Observing Social Life in the Small Town Midwest

Julianne Couch Book’s Review (2016)

“Where do you live?” and “how long you have lived here?” are the two questions for establishing one’s local community status. Responses are often dichotomized as those of newcomer versus native (hunter, 2014:85-99). Studying our hometown, like Julianne’s book, may give a researcher some benefits; familiarity, empathy, trust, access, and legitimation. In her books, she tried to describe how to make a living life in the small town Midwest which has psychological and sociological ties with her personal life. She often moved from one city to the other in the Midwest area for the reasons of family and work, so she called herself comes from “Wyo-wA,” that mean, “Wyoming-Iowa.” Familiarity makes the author’s insider knowledge led to both understanding and deeper access to the community.

Observation and interview conducted by Julianne into every small town belonging to the category of the frontier and remote (FAR) in her book have found many interesting things. Although all of this small town with a population fewer than 4,000 people was look similar, infact, they have specific problems which differ from one another. There is a small town which suddenly being depopulated due to the closure of industry and college which was experienced by Tarkio, a small town in the Missouri. There is a small town that has so many natural amenities but unincorporated and isolated like Centennial in Wyoming or Knox County in Nebraska. There is also a small town that has a relatively vibrant rural life like two small towns along the Mississippi River: Bellevue, with their vibrant tourism in Iowa and New Madrid, with their ethnicity diverse and fascinating geological history in Missouri.

Most American people know that during the 1800's, thousands of communities are scattered across the country, especially in Midwest, with two characteristics. First, primarily dependent on agriculture, fisheries, forestry, mining, or other resources based industry. Second, largely sufficient in that they were able to meet most of their food and shelter needs. As a result, before the mid of twentieth century, rural America could be described as “small town in isolation” (Albrecht, 2014:3). By the middle decades of the twentieth century, major technological developments (improved communication, TV shows, Radio, Newspaper, and Eisenhower Interstate Highway System) brought an end to the isolation era and ushered in the mass society era (Albrecht, 2014:41). This mass society era meant a major transformation in their way of living. Consequently, employment in agriculture and natural resources industries declined while jobs in the manufacturing sector increased.

A major obstacle to economic development in many rural areas in the rural America is their infrastructure that is often significantly inferior to that available in urban communities (Albrecht, 2014:59). On the other hand, in the current global economy, every unique skill can make one people (or a small town like Bellevue) stand out from the crowd. However, with a lack of vision and resources, people tend to look to the past for guidance rather than toward the future (Rousseau, 2014:235). This struggle of the small-town community to stays and maintains their places with all of the difficulties is called resilience which means accepting the new reality, even if it is less good than before. They try to take what remains and make it works. As Julianne said, communities have a cycle and transition naturally from the hopeful beginning to thriving, to struggling, to ending their days as vessels for nostalgia and reflection, but also for rebirth.

Another reflection from Julianne work is the importance of social capital within communities or residents. According to the Simmel’s work in the philosophy of money, he said that without the general trust that people have in one another, society itself would disintegrate. As a resident, the idea of giving back to the community was an especially strong normative expectation among the rural people. This statement may remind us to the Durkheim theory when he said, “let the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds, let the beliefs, tradition, and aspirations of the collectivity be felt and shared by individuals no longer, and society will die” (Poggi & Sciortino, 2011:84). In Durkheim, the collectivity must continue to make its ideas and norms; in Simmel, individuals must continue to establish with one another relations underwrote by their reliance on other’s conduct. This collectivity is the biggest challenge of the community in small-town in Midwest itself. How do they define their community, formulate what kind of hope for their future, and struggle together to make it great again?

Work Cited

Albrecht, Don E. 2014. Rethinking Rural Global Community and Economic Development in the Small Town Midwest. Washington State University Press. Washinton: Pullman

Couch, Julianne. 2016. The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century.University of Iowa Press. Iowa City

Hunter, Albert. 2014. Open to Disruption Time and Craft in the Practice of Slow Sociology. Edited by Anita Ilta Garey, Rosanna Hertz, and Margaret K. Nelson. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville

Poggi, Gianfranco & Giuseppe Sciortino. 2011. Great Minds Encounters With Social Theory. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California

Rousseau, Nathan. 2014. Society Explained an Introduction to Sociology. UK:Rowman& Littlefield