Kenan Ercel*
With Donald J. Trump announcing young Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 elections, we’ve started hearing the term “hillbilly” more frequently. This is because the title of Vance’s 2016 memoir was Hillbilly Elegy. The book, which Netflix adapted into a film in 2020, has topped bestseller lists again following Vance’s vice-presidential nomination.
As with many concepts in this Dictionary, “hillbilly,” which Vance mourns (through the elegy in his title), has no direct equivalent in Turkish. Translating “hillbilly” into Turkish is as difficult, and in some ways as impossible, as translating “efe” or “yörük” into English. It is a phenomenon distinctly rooted in the United States, similar to terms like “white trash,” “redneck,” and “hobo.” Moreover, the etymology of “hillbilly” is debated. According to one explanation, it comes from the term “billy,” used in Scotland to mean comrade or companion, which was applied in the 17th century to Scottish people who fled to the hills due to their religious beliefs. Another theory traces the term to supporters of Protestant King William III of England (1650-1702), known as “King Billy.” Those who migrated to the mountainous regions of the northern U.S. were eventually called hillbillies. However, some researchers believe this term entered usage much later, around the end of the 19th century, and thus disagree that it originated in Scotland or Ireland. The term spread as communities from the Appalachian and Ozark mountains moved to other parts of the U.S. after the Great Depression.
The main characteristics of the hillbilly stereotype include insularity, inbreeding, familial strife, a tendency toward violence, addiction to drugs and alcohol, foul language, ignorance, and laziness—a group embodying nearly all the seven deadly sins. One of the most striking portrayals of hillbillies in film is the rapists in Deliverance. The most caricatured version features a character with a thick Southern accent, chewing tobacco, with a straw in his mouth, always intoxicated by homemade moonshine, and never without a shotgun slung over his shoulder, while overalls are his standard attire.
A more nuanced and empathetic portrayal is found in J.D. Vance’s memoir, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. In his memoir filled with anecdotes about the problems plaguing his own family in Ohio, Vance paints a portrait of people lacking a work ethic, always blaming others, not valuing education, unable to maintain marriages, quarrelsome, and fatalistic.
When the book was first published, it was well-received even among Democrats because Vance criticized conservative ideology and the exploitation of religion. He lamented that these merely scapegoated groups like LGBTQ people, feminists, liberal academics, and pro-choice advocates, without offering any real solutions to ordinary Americans. Vance recounted a story of a friend who was habitually late to work because he disliked getting up early, and who blamed his unemployment on the stagnant “Obama economy” on social media. “As long as you despised the right people, you were considered a respectable individual,” Vance summarized. In other words, being anti-woke was all it took to be liked.
Despite his critical stance on conservatism and the church, Hillbilly Elegy was also praised by Republicans because, at the end of the day, his solution was individual salvation. As the subtitle of the book suggests, the problem and the solution both lie in family and culture. The main task is to transform the dysfunctional family structure and toxic culture that foster “learned helplessness.” For instance, during the recent opioid crisis—which devastated the same regions Vance writes about and nearly killed his own mother—the solution, according to him, was not sanctions on the companies pushing those drugs, but teaching individuals the discipline and morals to avoid bad habits.
While Vance’s memoir, written with clear political ambition, was showered with praise from a wide swath of the political spectrum, one dissenting voice was Nancy Iseberg. A professor of American history and author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Isenberg, in an essay published in The New York Review of Books, referenced another historian, Steven Stoll, to remind us that hillbilly history is actually one of dispossession at the hands of the state and capital. She drew attention to the class conflicts that Vance’s folkloric narrative obscures.
The European settlers who took refuge in the Appalachian region were communities engaged in subsistence economies. One key component of this economy was access to land for grazing livestock, fishing, hunting, gathering, and sourcing timber. Just as enclosure in England forced peasants off the common lands and into the proletariat, the people of Appalachia were similarly dispossessed. According to Stoll, the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794) during George Washington’s presidency wasn’t merely a protest against the imposed liquor tax but a revolt against the commodification of alcohol by the state. After the Civil War (1861-1865), the privatization of forestlands for logging and coal mining further accelerated the dispossession of the local population. In short, Stoll depicts hillbillies not as uncivilized, backward savages but as an honorable group trying to survive in the face of modernization, industrialization, and capitalism.
Despite its widespread pejorative and mocking usage, there are instances in popular culture where hillbillies are attributed positive traits, as Stoll suggests. Qualities like closeness to nature, strong family ties, authenticity, frankness, and the pioneering spirit of early European settlers in America are sometimes celebrated in the hillbilly identity. Anthony Harkins, who skillfully synthesizes both the negative and positive connotations of hillbilly in his comprehensive study Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004), argues that the hillbilly image serves two seemingly contradictory functions. It allows urban, middle-class white Americans to both romanticize a bygone era while simultaneously reaffirming and glorifying modernity through the caricature of a backward figure.
In this sense, the hillbilly serves a similar purpose to the peasant ethos in Turkey. At times, the “lord of the nation,” at other times, “God’s farmer,” but always defined through the urban gaze as an “other.” Sometimes representing the wisdom of Anatolia, sometimes inspiring the poem “Why Must We Kill the Peasants?” with the figure of Hillbilly Uncle Veli.
[1] Since “hill” means mountain, a weak equivalent might be “dağlı” (mountain dweller), in the sense of the Turkish phrase “coming from the mountains and taking over the vineyards,” but it still falls short.
[2] You can see the most caricatured and ironic portrayals of this typology in the comedy films featuring the duo Harold & Kumar.
[3] For example, the law firm where Vance worked lobbied on behalf of Purdue Pharma, one of the most notorious companies involved in the opioid crisis. For more on the opioid crisis, see https://birikimdergisi.com/haftalik/8860/abdye-ozgu-kavramlar-sozlugu-opioid-krizi
[4] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/left-behind-hillbilly-elegy-appalachia/
[5] While Isenberg doesn’t entirely reject this interpretation, she finds it overly romanticized. She points out that many hillbillies, far from showing sympathy for others during the enclosure and privatization of common lands, pushed out those who hadn’t yet staked their own claim to the land. Among the chief victims of this struggle were Native Americans and nomadic peoples.
[6] Harkins’ book, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004), is one of the most comprehensive studies on this concept.
*This article was originally published in Birikim Magazine in Turkish and translated into English by Politurco.
*Kenan Ercel is a prominent scholar, author and columnist at Birikim Magazine.
