The Green Side of Life
Appalachian Magic as a Site of Resistance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5805181 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rodger Cunningham (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 54-62 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Appalachian heritage (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0363-2318 • E-ISSN: 1940-5081 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/aph.0.0251 |
| OpenAlex | W2043977439 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 7 |
The Green Side of Life:Appalachian Magic as a Site of Resistance Rodger Cunningham (bio) In memoriam John Richards The magical practices of the Southern Appalachian region have attracted attention of various kinds over the decades. There are now, for example, several popular books and websites of varying styles of approach and degrees of reliability devoted to the subject (cf. Richards 27-29). But most of the specifically scholarly attention to the subject has come from folklorists and anthropologists. Leading examples of these studies are Ruth Ann Musick's Green Hills of Magic: West Virginia Folktales from Europe; Patrick W. Gainer's Witches, Ghosts, and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians; Anthony Cavender's Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia; and most recently Gerald Milnes' Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore. These scholars' works are illuminating in many ways, but they write out of a set or sets of disciplinary assumptions that I think hinder a complete understanding of the subject. This essay will proceed via a critique of these assumptions to an exploration of the real ideational matrix of Appalachian magic and then to an examination of the directions I believe future research on Appalachian magic should take, and why. The works I have mentioned are different in approach but share certain common attitudes. Musick and Gainer are mainly concerned with recording stories and customs with little theoretical interpretation outside a casual distinction between the rational and the "superstitious." Of the more theoretically oriented approaches, Cavender divides his subjects' folk-medical ideas into the "naturalistic" and the "magico-religious" with a sharpness that does not accord with his actual description of healers' practices, while Milnes essentially relegates his entire subject to the category of the irrational. What these writers have in common (whether explicitly stated or only implicitly informing their presentation of materials) is, first of all, the tendency of folklorists to constitute their object of study by the negative category of "the irrational," whose boundaries in turn constitute "the rational" as the privileged category; and secondly, a Malinowskian functionalism, assimilated to common sense, that sees magic as rooted in [End Page 54] an attempt to "explain the unknown." This functionalist assumption, of course, entirely begs the question of why people should resort to this kind of "explanation"-in short, how magic actually functions in a society-or indeed why "explanation" and causal efficacy are assumed to be the basic goals of human thinking and acting in the first place. As a result, these four writers, like many researchers into magic, overlook what I see as the most interesting implications of their own research, implications that the reader must constantly pull in fragments from between the lines: implications, that is, concerning the broader ideas about the cosmos that structure and justify their informants' practices. A better approach to magic, I think, is suggested by the Benjaminian anthropologist Michael Taussig: [Malinowski's] mode of interpretation is unacceptable because it presupposes most of what needs explaining-the richly detailed motifs and precise configuration of details and meanings that constitute the beliefs and rites in question. Furthermore, it actively diverts attention from the inner meaning of these phenomena. This becomes obvious if we ask this question ...: Why is this particular set of ideas, with its pointed meaning and wealth of embedded mythology, chosen in this specific circumstance and time, rather than another set of ideas and practices? Once we raise this question, a different mode of interpretation is suggested. ... Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its direction. (14-15; emphasis added) This quotation points toward the questions I think need to be investigated, neither credulously nor positivistically but in the spirit of what Owen Barfield called "final participation" (Barfield 133-141) and also that of Ashis Nandy's "critical traditionalism" (Nandy 27-29, 47-48, 62). There is a wide field open, I think, for researchers who will simply ask the right questions about the real meaning(s) of
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2025 (10) |
| Highly cited | No |