In one
of my classes a young woman once asked me, "Do they still pick cotton by hand?"
It was an innocent question, but it has troubled me for a long time. It troubled
me because the week before, I had seen her drive in an area where cotton was planted
along the road and where the blown cotton from the cotton wagons was scattered
along the road edge like a dusting of snow. She just did not know what she was
seeing. I have had similar experiences with other students, students who could
not tell maple from oak trees, who could not tell wheat from soybeans. Of course,
there is now no compelling reason why these urbanized children should know these
things. While other forms of literacy have increased what might be called "natural
literacy" has decreased as our sensibility becomes urban.
In class, I found that the voids in their knowledge of natural world hampered and distorted their capacity to understand the simplest elements of life in times past. It also impaired their ability to re-enter by way of imagination the fabric of life and to appreciate the great labor small things required. How do you build a fence out of fieldstone? How much do the rocks weigh and how do they stack and how tired are you after an hour? How long did it take the congregation to build the wall around their cemetery? How long does it take to weed around a tombstone? What must the forest have been like to have produced the lumber that made the bench seats of church pews out of a single board? How were these great logs cut and handled and made into boards? How many skilled labors and machinists did it take to manufacture a firearm in 1850? Why was Charleston, SC, more of a fur-trade town than a tobacco town?
I wanted them to be capable of more difficult interpretations: what is the relation between rolled hay and rural churches? When we see the spring and summer fields with hundreds of rolls throughout them, what can we reasonably surmise about the composition of the congregation at church the next Sunday? How can rural counties pay their municipal service bills from taxes on corn fields? What does it mean to see a red plastic tag clipped to the ears of cows in a field? Why have the insulators on electric fences been changed from red to yellow? Why do we see so many dead animals on our roads? Why are birds the first line of defense against erosion? Many other questions can be teased out.
As I taught courses such as "Southern Religion," "Comparative Religion," and "Religion and Ecology" I found that I often had to stop and explain things that were once widely known. Or I found that I had to invoke creative challenges to complacent viewing to force my students to see what was right in front of them. Some people, for instance, cannot "see" trash in the landscape until I do sharply focused and detailed photo essays about what is in fact all around them. As I taught these courses and found my self repeating the same descriptions, the same identifications, from class to class I began to think of devising a kind of guide so that some of what I had to stop class to explain could be learned another way. With such a guide, I could simply say, "Look at my essay about Lanes." An essay on lanes is no substitute for walking down a lane, but it might at least be a start in a world were few of my students have ever walked such a lane.
In a different area of concern, I want my students to appreciate the complexity of the social fabric of human life upon the land. I do not want to leave to them the comfortable notion that churches and stores and fields are somehow unrelated. I do not want them to be comfortable splitting religion from economics from biology. Life upon the land is a complex fabric of interactions, dependencies, outcomes that connect and reconnect across the landscape. The churches occur as the outcome of a set of beliefs about the final meaning of the natural world and life within it. The churches also occur as the outcome of a set of beliefs about farms and about stores. The local system of face-to-face credit of the old stores mirrored the congregational intimacy of the churches.
This web essay has many features. It is intended to serve as a linear skeleton on which I plan to hang many of the ecological and religious themes I discuss in my courses. At the same time, however, the design is intended to expandable, particularly in the illustrations pages. Right now Andrew, my webmaster, and I are editing and scanning hundreds of slides to illustrate a many more features of rural life than we have included here. We plan in the future to have a developed tree key that will provide limited tree identifications but also provide some information about the earlier use of particular trees. I am also thinking of producing a kind of catalog of familiar farm tractors. Other guides will cover familiar animals, birds, and roadside flowers. Eventually we will include a formal typology of crosses linked to the graveyard section, and we plan an extensive directory of local churches. We also plan a brief architectural quiz along the lines of "What kind of church is this?"
This page then is a work in progress and it is ultimately not linear. We keep spinning off into other web essays, other links, and we keep coming by different routes back to the beginning. A few of the designs in the page are simply intended to serve as examples of what is to come or to suggest to other web developers ways they might use this approach in their own pages. Please feel free to activate the email link provided on the first page and give us your ideas and comments.
Gerald L. Smith Professor of Religion Sewanee, TN July 1996