Mountains

Does a mountain topography lend itself to group solidarity, ecstatic spiritual experience, and social isolation? The author asks this question as he compares Pentecostal communities in the Arkansas Ozarks to the rise of the Hasidic movement in Carpathian Mountains of eighteenth-century Ukraine. Mountains have been universally revered as places of divine/human encounter—from Machu Picchu in Peru and Mount Olympus in Greece to Mount Sinai in Egypt and the five sacred mountains of China. Mountains are places of transformation. Alchemists in the Middle Ages regarded the mountain peak as “the philosopher’s oven.” The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the modern Hasidic movement, argued that authentic spiritual knowledge was best found among the simple, unpretentious people of the mountain villages. These were the shoemakers, chicken farmers, tailors, and innkeepers who made up his followers. He pointed out that God had appeared to Moses in an ordinary thorn bush, set aflame in the desert. “It is in the simple folk—the ‘lowly’ thorn-bush,” he said, “that this insatiable Divine flame is found.”

Mountain Stereotypes, Whiteness, and the Discourse of Early School Reform in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1910s–1920s

Dallas T. Herndon, the first director of the Arkansas History Commission and State Archives in Little Rock, opened his short study on the conditions of Arkansas's mountain schools in the 1910s by writing that he was “fully convinced… that no such extreme backwardness in reality exists anywhere in Arkansas as to be found in the most isolated parts of such states as Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Herndon followed this statement with a comical story he had heard about a conversation between a Georgia mountaineer and a “traveler from the outside world.” The traveler, he told, asked the mountaineer if he knew who President Woodrow Wilson and John Slayton, the governor of Georgia, were. The mountaineer openly replied that he did not. Taken aback by such ignorance, the stranger then asked the mountaineer if he knew God. The Georgia mountaineer answered, “Yes, I think I'se heard uf him; his last name be's Damn, ain't it?” Herndon was sure that in the Arkansas hills, no one could find a “man, woman or child who is quite so ignorant as that Georgia mountaineer…”

In Memoriam: Jimmy G. Harris (1930–2012)

Jimmy Gene Harris died in Seattle on 30 September 2012, at the age of 82. He led a remarkable life. He was a soldier of fortune, a champion for human rights, an exacting phonetic fieldworker, an observer of human nature, a teller of stories, a teacher and a mentor. Raised in the Arkansas Ozarks, he began his international adventures as a US Marine Corps sergeant in the Korean War. He pursued his linguistic education in Mexico City and at the University of Washington, with an MA in 1966 specializing in Japanese and Asian Studies, while also carrying out fundamental language revitalization fieldwork with the Stó:lō Nation (Salish) in the Fraser River Valley of BC. In 1973, he obtained an MEd from the University of Southern California. On leave from his duties in the field from 1976 to 1978, he spent time refining his phonetic knowledge with David Abercrombie in Edinburgh and with Eugénie Henderson in London.