Customer Reviews

A Space on the Side of the Road

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In one of the most profoundly affecting social science books I have read, Kathleen Stewart adopts a radical and poetic language to summon up the inarticulacies of people in a world got down. In an environment surrounded by ghosts, lost hopes and debris from other times, the denizens of this space manufacture tales, phantasmogoric stories which conjure up powerful forces beyond their control. It is through these stories that they try to gain possession of their own lives and environment in a capitalist America which systematically disempowers and uses up people and resources.

By avoiding leftist reified and conservative discourse, the impact of these forces on ordinary people is relayed in a humane and grounded fashion, devoid of meta-theoretical abstractions, which preserves their dignity and shares their insights. Kathleen's imaginative and empathetic approach cannot be too highly commended, for it is this which ultimately provokes an anger that working people should be treated with such disdain, by middle class academics as well as by capital.

Kathleen Stewart's book is not for everyone. Seemingly some people have even taken offense. Still, as a social scientist (I have a chair in organization studies), I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for it represents a critical avenue of development for writing social theory. Whether it presents the truth of the West Virginian experience I cannot say, as I've never visited the hollers she writes of (but I haven't seen a better analysis either, so I intend to believe her until somebody effectively disproves her), but I can state that she has found a way of writing about her experiences and communicating theory which is amazingly fresh and goes directly to the problem of developing critique in late modernity. I've rarely been moved to tears by a non-fiction book, but I wept while reading this -- tears of sheer joy of appreciating a brilliant mind. Should be required reading for all social scientists.

Susan Lepselter's poetic account of the creation of meaning by a betrayed and disenfranchised community is truly mesmerizing, but may be too dense for those uninitiated in the rigmarole of social theory. Her work is actually quite accessible compared to other writers in the field, and so makes itself vulnerable by straddling two different markets, the academic and the quasi-popular. Still, the book is moving and very enjoyable to read, and I can't recommend it enough.

As a West Virginian and an aspiring anthropologist, I was extremely disturbed by Stewart's approach to her subjects. I understand her impulse to write reflexively and her reluctance to impose meaning, but by allowing the text to be consumed by quasi-philosophical meanderings instead of communicating some concrete sense about her subjects, their way of life, and her relationships with them, Stewart does the people she claims to respect a great disservice. It's as though she's using them in the name of a broader academic mission, rather than concentrating on their experience itself.

When you describe people as living in a 'phantasmogoric dreamworld' and 'an alternative narrative space,' you are assigning another KIND of meaning -- one even more problematic than that of more traditional approaches. In the end, the book creates more distance between the reader and rural West Virginians than had previously existed. Kathleen Stewart may well believe that this is the role or the inevitable outcome of ethnography. If so, I hope she'll stay the hell away from my home state.

This ethnography is so laden with academic jargon that it is nearly unreadable and the coal mining towns she is supposedly studying are lost amidst Stewart's excessive and meandering theorizing. Stewart fails to center the reader and we are given little background information on the people and places that she is conducting fieldwork on. Nearly every other sentence begins with the annoying command directed at the reader to "picture this" or "imagine that." The few interviews we get from her informants are poorly placed and scantily contextualized. This book is much more about Stewart showing off than coal mining towns and she tosses around quotes by theorists Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Bauman without really understanding what they mean.

Despite her terrible writing, she does make some interesting points, but none insightful enough that you couldn't gather it from a better book that is able to utilize theory in a productive and clear manner. Stewart does make some interesting observations on the talk of the coal mining communities, but again they are lost in the dense tangle of weeds that Stewart mires them in.

I am furious with K Stewarts portrayal of West Virginians in a nonsense scrip she calls a book. The context of this gibberish can be analyzed as a misconception of the transfer of her intelligence to the posterior end of her lap.