Wham, Bam, thank you, Sam: Critical dimensions of the persistence of hillbilly caricatures

Abstract

Southern Appalachian Mountaineer (SAM or “hillbilly") stereotypes, particularly as represented in caricatures, have emerged from the more than 100 years of travel accounts and fictional works that erected a mythical Appalachia. Such universalistic portraits of Appalachians resulted from the inaccurate and incomplete perceptions of early Appalachian “scholarship” and from two fallacies in tandem. The fallacy of composition (what is apparently valid for a part is assumed valid for the whole) created the myth of a monolithic Appalachia. The ecological fallacy applied the myth by attributing the assumed average characteristics of Appalachians to any individual Appalachian. In this tautological manner, the fictionalized attributes of SAMs have been used to explain why SAMs are the way they are. Additionally, region, unlike gender and race, lacks sufficient political and economic salience to be cast as a national issue. Thus, whereas acceptance and respect have been extended to various minority groups that have organized via identity politics and become politically articulate, they have not been accorded to regional groups that lack national prominence.