This dissertation ethnographically examines the production of locality in rural Appalachia by looking at the use and maintenance of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes and the social and symbolic significance of home-produced food. The study centers on a traditional food storage building known as a cellar house, which is characteristic to the Mid-Ohio Valley in West Virginia, and demonstrates how inquiry into such conservative forms in the built environment reveals consistent attitudes about past and present cultural practices and about social changes. Such attitudes, which are conveyed through narrative, embodied actions, and materials forms, ultimately derive from local systems of value. The primary argument of this dissertation is that localities are contexts for social action and that full participation in and belonging to a locality consists in the demonstration and recognition of appropriate values through the performance of everyday practices.

Examining the material forms that people choose to conserve and adapt over time offers a way to understand what is locally desirable and appropriate. For example, the cellar house is a vernacular structure that persists on the contemporary landscape in the Mid-Ohio Valley and has enjoyed multiple uses and structural adaptations. Local residents deem the cellar house "useful" as a way to explain its persistence through time. Cellar houses are associated with home food production and with a remembered self-sufficiency. Practices such as gardening, butchering and canning are on the decline but remain important indexes of self-sufficiency and markers of personal industry, two values integral to dominant ethical and aesthetic stances rooted in work and workmanship. By examining work and work products as both ethical and artful, this study challenges conventional notions of art and aesthetics and demonstrates how local subjectivities emerge in the performance of place-based values.

Though focused on the Allegheny foothills of West Virginia, the findings on the centrality of work in this context has broader applications to contemporary rural life in the U.S. In addition, this research contributes to a shift in Appalachian studies from an emphasis on subjects' marginality and difference to their participation in expressions of a core work ethic found throughout the U.S.