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| Apple orchard atop Tanner's Ridge, Page Co., VA. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, 1979. |
Despite COVID-19 academic conferences haven’t let up. Instead, they’ve either gone entirely online or become hybrid, partially online and partially in-person. The American Folklore Society annual conference was hybrid, spanning the week of Oct. 18-25, in person in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and online from wherever the participants happened to be at the time. I was in Maine, part of a roundtable forum with others who were in Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio. John McDowell, folklorist from Indiana University’s Folklore Institute, put it together to showcase publication of a recent book, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, published earlier this year by Indiana University Press. The book grew out of a conference at Indiana University in the spring of 2017, sponsored by Indiana’s DERT group, the Diverse Environmentalist Research Team, based in the university’s folklore and ethnomusicology department. Although invited, I was unable to participate in the conference because I was scheduled for arthroscopic knee surgery at the same time. Later I was invited to contribute an essay to the book anyway, and to that end I decided to revisit a colloquium talk that I presented to the folklore department at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1984, which I entitled “Toward an Ecological Paradigm for Folklife Studies,” and again in a condensed version before the American Folklore Society, in 1986. I never tried to publish it; rather, I relied on some of it for a chapter of my book, Powerhouse for God (2018 [1988]), which focused on the folklife of mountain farming in the northern Blue Ridge Mountains from 1850 until the coming of the Shenandoah National Park to the area. The families living on what would become Park land were displaced—that is, kicked out—by the federal government which exercised eminent domain and attempted to resettle the families elsewhere, an experiment that, like others in Appalachia, failed. Nonetheless, the story of the families who lived there, I found, by looking at the household-by-household agricultural census, as well as courthouse records, wills, probate inventories, genealogies, trial transcripts, and local histories, was different from the prevailing narrative of these Appalachian mountaineers as a backward and impoverished population in a “land that time forgot.” In fact, the evidence revealed that these farming families were succeeding in the nineteenth century until around 1900 when a series of disturbances to their mountain agricultural ecosystem reduced them to the poverty in which they were found by government agents and journalists in the 1920s as plans for the Park were developing. Those disturbances included a blight that killed the chestnut trees, robbing the mountain families’ pigs of an important, and cost-free, food source, namely chestnut mast. Overpopulation was another problem, along with the coming of the railroad which enabled corporations from outside the region to buy timber rights and undertake large-scale timber harvesting. This left the land far more vulnerable to flooding and made farming far more difficult. In contemporary ecological terminology we would say that the ecosystem regime had achieved a degree of stability in the second half of the nineteenth century but that this series of disturbances took it to a tipping point in which the regime changed to a different and far less desirable ecosystem, one in which it was no longer possible for mountain families to make a living from farming in this area.
For the colloquium, the AFS paper, and the book, I was content to leave the story there, trying to underline the point that the Appalachian hillbilly stereotype was contradicted by the evidence; and that rather than settling into poverty this population was reduced to it. But for the DERT essay, after encouragement from John McDowell, I decided to add a section in which I presented and interpreted several performed narratives, spoken by the last generation of mountain farmers, about what it was like to try to make a living after the regime change. And in the DERT presentation for the AFS forum last October, I revisited my ecological approach to folklife in light of these additional narratives, and then related it to what we now think of as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), in this case the knowledge that enabled the mountain farming ecosystem to flourish and provide a living for families who lived there in the nineteenth century. But this ecosystem was unsustainable in the face of the pressures of modernization and development, and vulnerable to environmental disasters such as the chestnut blight.
I also spoke, at the end of this presentation, about an issue that has concerned me now for many years; namely, the roles of TEK and IEK (Indigenous ecological knowledges) in the discourses surrounding environmental as well as musical and cultural sustainability. But I will leave that for a later blog entry.
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