[Adapted and expanded from an in-class writing assignment.]
With this book, originally published under the less politically correct (but probably more telling) title Ozark Superstitions in 1947, Randolph characterizes the Ozarks as a terminally unprogressive region full of backward people. To do so, he selectively includes a series of deliberately silly-sounding folk traditions and adages from a handful of people in a handful of areas. How, then, does this represent the Ozarks? The short answer is that it doesn't. This is not scholarly work; it's kids' stuff. But the text is not entirely useless, for though it is utterly useless as a tool to understand the Ozarks, it tells us quite a bit about Randolph.
Trained at a major American university in the early 20th Century, Randolph would have been exposed to the Great Modernization Narrative, the one-size-fits-all myth of a single possible direction of progress from the darkness of superstition to the light of modern, secular science. This seems to have had a two-fold effect on Randolph:
1. Randolph seems to have bought in to the modernization myth. The Ozarks becomes a tool that allows him to measure his progress toward the goals of modern, secular, Western society. By presenting the Ozarks in a static, often laughably backward manner, he wants to confirm his very identity—he wants to confirm the truth of the modernization narrative.
2. Yet Randolph also presents himself as a romanticist, a nostalgic imperialist of archaic culture, who desires more than anything to preserve the perceived purity of a vanishing primitive society. In this model, the Ozarks becomes a victim of modernization. After all, how is it possible to be “pure” when modernity (in the form of technology and science) is slowly but irrevocably encroaching, threatening a foundational change in the way lives are lived? Randolph's obsession with purity borders on the pathological. I am convinced that a psychological reading of his life and work would be revealing, but I unfortunately do not have the adequate training or time to commit to an exhaustive approach.
Even if we could overlook the inaccuracies of Randolph's scholarship and his obvious biases, Randolph's writing is not particularly good. He essentially offers a mind-numbingly repetitive catalog of smugly written anecdotes and possibly made up traditions with few attempts at structure, transitions, or coherence. The chapters are roughly arranged by topic or theme, but they never read like more than a random series of loosely-linked recollections. It doesn't matter from what page the reader starts, because the book, quite simply, doesn't go anywhere. Is this Randolph's attempt at mimicking the Ozarks' ostensibly static culture? Or is it merely more evidence of Randolph's inadequacy as a writer, thinker, and scholar?
Since the academic value of this work is dubious at best, Randolph's work has been roundly criticized by contemporary scholars. Among them is Brooks Blevins, the leading scholar in Ozarks studies today, who in his book Hill Folks presents a more nuanced view of a region and people attuned to their own patterns of change; he shows that the Ozarks has constructed a unique identity through both its internal dialectic and its external relations with other regions. Finally, Blevins demonstrates quite convincingly the biases of pseudo-scholars like Randolph who use the Ozarks as a mirror to reflect their own modernist concerns about progress and purity.
