Yankee Moderns

"In Yankee Moderns, Michael Hoberman explores the convergence of folk regional identity - a culturally based sense of place - with the social, economic, and psychic pressures that have come with modernity. Focusing on the oral traditions of a small place, the Sawmill Valley of western Massachusetts, he finds that the folklife of apparently isolated rural communities is far more dynamic and adaptable to change than is popularly supposed.". "Rural New Englanders, Hoberman suggests, have too long been portrayed as backward-looking and dangerously homogeneous in their makeup - crotchety exceptions to modernity's nearly worldwide sweep. This insightful work, with its emphasis on instability and adaptation as persistent features of the folk region, does much to lay that stereotype to rest."--BOOK JACKET.