Another good review; especially appreciate the ending portion about the "stranger-ification" of family life under modernity. I went through a pretty high-profile public shaming/"cancellation" event and having rock-solid support from my immediate family without any weird political catch to it made it vastly more tolerable. This is also the appeal of those deep friendships that fewer and fewer people report having, and which are perhaps harder to form today since there are so few people we consistently spend large portions of our life around.
Another thought, inspired by the "back to Appalachia" schoolteacher and how much that resembles the modern "hicklib" whose highest calling is denigrating their culture of origin: I wonder whether we're seeing a mild "hill people-ification" of communities that traditionally are not hill peoples but are structurally becoming like them in modern society for cultural reasons rather than economic or military ones. Traditional hill peoples, as you note, are in marginal or border territories and just want to avoid taxes or conscription or whatever. Today, though, neither military conscription nor taxes are the chief concerns in play; instead, it's a dominant ideology that seems to slow-motion obliterate any group seduced by it. So, a lot of the long-term survival of traditional "valley people" in the Dakotas or rural Indiana or whatever could be developing a "hill people" attitude towards a centralized U.S. government, if only because if your community gets assimilated your TFR drops to .6.
I think your second point is pretty accurate, and would add the additional aspect of being left the hell alone more in very rural areas. Where I grew up the question “do you have a permit for that shed?” is a joke, while in the suburb I live in now it is a threat. Taxation and conscription might not be the main concerns, but the amount of control over you and yours seems to increase exponentially with the number of people you live near.
I liked both this and the Scott book review, but only in the sense that any news is better than no news, with respect to hill people. It opens a conversation. Both books (from the reviews ...) read to me like poll-tested missives about noble savages, ala Jared Diamond on tribes in New Guinea, or Scott on the border regions of Thailand, Burma, and Laos, for blank slate reader markets who want to read about human versions of zoo animals. Yes, those tribal denizens are so intelligent! And so on. I also perceive that both accts are deeply Anglo, and the Anglo world hardly has hills, except for Scotland (and of course, Appalachians are often Scottish), and the Scottish Highlands story is an old sad one, pickled and canned. To contrast, the hill peoples of the Alps, the Pyrenees, Peru and Afghanistan (Nepal!) are uncanned and open with histories and influences up to the present day. What they're not, is Anglo. And so few of them ever emigrated to the USA, so they're not recognizable on an American street, so books about them don't sell. The general suppression of Germanic culture in the USA that dates from the end of WWI to the present day ensures that Alpine culture becomes zoology not anthropology. Still, there's no explanation of phenomena like Swiss "armed neutrality" or anarchism (that grows in the 19th century with Russian and Swiss [William Tell] heroes) without reference to hill culture as an ethical norm. Even Israeli military doctrine draws on hill culture, because its military and its civic education draws so deeply on the Swiss example. I'm only focusing on the Swiss example because that's what I know, as my dad's side of the family is from Nidwalden, above Lucerne on the lake. An uncle of mine used to giggle that Lucerne in the 1700s forbade its women from marrying anyone from our canton because of its lawlessness. Shortly before Switzerland was founded (1291), our canton was excommunicated from the Catholic church for laying siege to the Einsiedeln Benedictine monastary. Had Schiller not conquered cultural Germany with his romantic era account of William Tell, we would hardly be known but for Swiss historians. It's not a matter of pride to me, however, nor to Switzerland, that the bloodthirstyness of hill culture as reflected in Swiss mercenary practice (not taking prisoners, mutilating bodies, threatening pillage for ransom, and so on) infected many military traditions with excess ferocity. A large part of Zwingli's Reform Protestantism was a rejection of mercenary life, which he failed to expunge from Switzerland because it brought in too much income to communities in place of taxes. It's also silly to call us clannish, since as successful mercenaries (and in the French Alps, as watchmakers), the hill people refreshed their culture with the booty, women, and profit of surrounding lands, while retaining their "ungoverned" character. It's also not at all the case that all hill people indulged in feuds -- the Scottish example may hold in Afghanistan, but certainly not in Switzerland (I don't know the Pyrenees case, but perhaps not there too -- did it hold in Peru too?). Again, the limited focus teaches far less that it suggests.
I'd love to see the equivalent analysis for peoples on unsettlable land, who are ungovernable not by design but by simple fact of the empires being largely interested in their land (until recently); the Inuit are the best example here, and in many ways develop characteristics radically different from hill folks; in the Arctic, life is precious (so casual violence is heavily discouraged) and the real enemy is nature itself (Inuit gods and spirits are, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost universally cruel and harsh).
There's a fair few literary works on the settlement of the northern parts of the Nordic countries, like Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150473.Salka_Valka) or Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_the_Soil). The Earth is a Sinful Song by Timo Mukka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Is_a_Sinful_Song), the one most familiar to me, was made into a movie with English subtitles, though I'm not sure how one would go on about obtaining it, and very much portrayed it's small Lapland village in similar tones as used here for Appalachians, though probably even more animalistic and "wild".
One interesting thing is that, in addition to wild and unruly religiousness, these northern parts often went for Communism, often hand in hand (there are some interesting stories from Finnish Lapland about this, like a family with a picture of Jesus on their wall for 364 days of the year expect for May Day, when it was exchanged to a picture of Stalin). Not Communism as a force of authoritarianism and communalization, Communism as a basic permanent fuck-you to the southern forces of civilization, whether government or the timber corporations that people in hardscrabble Arctic countries basically had to work for for at least a part of the year due to the particular poverty of the soil making even subsistence farming not worth their while.
"timber corporations that people in hardscrabble Arctic countries basically had to work for for at least a part of the year"
This leaves me confused; what if there were no timber companies, where would they work then, and wouldn't they be worse off? The only coherent answer I can make up is that they were indeed better off with the timber companies, but that doesn't mean that they didn't hate them, cause it was still hard work for low pay, Though not as bad as the actual subsistence farming, hunting and deer herding, for otherwise they would have ignored those companies.
It meant that they were employees, had bosses, belonged to unions etc. - things that would make Marxism more appealing than if they had *simply* been farmers.
Under communism, there would still of course have been timber work - just under state-owned magnates, not private corporations.
Thanks for the passage. As someone who tried to go back (it doesn't work; YOU'VE changed), but managed to leave again, I feel sympathy for her. Knew too much to settle into and accept the greater order of things, but not enough to get herself out again. There's a whole pre-industrial lifestyle and mindset we don't get, with acceptance as a necessary virtue - to a degree that seems perverse to modern sensibilities. Spend your whole life destroying your body through farm labor or childbirth? What else is there? Suffer like your ancestors did, and find happiness where you can.
Do you know the documentary Holy Ghost People? It shows worship at a snake handling church in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia in the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZIa4kutkIM
the smart ones rule through local collaborators and proxies and then get chased out by an afghan hill people insurgency.
The mountain people category generally fits the description; the basques, albanians, scottish highlanders, kurds and chechens do have a lot in common but I wonder how the Swiss fit this typology. They used to be warlike and independence minded but also very civic. Maybe they are a mixture of hill peoples independent spirit and the german drive towards organizing.
As one of the ungovernable hill people (aka, an actual Appalachian), I find this essay both amusing and a little sad. I think it would take another essay to fully discuss my thoughts and I have other things to do today. I will say this: that's a perspective.
Another good review; especially appreciate the ending portion about the "stranger-ification" of family life under modernity. I went through a pretty high-profile public shaming/"cancellation" event and having rock-solid support from my immediate family without any weird political catch to it made it vastly more tolerable. This is also the appeal of those deep friendships that fewer and fewer people report having, and which are perhaps harder to form today since there are so few people we consistently spend large portions of our life around.
Another thought, inspired by the "back to Appalachia" schoolteacher and how much that resembles the modern "hicklib" whose highest calling is denigrating their culture of origin: I wonder whether we're seeing a mild "hill people-ification" of communities that traditionally are not hill peoples but are structurally becoming like them in modern society for cultural reasons rather than economic or military ones. Traditional hill peoples, as you note, are in marginal or border territories and just want to avoid taxes or conscription or whatever. Today, though, neither military conscription nor taxes are the chief concerns in play; instead, it's a dominant ideology that seems to slow-motion obliterate any group seduced by it. So, a lot of the long-term survival of traditional "valley people" in the Dakotas or rural Indiana or whatever could be developing a "hill people" attitude towards a centralized U.S. government, if only because if your community gets assimilated your TFR drops to .6.
I think your second point is pretty accurate, and would add the additional aspect of being left the hell alone more in very rural areas. Where I grew up the question “do you have a permit for that shed?” is a joke, while in the suburb I live in now it is a threat. Taxation and conscription might not be the main concerns, but the amount of control over you and yours seems to increase exponentially with the number of people you live near.
"Come on, tell me it isn’t a crime that there’s no comparative analysis of the Mongols and the Comanches!"
The ACOUP blog does a bit of this, when it looks at how similar the Dothraki from Game of Thrones are to either of them (Spoiler - not very!)
https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/
I've just read this, it's excellent, and does the best job I've seen answering the question.
I already liked acoup but haven't seen that one!
I liked both this and the Scott book review, but only in the sense that any news is better than no news, with respect to hill people. It opens a conversation. Both books (from the reviews ...) read to me like poll-tested missives about noble savages, ala Jared Diamond on tribes in New Guinea, or Scott on the border regions of Thailand, Burma, and Laos, for blank slate reader markets who want to read about human versions of zoo animals. Yes, those tribal denizens are so intelligent! And so on. I also perceive that both accts are deeply Anglo, and the Anglo world hardly has hills, except for Scotland (and of course, Appalachians are often Scottish), and the Scottish Highlands story is an old sad one, pickled and canned. To contrast, the hill peoples of the Alps, the Pyrenees, Peru and Afghanistan (Nepal!) are uncanned and open with histories and influences up to the present day. What they're not, is Anglo. And so few of them ever emigrated to the USA, so they're not recognizable on an American street, so books about them don't sell. The general suppression of Germanic culture in the USA that dates from the end of WWI to the present day ensures that Alpine culture becomes zoology not anthropology. Still, there's no explanation of phenomena like Swiss "armed neutrality" or anarchism (that grows in the 19th century with Russian and Swiss [William Tell] heroes) without reference to hill culture as an ethical norm. Even Israeli military doctrine draws on hill culture, because its military and its civic education draws so deeply on the Swiss example. I'm only focusing on the Swiss example because that's what I know, as my dad's side of the family is from Nidwalden, above Lucerne on the lake. An uncle of mine used to giggle that Lucerne in the 1700s forbade its women from marrying anyone from our canton because of its lawlessness. Shortly before Switzerland was founded (1291), our canton was excommunicated from the Catholic church for laying siege to the Einsiedeln Benedictine monastary. Had Schiller not conquered cultural Germany with his romantic era account of William Tell, we would hardly be known but for Swiss historians. It's not a matter of pride to me, however, nor to Switzerland, that the bloodthirstyness of hill culture as reflected in Swiss mercenary practice (not taking prisoners, mutilating bodies, threatening pillage for ransom, and so on) infected many military traditions with excess ferocity. A large part of Zwingli's Reform Protestantism was a rejection of mercenary life, which he failed to expunge from Switzerland because it brought in too much income to communities in place of taxes. It's also silly to call us clannish, since as successful mercenaries (and in the French Alps, as watchmakers), the hill people refreshed their culture with the booty, women, and profit of surrounding lands, while retaining their "ungoverned" character. It's also not at all the case that all hill people indulged in feuds -- the Scottish example may hold in Afghanistan, but certainly not in Switzerland (I don't know the Pyrenees case, but perhaps not there too -- did it hold in Peru too?). Again, the limited focus teaches far less that it suggests.
I'd love to see the equivalent analysis for peoples on unsettlable land, who are ungovernable not by design but by simple fact of the empires being largely interested in their land (until recently); the Inuit are the best example here, and in many ways develop characteristics radically different from hill folks; in the Arctic, life is precious (so casual violence is heavily discouraged) and the real enemy is nature itself (Inuit gods and spirits are, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost universally cruel and harsh).
There's a fair few literary works on the settlement of the northern parts of the Nordic countries, like Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150473.Salka_Valka) or Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_the_Soil). The Earth is a Sinful Song by Timo Mukka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Earth_Is_a_Sinful_Song), the one most familiar to me, was made into a movie with English subtitles, though I'm not sure how one would go on about obtaining it, and very much portrayed it's small Lapland village in similar tones as used here for Appalachians, though probably even more animalistic and "wild".
One interesting thing is that, in addition to wild and unruly religiousness, these northern parts often went for Communism, often hand in hand (there are some interesting stories from Finnish Lapland about this, like a family with a picture of Jesus on their wall for 364 days of the year expect for May Day, when it was exchanged to a picture of Stalin). Not Communism as a force of authoritarianism and communalization, Communism as a basic permanent fuck-you to the southern forces of civilization, whether government or the timber corporations that people in hardscrabble Arctic countries basically had to work for for at least a part of the year due to the particular poverty of the soil making even subsistence farming not worth their while.
"timber corporations that people in hardscrabble Arctic countries basically had to work for for at least a part of the year"
This leaves me confused; what if there were no timber companies, where would they work then, and wouldn't they be worse off? The only coherent answer I can make up is that they were indeed better off with the timber companies, but that doesn't mean that they didn't hate them, cause it was still hard work for low pay, Though not as bad as the actual subsistence farming, hunting and deer herding, for otherwise they would have ignored those companies.
It meant that they were employees, had bosses, belonged to unions etc. - things that would make Marxism more appealing than if they had *simply* been farmers.
Under communism, there would still of course have been timber work - just under state-owned magnates, not private corporations.
Thanks for the passage. As someone who tried to go back (it doesn't work; YOU'VE changed), but managed to leave again, I feel sympathy for her. Knew too much to settle into and accept the greater order of things, but not enough to get herself out again. There's a whole pre-industrial lifestyle and mindset we don't get, with acceptance as a necessary virtue - to a degree that seems perverse to modern sensibilities. Spend your whole life destroying your body through farm labor or childbirth? What else is there? Suffer like your ancestors did, and find happiness where you can.
Pity she didn't live to see modernification.
Do you know the documentary Holy Ghost People? It shows worship at a snake handling church in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia in the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZIa4kutkIM
the smart ones rule through local collaborators and proxies and then get chased out by an afghan hill people insurgency.
The mountain people category generally fits the description; the basques, albanians, scottish highlanders, kurds and chechens do have a lot in common but I wonder how the Swiss fit this typology. They used to be warlike and independence minded but also very civic. Maybe they are a mixture of hill peoples independent spirit and the german drive towards organizing.
As one of the ungovernable hill people (aka, an actual Appalachian), I find this essay both amusing and a little sad. I think it would take another essay to fully discuss my thoughts and I have other things to do today. I will say this: that's a perspective.
Great review. Great feelings and meditations.