Moving in America

Abstract

Americans are movers. The rest of the world, looking on, has said this of us, and we can hardly argue with their perceptions, for we place such a positive value on mobility, tying it to personal and social progress. But we are hardly unambivalent about moving. In response to a need for roots, we cling to an agrarian family image of the good and proper and cooperative life lived in harmony with the seasons. Some of the most powerful fictions by which we negotiate for a common order are as fully explored in our folk and popular forms of expression—especially our songs and dances—as in our more sophisticated and complex works of art. It is in such conventional forms that we find the most consistent explanations of what it means, socially and psychologically, to travel on or to come home to stay.