Abstract
As numerous scholars have chronicled, the decade of the 1930s in America witnessed an explosion ofpopular interest in the presumptions and protocols of cultural ethnography. The Depression years were a time when such academic-sociological studies as Constance Rourke’s American Humor, Zora Neal Hurston’s Mules and Men, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, and Howard Odum’s various studies of rural Appalachia became virtual bestsellers in their own right-each animated by what might be called an indexical-excavatory enthusiasm for unearthing, itemizing, and exhibiting the vestiges (both material and human) of America’s putatively "vanishing" past. This article sets out to assess the cultural and ideological work this wide-ranging impulse performed, probing the ways that mainstream or popular ethnography in the 1930s (despite its often explicit interest in critiquing or challenging commercial modernity) came to underwrite a particular and highly over-determined narrative of corporate-capitalist "progress." To accomplish this, I examine three discrete yet exemplary ethnographic texts: Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Documenting places and people feared to be most immediately threatened by industrial-commercial development, I argue that these writers ultimately depicted America’s socioeconomic fringes not as the repository of a redemptive "folk" culture, but as the site and source of commercial capitalism’s own heroic and authentic "roots." Behind their interest in excavating and documenting the artifacts of a bygone age was a more formative desire to invent a model of the vernacular past that could somehow imbue capitalism’s rationalized and articulated operations with a tangible sense of historicity, a palpable and authenticating texture of "pastness."
