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A Space on the Side of the Road
A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers." To Kathleen Stewart, this particular "other" exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women "just settin'" track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of "just talk," Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal "space on the side of the road." It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by "progress."
Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one "occupied" by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an "official" America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."
Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one "occupied" by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an "official" America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."
264 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 1, 2009
What I learned from this book is that ethnography creeps me out. Especially when it's focused on examining a culture (in this case, rural "old weird America" in coal country/West Virginia/Appalachia) that I identify with, and, in some ways, belong to. Okay, I've only read the first thirty pages, but so far I'm most intrigued by the way she makes the textures of rural speech apparent by italicizing dialectical modifications. It seems like that's a pretty standard ethnographic practice, but it puts me on edge in this case because almost everything she italicizes seems like a totally regular thing that I either grew up saying or say still. It's a strange experience, to read a text that acknowledges the "otherness" of this culture that I belong to, while also possessing the critical vocabulary that diagnoses my outsider status. Not that my outsider status is some kind of stable entity anyway--most people don't seem to believe that I'm a country girl, or that Pennsylvania's got plenty of shacks and hollers and whatnots, and in any case my claim for authenticity is kind of fucked because I wasn't really an acknowledged native daughter since my parents were outsiders who moved in with their masters degrees and uppity liberal ideas. All of which is to say, this is a pretty rich reading experience because most of this stuff is already on my mind, in some low-grade way, most of the time.
November 3, 2010
I'm giving this a 3.5. I read this when I was in college majoring in cultural anthropology. I thought it was so interesting then, and even reading it again I found it really interesting. My problem with it is that it is extremely jargon heavy. You basically have to have a Ph.D. in anthropology to understand what the author is saying. I understand that when writing about anthropology for audiences that are familiar with anthropology you have to use the language that goes with it, but I felt that this was unnecessarily jargon heavy, almost for the sake of just being so. That being said, it is a really interesting look at the small mining town cultures in West Virginia.
September 28, 2009
aaaaah, i don't know i don't know. this book is so annoying in that it could be so good and the pieces are there, but the text is so whack. even if appalachian folks don't want to be in that "space by the side of the road," kathleen stewart will still insist on putting them there. because then their language and "culture" and the conflicts of their daily lives could not be turned into this performance. i feel, just because they are americans, does not mean that your field work cannot exploit their lives and turn them into some kind of never ending ritual.
June 15, 2007
I wonder what her informants think of her version of Appalachia.
June 1, 2026
Unique writing. Forcing me into her positionality and situatedness as an anthropologist. The blending narrative and the failure to recover a form of “authenticity” is revealed by her own “performative” words. How can we scale down and scale up to the understanding of culture and the locus of everyday?
On the Fissures of Culture(s)
“Difference” marks the space of culture precisely because it is never neutral. It is at once bounded, marginalized, and authorized to appear as itself. Difference gives culture form by rendering it tangible and legible, yet it also animates desire. This desire is not simply identificatory but relational, a pull toward alignment, attachment, and proximity that binds subjects to the very differences that distinguish them. Culture thus emerges not as a stable domain of shared meaning but as an affective and spatial configuration in which difference circulates as form, orientation, and force.
Within cultural studies, sustained debates over the legitimacy and descriptiveness of cultural gaps have often been tethered to anxieties about scholarly positionality. The concern is whether one can apprehend cultural difference without imposing a proprietary epistemology upon an Other cosmology. Kathleen Stewart’s intervention reframes this problem by refusing coherence as the condition of cultural knowledge. Rather than treating fissures, gaps, and ephemera as analytical failures, Stewart positions them as the very sites through which culture comes into being. The resurgence of “cultures” in her work does not affirm pluralism in a celebratory sense but exposes the processes through which difference is produced, circulated, and Othered in relation to an imagined Us.
The temporal inversion Stewart traces between American centers and peripheries further complicates the spatial imagination of culture. Peripheral life is not lagging behind a dominant present but generates its own intensities and temporal rhythms. This reversal unsettles linear narratives of cultural progress and reveals the American cultural landscape as a distorted cartography, one in which marginality is not derivative but productive. Culture, in this sense, is not a container but a field of forces that unevenly distribute attention, value, and visibility.
Stewart’s resistance to cultural excess that exceeds established theoretical grammars is central to her project. Instead of privileging what can be spoken, heard, or archived, she attends to the ephemeral, the tactile, and the affective. These dimensions of culture challenge the assumption that meaning must be stabilized in order to be known. This raises a methodological tension that cannot be resolved but must be inhabited. How does culture remain legible within scholarly writing when writing itself inevitably arrests temporality and reorganizes experience into a narrative sequence? Stewart does not offer archivability as a solution but proposes an ethnographic sensibility that inserts storied affect into description. Culture is not preserved but reanimated through narrative attentiveness to locality, rhythm, and texture.
Description, then, becomes a speculative and imaginative practice rather than a mimetic one. Cultural narration does not merely record fragmented locations but actively assembles them into an imaginary that remains provisional and unstable. This space of narration is also a space of critique, where the scholar must resist reproducing epistemological hierarchies that render other cultural formations either incoherent or deficient. Such restraint demands an ongoing self-reflexivity that acknowledges impurity as constitutive rather than aberrational. The field of cultural activity is not purified through theory but animated by its contradictions and excesses.
Culture is also a space of desire that is produced through mediating forms. This desire compels scholars to recalibrate their vocabularies and theoretical inheritances in relation to the local. The task is not to impose coherence but to extract density from what appears fleeting or disorganized. By grounding analysis in the ordinary and the mundane, Stewart shifts the locus of cultural significance away from spectacle and toward everyday intensities that are already embedded within larger ideological formations. Culture is thus neither exceptional nor autonomous but immanent to lived experience.
At stake in this approach is a defense of cultural unevenness. Culture cannot be imagined as flat, homogeneous, or territorially fixed. It is a leaky and opaque space characterized by slippage, differentiation, and contradiction. By foregrounding this unevenness, Stewart challenges the disciplinary impulse toward coherence and legitimacy. She authorizes those cultural forms deemed minor or low, echoing queer theoretical critiques of normativity that expose legality and legitimacy as contingent rather than naturalized states. To be rendered illegible or outlawed is not to exist outside culture but to reveal its regulatory limits.
This brings into focus the problem of competence in cultural wholeness. Competence presupposes hierarchy, continuity, and selection. Certain cultural spaces accrue authority while others are absorbed, subordinated, or erased. Exclusion is not a methodological error but an ontological condition of cultural formation. It cannot be undone through scholarly goodwill nor transcended through representation alone. Stewart confronts this condition by neither denying nor resolving it, but by insisting on a practice of searching within what has been subsumed. This search operates through the unstable confabulation of social and discursive practices in use. Cultural weight is always uneven, and oscillation is inevitable. Drawing from Bakhtinian insights, Stewart suggests that culture is constituted through competing voices and temporalities that never fully reconcile. The role of the anthropologist is not to stabilize these tensions but to remain attached to resurgent and ephemeral imaginaries that thicken cultural analysis through interpretive contingency. Shock, pause, opacity, and interruption are not analytical obstacles but generative conditions through which culture comes into motion as an unfinished and contested process.
On the Fissures of Culture(s)
“Difference” marks the space of culture precisely because it is never neutral. It is at once bounded, marginalized, and authorized to appear as itself. Difference gives culture form by rendering it tangible and legible, yet it also animates desire. This desire is not simply identificatory but relational, a pull toward alignment, attachment, and proximity that binds subjects to the very differences that distinguish them. Culture thus emerges not as a stable domain of shared meaning but as an affective and spatial configuration in which difference circulates as form, orientation, and force.
Within cultural studies, sustained debates over the legitimacy and descriptiveness of cultural gaps have often been tethered to anxieties about scholarly positionality. The concern is whether one can apprehend cultural difference without imposing a proprietary epistemology upon an Other cosmology. Kathleen Stewart’s intervention reframes this problem by refusing coherence as the condition of cultural knowledge. Rather than treating fissures, gaps, and ephemera as analytical failures, Stewart positions them as the very sites through which culture comes into being. The resurgence of “cultures” in her work does not affirm pluralism in a celebratory sense but exposes the processes through which difference is produced, circulated, and Othered in relation to an imagined Us.
The temporal inversion Stewart traces between American centers and peripheries further complicates the spatial imagination of culture. Peripheral life is not lagging behind a dominant present but generates its own intensities and temporal rhythms. This reversal unsettles linear narratives of cultural progress and reveals the American cultural landscape as a distorted cartography, one in which marginality is not derivative but productive. Culture, in this sense, is not a container but a field of forces that unevenly distribute attention, value, and visibility.
Stewart’s resistance to cultural excess that exceeds established theoretical grammars is central to her project. Instead of privileging what can be spoken, heard, or archived, she attends to the ephemeral, the tactile, and the affective. These dimensions of culture challenge the assumption that meaning must be stabilized in order to be known. This raises a methodological tension that cannot be resolved but must be inhabited. How does culture remain legible within scholarly writing when writing itself inevitably arrests temporality and reorganizes experience into a narrative sequence? Stewart does not offer archivability as a solution but proposes an ethnographic sensibility that inserts storied affect into description. Culture is not preserved but reanimated through narrative attentiveness to locality, rhythm, and texture.
Description, then, becomes a speculative and imaginative practice rather than a mimetic one. Cultural narration does not merely record fragmented locations but actively assembles them into an imaginary that remains provisional and unstable. This space of narration is also a space of critique, where the scholar must resist reproducing epistemological hierarchies that render other cultural formations either incoherent or deficient. Such restraint demands an ongoing self-reflexivity that acknowledges impurity as constitutive rather than aberrational. The field of cultural activity is not purified through theory but animated by its contradictions and excesses.
Culture is also a space of desire that is produced through mediating forms. This desire compels scholars to recalibrate their vocabularies and theoretical inheritances in relation to the local. The task is not to impose coherence but to extract density from what appears fleeting or disorganized. By grounding analysis in the ordinary and the mundane, Stewart shifts the locus of cultural significance away from spectacle and toward everyday intensities that are already embedded within larger ideological formations. Culture is thus neither exceptional nor autonomous but immanent to lived experience.
At stake in this approach is a defense of cultural unevenness. Culture cannot be imagined as flat, homogeneous, or territorially fixed. It is a leaky and opaque space characterized by slippage, differentiation, and contradiction. By foregrounding this unevenness, Stewart challenges the disciplinary impulse toward coherence and legitimacy. She authorizes those cultural forms deemed minor or low, echoing queer theoretical critiques of normativity that expose legality and legitimacy as contingent rather than naturalized states. To be rendered illegible or outlawed is not to exist outside culture but to reveal its regulatory limits.
This brings into focus the problem of competence in cultural wholeness. Competence presupposes hierarchy, continuity, and selection. Certain cultural spaces accrue authority while others are absorbed, subordinated, or erased. Exclusion is not a methodological error but an ontological condition of cultural formation. It cannot be undone through scholarly goodwill nor transcended through representation alone. Stewart confronts this condition by neither denying nor resolving it, but by insisting on a practice of searching within what has been subsumed. This search operates through the unstable confabulation of social and discursive practices in use. Cultural weight is always uneven, and oscillation is inevitable. Drawing from Bakhtinian insights, Stewart suggests that culture is constituted through competing voices and temporalities that never fully reconcile. The role of the anthropologist is not to stabilize these tensions but to remain attached to resurgent and ephemeral imaginaries that thicken cultural analysis through interpretive contingency. Shock, pause, opacity, and interruption are not analytical obstacles but generative conditions through which culture comes into motion as an unfinished and contested process.
February 24, 2012
One of my favorite explorations of ethnography, culture, storytelling and the process of which and how it defines who we are and how we tell/ re-tell our own and other people's stories. A must read for anyone interested in ethnography, culture, reading, and the oral tradition.
June 23, 2010
this book grew on me after the anthropology department made me read it no less than 3 times.
May 30, 2016
By far my favorite ethnography.
May 14, 2023
If I'd stayed in academia, I'd hope to have been able to write in the vein of Stewart.
December 26, 2021
Stewart's early 90's ethnographic study of white poverty in the West Virginia mining towns has now achieved canonical status. But the book has not aged well. It's not that Stewart's idea to study poor whites was ill-conceived. Indeed, they have a rich culture, and the verbatim transcripts and relayed stories are fascinating to read, with a few that are heartbreaking. But Stewart never figures out what to with her archive. Each snippet of speech is followed by truckloads of theory that Stewart dumps for pages at a time. The book can be maddening to read, and has no forward momentum. I feel as if the chapters could be totally rearranged and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. Stewart wants to save her subjects from the stain of white trash backwardness, but her argument that their neighborhoods are so destitute and their ways of life are so foreign that the laws governing modernity literally break down like a used truck when applied to these subjects doesn't help her case. Further, some of Stewart's analysis zooms in so closely that she cannot see for the forest for the trees, and ends up particularizing behaviors and ideas that are, in fact, quite common to Americans of all classes. In the end, Stewart's repetitive and insistent application of theoretical jargon does little to elucidate the rural citizens that she sincerely befriended, which unfortunately adds water to the belief that those whose lives become evidence for the "culture of poverty" are too illegible to be represented accurately.
June 25, 2019
One star is too many. Stewart's entire argument is based on the identification of the "othering" of West Virginia, yet she herself spends her entire book participating in the same othering she purports to critique. She further seems to have taken Geertz's call to thick description entirely too much to heart and therefore provides very little in the way of an actual ethnographic account. Rather, she gets caught up in the perceived wildness and backwardness of her fieldsite. Ultimately, she perpetuates horrible stereotypes of Appalachia by failing to provide any sort of analysis. Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to "imagine" her fieldsite through descriptions which can only lead an uninformed reader to see West Virginia as a place stuck in a haunted past, unable to modernize.
Speaking as a West Virginian with an anthropological background, this book is frankly offensive.
Speaking as a West Virginian with an anthropological background, this book is frankly offensive.
March 5, 2022
Inspiring, intelligent and beautifully written, but not devoid of the pitfalls of ethnography.
June 25, 2008
I'm going to compare this book to Pandolfo's Impasse of the Angels, so if you haven't read that, this probably won't make much sense.
1) This book is more rigid about the framework it sets up for doing ethnography. It frequently comes back to the "space at the side of the road" or "just talk" or a number of other refrains that I don't remember. Impasse was more subtle about what it was doing. It was less about isolating ethnographic facts and more about presenting stories or prolonged descriptions of things.
2) This book is more visual. It constantly says "imagine that..." or "picture..." I feel like this is an attempt to avoid presenting a single truth about West Virginian society. To me, it may be kind of reductive. An understanding of another place can't be restricted to visual understandings of that place, I think.
3) This book is more fragmentary. There are short, 1-3 page fragments of ethnography. Impasse, on the other hand, has prolonged engagements with individuals or images.
4) This book was more reflexively post-modern. There's a section where Stewart gives the history of West Virginian territory, but says things like "I could say that..." before giving any historical information. I guess she's trying to avoid imposing a particular narrative frame or single understanding of West Virginians and the historical emergence of their culture. That's pretty cool. Impasse didn't really do that.
Basically, I preferred Impasse. But this book was good too.
1) This book is more rigid about the framework it sets up for doing ethnography. It frequently comes back to the "space at the side of the road" or "just talk" or a number of other refrains that I don't remember. Impasse was more subtle about what it was doing. It was less about isolating ethnographic facts and more about presenting stories or prolonged descriptions of things.
2) This book is more visual. It constantly says "imagine that..." or "picture..." I feel like this is an attempt to avoid presenting a single truth about West Virginian society. To me, it may be kind of reductive. An understanding of another place can't be restricted to visual understandings of that place, I think.
3) This book is more fragmentary. There are short, 1-3 page fragments of ethnography. Impasse, on the other hand, has prolonged engagements with individuals or images.
4) This book was more reflexively post-modern. There's a section where Stewart gives the history of West Virginian territory, but says things like "I could say that..." before giving any historical information. I guess she's trying to avoid imposing a particular narrative frame or single understanding of West Virginians and the historical emergence of their culture. That's pretty cool. Impasse didn't really do that.
Basically, I preferred Impasse. But this book was good too.
September 23, 2014
At first I was really turned off by how jargon-heavy the writing is, but either after the first chapter or so she eases up on this or the subject matter becomes so engaging that it becomes less noticeable.
West Virginia is a fascinating place and I find the Coalfields to be among the most fascinating culturally. What I love about this book is that Stewart really engaged with the people and therefore, I think, was able to document them more authentically than others who have attempted simpler narratives. I feel like she had a better understanding of the culture and how it sort of evades classification from the outset rather than trying to box it into something and drawing her conclusions only after classification systems failed her.
So if you can bear through the first chapter or two and find Appalachian culture interesting, it's a really solid read.
West Virginia is a fascinating place and I find the Coalfields to be among the most fascinating culturally. What I love about this book is that Stewart really engaged with the people and therefore, I think, was able to document them more authentically than others who have attempted simpler narratives. I feel like she had a better understanding of the culture and how it sort of evades classification from the outset rather than trying to box it into something and drawing her conclusions only after classification systems failed her.
So if you can bear through the first chapter or two and find Appalachian culture interesting, it's a really solid read.
March 26, 2008
One has to learn how to read this book. But once one does learn to skip over the references and jargon, one is rewarded with a fascinating study of an "other" America. Then, one can read the book again and work with the jargon, wikipedia some of the references, and before you know it, another book emerges, showing the one of the most effective resistances to capitalist and materialist modes of being. It's all in the language, baby!
July 14, 2015
I only gave this 1 star because I could not give it 0. I had to read this in college, and it is probably the most painful books I have ever had to read. The dialogue of the locals was the only redeeming factor of this book. The author takes it upon herself to re-create words and give them a totally different meaning. She also creates her own obscure words which make no sense.
August 3, 2016
First introduced by my socio-ling professor, who's Appalachian. Reread after two years. Talk about the Appalachian way of storytelling and remembering (in Stewart's own term: re-membering). A little too anthropological, but ethnographically readable. Indeed, memories can only be presented as fractured, as fragments.
Read
April 16, 2014"Imagine the hills as a phantasmagoric dream space--a wild zone beyond the pale that is filled with things dangerous, tragic, surprising, spectacular, and eccentric. Imagine how danger and promise mark the space of the hills as a dream world born of contingency and desire."
--Kathleen Stewart
--Kathleen Stewart
August 24, 2007
a good book about appalachian narrative culture in a very small field.
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