When Your Backyard Teaches You Not to Generalise

By Andy — 2026-10-18 — Literary News

A publicist in Brooklyn asked her to explain what national conversations get wrong about rural people. Amy Olberding, a philosophy professor who also farms, saw the trap immediately.

The question was meant to help. The book needed attention, and someone convinced that a rural voice had something useful to say about rural attitudes seemed like good material. Clean angle. Publishable. But Olberding knew better.

She could have grabbed the third rail—the one everyone touches when discussing rural America. She could have defended JD Vance's wish to be buried in his family graveyard in Kentucky, complicated the charge of blood nationalism, positioned herself as the expert interpreter of country life. It would have worked. Attention is attention, and she's trying to sell a book. But it would have been, as she puts it, "like grabbing the electric fence on purpose."

The thing is, Olberding isn't actually what you'd call a typical rural person, even though she owns a tractor and can handle a chainsaw and maintains a fourth-generation, 200-acre farm in the southern Missouri Ozarks. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy. She taught at the University of Oklahoma. The training that got her there was useless for speaking as a sociologist.

What it did instead was make her suspicious.

Years ago, college students showed up at her farm to set hair traps for bear tracking. She was filthy with work when they arrived—dirt and sweat, heavy boots. The students kept their distance, talking from the road like they were afraid. When she told them she was a professor, something changed in their faces. Relief. They let out breath they'd been holding. Suddenly they talked like normal humans instead of people expecting to get shot.

Someone at their university had briefed them: rural Ozark folk would be ornery, oppositional. Watch out for bears and the locals. This was what they'd been told to expect.

Actually, that's not quite right about the ending. When her brother emerged from the woods carrying a chainsaw—he's a mathematician, though they wouldn't have known that—the students went stiff again.

That anecdote haunts her precisely because it shows the problem. Two people on a farm, both educated, both covered in the work of the place. One gets coded as professor and becomes safe. The other carries a tool and becomes threat. The categories break down in about thirty seconds, and yet they broke down only because of a single fact disclosed.

If forsythia blooming at different rates on the same property—the high hill always a week ahead of the low—teaches you anything, it's that even the same plant in the same place isn't uniform. Why, then, imagine that "rural culture" or "rural people" means something singular you could grasp and package for a magazine?

You can only speak to the genuinely local. By local, she means this farm, this region, this specific acre where her ancestors rest in the ground her mother tended before she did.

The book she's written isn't about what rural America thinks. It's about grief, memory, and the confusion of living two lives that society insists must be split into halves—the educated bits and the farming bits, the elite professor and the person who kills chickens and tends graves.

Those halves don't divide cleanly once you're actually standing on the land.

Source: "Her double life in philosophy and farming works until she tries to write a book." — Polity Books