When the economy turns upside down, Appalachian homesteaders might have the answers
One of the most enduring stereotypes in the United States is that country people are unsophisticated, ignorant, and stuck in the past. You can tell a stereotype has been around a while when it has generated its own vocabulary, and this one has produced an impressive list: bumpkin, clodhopper, hayseed, hick, hillbilly, rube, yokel. We’ve all heard the jokes: you might be a redneck if your house is on wheels and your car is on blocks.
If I took a visitor on a drive through eastern Kentucky, she would see evidence that appears to support the stereotype: Trailer homes and junk cars and washing machines dumped in creeks. But that’s how stereotypes work—you can look right at something and not see it. What if our visitor set aside prejudice and looked closer? Yes, she would observe signs of poverty, that structural kind of poverty woven into the fabric of society. And in a time of pandemic and economic crisis, the impact of poverty is magnified; it is a major part of the problem
But our visitor would also see something else—something that may represent part of the solution. She would see flocks of chickens scratching in yards and firewood stacked on porches. Rows of corn and tomatoes and greasy beans; homes built by the families who live in them. The closer she looked, the more she would see. A line of beehives, a cistern, solar panels on a post, hogs in a pen, a freezer packed with venison.
These are examples of what scholars refer to as subsistence production, where people meet a portion of their economic needs through their own labor. In eastern Kentucky, a given family will often combine a variety of subsistence activities, in which case they’re homesteading.
Contemporary homesteading is important for a number of reasons. It requires a great deal of skill and knowledge. A well-run homestead is, among other things, an intellectual accomplishment. People make a conscious choice to homestead; it’s not a relic from the past or some quaint, outdated hobby. They choose homesteading in pursuit of a wide range of goals: to shape a life in accord with spiritual beliefs; to raise capable children; to reduce their ecological footprint.
Homesteading is especially important, in our current situation, because it’s a form of economic resistance. Homesteaders, even highly skilled ones, are not able to achieve complete self-sufficiency; the mainstream economy produces too many needful products, from eyeglasses and vaccines to refrigerators and chainsaws. What they are able to achieve, however, is a measure of distance from the mainstream economy. Consider a family that avoids spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house and mortgage by building a frugal home on a couple acres of cheap Kentucky hillside. That family has partially shielded themselves from damaging aspects of the mainstream economy—wages that are lower than they ought to be, runaway shops, the crippling burden of debt, the boom and bust cycles that inevitably plague a system where corporate ownership is just another form of gambling. That family has created, as one homesteader told me, “a place semi-independent from the machine.”
This is why there’s a surge of interest in homesteading every time the mainstream economy flounders, going back at least to the mid-1800s. We are entering another such period, when millions of people in cities and suburbs wake one morning, read the alarming headlines, and realize that knowing how to grow a garden might be a good thing. That sheltering-in-place might feel better if you’ve got your own patch of ground. That a joke about “cars on blocks” might actually be a joke about what city folks don’t know, and that being able to replace a CV joint might not be so backwards, after all. And suddenly, we turn to overlooked and misunderstood places like Appalachia in search of answers.
Jason G. Strange is chair of the department of Peace and Social Justice Studies at Berea College and the author of “Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism.”