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Yankee Moderns - Sawmill Valley Western Massachusetts (Hardcover)
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Yankee Moderns - Sawmill Valley Western Massachusetts (Hardcover)
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In Yankee Moderns, Michael Hoberman explores the convergence of
folk regional identity--a culturally based sense of place--with the
social, economic, and psychic pressures that have come with
modernity. Focusing on the oral traditions of a small place, the
Sawmill Valley of western Massachusetts, he finds that the folklife
of apparently isolated rural communities is far more dynamic and
adaptable to change than is popularly supposed.
Deftly intertwining anecdote and analysis, Hoberman draws largely
upon interviews he conducted with older residents of the Sawmill
Valley. He uses their words to paint a vivid picture of everyday
life there during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries--a time when small-scale farming and lumbering began to
give way to the newer economic forces of industrialization and
tourism.
As he studied these oral traditions, Hoberman discovered a high
degree of self-consciousness and social tension, which he
attributes to the region's post-agricultural economic woes and to
its somewhat reluctant proximity to several Connecticut Valley
immigrant enclaves. Yet, he asserts, even as their old agrarian
ideals and one-time cultural uniformity became matters of distant
memory, the residents of Sawmill Valley recognized these facts and
coped quite competently with the changing conditions of their
lives.
Rural New Englanders, Hoberman suggests, have too long been
portrayed as backward-looking and dangerously homogenous in their
makeup--crotchety exceptions to modernity's nearly worldwide sweep.
This insightful work, with its emphasis on instability and
adaptation as persistent features of the folk region, does much to
lay that stereotype to rest.
The Author: Michael Hoberman teaches English at Greenfield
Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and also works as a
visiting lecturer in American Studies
at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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