Setting Out Productions

Vermont is probably one of very few places where direct democracy happens.  Every year on the first Tuesday in March Vermonters will head to their local school or city hall to participate in Town Meeting.  At this annual gathering registered voters debate and vote on issues facing their town.  The ‘don’t talk about politics’ [...]

The Magic of Summer Cottages | WBUR and NPR – On Point with Tom Ashbrook

In this On Point podcast, The Magic of Summer Cottages, Tom Ashbrook and his guest, Tereasa Surratt, discuss the urge to ‘get back to nature’.  Their conversation is mostly about the positive sides of being in the country, [...]

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver tells a wonderful anecdote about having ‘insider’ status in a rural area;

“The only useful generalization I’d hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of ‘insider’ vs. ‘outsider.’  When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question [...]

I found this piece while looking through the internet archives for found footage.  (I’m thinking that maybe i could incorporate manifest destiny expansionism into ‘Real’ Vermonters.)  Please note this is not my piece.  It was made by producers at blip.tv and is under creative commons licensing.

Lydia Ratcliffâs and Lovejoy Brook Farm from [...]

Tamise Van Pelt’s article, Otherness, begins: “As half of a signifying binary, the ‘Other’ is a term with a rich and lengthy philosophical history dating at least from Plato’s Sophist, in which the Stranger participates in a dialogue on the ontological problems of being and non-being, of the One and the Other.”

In contemporary theory the ‘Other’ can signify varying things across different discourses.  There is disagreement whether Otherness is an attribute (as in identity theory) or an alterity (as in Lacanian theory).  In looking at Vermonter’s views of ‘outsiders’ I am interested in identity theory’s humanized version of Otherness.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first to bring the concept of Otherness into identity theory.  In her classic feminist text, The Second Sex, she claimed “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. . . . In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for the American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for the colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.”  In her view the Other helps to define the subject or group and forces people to “realize the reciprocity of their relations.”

Continue reading Otherness

In 1998 79 year-old retired dairy farmer, Fred Tuttle ran against millionaire Jack McMullen in the republican primary for a Vermont Senate seat.  Tuttle only spent $200 on the campaign and won.

Fred’s bid for congress started as a protest against McMullen, a Harvard-educated Massachusetts native who owned a second home in Vermont.  Voters [...]

When my family skis at Sugarbush (which can be more than 30 times a year for the family members who live in VT and have passes) we talk to more out-of-staters than Vermonters.  Increasingly their end of the conversation goes ‘Oh yeah, we [...]

After hearing about my upcoming project, ‘Real’ Vermonters, my friend Brendan sent me a Vermonter.com article titled “What is a Flatlander?”.  I grew up in Vermont and, although I don’t currently live there, I think it will always be one of my favorite places.  I’ve always taken our ‘flatlander’ lingo for granted.  It really wasn’t [...]