Grounding the Counterculture: Post-Modernism, the Back-To- The-Land Movement, and Authentic Enviroments of Memory

University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2013 Grounding The Counterculture: Post-Modernism, The Back-To- The-Land Movement, And Authentic Enviroments Of Memory Jonathan Bowdler University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Bowdler, Jonathan, "Grounding The Counterculture: Post-Modernism, The Back-To-The-Land Movement, And Authentic Enviroments Of Memory" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 629. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/629 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. GROUNDING THE COUNTERCULTURE: POST-MODERNISM, THE BACK-TO-THE- LAND MOVEMENT, AND AUTHENTIC ENVIROMENTS OF MEMORY A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History The University of Mississippi by JONATHAN A. BOWDLER May 2013 Copyright Jonathan A. Bowdler 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This thesis will explore the regional and cultural dimensions of the Back-to-the-Land movement during the 1970s in an effort to move scholarship away from applying theoretical constructs such as post-modernism to diverse social movements. By drawing on the three main Back-to-the-Land publications, namely the Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News, and the Foxfire books, this paper will demonstrate the varying impulses and regional nuances of the movement as well as the continuity and discontinuity of the back-to-nature tradition in America. Particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which the Southern homesteading experience has been masked within the scholarship and how a reexamination of the movement from a Southern perspective can move historiography and historical methodology forward. The analysis put forward in this paper will serve to critique the study of ethnohistory by demonstrating the permeability of Native identities and the ways in which labor in the natural environment constructs identity. Native American and rural Appalachian cultural symbolism was employed by back-to-the-landers who sought out native knowledge through oral histories, most notably obtained in the Foxfire books. The construction of identity through knowledge and work of the physical environment was in no way post-modern because it was grounded in the soil that back- to-the-landers turned for their vegetable gardens. ii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to a gnarled olive tree in Marseille, a rainy jungle in Seattle, a vegetable garden at Camp Hanover, a mountain holler in Charlottesville, and a pond in Oxford, Mississippi. All are sites of memory that connect me with the friends, family, and colleagues who have been an intrinsic part of creating this work of history. They know who they are, though it remains to be seen if the trees do. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor Charles Regan Wilson in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, whose advice and positive feedback have made this work possible. I would also like to thank Professors Elizabeth Payne, Deirdre Cooper-Owens, Mikaëla Adams, John Neff, and Lester Field, whose methodological feedback informed my graduate career at the University of Mississippi. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………ii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………..iv INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1: The Modernism of Stewart Brand and Gurney Norman…………………………18 CHAPTER 2: Mother Earth News and Post-modern Play………………………………………38 CHAPTER 3: Foxfire and Southern Milieux de Mémoire………………………………………58 EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………………...79 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………….81 v INTRODUCTION In fall of 1970 Eliot Wigginton guided a group of high school students, laden down with audio recording equipment and a camera, to a ramshackle log-house in the hills of Rabun County, Georgia. There they met with an affable eighty-four year old widow named Arie Carpenter. Aunt Arie, as she was known to her interviewers, was both a disarming presence and a disorienting relic of the past. It did not help that she met the students with a butcher knife in her hand. Eliot Wigginton later described the experience as inexplicably disconcerting. He confessed, “The image of the raw, severed hog’s head— coming as it did on the heels of my just completing Lord of the Flies with my students—in the clutches of a tiny, white-haired lady…this image was unforgettable. It was harmony and discord, resonance and dissonance, peace and chaos….it was almost unbelievable.”1 The interview with Aunt Arie was not the first oral history to be recorded by Wigginton and his students, however it soon became one of the most famous.2 Three years prior to the interview with Aunt Arie, Wigginton had had an epiphany that led to the establishment of the Foxfire series, an experiment in experiential learning, which encouraged students to explore local Georgian history outside of the classroom. What started out in 1966 as a small regional school magazine blossomed into a full-fledged book in 1972, and a series of similar books soon followed. Eliot Wigginton understood the purpose of his project and 1 Eliot Wigginton, Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait, ed. Linda Garlan Page and Eliot Wigginton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xiii. 2 Indeed Aunt Arie became one of Wigginton’s allies in his effort to promote experiential learning. Apart from the thirteen Foxfire books and one additional work on Appalachian arts and crafts, Aunt Arie was the only local Rabun Gap resident to receive an entire book devoted to her stories and recipes. Ibid., Introduction. 1 attributed much of its success to interest in Appalachian cultural preservation and educational ingenuity.3 His interpretation, however, tells only part of the story. The vast majority of Wigginton’s readers were not schoolteachers seeking to reinvigorate stale or pedantic lesson plans. Nor were they solely interested in the cultural preservation of rural Appalachia. Foxfire spoke to larger currents within the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It spoke to emerging environmental sentiments by presenting interviews on Appalachian foodways and “less invasive” forms of agriculture.4 It spoke to latent spiritual interest in Native American cultural practices as a means of recapturing a mythical pre-modern past.5 Furthermore, it spoke to an emerging group of middle-class white youth who yearned to physically return to nature in the belief that a self- sufficient lifestyle would allow them to wash away the environmental sins of industrial capitalism. Aunt Arie’s rustic butcher knife, the dripping hogs head in her sink, and her painstaking attempts to pluck out the hog’s eyes with a dull pairing knife, were all culturally symbolic acts linked to these desires. In essence, Aunt Arie represented the last vestiges of America’s pioneer heritage, a legacy slowly disappearing in the face of industrialization, 3 Wigginton’s first memoir served more as a handbook for teachers interested in his new form of experiential learning which took students out of the classroom. In his first book, published by the Institutional Development and Economic Affairs Service (IDEAS), Wigginton’s methodology is explained, by the president of IDEAS, as “a successful model project worthy of replication. The process underlying Foxfire is applicable and adaptable to a wide range of subject matter…English, journalism, local history, social studies, environmental studies….young people are afforded a reality learning experience which can help them discover themselves to be worthy, self-reliant…members of their own communities.” Eliot Wigginton, Moments: The Foxfire Experience (Kennebunk: Star Press Inc., 1975), x. 4 For a discussion of the rise of environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s see Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 15-21,94-108; Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York Columbia University Press, 2002), Chapter 10. 5 This process has been explored in depth in Philip Deloria’s works on the perception of Indianness in American culture. See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 2 electrification and environmental degradation in southern Appalachia.6 Wigginton’s sense that these symbols were “harmony and discord, resonance and dissonance” hints at the transition America, especially Southern America, experienced in the 1970s The interview with Aunt Arie occurred at a cusp in American history. The reigning declensionist narrative of the past half-century posits that the 1960s was a period of increased political participation, social experimentation, communal action, and hope. On the other hand, the 1970s is seen as a period of political disillusionment, social fragmentation, historical discontinuity, self-absorption, and pessimism. 7 This pervasive narrative found its way into the titles of some of the most widely used college textbooks of the twentieth century, especially Tom Engelhardt’s The End of Victory Culture, William O’Neil’s Coming Apart,

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