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If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Jay Mechling
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Extract

I suppose I can find in the details of my own biography all the contradictions of place and mobility in modern American civilization. I was raised for eighteen years in the same house in Miami Beach, one of the paradigmatically transient cities in America. I was an undergraduate in a small southern town, where people were as likely to stand up for “Dixie” as for “The Star Spangled Banner” and where a sense of place hung in the air like Spanish moss on the live oaks. I was a graduate student in Philadelphia and took my first job in Davis, California.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 59 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. This prospectus, “Sacramento Valley Studies: Interdisciplinary Strategies for the Study of American Place,” is available from the National Humanities Institute, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, Conn. 06510.

2. My five propositions are quite in keeping with the ten Gene Wise offered in his fine lecture, “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” the keynote address at the University of Iowa conference on “Contemporary Approaches to the Study of American Cultures,” in January, 1977. As a matter of fact, my proposals are a kind of operationalization of Wise's axioms. (Wise's paper also appears in this issue of Prospects, along with the others from the conference.)

3. The best treatment of the myth-symbol-image school of American Studies, including a critique of its philosophical assumptions, is Kuklick, Bruce's “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 24 (10 1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The tradition still lives in American Studies teaching and writing. See Chmaj, Betty E., Image, Myth and Beyond (Pittsburgh: Know, 1972).Google Scholar

4. For an interesting view of the subculture issue, with comments from ten anthropologists, see Despres, Leo A., “Anthropological Theory, Cultural Pluralism, and the Study of Complex Societies,” Current Anthropology, 9 (02 1968), 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Pelto, Pertti J. and Pelto, Gretel H., “Intra-cultural Diversity: Some Theoretical Issues,” American Ethnologist, 2 (02 1975), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Berger, Peter L., Berger, Brigitte, and Kellner, Hansfried, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage, Random House, 1973), pp. 112, 206.Google Scholar

7. There is more to be said about American Studies as part of the demodernizing consciousness, more than I can treat here. The antagonism to the public-private sphere dichotomy, for example, is a demodernizing theme in radical sociologies (see C. Wright Mills's wish to connect “personal troubles” with “public issues”), and it is part of the explicit agenda of the groups—first the Radical Caucus of the American Studies Association, later the Connections Collective—who founded the journals Connections and Connections 2. And there are ironies in this demodernizing consciousness, which is (as Berger is quick to point out) an artifact of the modernization of consciousness. The identity-consciousness, some say narcissism, of American Studies is profoundly modern.

8. Berger et al. develop these ideas in Chap. 3, “Pluralization of Social Life-Worlds,” The Homeless Mind, pp. 63–82.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 78

10. Berger, Peter L., “In Praise of Particularity: The Concept of Mediating Structures,” Review of Politics, 38 (07 1976), 402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Berger, Peter L., Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1974), p. 151.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 183.

13. “In a modern society [the ‘right to meaning’] implies the right of the individual to choose his own meanings. In premodern societies it implies his right to abide by tradition.” ibid., p. 185.

14. Berger, , “In Praise of Particularity,” p. 403Google Scholar. The position paper that officially defines the theoretical foundations and assumptions of the mediating-structures project is Berger, Peter L. and Neuhaus, Richard John, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977).Google Scholar

15. Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1966), p. 95.Google Scholar

16. Tuan, Yi-Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974)Google Scholar. The well-known horizontal mobility of Americans may make topophilia, “love of place,” somewhat problematic. If American marriage and divorce patterns add up to what has been called “serial polygyny,” then perhaps topophilia must take place within a pattern of “serial regionality.”

17. There are paradoxes and problems aplenty in the notion of making local region the repository of meaning, not the least of which is social justice. See the Berger and Neuhaus discussion of individual versus community rights in To Empower People, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

18. Wallace, Anthony F. C., “The Psychic Unity of Human Groups,” in Studying Personality Cross-culturally, ed. Kaplan, Bert (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1961), p. 131.Google Scholar

19. “The problem of social order,” says one cognitive sociologist, “is essentially the problem of producing some sharedness of meanings and some coordination of the activities of members of any society sufficient to allow them to achieve what they consider to be adequate gratification of their needs and desires through their everyday lives.” Douglas, Jack D., American Social Order: Social Rules in a Pluralistic Society (New York: Free Press, 1971), p. 3.Google Scholar

20. Wallace, Anthony F. C., Culture and Personality, 2d ed. (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 22–23Google Scholar. Perhaps I have drawn too stark a contrast between the two approaches. My judgment that earlier American Studies' emphasis on “the replication of uniformity” was an “error” is perfect hindsight, of course, and I see the two approaches as more of a dialectic than an irreconcilable dualism. In practice we should be testing both propositions—that Americans are all different, and that Americans are more like each other than they are like non-Americans. Nevertheless, I still stand by my contention that the uniformist approach of past American Studies not only led to untenable generalizations about American culture but led also to an unrealistic and unjust portrait of the American social order. A nice essay on the problems of balancing both perspectives is Metzer, Walter P., “Generalizations about National Character: An Analytical Essay,” in Generalizations in the Writing of History, ed. Gottschalk, Louis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 77–102.Google Scholar

21. Wallace, , Culture and Personality, p. 27.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 24.

23. Ibid., p. 36.

24. This is a vast literature. A good starting point is Bailis, Stanley' “The Social Sciences in American Studies: An Integrative Conception,” American Quarterly, 26 (August 1974), 202–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bateson, Gregory's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972) is brilliant.Google Scholar

25. Pelto, and Pelto, , “Intra-cultural Diversity,” p. 14.Google Scholar

26. The interdisciplinary journal, Human Ecology, is devoted to this integrative conception. See, for example, Bruhn, John G., “Human Ecology: A Unifying Science?” Human Ecology, 2 (04 1974), 105–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The American Ethnologist, 4 (02 1977), 1–198Google Scholar, is a special issue of eleven articles on human ecology.

27. To begin with, Harumi Befu, “Contrastive Acculturation of California Japanese: Comparative Approach to the Study of Immigrants,” Human Organization, 24 (Fall 1965), 209–16Google Scholar, leads in larger concentric circles to comparative studies such as the essays collected in Conroy, Hilary and Miyakawa, T. Scott, eds., East Across the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and to Nash, Dennison and Schaw, Louis C., “Achievement and Acculturation: A Japanese Example,” in Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology, ed. Spiro, Melford E. (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 206–24Google Scholar; and back to Vogel, Ezra F., “The Japanese Family,” in Comparative Family Systems, ed. Nimkoff, M. F. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 287–300Google Scholar; and the essays in Japanese Culture, ed. Smith, Robert J. and Beardsley, Richard K. (London: Methuen, 1962).Google Scholar

28. A discussion of each term appears in my “Sacramento Valley Studies” prospectus. See, also, Mechling, Jay, Merideth, Robert, and Wilson, David, “American Culture Studies: The Discipline and the Curriculum,” American Quarterly, 25 (10 1973), 363–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mechling, Jay, “A Note on American Studies Bibliography,” American Quarterly, 26 (August 1974), 199–201Google Scholar; and Mechling, Jay, “Languaging American Studies,” The American Examiner, 2 (Winter 1970), 3–7.Google Scholar

29. Bernstein, Leonard, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar, n.p. Interdisciplinary thinking of this sort surely is akin to the bisociation and “Eureka!” experience characteristic of humor, scientific discovery, and art. See Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1964).Google Scholar

30. Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Nash, Roderick, The Wilderness in the American Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar

31. Lévi-Strauss, Claude's The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966)Google Scholar is a stunning performance of this sort of synthesis. Both Henry Glassie and Leonard Bernstein use Chomsky's structural linguistics in order to understand the syntax of middle Virginia folk housing in the one case and, for example, Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor in the other. Glassie, Compare Henry, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1975)Google Scholar and Bernstein, Leonard, The Unanswered QuestionGoogle Scholar. Information theory allows Gregory Bateson to talk about Balinese art and Leonard Meyer to talk about modern music with essentially the same referential vocabulary and processual model. Bateson, Compare Gregory, “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 128–52Google Scholar, and Meyer, Leonard B., Music, the Arts and Ideas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967).Google Scholar

32. Ruyle, Eugene E., “Genetic and Cultural Pools: Some Suggestions for a Unified Theory of Biocultural Evolution,” Human Ecology, 1 (03 1973), 201–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Michael Zuckerman offers a splendid critique of the materialist bias in modernization research in “Dreams that You Dare to Dream: The Role of Ideas in Social Change,” unpublished paper delivered at the meeting of the Social Science History Association, October 29–31, 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

34. Merriam, Alan P., A Prologue to the Study of the African Arts (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1962), p. 14.Google Scholar

35. Robert Plant Armstrong in anthropology, Peter L. Berger in sociology, Abraham Maslow in psychology, Henry Glassie in folklore, and Martin Diamond in political science are all examples of people who try to bring together the social sciences and humanities in their own work rather than sit as “token humanists” on a team of social scientists.

36. Armstrong, Robert Plant, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and Welkpring: On the Myth and Source of Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar

37. Place, Linna Funk et al. , “The Object as Subject: The Role of Museums and Material Culture Collections in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 26 (08 1974), 281–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, Linda Keller, “American Studies at Douglass College: One Vision of Interdisciplinarity,” American Quarterly, 27 (08 1975), 342–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Junker, Buford H., Fieldwork: An Introduction to the Social Sciences (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960).Google Scholar