Abstract
For the past half-century, the 1972 film Deliverance, based on James Dickey's 1970 novel, and the Appalachian region have become inextricably linked in the cultural consciousness of many Americans. This is true not only of the general public, who were either first introduced to the region by the film or had their existing preconceptions of the southern mountains reinforced by it, but also of the many academics who constitute the interdisciplinary subfield of Appalachian Studies. The usual fashion is for scholars of the region to only mention Deliverance briefly, noting its stereotypical elements and then moving on to dispel these distortions with what are deemed more accurate portrayals of Appalachian people and communities. In Something in These Hills: The Culture of Family Land in Southern Appalachia, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall utilizes a somewhat different approach to the film by describing in some detail the complex interplay between the physical environment where the movie was filmed, the social experiences of producers and actors while filming, and the longer-term impacts that the movie had on the local communities where it was filmed.
All that being said, the description of the complicated nexus between Deliverance and the Appalachian region, addressed in various places throughout the narrative by Coggeshall, is by no means the central focus of the book. Rather, as indicated by the title, the primary emphasis is on families and their relationship to land, specifically in the Blue Ridge region of Upstate South Carolina as well as contiguous counties in southwestern North Carolina and northeast Georgia. Conducting fieldwork for approximately six years (2006 to 2012), Coggeshall relies primarily on data that come from nearly 90 in-depth interviews he conducted in Greenville, Pickens, and Oconee Counties in South Carolina. The findings of the research are succinctly stated by Coggeshall as follows: “Ultimately, the southern Blue Ridge area is a contested space between inhabitants and residents, between menace and majesty, and between commodity and personification” (p. 51). Unpacking this summary quote simultaneously reveals a more nuanced delineation of Coggeshall's argument as well as the structure of the book.
In addition to laying out the methodology and main themes of the book, Chapter One also provides an informative review of social science conceptualizations of space, place, and Appalachia. Rejecting the more traditional dichotomy of “insider/outsider” when it comes to regional analyses, Coggeshall finds a distinction between “resident” and “inhabitant” to be more fruitful when it comes to land and family in Southern Appalachia. Residents, no matter how long they have resided in the region, typically adopt “the common American attitude that land is a commodity valued for its utilitarian or recreational characteristics,” whereas inhabitants have “a deep emotional tie to the land” cultivated over a lifetime and often over generations (p. 30). Described in Chapter Two, these two social groups are brought into proximity with one another in the region primarily as a result of political and economic forces that have affected many Appalachian and other rural communities in the United States. In the case at hand, beginning in the 1960s two rivers in upstate South Carolina were dammed by a local power company, creating lakes that destroyed several extant communities and created newer ones along the lakeshores that attracted more well-to-do residents from outside the area.
Despite the many social differences between residents and inhabitants, both groups are united in facing the “menace and majesty” of Southern Appalachia's Blue Ridge range. While Chapter Two provides some general description of the geophysical and related features of the area, Chapters Three and Four more systematically addresses these issues. Chapter Three examines the attitudes and experiences of residents with respect to the local environment, recounting natural dangers (such as steep terrain, bears, raging rivers, and floods) along with various human dangers. With respect to the latter, Coggeshall discusses some of the images from Deliverance along with some of the actual people who inhabit what is sometimes called the mountainous “dark corner” of South Carolina. Of course, these dangers of the landscape are counterposed with the benefits of living in a “majestic” natural environment, which drew many residents to the area in the first place.
Chapter Four in turn describes the attitudes and experiences of inhabitants toward the same environment, which to a large extent parallel those of residents but have more subtlety and distinction. For example, inhabitants have long learned to avoid certain parts of the rivers for fear of drowning, while residents and white-water tourists have more often met with this unfortunate fate over the past several decades. As well, inhabitants have developed their understanding of human dangers against a more personalized backdrop of mental illness, drug and alcohol use, and, historically, the need for individual vigilantism in this remote and isolated region.
The remaining chapters of the book delve more deeply into the relationship of long-term inhabitants to the land they occupy, and it is here that Coggeshall marshals a wealth of ethnographic data to develop an innovative argument. As noted above, in contrast to residents, who tend to view land as abstract commodified space, inhabitants have a strong “emotional tie to the land.” The gradual development of this emotional connection is detailed in Chapter Five, where Coggeshall enumerates a variety of factors that create this deep relationship between inhabitants and their land. Most of these factors center on family connections, such as generational family ownership, using land for family subsistence, and the burying of deceased relatives on family property, which help to give the land personal and cultural meaning far beyond that of narrow utilitarian concerns.
As Coggeshall argues further in Chapter Six, the relationship between inhabitants and the land they occupy even takes on a spiritual hue, resulting in a “metaphysical synthesis” of soil and people (p. 141). Indeed, for many of those he interviewed the land had gone through a process of personification, becoming an animated entity that was an integral part of the family. This sentiment is reflected most acutely in situations where land ownership is threatened or lost, such as in the 1960s when the dams were being developed or more recently in the face of luxury real estate development. All told, the loss of land is akin to the loss of a family member. In Chapter Seven, Coggeshall concludes with a nice summation of his arguments, which are perhaps most succinctly captured in the chapter's subtitle: “The Ambiguous, Anthropomorphic Mountains” (p. 164).
Overall, Coggeshall's book is well-organized, well-researched, and thoughtfully engaging. Academics specializing in the field will find the conceptual distinction between residents and inhabitants quite useful for further research and the personification of land thesis theoretically provocative. Those new to Appalachian studies will find the book a nice introduction to the field and the region. In sum, Something in These Hills is a book that has something for everyone who has an interest in Appalachia and related issues.