The past is another country: representation, historical consciousness, and resistance in the Blue Ridge

Abstract

How do people resist the change brought about by uncontrolled development? How do they represent their culture to government agencies and corporate interests? And how can ethnography describe the many facets of such problematic situations? The Past Is Another Country investigates these questions through a study of the people living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. This group's historical consciousness of local culture, articulated in response to a major political dispute, establishes the terms of a struggle with social, cultural and ecological change. When a large power company proposes flooding fertile farmlands to build a vast hydro-electric generating facility, local culture becomes a representation of social identity and local interests. By questioning their social experience in the domains of family and kinship, politics, and religion, residents of the land experiment with new cultural representations and pose a comprehensive cultural rhetoric. The Past Is Another Country speaks not only to social conditions in the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian region, but to local struggles in general, and to the politics of cultural representation throughout the world. It will provoke the interest of everyone concerned with cultural authenticity and with the effect of a rapidly evolving world system on the local 'capillary' regions of social life.