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Tobacco, Toyota, and subaltern development discourses: Constructing livelihoods and community in rural Kentucky
Abstract
This dissertation is a project in interpretive ethnography for which fieldwork was done in "Greenway County," Kentucky, between 1986 and 1989. The question guiding the research was: How are decisions about the future of work in Greenway County, Kentucky, mediated by local constructions of (1) livelihood; (2) identity; (3) relatedness; (4) power; and (5) change? This problem challenges notions of "modernization" as progression from "underdeveloped" to "developed," instead asking what the multiple scenarios of development are in a region, and tracing them through an overdetermined context. East central Kentucky was chosen as the site for this research because (1) factory and farm work have long been combined in the region, contesting classification of the work force as either "peasants" or classical proletariat, (2) there is a rapid influx of multinational capital into the region, sparking talk of change, and (3) the ethnographer is indigenous to the region, affording multiple "placement" of the analytical voice along with those interviewed. Methods used in this ethnographic project included participant observation in numerous settings, semistructured interviews, mapping of social networks, ethnohistory, analyses of aggregate data, and discourse analysis of local and regional news reports. Livelihood images and forms of life in Greenway County were clustered analytically as "tobacco," "toyota," and "subaltern" development discourses. Tobacco and Toyota, as key symbols in dominant discourses of development in the region, represent the participation of Greenway Countians in two multinational industries; the former discourse, surrounding the cash-cropping of burley tobacco, may be characterized by images of continuity, and the latter by images of change. A subaltern development discourse in Greenway County is locally initiated and controlled, mostly by women, and its participants do not rely as much on "official" settings of decision-making to enact their images of the future of work in Greenway County. The central conclusions of this dissertation are that more subtle forms of analysis than regionalized dichotomies of the powerful and the powerless must be invoked to study "development," and that if agriculture and manufacturing are viewed as both being multinational industries, we can better see the ways in which workers manipulate and are manipulated by those industries.
Subject Area
Cultural anthropology|American studies|Geography
Recommended Citation
Kingsolver, Ann Elizabeth, "Tobacco, Toyota, and subaltern development discourses: Constructing livelihoods and community in rural Kentucky" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9120901.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9120901