Chippewa Lake: A Community in Search of an Identity by Cindy L. Hull (review)

122 The Michigan Historical Review opening” (p. 195). The result, Galster asserts, is collective adaptations that together make for “a blinding example of collective irrationality at a metropolitan scale” (p. 275). This has produced a structure with a distorted set of incentives and constraints both in the suburbs and the city whereby residents become less educated, entrepreneurial, cooperative, tolerant, and civil. What they do become, according to Galster, is more myopic, suspicious, irresponsible, passive, and violent, which has produced obvious effects on the region’s quality of life, productivity, and economic competitiveness. The consequence of this is an idiosyncratic coping mechanism that hobbles the region, making it incapable of responding effectively to deindustrialization and globalization. Driving Detroit is a sobering read. Other metropolitan areas have experienced industrial decline and white flight. Detroit, however, stands apart in how far the processes have gone. Galster concludes that greater Detroit is a dysfunctional and unsustainable metropolitan area. In this work the reader will find no cause for hope; students will have much to discuss and debate. Stephen Burwood Eastern Michigan University Cindy L. Hull. Chippewa Lake: A Community in Search of an Identity. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 203. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Paper, $29.95. Michigan, as much as any other state in the union, has felt the financial crunch of recent global economic restructuring. While this shift in global manufacturing and production is most obvious in Michigan’s “flagship” industries, such as automobiles and cereals, the impacts of such processes on the small towns and agricultural villages that make up a majority of this state’s and this country’s geography are not often considered. In Chippewa Lake: A Community in Search of an Identity, anthropologist Cindy L. Hull investigates the shifting nature of community in a rural Michigan township as it is confronted with an uncertain economic future and a recognizable change in its demographic makeup. Bringing traditional anthropological methods to bear on Chippewa Lake, a place she has called home for over thirty years, Hull tells the story of a farming community that is both steeped in tradition and Book Reviews 123 undergoing irrevocable change as farming becomes less and less capable of providing families with the income necessary for survival. Though the plight of the small farmer in America is not a new story, the difference here is that Hull focuses on a perceived loss of community by Chippewa Lake residents. Through oral and archival histories, Hull tells the story of Chippewa Lake’s founding families and paints a picture of an idyllic small, tightknit , homogeneous community. Through ethnographic analysis of two other major demographic categories present in Chippewa Lake, nonfarming families and recent retirement and commuter residents, Hull demonstrates that this notion of community is seen as disappearing, and she questions whether this type of community has ever been present at all. Hull challenges stereotypes of rural life in America and shows that rural communities have always had a fair degree of internal diversity that is often overlooked by long-term residents and outsiders alike. She provides ample evidence that internal cleavages within these communities act to reinforce difference between “insiders” and “outsiders,” even when the outsiders have been living in town for years. This reifying of difference can and does act as a barrier to change as ideas of progress and community begin to polarize those who have long-term roots in the town and those who have recently moved to the area. Differing ideas about what is good for the town reflect residents’ varied interests, are shaped by their own histories with the town, and reveal competing notions of what rural life is supposed to represent. Hull points out that, as much as residents complain about the changing nature of their community, some of the characteristics that they most identity as lost continue to be practiced at the informal level, especially in times of tragedy or loss. In the end, Hull raises important questions about what “community” means, both to scholars and to the people whose lives we study. Rory G. McCarthy University of Pittsburgh ...