| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jane S. Becker. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 331. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.95.

Rarely has a historiographic treatment of material culture achieved the transdisciplinary scope that Jane S. Becker's book has. This folkloristic account documents the transformation of Appalachian women's textiles from handicraft to industrial commodities in the Depression era using a politics of culture framework. Through detailed and thorough research of popular, academic, institutional, and museum historical sources, Becker constructs a compelling argument for how the commodification of craft objects in the Appalachian crafts movement also commodified tradition. She demonstrates that the historical meanings assigned to these objects constructed mythic folk histories and traditions that instilled middle-class buyers with an ideology of white American identity but fragmented lives and destroyed craft producers' own personal and cultural histories in the process. Her emphasis on careful documentation convincingly supports her conclusion that the Appalachian case reveals how "the commodification of tradition depends upon . . . deceptions, along with a sort of deliberate amnesia" (p. 236). The book therefore encourages readers to apply her material to cross-disciplinary issues in postcolonialism, identity constitution and loss, and political and policy constructions of culture. . . .

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