Mountain View : an ethnographic account of cooperation and conflict in a Tennessee community on the Cumberland Plateau

Many small rural communities in the United States have experienced rapid social, cultural, and economic change associated with increasing urbanization. These interrelated changes have often been found to trigger a deterioration of community identity and participation. Yet communities do not necessarily deteriorate, as local residents may initiate adaptive, revitalizing responses to the changes affecting their communities.

In order to examine how members of one small community have adaptively responded to change, this study focuses on patterns of cooperation and conflict over a period of 45 years since the community was settled. An ethnographic approach was taken to examine these patterns in Mountain View, a small rural community on the Cumberland Plateau in Middle Tennessee. Although participant observation and informal interviewing were the basic means of data collection, various research techniques were used in the study. Qualitative data were used as the primary basis for analysis, with quantitative data used to further verify conclusions.

The circumstances of Mountain View's settlement facilitated the development of close and cooperative relationships in the community, and a number of mechanisms have helped to maintain those relationships to some extent to the present. Yet Mountain View has gone through many changes, and tensions and conflicts within the community have threatened cohesion. Community members have, however, successfully adjusted to changes and managed tensions in order to preserve a strong sense of community identity, participation, and cooperation. They have, through unconscious means as well as consciously planned avenues, prevented the deterioration of their community.