WHAM, BAM, THANK-YOU, SAM - CRITICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE PERSISTANCE OFHILLBILLY CARICATURES

Southern Appalachian Mountaineer (SAM or ''hillbilly'') stereotypes, p articularly as represented in caricatures, have emerged from the more than 100 years of travel accounts and fictional works that erected a m ythical Appalachia. Such universalistic portraits of Appalachians resu lted from the inaccurate and incomplete perceptions of early Appalachi an ''scholarship'' and from two fallacies in tandem. The fallacy of co mposition (what is apparently valid for a part is assumed valid for th e whole) created the myth of a monolithic Appalachia. The ecological f allacy applied the myth by attributing the assumed average characteris tics of Appalachians to any individual Appalachian. In this tautologic al manner, the fictionalized attributes of SAMs have been used to expl ain why SAMs are the way they are. Additionally, region. unlike gender and race, lacks sufficient political and economic salience to be cast as a national issue. Thus, whereas acceptance and respect have been e xtended to various minority groups that have organized via identity po litics and become politically articulate, they have not been accorded to regional groups that lack national prominence.