The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990

Abstract

The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990. JANE ADAMS. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994; 321 pp. Adams's book represents ten years of fieldwork and archival research in Union County, located in Southern Illinois. Here the author is historical ethnographer as well as friend and a nearby neighbor of those studied. The book provides a blueprint for delineating the lives of people who are literate and expect to read about themselves when the research is published. is a challenge anthropologists increasingly may face as the United States becomes a more frequent research subject since the field largely abandoned it after World War II. This account of how life is lived on farms starting from late in the last century through the vast economic and social changes that transpired since, is an engaging book, written in a fluid and elegant style. Adams meets the challenge of providing a tangible and often fascinating grasp of everyday experience by focusing on how farm families made a life; managed their farms; fed themselves; ordered their homes; and arranged ordinary tasks such as going to the toilet or washing clothes. Adams traces changing farming practices, housing, rural communities, and gender roles over 100 years. To do this she uses oral histories, dairies, photos, and documents obtained from seven families to show how urbanization, industrialization of agriculture, concentration of farms, government policies, and the depopulation of the countryside transformed rural life and family farming. Her account adds a new dimension to our emerging picture of U.S. farm life, families, and communities by detailing life where the upland South meets the Midwest of poor soils, and where families must eke out a living. This ethnography should shatter many assumptions about the prosperity, ethnicity, and the dominance of grain farming in the Midwest. Certain parts of the region, Adams shows us, are characterized by labor intensive crops- strawberries, green beans, asparagus, raspberries, potatoes, apples, or peaches. Such farming resulted in demands that shape distinctive configurations of family in relation to the farm. Although the focus is on the household and the mesh between kinship unit and production unit is graphically detailed, Adams also depicts how the family and farm transcend individual life histories. She does this by showing how the built landscape of farm buildings and structures modifies the countryside as well as defines changing family and farm practices. Five generations are described for each of the seven families. As these families developed, rooms were added to homes, remodeling carried out, and home furnishings as well as farm animals and equipment changed. Domestic activities such as making soap, canning food, are portrayed; this was work that was altered as electricity came to the countryside and roads improved, making trips to town easier. Transformations in various domains of family and farm are indicated by wonderful chapter titles: Worked Can See to Can't See; Were the Fattest People Ever Going to the Poor House; It Was Either I Work or We Sell the Farm, and my favorite, Used to Eat Inside and Shit Outside; Now We Eat Outside and Shit Inside. …