UC Berkeley

When I was growing up in the beautiful Red Lick Valley in eastern Kentucky, I saw many families practicing intensive subsistence production. They grew large gardens, raised chickens for eggs and meat, built their own homes, and fixed their own cars and trucks. On the Yurok Reservation, I again saw a profound and ongoing engagement with hunting, gathering, and crafting activities - and then encountered contemporary subsistence yet again when I visited my wife's childhood home in rural Ireland. When I began my graduate studies, however, I could find little reflection of these activities in either the scholarly record or popular media. When they were noticed at all, they were often targeted for stereotyped ridicule: contemporary homesteaders in the US were either remnant hippies from the `60s, or quaint mountain folks lost in time. I already knew that these stereotypes were misleading and insufficient. However, they also highlighted the lack of understanding of a genuinely puzzling phenomenon: why, in the heart of an advanced industrial nation, are so many people still embracing what is, in essence, peasant production?

Using multiple research methods - including in-depth, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, surveys, and archival work - I have found that contemporary homesteading is not a window lingering open upon the past, but a thoughtful and serious attempt to respond to the present. It is best thought of as an unusual kind of social movement. Rather than attempting to foster change by modifying policy or reforming dominant institutions, homesteaders pursue change through a conscious reworking of the economic foundations of their lives. Barbara Epstein calls this a "prefigurative" strategy: it aims to directly manifest - to prefigure - ways of life and relationships that dissidents believe are more appropriate. Because they do not require the visible organizational armature and attention-grabbing strategies of more traditional social movements, prefigurative movements - like the back-to-the-land movement - have often been overlooked by researchers.

Contemporary homesteading is also an unusual social movement in that it attracts participants from widely different socioeconomic backgrounds. In eastern Kentucky there is an acute cultural distinction between two groups, known to each other, somewhat pejoratively, as hicks and hippies. I have found that neither group is accurately described by the dismissive stereotypes to which they are often subjected. There is indeed a countercultural back-to-the-land movement in the research area that emerged originally out of the radical leftist ferment of the 1960s. But rather than representing a dwindling cohort of aging hippie communards, this movement is comprised of people of all ages; my research suggests that there are more back-to-the-landers in the area now than there were forty years ago. Moreover, it is a movement comprised of a multi-stranded left, in which participants are as likely to have been radicalized through, say, the Quaker tradition or Catholic liberation theology as through the Grateful Dead or Timothy Leary. The stereotype of the "hick" homesteaders is no more accurate. They are not simply country folks carrying on Appalachian subsistence traditions despite the fact that those traditions have lost all practical relevance. Many of them have lived in cities and worked modern jobs, and consciously embrace homesteading in response to those experiences. They, too, are part of a back-to-the-land movement, in the sense of having chosen to live a certain way as a strategy of resistance.

The presence of two groups who embrace homesteading, and yet remain distinct and somewhat distanced from one another provides one of the most profound and difficult questions that my research confronts. While there are individuals who move freely between these two groups, in general they remain remarkably segregated - even when they live side by side along the same country road. What accounts for this cultural distance? Whatever the difference between "hick" and "hippie" homesteaders, it is not straightforward: nearly half of those who can clearly be identified as belonging to the group of "countercultural back-to-the-land homesteaders" are themselves from rural Appalachian families.

By far, the single most consistent difference between these two groups is that one group is not only college educated, but actively and independently literate; members of the other group, with few exceptions, have not attended college and seldom read. But this finding begs another question: why should a difference in the practice of literate intellectuality stand at the heart of profound cultural differences that encompass everything from diet and diction to religious belief and political orientation?

The answer is complicated, but it emerges from the recognition that a modern capitalist society is one in which people have profoundly different experiences in all aspects of their lives, from cradle to grave, based on their socioeconomic position. As children, they attend radically different kinds of schools, or are slotted into separate tracks within a given school. After they leave school they have access to different kinds of jobs - shelving products at Wal-Mart, say, versus teaching in a college classroom. When people spend decades of their lives working such jobs, they end up with such divergent life experiences that they might as well be living in different societies. These divided institutional experiences are reinforced in turn by sharp segregation and by the development of opposition to the culture of those in other socioeconomic positions. The command or lack of literate intellectuality plays multiple roles in shaping and sustaining these starkly distinct life experiences, perhaps most clearly by shaping how a particular individual moves through the positions provided by dominant institutions. Taken together, these dynamics culminate in a forceful process that I refer to as "capitalist ethnogenesis": a process of cultural differentiation within a single society, rather than through geographic separation within separate, non-interacting or weakly interacting societies.

The homesteading movement contains two groups who turn to the rural landscape for answers to the problems of modern civilization - but how they perceive and interpret that civilization and its problems are markedly different. They are, in effect, responding to different modernities. They turn to homesteading as people indelibly marked by the system they dream of escaping.