Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes by Edward Slavishak (review)

In their craft, historians are not accustomed to considerations or questions of the term “positionality.” Our colleagues in the social sciences though, wrestle with this term and the issues associated with it on a daily basis. They are ever mindful of the disparity and power dynamics at work between themselves (the researchers) and their subjects when conducting research. Most historians (with the exception of those practicing oral history) seldom encounter such ethical quandaries and are not subjected to the rigor of institutional review boards. What can be accessed via an archive or special collection is usually fair game to write about in history, no questions asked. Meanwhile, sociologists and anthropologists must consider before they ever begin collecting material the ethical implications of their work: “Am I taking advantage of my subjects? Have I represented these persons or this community fairly?”

Thus, social scientists may see a lot that is familiar in Edward Slavishak’s Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes, but now historians (and the greater interdisciplinary community of Appalachian Studies) have a thought-provoking and useful intellectual history to illustrate the extent of this issue.

Slavishak makes it clear in his introduction that he is not describing the effects of interveners on the region or detailing the evolution of Appalachian stereotypes. That path is well-worn and understood by authors and activists for decades, even since the first generation of Appalachian Studies scholars began the discipline. Rather, Proving Ground asks what effects the interventions had on those who performed them, and how entry into the mountains and conducting work there became stepping stones toward bolstering one’s personal credentials within a number of professions.

In the book’s chapters this means that the focus is, for instance, less on the Appalachian Trail’s (AT) impact on the region’s local economies and homes ever since the AT was plotted, and more on Benton McKaye, the Trail’s architect, and how creating the AT became a means by which he could advance his vision of Appalachia as an ideal respite for American vacationers. In another, Slavishak follows the career of Marion Pearsall, an anthropologist who conducted research in Leslie County, Kentucky, in the late 1950s, and essentially founded a discipline (medical anthropology) based on her research there. With Pearsall, he attends less to the fraught politics of the participant-observer dynamic that social scientists normally grapple with, and more on Pearsall’s ability to translate the experience of her fieldwork into a usable method—a highly-acclaimed tool that other anthropologists could apply to a variety of contexts, not just in Appalachia.

The influence of William Cronon’s groundbreaking analysis in “The Trouble With Wilderness” (1995) is evident throughout Proving Ground. Cronon excoriated his colleagues in the environmental movement for their bourgeois glorification of the unspoiled “wilderness” area as the ideal and most valuable state of nature. But just as early generations of environmentalists privileged “wilderness” areas where no human activity could endanger the supposed natural harmony, so did Slavishak’s subjects trade on the notion of Appalachia’s isolation. Mary Breckinridge, founder of the Frontier Nursing Service and a mentor of sorts to Marion Pearsall, says as much in her cameo: the “inaccessibility” of places like Leslie County, Kentucky, was in Breckenridge’s view, a “priceless asset.” Pearsall and Slavishak’s other subjects “claimed possession” of this inaccessibility—“it was a way to display the effort required to work in the mountains” (p. 112).

The last chapter, a profile of photographer William Gedney, offers a thoughtful and interesting analysis of that profession, but it seems as though Slavishak could have achieved a more current illustration had he devoted his focus to film and television documentarians. Gedney was lauded for an “unobtrusive” style, in contrast to the many lurid and melodramatic poverty exposés that were popular in his era. It would be interesting to see how the many motion picture documentarians in Appalachian history navigated their professional landscape...