Self and story in Appalachian coal mining communities.

Abstract

Everyday speech practices in coal mining communities of southern West Virginia create personhood and sociality through a rich weave of metonymic association and non-linear temporal juxtapositions that produce a sense of reality that is oppositional to dominant 'American' culture (as it is increasingly colonized by consumerist codes and a flattened, corporately managed sense of time and life script). The structure of stories in "coal camp" speech works through a complex play with latent meanings, jumps in narratival voice, a deeply ironic awareness of the slippage between signified and signifier. This discourse emerged out of a unique web of social relations that were forged in a century of experience as a rural proletariat in a region with extreme class inequality and severely etiolated local government. In the face of these threats, people in the "coal camps" have developed a "way with words" that gives them a sense of their own agency and a capacity for mutual support that draws on: the commonality of oppression; a mix of race and ethnicity; traditions of egalitarianism and reciprocity that are drawn from pre-capitalist forms. Using post-structuralist methods of analysis, this study tries to go beyond post-structuralism to propose a theory for understanding 'persons' as unitary historical agents. In this model, personhood is the capacity to create and attend to narratival indeterminacy-- an ability to open language up to the paradoxes of time that are the source of human creativity. The hegemonic construction of 'Appalachians' as "white trash" has been, in part, an attempt to reify and attack this very creativity of narrative tradition. This creation of (usually unmarked) Whiteness as (marked) Other has intriguing implications for theories of ethnicity.