A Space on the Side of the Road

Rating:
Summary: pretention and distance
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Only your opinion!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Unamerican Nightmares
Review: 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.