Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 17:12:09 -0500 From: star.matrix at verizon.net Subject: Re:Hicks & Inbreds
>>The mass of rural people is less forward-looking, intelligent and open
than
>>the mass of urban people, both through self-selection (members of the
rural
>>working class remain in the countryside either because they can't or
don't
>>want to work in industries other than agriculture) and through the way in
>>which rural life (smaller and more homogeneous communities) shapes
people.
>you need data to back this assertion. fork it over.
I hereby include by citation the first twenty-one years of my life. I'm a "participant observer" on this one. Clever people are born in the country, but they don't stay there.
>you are misunderstanding the comparison. it is not that being rural=black,
>but that blaming rural people for their conditions by claiming that it is
>because of inbreeding is a process of racialization. it marks their bodies
>with the stamp: icky, retarded, etc. all the thigs that come to mind when
>someone says inbred.
But this isn't what Thomas is getting at at all when he refers to the Welsh as "an impotent people/ sick with inbreeding". As you mention below, actual physical inbreeding has very few adverse conseqences whatever; the Hapsburgs carried it out for hundreds of years and developed nothing more than a prognaceous jaw.
On the other hand, there is another common usage; for example, one might suggest that the field of cultural studies is "rather incestuous", because it's the same small set of people taking in one another's ideas, exacerbating the quirks and prejudices in their belief systems, because their only standard by which to measure things is other people more or less the same as themselves. I'm told that there is such a thing as "firehouse syndrome" -- the phenomenon whereby firemen who work in less busy stations tend to have bizarre views on some subjects, because they spend so much time talking to one another.
In this sense, "inbred" is correctly opposed to "cosmopolitan" and is correctly identified as a property of the country rather than the city. It also appears in Marx's usage of "the idiocy of rural life"; it's no coincidence that /idiotes/ is originally from "private, isolated".
> futhermore, there are
>frequent references to rural whites as harboring more >racist and sexist
>beliefs than other groups. this is not accurate.
I don't know whether it's true in the USA; it certainly is in the UK, and numerous surveys carried out by the Countryside Alliance showed this. I'd also note that homosexuality is much less accepted in rural communities.
dd
PS: While I'm responding to this digest, I'd note that one result of the progress made by feminism in the 1990s was that strip clubs have proliferated in number, and reached a sufficient level of mainstream acceptance that I have to turn down invitations to them at least once a fucking week. This may be a victory for somebody, but it isn't me.
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