Some words on what I mean when I talk about hillbilly liminality. My writing on this site has spoken of hillbilly liminality in three posts now, yet I haven’t defined it. Aside from its pleasant and euphonious abundance of Ls, Is, and Ys—there is only one hard T, and so the the words roll along softly and gently like the Appalachian foothills—the term contains complex meaning crucial to what I write about—as well as about how many others and I live and experience the world. Furthermore, the “concept” (here in quotes because I’m not sure I would call it a concept, yet any noun more concrete seems. . . well. . . too concrete) of hillbilly liminality is necessary to explain as a tripartite concept with each part informing and interacting with the others. I use the term hillbilly liminality in three ways: as a theoretical position, as a lived (actual) experience, and as a conceptual framework that attempts to reconcile the first two.

The theoretical position is based very much on the work of the person who coined the term “liminality”: German-French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep uses the term to describe a kind of in-between space in rites of passage—one between separation and re-incorporation. But he did not merely confine the term to rites of passage in the usual sense we think of (for instance, from a boy to man); he suggested instead that liminality occurs in various types of social rites of passage; moving from one social status to another is a type of rite. Other types include geographic movement, situational change (e.g., changing jobs), and the passage of time. The rite of passage from boy to man can be considered a passage from one social status to another, but my concern is with social status movement as it exists or as it is possible in late-stage capitalism—particularly in the United States—vis-a-vis education, geographic movement, personal economic growth or stagnation, as well as the perceptions these invoke in those who interact with the liminal hillbilly. It is this passage from one social status to another, and the educational, cultural, and economic evolutions that are integral to that passage, that I am concerned about in my thinking and writing. The theoretical concept of liminality allows us to interpret and analyze aspects of the passage, making the typically implicit visible.

Liminality with the modifier “hillbilly” turns the theoretical into the actual—the lived experience of liminality. In this case the lived experience of a working class Appalachian grappling with being the only member of his family to leave home to pursue a college education, a life in academia, and to achieve upper-middle class status. This is the day-to-day, the year-to-year, the looking at the world outside the bus window and reading the billboards as they fly by. This is watching every member of your family but one die—two while still in their forties. This is factories shutting down and moving overseas, leaving your 8th-grade dropout mom to lose the only job she’s ever had outside of trying to raise a family up from nothing but layaways and trading stamps. You can apply theory to the lived experience, but the lived experience (the actual) is not theoretical. The lived experience is the old winding roads where you learned to drive and that you can still almost navigate with eyes closed. It’s being a bookish kid in an English program learning what literary theory is—and not understanding it until one day you do. One day the pieces of an intricate Ostomachion fall into place and you gain a script for analyzing everything stretching in front of and behind you. This lived experience doesn’t necessarily move you out of liminality (more on this later), but it does accumulate and become a philosophy when the theoretical and the actual merge.

What might it mean, however, to become trapped in that liminal space—to neither fully separate nor re-incorporate? What are the implications of that entrapment, or can the liminal space actually be a free and productive one—no trap at all, but an escape? This possibility undergirds the conceptual framework behind both my lived experience and the writing that is a response to that experience. This conceptual framework serves as an interpretive lens through which to analyze, understand, and interpret—make sense of—culture (as in both cultural products and culture writ large), economics, politics, science, and even mundane day-to-day human activities as pulling on a pair of boots or making a cup of tea. My academic training is in literary analysis and rhetorical studies, what one might call the practice of not taking anything at face value. The analytical processes of interpreting literature and language instills in one a habit of interrogating the world more broadly. This interrogation should start with oneself (the very first artifact we have interpretive access to) and move outward.

Central to this interrogation is the act of meaning making, which we start at our very birth. And I started making meaning as a hillbilly living in rural American in the declining American decades of the 20th century. Decades later, when I watched my academic friends denigrate rural America (for reasons justified and unjustified) and my rural friends lash out at educated urban liberals (for reasons justified and unjustified), it became clear to me that I am both of these and also neither of these. I could understand both the positives and negatives of both supposed sides of a social-political-geographic divide. This was how hillbilly liminality was born—as a way to assuage the discomfort of being both and neither, as well as a way to deploy that liminality for analytical purposes. Of course these analytical purposes are in no small part concerned with what I consider the unnatural (artificial), unnecessary, and destructive divisiveness forced upon us by those who ultimately gain power, money, and other resources from a divided people. But more on that elsewhere…

For a much longer discussion of meaning making and Truth, read In Defense of Writing).

Hillbilly liminality, then, is the theoretical, actual, conceptual experience of standing astride two very different sides of a rite of passage—and having no footing secured in either. I started using this phrase a few years ago to describe an internal and personal feeling I had about my passage from working class Appalachian to upper-middle class masked Appalachian working in higher education in a city just outside of that region where I grew up. The Appalachian Mountains are the central geological entity from which a whole geographic region—stretching from New Brunswick, Canada to Northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—springs. In Ohio it spreads across 32 of the state’s 88 counties from Lake Erie on the north to the Ohio River on the south. Cuyahoga county where I now live, although not an Appalachian county, owes much to the coal dug up from beneath those counties that are, which was moved north to fuel the steel mill fires that created industrial America. I wonder with my tongue planted firmly in cheek where that passage fits into van Gennep’s theory. I am one of thousands of Appalachians who have moved from their homes in the mountains and the hills to the cities of the industrial north, though most did so to trade picks and shovels for conveyor belts and blast furnaces. My own great-grandfather, George Hayden, was one of these, moving from Southern Ohio to a house not far from where I now write, only to return eventually to that hole in the ground where he lost his life in a mine collapse. I don’t know why he went back to those hills after living in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. That story is lost to history. But I do know you never shake those hills and mountains from your soul. Maybe the best you can hope for is a quiet liminal space from which to regard the intricacies of all the worlds you find yourself traveling through.

---

A quick addendum, added after posting, because this lengthy passage from David I. Kertzer’s introduction to Rites of Passage demonstrates Mary Douglas’s view on the liminal, which will inform much of what I write on this issue moving forward:

In her influential 1966 book, Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas draws out theoretical implications from van Gennep’s concept of the sacred nature of this liminal stage, giving special attention to the dangerous quality that this state often has. “Danger,” she writes, “lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next.” Douglas offers examples from a wide variety of contexts, from the dietary taboos of Leviticus to initiation rites in Africa. “Holiness,” she tells us, “requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong.” Those people, or those things, that do not fit comfortably into such a class lie at the margins, and the margins are a perilous territory.

The reference to van Gennep in her work is clear: “The person who must pass from one [state] to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new status.” Among Douglas’s insights was the application of this theoretical approach to contemporary secular situations where the lack of rites of passage leaves individuals in a marginal state, and hence regarded uneasily by the larger society. As an example, she writes of the ex-prisoner who, without any ritual means of incorporation into his or her new role in society, remains forever at the margins.