Featured
America’s fascination with Appalachia gained new life after former President Donald Trump named “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate.
Vance, a junior senator from Ohio, has received praise and criticism for the 2016 memoir about his chaotic upbringing in Ohio and summers with his grandparents in Kentucky.
Proponents of the bestseller that was made into a movie laud Vance’s account of his journey from hardscrabble childhood to Yale Law School.
Critics say it paints the mountainous region that extends across 13 states from New York to Mississippi and Alabama with too broad a brush and unfairly blames Appalachians for their economic circumstances.
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, is familiar with the region. She spent a year in West Virginia doing research for her book on a Russian Orthodox community, “Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia.”
She answered questions for Northeastern Global News about what it was like to live in the only state completely within the geographic boundaries of Appalachia, and what myths about the region need to be dispelled.
There’s an assumption that Appalachia is a throwback to some past Americana, so there’s a deep cultural fascination with the region as an assumed time capsule.
The assumption is sadly reinforced through art, media and literature but has received critical pushback from Appalachian authors and speakers, including the brilliant Silas House (“The Coal Tattoo”), writer Neema Avashia, (“Another Appalachia”) and public historian Elizabeth Catte (“What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia”) and others.
Appalachia is spectacular, not just because of its diverse people, but also because of its ecological beauty.
The landscape, even amid geological devastation, is remarkable. There’s a reason so many hikers and walkers are attracted to the Appalachian Trail.
When I conducted fieldwork in West Virginia, I lived in a cabin on the side of a mountain in a small town about 40 minutes from the borders of Ohio and Kentucky.
The morning mist would settle into the hollers and hang on the mountain tops. It was a scene of otherworldly beauty.
The size and geographical stretch of the region provides us with immense ecological diversity. For example, there are over 64 different species of high priority birds in need of conservation attention living in the temperate region of the Appalachian Mountains.
In my anthropology seminar on media, we look at how Appalachians have been and continue to be depicted as “other” through film, photography and other mediums.
Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, with LIFE magazine’s photographic coverage of Appalachia, perpetuated eugenics-based ideas about the cultural difference of poor whites.
“Deliverance,” an Academy Award-nominated film from 1972, is perhaps the most recognizable media depiction of Appalachian “otherness,” in which rural inhabitants are depicted as immoral, uneducated and deceptive.
Meredith McCarroll, a scholar of media and Appalachia, talks about this framing as “living off the moral grid,” where Appalachians are depicted as wild and outside the bounds of normative American society.
Appalachian people are tired of the narratives that whitewash the region, painting folks as hillbillies.
There is a wealth of ecological, social and economic diversity in Appalachia, whose boundaries include cities and urban areas, suburbs, rural communities and historic tribal lands that are federally recognized.
Given the size of the region — over 200,000 square miles — the level of economic viability varies, depending upon industry, population and natural resources, among many other factors including roads and state infrastructure.
The area in West Virginia where I did my fieldwork was economically depressed, due to mine closures, a lack of investment in green energy economies and limited access to employment.
It was a remote location and many folks didn’t have access to reliable vehicles or funds for the gasoline needed to drive to the largest city some 40 minutes away.
Almost 18% of county residents lived below the poverty line.
The Russian Orthodox community I studied largely lived well above the poverty line. The community, which consisted of a men’s monastery and a parish, transformed — we could say gentrified — the town. Most people in the parish had jobs — doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, IT, etc.
Coal, steel, manufacturing and other large industrial enterprises have declined in Appalachia since the 1980s.
Coal is still an integral part of the Appalachian economy, as shown in Elaine McMillion-Sheldon’s documentary, “King Coal.”
When I lived in West Virginia, I saw mountains diminish as hilltop removal happened through surface mining.
Extractive fracking and natural resource companies have laid waste to the region in order to make a profit for their shareholders.
The road that ran past the cabin I rented was filled with logging trucks, and deforestation was an issue in the area where I worked.
There was also a push to buy gas and mineral rights from folks. For example, land surrounding my cabin was dotted with survey flags, where gas and minerals could eventually be extracted.
The county I lived in happened to have potable water, but two counties over that was not the case. The water crisis in West Virginia is due to extractive practices that create environmental catastrophes.
Certainly, drug addiction does exist in Appalachia. But the history of it is one of capitalistic indulgence by drug companies at the expense of human lives in the region.
I can’t generalize about the concerns of Appalachians.
What I can say is that people need to listen to Appalachians who are pushing back against stereotypes, supporting local communities and economies and showing us — through politics, art and activism — the vibrant patchwork of identifiers and personalities found around the region.
Nobody likes to be stereotyped.