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5 # Appeals to Place

One of the most important contributions to modern rhetoric is Kenneth Burke’s multivolume treatment of human motives. Writing in the after- math of World War II, with the confounding behaviors of the Nazis, the imperial Japanese, and the inventors of the atomic bomb still fresh on his mind, Burke’s focus fell upon his own specialty: human language, which he considered a form of symbolic action. Burke’s ambitious goal in his books A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, and in the various essays toward the proposed but never completed Symbolic of Motives, was no less than to understand the way people talk about how they make de- cisions, undertake new actions, or change their attitudes under the influ- ence of propaganda and other forms of social speech and writing. No one has ever taken a harder look at how people use language to justify their behavior and motivate others (and themselves) into purposeful action.

In the first book in the series, A Grammar of Motives, Burke devised an approach to the analysis of everything from single sentences to complex literary texts and even life philosophies. He called his method “dramatism.” In the simplest possible account I can give in ordinary language, dramatism amounts to an elaboration of the journalist’s classic questions in report- ing on news events: who, what, when, where, how, and why?1

In any human action:

• The question who? has to do with the agent of the action.

• What? deals with the act.

• When and where? deal with the scene.

• How? deals with the means.

• Why? deals with the purpose.

In analyzing the way people talk about their actions, Burke saw patterns that he called ratios, in which one dramatistic element—agent, act, scene, means, or purpose—is habitually explained in terms of another one. The ratios indicate certain philosophical outlooks. The ratio of agent and pur- pose, for example—the habitual connection of a person’s actions with some rationale or purposeful aim—is characteristic of idealism. An idealist might explain the choice to study nursing by a love for humanity. By contrast, the ratio of agent and scene, or act and scene, is characteristic of material-

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 5 . S o u t h e r n I l l i n o i s U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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ism, a particularly modern way of looking at things. A materialist might explain the choice to study nursing by some experience in childhood (the influence, perhaps, of the life-saving help of a nurse after an accident) or because of family background (everybody in the family works in health care), which might suggest even a genetic predisposition: the person felt compelled to the choice by his or her very physical make-up.

Burke’s ideas—greatly oversimplified in this brief summary—have left a strong mark on my approach to modern rhetoric through the study of appeals. I share with Burke an interest in

• what moves people to action,

• how habitual patterns of thinking and language-use characterize different world views, and

• how writers bring different elements of an argument into alignment— for him, the different elements in the ratios; for me, the different po- sitions involved in an appeal.

But the appeals model also departs from Burke. One big difference is that it demands a closer look at the question of scene.

Burke appears to conflate the elements of time and place in his think- ing in the modernist manner noted at the end of the last chapter. But a close look at the ways people make appeals indicates that, unless we want to overlook the rhetoric of certain discontented groups in modern times, we need to separate the questions of when? and where? Appeals to time and appeals to place make very different kinds of arguments and may even be characteristic of totally different outlooks on the world. Burke’s treat- ment of time and place as parts of the same dramatistic element of scene— a kind of automatic ratio, an identification that goes unanalyzed in his work—may well suggest his own cultural bias as a modernist and Euro- centric thinker.

Thoroughly modernized cultures and individuals, some would say, suffer from a devaluation of place. Think of the simplest possible appeals, the kind that gel into sound bites and slogans. Just as clichés such as “time is money” hint at the value we put on time, so there are clichés that suggest our value of place, but none quite so pervasive and unambiguous as “time is money.” We speak of “finding your niche”—an ecological metaphor—to talk about discovering your purpose in life and a place to work it out. We ask people, “Where are you coming from?” when we’re having trouble understanding what they’re thinking, as if their point of origin, some land of personal meaning, could explain a difficult or troubling idea. But both of these expressions hint at a loss of place as much as a grounding in place. Your

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54 # Appeals to Place

“niche” is something you have to search for; “where you’re coming” from is not where you are right now. Even a rather outmoded maxim like “Home is where the heart is” suggests a wandering heart that makes its home in several different places.

Mobility is a crucial value in modern life. Social and economic mobil- ity—moving up in the world—is often tied to geographic mobility, the will- ingness and ability to travel around to find the best opportunities. The downside is a feeling of being uprooted and alienated from the land. The great majority of people in the United States, arguably the most modern- ized nation on earth, have a family connection to this continent of only a few generations. Most people move to a new town some time during their lives. Fewer and fewer people are rooted to the land by profession. Over 70 percent of American citizens worked in agriculture at the end of the nine- teenth century; by the end of the twentieth, the number was fewer than 3 percent of the total population.

No wonder, then, that appeals to place in modern life often feel like a compensation for loss of the connection with the land. People play “vir- tual reality” games in fictional lands while they sit in small, air-conditioned enclosures that offer little contact with the outer elements of life. Envi- ronmentalists and other activists appeal to what seems to them a fading sense of connection with the land. Producers of children’s television pro- grams feel the need to explain where food comes from.

This chapter suggests that, emerging from this kind of life, special ways of dealing with the question of scene have evolved in modern rhetoric. One effect is that appeals to place rarely work unless they combine with some other kind of appeal. As we shall see, appeals to race and appeals to the body—introduced here and discussed in more detail in later chapters—of- ten work together with appeals to place. As a point of departure, I want to ask, in a revised version of Kenneth Burke’s scheme, how agents of ac- tion (who?) are connected with place (where?) and how questions of time (when?) compete with considerations of place in modern rhetoric.2

A Native American Perspective on Time and Place

In invocations of earthly places, modern writers are drawn to words with the prefix re-; they want to re-discover, re-veal, re-turn to the lost land. Re- inhabitation is the term the poet Gary Snyder has suggested as the watch- word for political and cultural environmentalists (Place in Space 236–51; see also Buell). Only the Native Americans, whose myths and texts Snyder draws heavily upon, have a strong claim on original inhabitation in North America (though anthropologists suggest that even they came from Asia originally).

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The Sioux activist and philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. appeals to this privi- leged position in his book God Is Red. He claims that Native spirituality differs from the imported Christianity of European Americans precisely in rejecting linear and time-based doctrines such as progress and devel- opment in favor of a cyclical, place-centered world view that honors sa- cred sites and timeless myths. Somewhat ironically, Deloria also claims a stronger sense of history for the Native outlook. The white world’s sense of time is abstract, much like its sense of space. But Indian history, con- nected strongly with place, has heft and substance.

Old World religion went wrong, Deloria suggests, by pulling loose from its moorings in the Mediterranean region and imposing itself on the New World. As the tribal connection to place faded for the uprooted Europeans, the historical sense of mission intensified as if in compensation. Through such doctrines as “manifest destiny”—the claim that divine will guided white explorers, pioneers, and colonists—religion was first enlisted and ultimately engulfed by the secular ideology of progress. The advent of monotheism itself appears in Deloria’s scheme as an allegory for the destruction of di- versity by a single race, an imperial people driven by an imperial god, a local deity that expands and devours all the competition.

Indian religion takes a very different view of time and history, one con- ditioned by the sense of place. Deloria claims that “it is exceedingly diffi- cult for a religion, once bound to history, to incorporate sacred places into its doctrine,” but “religions that are spatially determined can create a sense of sacred time that originates in a specific location” (71). The forthrightly mythic narratives of tribal people occur within sacred time, “a long time ago” or “once upon a time.” As the Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko explains, the old stories may be vague about their time frame largely be- cause the stories are always still working themselves out in the present. Yet they are usually very specific about where they take place. “Even now,” Silko writes in her essay “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,”

the people at Laguna Pueblo spend the greater portion of social oc- casions recounting recent incidents or events which have occurred in the Laguna area. Nearly always, the discussion will precipitate the retelling of older stories about similar incidents or other stories con- nected with a specific place. (40)

She writes, for example,

[Since] the stories about boulders, springs, and hills are actually rem- nants from a ritual that retraces the creation and emergence of the Laguna Pueblo people as a culture, as the people they became, then continued use of that route creates a unique relationship between

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56 # Appeals to Place

the ritual-mystic world and the actual, everyday world. A journey from Paguate to Laguna down the long incline of Paguate Hill retraces the original journey from the Emergence Place, which is slightly north of the Paguate village. Thus the landscape between Paguate and La- guna takes on a deeper significance; the landscape resonates the spiri- tual or mythic dimension of the Pueblo world. (38)

From the perspective of rhetorical study, we can think of the Native American claim on the land as an identification of race with place, of ethos with homeland, or in the terms of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, a ratio be- tween agent and scene, who and where. Along the same lines, Deloria ar- gues that the white man’s ethos connects race with history, also a ratio of agent and scene, but substituting when for where. The terms of the ratio inevitably affect one another. Just as in Indian spirituality place is rendered sacred by the repeated parallel actions of the people over time, so in pro- gressive ideology history becomes mythic by its association with God’s cho- sen people. In Deloria’s view, concepts such as manifest destiny and progress do not partake of real history, the material conditions under which people live and work, but are merely propagandistic narratives that share with history a chronological structure.

If the place-centered narratives of the Indians are vague about time, the white man’s time stories are similarly vague about place. The validity of progress is not place-dependent; progress is equally good wherever it is applied. And as Deloria argues, the narrative of progress is also vague about any people, such as Indians or Mexicans, who might be associated with the places where the narrative gets worked out. (The “wide open spaces” into which the pioneers and cowboys moved had in fact been inhabited by Native tribes for thousands of years.) Indians rarely get represented as flesh and blood realities in the narratives of progress; rather they appear as ghosts from the past, remnants of a story that progress has left behind, the gothic underside of modernist discourse (see Bergland). The present and the fu- ture become the exclusive domain of the people that progress favors. That domain, if it must be named, can be no less than the whole earth.

In this way, the narrative flows into the story of globalization and the modern concept of development. According to Deloria’s interpretation, the concepts of “globalization” and “development” amount to a recent “vari- ant of manifest destiny.” Advocates of global technological development frequently “judge a society or civilization by its technology and . . . see in society’s effort to subdue and control nature the fulfillment of [something like] divine intent” (69). They talk as if it is inevitable that people want to modernize their lives and live the way people live in the “developed coun-

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tries.” The sense of inevitability sounds to critics like Deloria very much as if they are saying that development is destiny, the will of God.

Deloria’s writing takes on the character of an appeal as he examines the implications of the two perspectives for contemporary politics. What In- dians have seen for a long time and what some whites have begun to real- ize, Deloria argues, is that technological development can succeed only at a great cost; it “falls flat” when confronted with the environmental record. “In less than two and a half centuries American whites have virtually de- stroyed a whole continent and large areas of the United States are now almost uninhabitable,” Deloria writes (69):

Ecology, the new left politics, self-determination of goals by local communities, and citizenship participation, all seem to be efforts to recapture a sense of place and a rejection of the traditional Ameri- can dependence on progress—a temporal concept—as the measure of American identity. (74)

This passage shows that Deloria’s argument is hardly devoid of temporally oriented rhetorical concepts like kairos and exigence. He is essentially ar- guing that the Indian worldview is a perspective whose time has come. But the appeal to place nevertheless prevails. The connections he makes and the authority he commands depend upon it. The audience position, or “sec- ond persona,” to which he appeals becomes in this passage not other Indi- ans like himself but certain outposts of Euro-Americans who now see the importance of place: environmentalists and communitarians, for example.

We can think of ideology, and perhaps even culture itself, as a set of habitual appeals so old and powerful that they have become the medium of public thinking and action. Any proposal for change must work through these encrusted appeals. Thus Vine Deloria can make his appeal to the discontents among the people of progress only by working through the appeal to history. He dismisses the ghostly image of the tribal peoples and appears on the historical scene as a real flesh-and-blood Indian who re- fuses to fade away. Originally published in the early 1970s as the environ- mentalist movement took root in the United States, his book was released in an expanded version in 1992 to coincide with the five-hundredth an- niversary of Columbus’s voyage.

But Deloria refuses to stop with kairos and exigence, which represent special versions of an appeal to time, treating time as if it were a place. Kairos and exigence say that we have arrived at a point in time as if we were time travelers. The point in time functions something like a sacred site. Deloria won’t go that far; he insists that time is conditioned by place

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58 # Appeals to Place

rather than the other way around. He appeals to the particular places that Indians hold sacred, where history crystallizes into myth—Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn, for example. The places are particular and real. The Place of Emergence where the People first entered into this world, says Leslie Marmon Silko, almost matter-of-factly, is “a little north of . . . Paguate.” For me to say something equivalent from my cultural perspective, I would have to claim that the Garden of Eden is over by the shopping mall.

Speaking from the communal position of the Native American, Deloria nevertheless takes on the persona of a distinguished individual author in his appeal to readers in an individualist literate culture. His invocation of native place both identifies him with his community, a place-centered race of people, and appeals to disaffected Euro-Americans—people who have felt the tug of identification in specific places (in my own case, the sea islands and Appalachian foothills of South Carolina) but have seen the op- portunity slip away as the places are transformed by forces travelling un- der the banner of progress, development, and growth, and as economic ne- cessity has enforced geographic mobility.

The connection of race with place raises questions about the com- prehensiveness of major concepts in rhetorical theory, notably kairos and exigence, which tend to be based in time and history. If Deloria’s critique of temporality as a Eurocentric bias has any validity at all, then a rhetoric that takes these concepts as central to its mission may well embody that bias. Such are the stakes as we begin to think of rhetoric as a cross-cultural enterprise.

In this sense, the rhetorical appeal, as we have been developing it, be- comes a good concept for anchoring a rhetoric of place because it strongly embodies the qualities of position, direction, and distance. The notion of an appeal to place is thus doubly interesting as a way to examine the largely unexplored tension between spatially oriented and temporally oriented rhetorical concepts, a tension that may be linked to cultural differences between tribal and modern, native and colonial, or local and global per- spectives. Deloria’s appeal could also activate another kind of racial long- ing—the vague feeling of dislocation and alienation that is the heritage of a people separated from their ancestral lands.

Local Versus Global: The Appeal of the Native American Perspective

We can use the appeals model to summarize our analysis of Deloria’s critique:

• In the author position, Deloria stands for the indigenous popula- tion of the Americas, displaced by a European culture whose time- based religious practices favor material progress, technological de-

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velopment, and globalization, a culture that tends to impose itself globally without careful consideration of local people and places.

• The position of value to which he appeals is a spiritual tradition rooted in an awareness of sacred places.

• The audience position includes non-Indian readers discontented with the culture they have inherited from their ancestors, likely to iden- tify with the Indian plight because of their sense of uprootedness.

The complex appeal to place in this Native American rhetoric competes with habitual appeals to time (progress, destiny, development, etc.) in the main- stream rhetoric of American life. In questioning the accepted view that large- scale technological developments (hydroelectric dams, complex systems of roadways, etc.) are appropriate and good no matter where they are ap- plied, the appeal to place also highlights the conflict between ways of life that make claims to global fitness and ways of life associated with local practices and small communities.

The conflict between global and local perspectives becomes a focal point in Silko’s appeals to place. In her phenomenally successful 1977 novel Cer- emony, Silko gives us the memorable character of Tayo, a mixed-race La- guna Pueblo Indian from New Mexico (like Silko herself) who enlists with his cousin Rocky to fight in World War II. Though Rocky is a full-blooded Indian, he is much more concerned than Tayo with assimilating into the American mainstream culture. He is a good student in high school and a star football player. He goes to fight the war as a loyal American citizen. By contrast, Tayo goes out of clan loyalty to Rocky, urged by his family to take care of his cousin and come home safe. But Tayo comes unglued. When ordered to shoot a Japanese prisoner on the Pacific front, he sees the face of his Uncle Josiah superimposed on the man standing before the firing squad. Then Rocky dies on the Bataan Death March, and Tayo survives to come home alone. After treatment in an army mental ward for “battle fa- tigue,” he arrives back in Laguna to find that his uncle has indeed died and that the land is beset by drought, for which Tayo blames himself: he had cursed the rain that hampered his efforts to carry the wounded Rocky on their march through the Philippine jungle. The bulk of the story is devoted to the process by which Tayo’s healing accompanies a reinhabitation of his native land.

To the majority of novel readers in the late 1970s—highly literate, col- lege-educated, modern people—Tayo could only have seemed an exotic character. His upbringing as a traditional Native American in an obscure spot in the New Mexican high plains must have seemed distant to read- ers in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. What then was the appeal?

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60 # Appeals to Place

It’s all about context, the rhetorical situation. For one thing, the theme of the returning soldier was a familiar one. The war in Vietnam had ended in 1975, and the images of Tayo’s experience of jungle war would have reso- nated with the television images of war in Southeast Asia and the stories of post-traumatic stress that followed the soldiers home (or for returning soldiers themselves, it would have resonated with the actual memories).

For another thing, Tayo’s uprootedness and the ensuing heartsickness would have appealed to a generation of young men and women who felt pulled here and there by the global forces beyond their control—if not global war, then the global economy. Social mobility has always been tied to geographic mobility in the U.S. economy. To move up, you have to move out. My own case was typical. I finished graduate school in 1979 and had to cut my ties to the place where my family lived, leave the South, and take a job in the Southwest—the only offer I got—teaching in a small college in central New Mexico, where among other new experiences, I found my- self working with Pueblo Indians like Tayo. Ultimately the experience was enriching, but it definitely added new stresses to my life and gave me the uprooted feeling that cultural historians say is typical of modern life.

Finally, the non-Indian audience of modern readers (like me) could also connect with Tayo’s realization that the evils of war eventually come home to roost even if their primary impact is felt halfway around the world. As Tayo discovers, the atom bombs that fell on Japanese cities were devel- oped and tested in his own home state—at Los Alamos National Labora- tory and Trinity Site—and the uranium was mined on his own reservation. The work of the atomic “witchery,” as he sees it, continues even after the war is over. The atom bomb may have ended the war, but it left the world in a state of constant worry. That realization becomes part of the adjust- ment he must make to the postwar world. This literary depiction of a loom- ing threat captures powerfully the sense of dread that characterized the Cold War experience of many of Silko’s readers in the 1970s.

Silko’s novel thus appeals to the reader’s sense of war-weariness, up- rootedness, and nuclear dread—the downside of economic prosperity and global technological development—to create sympathy for an alternative worldview based on the kind of local identities and place-centered rituals she celebrates in her novels and essays. She appeals not only as a tradition- alist but also as a modern author. Her work is about the return to the land, the reinhabitation of place.

Reinhabitation: The Countercultural Perspective

This concept of reclaiming the land and the new rhetoric of place were also being worked out by non-Indian writers during 1970s, members of

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an increasingly articulate counterculture. The term “reinhabitation” was introduced into the debate by the poet and essayist Gary Snyder. No stranger to the counterculture, Snyder had gained some notoriety as a member of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, providing Jack Kerouac with the model for the character Japhy Ryder in his autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums. Having left his childhood home in the Oregon woods, where his family worked as loggers—first to study Asian literature and language at Berkeley, where he met Kerouac, and then to pursue his interest in Bud- dhism in Japan, China, and India—Snyder ultimately returned to live in the woods of northern California and began to produce writings that made a strong appeal to place. He won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for his collec- tion of poems Turtle Island.

In an introductory note, Snyder explained the title of Turtle Island, us- ing the rhetorical act of renaming to develop a special appeal to place:

Turtle Island—the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millen- nia, and reapplied by some of them to “North America” in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.

A name: that we may see ourselves more accurately on this conti- nent of watersheds and life-communities—plant zones, physiographic provinces, culture areas; following natural boundaries. The “U.S.A.” and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here.

The poems speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a “song.” The land, the planet itself, is also a living being—at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions—African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

Snyder is fully aware of the Indian critique of the imperialist “schemes” of Anglos like himself, as he makes clear in a comment from another essay:

[Speak] of the United States and you are talking two centuries of ba- sically English-speaking affairs; speak of ‘America’ and you invoke five centuries of Euro-American schemes in the Western Hemisphere; speak of ‘Turtle Island’ and a vast past, an open future, and all the life communities of plants, humans, and critters come into focus (Place in Space 248).

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But he risks borrowing the Native name and the rhetoric implicit in the phrase “Turtle Island” to hold out hope for a new understanding of the New World. He takes the next step in the appeal to disaffected members of the mainstream culture, appealing to the “ancient solidarity” of tribal cultures. White and black people of the current generation did not arrive like their ancestors as conquerors or slaves but merely found themselves like sea turtles “beached up on these shores.” Now begins the “work of being to- gether on Turtle Island.”

In the poems of Turtle Island, Snyder does his best to bring “a vast past, an open future, and all the life communities of plants, humans, and crit- ters . . . into focus”—not by the kind of global pronouncements we see in the introductory note but by gritty depictions of life lived close to the earth. A good example is “The Dead by the Side of the Road,” in which a coun- tercultural speaker—a sort of shaman figure adrift in modern life—tells what he does when he finds animals killed by traffic along a California superhighway:

How did a great Red-Tailed Hawk come to lie—all stiff and dry— on the shoulder of Interstate 5?

Her wings for dance fans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I never saw a Ringtail til I found one in the road: case-skinned it with the toenails footpads, nose, and whiskers on; it soaks in salt and water sulphuric acid pickle;

she will be a pouch for magic tools. (7)

So it goes for a “skunk with a crushed head,” a fawn “hit by a truck on high- way forty-nine,” a doe “apparently shot” and left to die. Like the Indians before him, the speaker of the poem treats the dead animals with ritual- istic respect (“offer cornmeal by the mouth”—a practice of Indian deer hunters, also mentioned in Silko’s novels) and then puts them to use in the rituals of dance and magic—and poetry.

Notice how Snyder shows a kind of loving attention to the details of place—the identification of the local fauna as well as the numbering of

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the roads—which parallels the attention the speaker pays to the dead animals. The poem closes with a haunting image of how large-scale de- velopment—which goes under the name of progress—ignores the patterns of local life. The animals die because the great superhighways cut across their ancient pathways, the little trails that a person walking alongside the big highways, like the speaker of the poem, can still see:

Pray to their spirits. Ask them to bless us: our ancient sisters’ trails the roads were laid across and kill them: night-shining eyes

The dead by the side of the road. (8)

In this poem, roadkill becomes an image of every creature run down in the name of progress and development. The poem addresses the animals as “sisters” and then makes the most of their remains—in a rhetorical ap- peal as much as in pouches and fans.

Snyder’s vision suggests a hybridized new breed of people who commit themselves to a “reinhabitory move” (Place in Space 236–51). It involves reconnecting with or returning to the sacred, the original, the crusted over, despoiled, or forgotten places where we find ourselves in the modern world.

A more recent example of a writer who develops this kind of appeal is Janisse Ray, whose 1999 book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood shows how living in the splendor of the California forests isn’t the only way to find value in the place called home. Ray grew up, almost literally, in a south Georgia junkyard, the daughter of a mentally troubled father from a fam- ily of “Crackers,” the usually derogatory name given poor whites of Scots- Irish descent who settled in the red-clay hills and sandy coastal plains of Georgia and South Carolina. Ray went off to college, spent time in the big city, but finally returned to settle on a farm in her old homeland. Her book explains why.

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets,” Ray admits, anticipat- ing the objections of an audience she knows will be suspicious of the people and places she celebrates:

There’s nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pines. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow. No mountains, no canyons, no rocky streams, no waterfalls. The rivers are muddy,

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wide and flat, like somebody’s feet. The coastal plain lacks the stark grace of the desert or the umber panache of the pampas. Unless you look close, there’s little majesty. (13)

But, she goes on to say, “It wasn’t always this way,” and in remnants of pro- tected land, “you can see how south Georgia used to be, before all the longleaf pine forests that were our sublimity and our majesty were cut. Nothing is more beautiful, nothing more mysterious, nothing more breath- taking, nothing more surreal” (13–14). Playing off the word “nothing” in this passage—beginning with “There’s nothing in south Georgia” and fin- ishing with the “Nothing . . . more beautiful” sentence—Ray teaches her audience how to “look close.” Looking close means seeing not only what’s there but also what has been lost:

Longleaf pine is the tree that grows in the upland flatwoods of the coastal plains. Miles and miles of longleaf and wiregrass, the ground cover that coevolved with the pine, once covered the left hip of North America—from Virginia to the Florida peninsula, west past the Mis- sissippi River: longleaf as far in any direction as you could see. In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sun- set and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of the fog. The tip of each needle carries a single drop of silver. The trees are so well spaced that their limbs seldom touch and sunlight streams between and within them. Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall, richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground orange and scarlet. Purple liatris gestures across the land- scape. Our eyes seek the flowers like they seek the flashes of birds and the careful crossings of forest animals. (14)

This great forest is now gone across much of its range—from Virginia, from Louisiana, from Texas, from South Carolina—but good-sized remnants re- main in Georgia and north Florida. “It is a loss,” says Janisse Ray, that “shad- ows every step I take” (15). The remnants of the forest become a “shrunken . . . baby” she holds in her arms (15), a victim of her own Cracker ances- tors, who were victims themselves:

Passing through my homeland it was easy to see that Crackers, al- though fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t had the means, the education, or the ease to care particularly about its natural communities. Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself has been the victim of social dilemmas—racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty. It was overtilled; eroded; cut; littered; polluted; treated as a commodity,

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sometimes the only one, and not as a living thing. Most people wor- ried about getting by, and when getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we ignored it. (164–65)

The time has come to value the land in a new way, Ray argues. She ap- peals to a new generation of Crackers like herself. There is no need to be ashamed of our history, she suggests. Our ancestors behaved as they did for reasons we can understand. But we have to find different ways to “de- fend [the land] to death.” We need to see it as a living being like ourselves, she suggests. As in Native American rhetoric, she combines place appeals to race appeals (insofar as Crackers can be considered a separate race).

She also combines her appeals to place with appeals to the body, per- sonifying the forests and the landscape. “The rivers are muddy, wide and flat, like somebody’s feet,” she says (13). The pine forests once thrived on “the left hip of North America” (14); the grasses have “heads” and the flow- ers “paint the ground” (14). The land is not a “commodity” (165) but a “baby” (15) and a “victim” (165). Like Aldo Leopold before her, Ray wants people to value the land as much as they value human life, so she describes the land in terms normally associated with the human body. Ray professes to feel the story of the longleaf pines “scrawled on my bones” (4). In an effort to instill in her audience the high value she places on the perpetu- ation of the forests, she appeals to their experience of their own bodies as a source of identity with the “communities of life” she celebrates.

The complex appeal to place and body appears again in the work of recent African American writers. Surviving generations of the “African Diaspora,” they find themselves doubly dislocated by the experience of modernism. Forced to leave Africa and dragged into slavery, displaced Africans later left the rural South to escape captivity or racism or rural poverty. Perhaps for this reason, argues the essayist bell hooks (who spells her name without capitals), “many contemporary black folks see no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns” (“Touching the Earth” 56). Working in the opposite direction, hooks argues that “collective black self-recovery” can only take place “when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors” (56).

“Living in modern society, without a sense of history,” hooks contends, “it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and fore- most a people of the land, farmers” (53): “African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation runaways, the ‘Seminoles,’ methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn” (52).

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66 # Appeals to Place

The “psychological impact of the ‘great migration’ of black people from the agrarian south to the industrial north” has yet to be studied carefully, hooks notes, but it is clear enough that “it altered the communal practices so central to survival in the agrarian south” and “fundamentally altered black people’s relationship to the body”: “Working in conditions where the body was regarded solely as a tool (as in slavery), a profound estrange- ment occurred between mind and body” (54). In the industrialized north, black people could no longer “cultivate a spirit of wonder and reverence for life,” could not grow “food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul,” could not “make a connection with the earth that was on-going and life-affirming” (53).

“When the earth is sacred to us, our bodies can be sacred to us,” hooks writes (56). The key point in this appeal—a point hooks shares with writ- ers as different from her as Deloria, Silko, Snyder, and Ray—is that places, like bodies, have a history, and the connection of places with bodies re- connects individuals to the history of a people, to ancestors. Modern ap- peals to place, in this sense, always advocate what hooks calls “collective self-recovery” (56).3

Virtual Places, Empowerment, and the Promise of Utopia

Before turning to a more detailed account of appeals to the body in the next chapter, let’s take a quick look at one more, altogether different kind of appeal to place. How many times a day do we hear the invitation to “visit us at www.whatever.com”? In what sense is the treatment of web “sites” and computer “environments” as if they were real places like the treatment of forests as if they were communities of people?

The short answer is that both involve the sort of substitution or swerve from the ordinary perception of things that is typical of rhetorical appeals. We want people to see things differently so that they will reconsider what is most valuable to them. This kind of rhetoric involves the risk of playing into our opponents’ worst fears. Critics of “virtual reality” say that it un- dermines our sense of social responsibility to the local community. If we spend all our time visiting, shopping, even flirting online, we lose touch with local people and places. Likewise, critics of environmentalism argue that “tree-huggers” care more about the land than they do about people. Personifying the landscapes—treating forests as “babies” and “victims”— would seem to support the allegation.

But by adding the element of racial and regional ethos, writers like Deloria, Silko, Snyder, Ray, and hooks anticipate this objection and hu- manize their particular versions of environmentalism. They tie environ- mental health to issues of human health (physical or mental or both). If

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Appeals to Place $ 67

improper use of pesticides is killing the local pine trees and woodpeckers, it’s probably killing the local people, too. If strip mining is changing the character of the local land, it’s probably disturbing the identity of the local people as well.

The producers of virtual marketplaces make only limited efforts to show a similar consideration for the locales and real-life communities that they seem so eager to replace. The environmentalists studied here (though not all environmentalists by any means) have no desire to compete with pro- grams of social improvement; they want to improve the land as a place of human inhabitation. Developers of virtual communities, by contrast, com- pete with local communities for the attention and business of shoppers and clients. The attention of key audiences is like a limited resource. With information accumulating on every side, what will appear so valuable that it cannot be ignored? One of the claims that virtual places like websites make on our attention is that they put at our fingertips the kinds of shop- ping opportunities and other activities that would require great physical effort to carry out in the real world, that would require us not only to go out to the store but perhaps to go to many stores in many cities to get what we want. The same is true of dating services, banking options, online gam- ing, and insurance sales.

What we have here is a claim to empower the individual in new and ex- traordinary ways, to make us the masters of worlds formerly inaccessible because of their diffusion in place and time and their distance from the places we call home. As we will learn in the next chapter, the claim to em- power an audience is typical of certain appeals to the body, especially in the rhetoric of technology.

The point we need to make here, in closing, is that modern rhetorical practice often involves the promise to relieve audiences of the restrictions they feel from being tied to one place and being confined within a human body. Virtuality is one of several components in a utopian vision, accord- ing to which people assume positions formerly reserved for the gods. From the perspective of a place-conscious worldview, however, anything claim- ing to be utopian must arouse suspicion, for the literal meaning of the word utopia is “no place.”

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