Two Types of Attachment

 

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell describes two types of attachment to places. 

These are two different ways that we “ascribe meaning to places, imbuing them with emotion and feeling, making them much more than the bundles of matter that they are, The individual attributes of a space emerge into something much more culturally meaningful: a neighborhood becomes the self-identity of a people a national park becomes for some visitors a lasting source of positive emotional attachment; a farm becomes more than fields and crops but the site of family ritual passed down to future generations.” (239)

The first is place attachment, which he explains as “members’ connection to the biophysical attributes” of a place, (Farrell, Battle, 239). Place attachment in his definition involves connection to the land. It doesn't necessarily have to do with social relationships, but concerns a deep attachment to the environment. People become attached to a landscape in various ways, through work, story, recreational experiences, etc. There is a significant body of literature on place attachment theory that is worth exploring.

The second is community attachment, which I am defining as "members’ connection to the social-relational community of a place." In this sense, attachment comes primarily through one's relationship to people, to a community of people who may also reside in a certain geographical locality--thus there is some conflation with place attachment. It is about social bonding.

Community attachment involves two factors. Group identity is about feeling connected to a group's purpose or character. An example might be identifying as a Corbin Redhound (our local high school mascot) - a strong sense of connection to this local school-based identity because one feels connected to the football team, or the band and their purpose. The other factor is interpersonal relational bonds between community members--real, lived relationships between members of this community. While group identity can be somewhat abstract, interpersonal bonds are very concrete and involve friendships, kinship, and other intimate personal connections between specific people.

"Community attachment relates to a person's sense of fit or belonging in a locality, which creates a sense of loyalty. . . . community attachment and community satisfaction should not be automatically equated with each other. People can be very attached to their community and yet highly dissatisfied with it." Ralph B. Brown "Community Attachment" in the Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, edited by:Karen Christensen & David Levinson. SAGE Publications, 2003.

I am trying to think about this in relation to Appalachia and other parts of Kentucky. I think you often have community attachment without a strong place attachment. This may be what Harry Caudill is pointing to when he writes about the woods, "The hill people probably know as little about their native heath as any folk on earth . . . . Today, a typical eastern Kentuckian cannot tell a black oak from a black gum or a hickory from a hornbeam. Though the people of China will pay more than sixty dollars for a pound of dried ginseng root most Kentuckians can walk past it without recognition" (Caudill, Darkness at Dawn, 38, 41). I see this exemplified in my wife's life – she has a strong attachment to the relationships and the relational network of extended family and friends that she grew up with in her small town. These are social bonds that have been forged for generations of living together. But she doesn’t have a strong connection to the land and its features, the environment and ecology of her local area. She doesn’t know the land or the geography, nor spend any time in it.

Now some of her family also has place attachment, which was formed through years of hunting, fishing, and farming the land.

Another issue of place attachment is that it might be super-local – families might be very attached to their holler or their mountain, but not so attached to the other side of the mountain. Families forge these sorts of super-local place bonds by generations of living in one certain place, the family holler or farm. Thus a very powerful place attachment might coincide with a negligent attitude toward environmental destruction someplace else. This sort of super-local place attachment for one’s own property but not the property of another fails to appreciate the interconnection between these “properties” defined by deeds rather than an interconnected landscape. It makes it more difficult to build joint or communal action to protect a landscape.

"Too Special to Drill"

In The Battle for Yellowstone, Justin Farrell writes that "some areas are ‘too special to drill,’ and some areas are not. Some ecosystems we plunder with impunity, and some ecosystems lead us to pause and reflect on repercussions" (Farrell, 238-39).  

I couldn't get my mind off this idea that in the history of industry in Appalachia, there was no place "too special to drill" - no place that shouldn't be logged, mined, or stripped. In Appalachia, no place was treated as "special." There were no sacred places, no sacred mountains. Every landscape, every mountain was devalued as "overburden."  

For instance Harry M. Caudill writes about the passivity, negligence, and complicity of local officials who handed over the rich Appalachian landscape to the rapacious machines of the logging and mining industries. "Kentucky mountaineers . . . transferred legal title to [the land] to 'furriners,' [foreigners] then routinely elected judges and legislators who steadfastly sided with the coal owners in all clashes between their rights and those of the resident population. These officials stood by while mining mangled mountains, ruined streams, and made broad areas into wastelands" (Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn, 46)

He further notes that "Appalachia's absentee landlords have had many willing helpers within the region. Their greed has been more than matched by that of local entrepreneurs who were, and are, all too willing to plunder their homeland and impoverish their kinsmen for profit" (Caudill, Darkness, 31)

Chad Montrie notes that some local Appalachian people supported and defended the destruction of the Appalachian environment, perpetuating the falsehood that Appalachia was a poor land, "not worth a plug nickel." As Caudill writes, all powerholders from legislators to educators "continued to spread the worn myth that Appalachian people are poor because their land is poor and, by implication at least, that the wisest course is to leave. Thus indifference on [college] campuses combined with greed in boardrooms to work the ruin of one of the fairest and most promising parts of the globe" (Caudill, Darkness, 43)

In a perverse logic, those complicit with the mining industry actually argued that Appalachia was improved by strip mining. They "defended surface coal mining as good for miners, the local economy, and even the land" saying, "it gives people work and the land that we strip is in 50 percent and a lot of times 100 percent better condition that it was when we came in there." Montrie writes "On one job they paid a man to mine a part of his property that ‘wasn’t worth a plug nickel,’ leveled it off flat and sowed grass all over, ‘'and now he’s got a pasture out there.’’ Other operations had created flat land for a college and an airport, which [was] believed to be a better use of the land" (Montrie, Making a Living, 89). 

Farrell asks “But what makes something more ‘special' than something else? Where do those moral boundaries come from?” His answer is "the stories we tell about a place"--pointing to the role of sacred story and myth, both personal and communal, that instills certain places with a sense of the sacred. People, individuals, and communities construct sacred places through these narratives that create attachment to places. “We rarely think about them explicitly, but these deep narrative and commitments that are inscribed in our identities and cultures inform what we judge to be more ‘special'" (Farrell, Battle, 238).

So where are the sacred stories of the Appalachian landscape? This is the chilling line from Caudill, "The lack of an Appalachian land epic made the hill people willing collaborators in the destruction of their own region" (Caudill, Darkness, 31, emphasis added). 

What are the sacred stories, myths, narratives, and folktales that enchant or re-chant the Appalachian hills? That's what I am looking for.  

Sources

Caudill, Harry M. A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future. University Press of Kentucky, 1976.

Farrell, Justin. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Montrie, Chad. “Degrees of Separation: Nature and the Shift from Farmer to Miner to Factory Hand in Southern West Virginia.” In Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, 71–90. University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

The Home as American Sacred Space

Towards the end of the introduction  in American Sacred Space, Chidester and Linenthal ask "What is American about American sacred space?" (25) 

This is a great question. After all, in many ways sacred spaces are similar in their features and characateristics. We can use the same set of concepts and tools to examine and analyze sacred space no matter where they are.   

They suggest that these spaces have been distinctively shaped by the American historical experience. They go on to discuss several feature of the American historical experience that have been particularly influential in shaping these spaces. These include:

• the frontier situation
• the American legal system
• a managerial ethos involving the federal bureaucracy
• commodification and property rights
• revolutions of information technology
• a national orientation and patriotic sacrality
• American civil religion

One new and interesting idea they bring to the analysis is that of "home." While homes are ubiquitous, they write "At first glance, the home might seem the locus of the ordinary, the everyday, or the mindane in American symbolic life. However, domestic space in America has also been set apart as a special, sacred site of religious significance" (22). They go on to mention the "cult of domesticity" that has ritualized and regulated family relationships as been a compelling force in shaping public and political life. American politicians have long wanted to extol their familial virtues and present their families in performances of the virtuous and happy Christian family. 

This may indeed be a distinctive (though not exclusively) American sacred space. Thinking about this, I was struck by the sheer number of homes that have been turned into sacred sites. In fact, we will be visiting one of these during the summer institute - Monticello.  All the "founding fathers" have their domestic shrines, most famously George Washington's Mount Vernon. But there are so many more throughout the American landscape--almost every community has preserved and maintained homes as a form of sacred space from the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West, FL or Graceland in Memphis, TN, a full-blown shrine to a mythic figure.  In Kentucky we have Ashland the home of Henry Clay in Lexington, KY and the William Whitley home established in the frontier near present-day Crab Orchard the hometown of my wife. And there are so many others, almost uncountable. Why do Americans create shrines and sacred sites out of homes? What do these say about the American home as a sacred site, the "cult of domesticity", the Christian home and family, and the "great men" who built and ruled over these homes? 

What are the layers here? "Home" is in one sense a place constructed by and for the family. The home is the ultimate "built environment" - the site of meticulous energy, control, supervision, maintenance of a very personal nature and its own family culture. And the home is the location of private religious observance from Passover to Advent wreaths to ancestor altars. Of course some families have more autonomy and agency here than others. The home raises the whole question of what is family anyway? What are the religious and cultural forces that have acted to create this idea of home?  These have been interpreted as monuments to a man's greatness-but this perspective is now actively contested. In one sense, the domestic is in tension with and contrast to the political. Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, TN was called "Hermitage" as if it was an escape from the political man, a place of privacy and sanctity. And George Washington longed to escape politics and the District of Columbia and return to the freedom and leisure of civilian life at Mount Vernon. A leisure, we might add, built on the labor of enslaved people. But at the same time, domesticity "the family man" has long been source of legitimacy for politicians in American.  And the family photo has been an inescapable aspect to political campaigns.