Customer Reviews

The Livelihood of Kin: Making Ends Meet "The Kentucky Way"

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I read this wonderful book in my cultural anthropology course, and I found it informative and a pleasure to read. I found the material to be enlightening; increasing my knowledge of the region, its people, and their ways.

I gave this book to an introductory anthropology class a couple of years ago, in the misguided hope that an ethnography written about Americans would appeal to them. I think a good book about rural Americans (something like Fitchen's wonderful "poverty in Rural America) would indeed have drawn them in, but they hated this book! They thought the tone was condescending. They said the author repeated her points over and over again till they were bored out of their minds. And they picked up on the basic moral confusion of the author's argument, which falls in the same trap as all the tired "culture of poverty" writing of the 60s and 70s. On one hand we're supposed to admire these poor Appalachians because they are independent and tough, and they are happy being marginal and poor. On the other hand we're supposed to be sympathetic to how they are mistreated victims, suffering from neglect and the oppression of the dominant middle class. The confusion never seems to dawn on the author, who doggedly portrays everything the people do as somehow "functional," a way of making ends meet. The possibility that some things may not be very "functional," never seems to dawn on her.

I will not use this book again, except in a bad example in a class on writing ethnography. The author seems capable of making any topic, even ones that are intrinsically exciting, boring and dull.