Wreading Wednesday: Two Books on a Flight

Last week, I spend a two days in transit to the ASOR annual meeting. It was a great time to catch up on some reading and I read two through provoking books that will continue to inform my thinking and research for the foreseeable future.

Book the First

I should have read Scott Trafton’s book Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (2004) earlier. It traced the development of Egyptomania through the 19th century with a particular emphasis on how Egypt became the object around which whites and Blacks negotiated racial identity. Trafton’s book, in particular, highlighted the way in which Black thinkers influenced white arguments for the racial identity of ancient Egyptians. The more Black thinkers recognized ancient Egyptians as Black the more white scholars sought to either declare Egyptians to have been white or distance the culture of Greece and Rome from Egyptian roots. While some of this narrative is well known — especially in the work of Martin Bernal — Trafton digs into the ubiquity of Egyptomania in American popular culture and showed that conversations in Black and white media negotiated the growing rift between Black and white views.

More compelling still was Trafton’s argument concerning the role of penetration in the cultural imaginary of the period. From Howard Carter’s piercing the doorway of Tutankhamun to the interest in theories of the hollow earth, Trafton shows how this metaphor of imperial discovery parallels the anxieties surround race and the growing involvement of Black thinkers, politicians, and activists into realms traditionally dominated by white people. This metaphorical reading of the practice of Egyptology (and archaeology) is pretty exciting especially when brought to bear on pseudoarchaeological ideas. The notion that (pseudo-)archaeology can represent a channel for social anxieties is not new, but I’ve never seen as eloquently articulated across traditional archaeological discourse (of the day), pseudoarchaeology, and fiction. This is important for my own interests in pseudoarchaeology in that it offers a model for how the discursive concerns of archaeology regularly overflow disciplinary bounds and engage with conversations in the pseudoarchaeological realm.

Book the Second

I also read Steve Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t (Chicago 2023). This was pure indulgence, but in the end, it gave me some remarkable insights into some of the long simmering projects that I’ve been working on over the last dozen years or so. It’s one of those books that balances conversational style with academic citations (and complexity). The basic narrative is that traditions ideas of rural America as this idyllic landscape filled with simple, honest, and unassuming farmers and citizens is simply a pious myth (mostly, it would appear, grounded in a Classical view of cities as being corrupting exacerbated by 19th and 20th century criticism of industrialization, but that’s my editorial interjection). Instead Conn presents a history of 20th century rural America that is fully engaged with the modern world, with capitalism, with the federal government, and with all the problems associated with those institutions. As someone who lives in a moderately rural area — which many in the US see is completely and profoundly rural — I can vouch for most of Conn’s arguments.

For example, our community benefited from the military expansion associated with the Cold War (and sustained by the war on terror). The presence of a Strategic Air Command base in Grand Forks (which is now a drone base) and the ubiquity of both missile silos and various other Cold War era military relics in the broader region make clear the deep investment economically and socially of the military in this rural outpost. Conn argues that the militarization of rural areas not only took advantage of low cost land (often at the expense of farmers), but also became a recruiting ground for soldiers. Rural communities suffered greater losses in the Gulf Wars, for example, than urban ones and their loyalty to the military demonstrated both an ambivalence toward particular policies (and often leadership) and a steadfast commitment to the proximate benefits of the military’s presence and its ethos.

More significantly for some of our work, the development of Grand Forks Air Force base coincided with the suburbanization of Grand Forks. Conn makes the interesting argument that the development of suburbanized small towns did not reflect the movement of residents from high density urban centers into lower density rural communities, but rather the movement of people from low density urban areas into higher density small urban communities. In archaeology, we often call this nucleation. This trend was obvious from our research in Grand Forks, but we weren’t able to quite articulate it clearly. One of the more interesting observations that Conn makes is that when smaller communities began to grow, the population coming to town from rural areas were often poor. They found housing in trailers and mobile homes. Grand Forks certainly saw this particular aspect of urban growth in the mid-20th century.

This book has much more to offer than what I have presented here. What I particularly appreciate is Conn’s effort to demonstrate that rural areas were not the backward peripheries of an urbanizing America which somehow preserved “traditional values.” Instead, Conn rightly observed that rural areas were every bit as modern (in a colloquial and literal sense) as urban ones and in some ways, anticipated larger trends in American society, economy, and life. That said, Conn never loses track of the paradox that part of the appeal of rural areas is their willingness to promote their way of life as tradition while at the same time remaining deeply engaged with national and global trends (and problems). The problems of slow violence — from rural poverty to the challenges of addiction, environmental pollutants, and the economic cost of rampant capitalism — remain as present in rural areas as urban ones in the US. In our neck of the woods, we often claim to be “insulated rather than isolated” from various national and global pressures. In Conn’s estimation, communities like ours are mostly insulated by dint of reputation rather than reality. 

So that’s it. Two flights, two good books, and a nice run into the long holiday weekend and the end of the semester.