Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
MATERIALITY & MATERIAL CULTURE IN APPALACHIA: Part 1
Session Abstract or Summary
Material culture, or the physical world of objects and things integral to the constitution of social life, has always been strongly connected to both Appalachian lifeways and representations of the region in unique and diverse manners. However, material culture often operates ‘behind the scenes’: unnoticed, yet strongly implicated in our lives and the way we discuss Appalachian economies, ecologies, identities, and places. Artifacts make tangible, personal, emotional connections between individuals, communities (both geographic and imagined), and regions. Material culture studies offer a unique way to expand our narratives of lives, people, and places, to challenge hegemonic discourse, such as stereotypes about Appalachian backwardness, and to reconsider the material realities of everyday life. Critical studies of materiality, or the qualities, meanings, actions, and identities enacted in the dialectical relationship between people and material culture, thus have the potential to weave emancipatory discourse in Appalachia. This multidisciplinary session broadly explores connections between material culture, Appalachian lives, representations, histories, and futures.
Presentation #1 Title
Among the Trees, the Boards, and the Planes: Relational Materiality and the Meaning of Work in the Craft of Musical Instruments
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper explores how meaningful labor is co-constituted among forest environments, craft materials, and artisan musical instrument makers in the Allegheny highlands of West Virginia. Bringing a relational approach of materiality to the study of the meaning of work, I suggest that affective relationships cultivated between makers and materials during the craft process contribute to the liveliness of instruments, or their roles as life-like and cohabitating beings in workshop spaces and homes. This liveliness of instruments and craft materials serve to “re-enchant” labor that has been effectively disenchanted by rational logics and instrumental processes of the region’s extractive industries and capitalocentric economies. I follow the process of creating a violin, an enduring material symbol of Appalachian lifeways, in an apprentice with a master maker to show how the skill and intention of the craft laborer and the agentive, substantive being of wood craft materials co-constitute meaningful work. Illustrating the temporality and materiality of such co-constitutive relationships and their resultant influence on the re-enchantment of labor processes, I hope to demonstrate the importance of such relational frameworks and their utility for exploring the materially driven spheres of Appalachian political economies and ecologies.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.
Presentation #2 Title
Queer theory, spatial innovation, and the “unsettling” of the Appalachian Settlement School
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
At the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, American social settlements were woman-identified communities, and yet most historians of the movement have avoided the subject of sexuality. Recently the paradigm has begun to shift; at least for scholars of the country's most renowned social settlement, Hull House, and its founder Jane Addams. In Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, Shannon Jackson is less concerned with whether Addams was a Lesbian than with how her work can be understood through the lens of queer theory. She argues that "social housekeeping" was a strategy Addams and her cohorts used to transgress social boundaries, concluding that by queering ideas of community and family, Hull-Houses' "spatial redefinition" was a daily lesson in ways of violating gendered, familial and classed conventions. This paper will use a queer theoretical approach to begin the process of "unsettling" the Appalachian settlements schools which during their formative years were also woman-centered communities. Using archival records and the built environment itself to reveal the spatially innovative daily life of the Pine Mountain Settlement school, I will argue that, like their Hull-House sisters, the Appalachian settlement-women used the radical redefinition of space to resist heteronormativity without necessarily falling into present-day categories of homosexual identity.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Karen Hudson is Visiting Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation, University of Kentucky, College of Design. She is writing a book manuscript on the everyday life and material culture of the Kentucky Mountain settlement school movement (University Press of Kentucky).
Presentation #3 Title
Bodies in Potion: Practice, Women’s Wellness Products, and the Body Progressive in Early 20th Century Appalachia
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
Appalachia has been represented in discourse as both backwards and backwoods for nearly 150 years, and m, and material culture often forms the backbone for such portrayals of Appalachian deficiency. Historically, Appalachians have been perceived as lacking or misusing modern material artifacts in discordance with national tastes, trends, and access. Appalachian houses, clothes, landscapes, consumables, and bodies have been upheld as evidence of innate Appalachian inferiority and as symptoms of provincialism. Appalachian women have been portrayed as particularly pitiable: passive captors in an archaic system whose tastes, desires, habitus, bodily awareness and bodily competence have been handed down from men and cyclical poverty. Women have been portrayed as unclean, unhealthy, and unfashionable. Early 20th-century Progressive Era reform campaigns to modernize Appalachians, especially in coal camps, sought to address these perceived deficiencies by inculcating women into scientific health and householding practices, including rigorous standards for the home and body. These standards developed coeval with the intensified influx of consumer hygiene and cosmetics products into coal communities, and women’s bodies became sites of complex negotiations regarding femininity, health, and modernity. Archaeological and oral historical investigation of household consumer goods in Kentucky coal towns is mobilized to argue: 1.) Contrary to stereotypes about backwardness and isolation, women actively pursued and used the same consumer body products as their counterparts across America. 2.) Appalachian women were not passive receptors or reflectors of middle class tastes, national trends, or local domination. Using health and hygiene products daily was an embodied act constituting modern women in practice. Women‘s bodily consumption was imbued with both subtle and overt power, which dynamically referenced and reinvented national ideals about modern womanhood.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Zada Komara is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Anthropology. Her work focuses on Appalachian industrialism through historical archaeology and oral history, and she is administrator of the UK Appalachian Center’s Coal Camp Documentary Project: https://appalachianprojects.as.uky.edu/coal-camps
Presentation #4 Title
The prospect of preservation: Utilizing alternative legal claims for environmental justice
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
The criticism most often cast against the laws that exist to protect cultural heritage in the United States is that they have no teeth. Only second to this is the notion that preservation is often tone deaf to the actual needs of a community, focusing on saving buildings over people. While there has been a focus on preservation as an economic development tool, preservation can and should play a role in protecting the environment and promoting the well-being of communities by allowing them to maintain a connection to place. In Appalachia, the importance of preservation and conservation, and issues of social and environmental justice have always been important. Now more than ever, Appalachian culture and the environment are in the path of destruction of a declining industry, potentially shrinking regulations and increasingly powerful corporate and political interests that disregard the people that live in the region. Preservation of cultural resources can serve (and has served) as an important weapon in the fight against the loss of land and identity. This paper will explain how litigation of the National Historic Preservation Act over mountaintop removal cases at Blair Mountain and Pine Mountain have moved forward a legal framework for historic preservation to be utilized to protect the environment and to promote environmental justice by preventing the use of this destructive resource extraction process.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Emily completed her doctoral work at Cornell University where her research focused on cultural resource protection, environmental justice, and land tenure issues impacting the Haudenosaunee* Confederacy in upstate New York. Her current work focuses on indigenous perspectives on sovereignty, bridging the gap between environmental and cultural resource protection laws, and environmental and climate justice issues. Emily is also a member of the Florida and Maryland Bars and has been an active member of the American Bar Association, working extensively with the ABA’s Civil Rights and Social Justice, International Law, and Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources Sections.
Among the Trees, the Boards, and the Planes: Relational Materiality and the Meaning of Work in the Craft of Musical Instruments
This paper explores how meaningful labor is co-constituted among forest environments, craft materials, and artisan musical instrument makers in the Allegheny highlands of West Virginia. Bringing a relational approach of materiality to the study of the meaning of work, I suggest that affective relationships cultivated between makers and materials during the craft process contribute to the liveliness of instruments, or their roles as life-like and cohabitating beings in workshop spaces and homes. This liveliness of instruments and craft materials serve to “re-enchant” labor that has been effectively disenchanted by rational logics and instrumental processes of the region’s extractive industries and capitalocentric economies. I follow the process of creating a violin, an enduring material symbol of Appalachian lifeways, in an apprentice with a master maker to show how the skill and intention of the craft laborer and the agentive, substantive being of wood craft materials co-constitute meaningful work. Illustrating the temporality and materiality of such co-constitutive relationships and their resultant influence on the re-enchantment of labor processes, I hope to demonstrate the importance of such relational frameworks and their utility for exploring the materially driven spheres of Appalachian political economies and ecologies.
