Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Third book....a review

The Living Room Bed: Birthing, Healing, and Dying in Traditional Appalachia

It is standard ethnographic procedure for anthropologists to perform participant observation studies on those “far and away” exotic places. In the course of doing so, that anthropologist lives among the “natives” for a year or two to better understand the culture. The Living Room Bed is an ethnographic study from a life time of participant observation. Peggy Ann Shifflett has her pulse on a culture that is so rapidly changing that it has become unrecognizable within a generation. Between these covers she has captured the essence of a by-gone era.

I grew up 325 miles away from Peggy Shifflett but, yet, in the same neighborhood. We had a living room bed, so I come to find out as I read her book. Like a fish not realizing the water around him, Dr. Shifflett’s culture surrounds me. Many of the customs and traditions she presents in this book began coursing back through my memory as I read of lullabies (hush little baby don’t say a word) and folk remedies, Lucky Strike butts (without filters) to being the youngest child (as I was), and to pulling the quilts mother made tightly around my chin as the snow flew outside to the fly swatter arsenal against a sortie of flies coming in through our screen door long needing repair.

Told from a uniquely female perspective I learned the depth of things from which I only saw the surface as a child. If you experienced any semblance of these traditions, such as your deceased father lying for visitation in your living room as mine did, or if you are from another place and time entirely, this ethnography of birthing, living, and dying in a now gone culture is full of joy and full of sorrow and full of everything that fills in between, all of which is delightful in its presentation.

Dr. Stevan R. Jackson

Anthropologist, Virginia Tech

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