- "You Get Sawdust in Your Blood":"Local" Values and the Performance of Community in an Occupational Sport
The conflicts and affiliations that produce and define community can often be seen most clearly in performance. This article examines the way group identity is constructed around a multifaceted notion of localness at a woodchopping competition in northwestern Connecticut. As the immediate connection to logging as an occupation fades, community identity is enacted at a referential level defined here as a metaperformance-in this case a celebration engaged in by men and women, primarily from other trades, who nonetheless mobilize notions of logging tradition and history to enact a "local" community with resonance in their suburban, postindustrial context.
So many people come up to me and they say, "Why are you doing this?" You know, kids will say, "Why are you doing it?" And I'll say, the first thing I say is, "Because it's part of our history." And they look at me funny-it's not the kind of history that they've learned, with the Presidents and all of that. Who really studies about lumberjacks, you know? They don't really teach that kind of thing I guess.
-Shannon Strong, northwest Connecticut "local" and three-time Lumberjill World Champion
If you walk through the Goshen, Connecticut, fairgrounds on Sunday or Monday of the Labor Day Weekend, past the ring where cattle judging is in progress, through the cholesterol alley of fried dough and sausage stands, and past the poultry barn, you come to the woodchopping ring. A crowd of a few hundred has gathered, with the most devoted fans on lawn chairs in the front rows of the grassy amphitheater. Preliminary rounds for the day's most popular event, the axe throw, are concluding on the right-hand side of the ring; meanwhile, contestants prepare for the chopping event by nailing footholds into their assigned section of a "stick" of eight-inch square whitepine timber. Soon, Ken Anstett, the elder statesman of local woodcutters, ambles up to the microphone in his trademark overalls. After a few curmudgeonly jokes about seeing the "same ugly faces as last year" among the assembled contestants and spectators, he calls out the first "Three, two, one, go!" and the axes-and the woodchips-start flying. Over the next three hours or so, local sawyers and a few professional lumberjack [End Page 301]
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competitors (as well as a handful of people who fit both descriptions) put on a stylized enactment of the skills of the traditional, premechanical logger (Figure 1).1 After the last log is sawed and the final thrown axe hits the beer can that marks the target's bull's eye, the Woodsman of the Day is announced, the crowd disperses, and the lumberjacks pack up their tools. A few return the next day to their work in the woods, but most of them resume their daily routine as plumbers, nurses, or auto mechanics, each having played their role in this enactment of the local logging legacy.
This article analyzes the construction, maintenance, and negotiation of group identity through performance, and in particular how group identity operates when it has been abstracted from its original referents. The group identity that initially appears to be at stake is one that is particularly bound up in notions of history and traditionality, that of "the logger" or "the woodchopper": Loggers are often cited as an archetypal folk group by those surveying the field of folklore (Dorson 1973; Toelken 1996), and this occupational identity continues to have strong local resonance. Yet the group or community identity enacted in the Goshen woodcutters' show is of a different order, defined not so much by shared work in the woods, since only a small percentage of the participants are working loggers, but through shared public performance of values and skills. These values and skills, while based on and referenced to woods work and logging history, help construct another group identity, a site-specific version of...