Regionalism

Regionalism. Regionalism has persisted in the United States in spite of social and economic mobility and telecommunications innovations that tend to homogenize culture and diminish geographic isolation. Studies of regionalism may be divided into two groups: those that emphasize material factors and those that emphasize ideas. The first considers the region as a form of classification that differentiates cultural traits geographically. These classifications identify culture areas, which become the basis for cultural‐diffusion studies. Questions of regional identity may arise in such studies, but more often the analysis is limited to material culture and folk art and crafts. The second type of study views regionalism as a form of collective solidarity and identity, often set against a national identity of the standardizing forces of modernization and globalization. Attempts to construct a theoretical understanding of regionalism have tended to conflate these two emphases, as was the case with early twentieth‐century theories of environmental determinism and folk sociology.

The story of regionalism in American history begins at different times, depending on which view of regionalism is given greater importance. For example, indigenous North American populations developed regionally distinct ways of life associated with different resource bases and forms of social organization. Clearly, distinct culture areas existed before the arrival of European settlers, but speculation about regionalist sentiment makes little sense in light of the strength of tribal identity and the absence of any compelling reason to conceptualize one's place in the world in terms of territorial parts in relation to a whole.

Similarly, in the early Colonial Era, particular ecological settings and different national and religious identities of European settlers led to distinct culture areas and forms of life within the colonies. These differences were associated with regional identities, however, only after being cast in relation to a spatially more extensive protonational spirit. Differing colonial experiences and the settlement of the western frontier created strong and persistent regional political interests. The unique ways of life that divided the northern and southern colonies and the trans‐Appalachian West, and that set individual colonies apart from one another, helped to shape American politics through the nineteenth century, despite the strong sense of continentalism that dictated the federal government's geopolitical strategies.

The Civil War was the most violent and destructive expression of these competing sectional interests. The war's decisive military outcome did little to diminish the sense of separateness between the North and the South, as reflected in the several regionalist movements associated with southern intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter half of the nineteenth century also witnessed a growing sense of the particularity of western political interests. Here, regionalism provided a frame for the economic interests of an industrial, commercial, and urban Northeast; an agricultural and rural South; and a transitional Middle West, astride a burgeoning industrial belt and rich agricultural lands; and an American West rich in natural resources and characterized by extensive agriculture. To the American eye, the nation was a federal union made up of distinct regional societies and cultures. To others, and especially to Europeans, what most characterized American culture was its homogeneity.

The importance of regionalism in twentieth‐century American intellectual life varied widely. It also underwent a gradual semantic shift. Once an expression of subnational political interests, it gradually came to refer to antimodernist cultural themes. In this respect, regionalist movements were influential in painting, literature, and architecture, usually as a counterpoint to modernist canons. Regionalist movements in planning, sociology, and human ecology emphasized decentralization and presented the region as an effective antidote to the perceived placelessness of an increasingly urban, corporate, and bureaucratic America. Such diverse American intellectuals as the philosophers Josiah Royce and John Dewey, the historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb, and the sociologist Howard Odum and geographer Carl Sauer expressed concern about the loss of regional sentiment in twentieth‐century America. The urbanist Lewis Mumford championed a relatively unique regionalist vision that he though compatible with urbanization, technology, and professional planning.

Many of these writers shared a utopian communitarian vision of an America composed of decentralized democratic polities. Regionalism was thus one defense against the perceived coercion associate with centralization. In fact, however, it has more often been associated with isolation from the mainstream, which explains in part why regionalism as a concept has been more important to folklorists and American Studies specialists than to political scientists, sociologists, and economists. Regionalism has, however, played a role in subdisciplines that focus on social and economic ties between cities and their hinterlands, such as urban sociology or functionalism or regional economies.

The social scientific study of American life has tended to view regional studies, outside of urban regions, as nostalgic and conservative, especially in relation to divisions of social life along class and ethnic lines. This perception changed gradually at the end of the twentieth century, however, as regionalism gained some prominence in postmodernist studies and as attachment to places and regions figured in discussion of modern identities. Environmentalist thought also turned its attention to regionalist themes, as in the concept of bioregionalism and in other attempts to conceptualize the relation of human communities to the natural environment.
See also Nationalism; New England; Social Class; Social Science; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Howard W. Odum and and Harry Estill Moore , American Regionalism: A Cultural‐Historical Approach to National Integration, 1938.
Merrill Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America, 1965.
Michael Steiner and and Clarence Mondale , Region and Regionalism in the United States, 1988.
Barbara Allen and Thomas J. Schlerth, eds., Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures, 1990.
David M. Holman , A Certain Slant of Light: Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction, 1995.
James M. Dennis , Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, 1998.
Bruce Katz, ed., Reflections on Regionalism, 2000.

J. Nicholas Entrikin