Essays from West of 98: People and Place
A few weeks ago, I wrote about “PLACE” as a meaningful word to guide me in 2022. I wrote about the need to examine the relationship between people and place and how to work on strengthening that relationship locally.
It is no coincidence that my favorite authors all draw immense literary power from the relationship between people and place. Wendell Berry’s novels and short stories are set in a fictionalized version of his northern Kentucky home area. He has created an entire universe of characters and places that are inextricably connected. His non-fiction centers on his own relationship to his farm and to nature and to the overall relationship between humanity and nature. Elmer Kelton’s fiction was driven by characters who loved or hated (sometimes both) the land they were connected with by heritage or vocation. Wallace Stegner was the son of itinerant “boomers” (and was jealous of his protégé Berry’s connection to a singular place), so Stegner focused on the American West at large and man’s often ill-conceived relationship therewith. Even Larry McMurtry, hardly a sentimentalist, wrote characters who were deeply influenced, motivated, or flawed by their place and its effects on a person. In my estimation, the single greatest non-fiction work about Texas is John Graves’ “Goodbye to a River,” in which Graves wrote an entire travel journal, local history, and philosophical treatise based purely on his personal relationship with a single stretch of the Brazos River.
Clearly, my favorite literature is deeply biased towards the West and rural life, so I am not giving you a representative sample of the entire scope of world literature. But you can step beyond my own reading list and find that so much of the world’s greatest literature centers around people and their relationship to a place, whether large or small, from the Mississippi River to New England to Russia to the Middle East and beyond.
There’s a reason why so much beautiful literature exists about the connection between people and the world around them. There is inherent beauty and value in how people shape their place and vice versa. There are also inherent costs and sacrifices in that relationship. The very idea of “culture” largely exists as a by-product of this relationship. Regional differences in culture are no accident or coincidence. Those differences are a function of each unique place and how it shapes the people who inhabit that place. This applies to everything from food to music to religious customs to local slang and more.
There are many ways to start a fight on the Internet, or at least that is what I have been told). If you ever want to toss a flaming torch into a pile of gunpowder, just post something on the Internet about the “best” type of barbecue in America. Partisans of Texas, Kansas City, Memphis, the Carolinas, and a host of other regional variants have feelings that are charitably described as “intense.”
Each type of barbecue is very, very different. Those differences do not exist because each region arbitrarily decided to stake out a different position in The Great Barbecue World War. Those differences—from meat selection to the seasonings to the cooking methods and the fuel—all result from local culture and the history of locally available resources. In short, each definition of barbecue results from a people’s relationship to that local place.
The Internet and television have transformed our world in many respects. Before you think I am becoming some sort of Luddite crank, I do not think that was *all* bad. However, television and the Internet have had some curious impacts on our society. They have rapidly homogenized and nationalized our culture. When culture becomes homogeneous, it is no longer tethered to local place. And when the relationship between people and place become frayed and more diluted, how does that impact the value of the local place?
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.