and elegantly written book, which proves his own expertise in the fertile interdisciplinary ground of Appalachian studies.

Andrew Crooke...

pdf

Share