Kill All the Chickens

Grief and Memory on an Ozark Farm
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-5095-7544-2
Verlag: Polity Press

Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten

As a philosopher, Amy Olberding is trained to wrestle with abstraction. But when she takes over her ancestral family farm in the Ozarks, her experience turns far more earthy. Her double life in philosophy and farming worked well enough, for a time. But then she tried to write a philosophy book about grief.

Olberding's profession prepared her to write a scholarly book, but left her ill-equipped to do so among the haunting traces of her ancestors: the grandfather who could fix anything, the uncle who cautioned against letting your brains show, and the grandmother who once had all her chickens killed to conceal her hillbilly origins. Like her grandmother, Olberding was adept at killing chickens, at least metaphorically, taking on the marks of class and education expected of professors. But her efforts to write dispassionately about grief from a farm populated with family ghosts quickly foundered. Instead, Olberding presents a lyrical mosaic that refuses to shy away from the acute confusions that come with loss. Insistently joining farm life to learning and Ozark ancestors to philosophers, Olberding offers evocative meditations on community and tradition, the contradictions of mental and manual labor, the worlds of urbane airs and country speech, and describes a life of the mind slowly giving way to raw experience.

Kill All the Chickens is the book you get when loss is less a problem to solve than a place where you live. Most of all, it is an effort to revive some chickens, to let the earthy stuff of sorrow sometimes mess up the cleaner wisdoms philosophy might offer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Olberding, Amy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. What I'm Really Saying
2. What a Fellowship
3. Heat-Strengthened
4. Some Glad Morning
5. I Think, Maybe, It Isn't
6. Circle Be Unbroken
7. The Invention of Death
8. Fine for Caius
9. At the Orthocenter
10. Ary a Word
11. Kill All the Chickens
12. Independence Day
13. Wasting my Fiftieth Year
14. I Hope to Meet You There
15. Slipping the Net
16. The Armor of God
17. Ways to Kill a Groundhog
18. Lay By and Store
19. Come Home
20. The Supply Closet of Glory
21. Nod Line
22. Some Sort of Deal
23. Best Keep It
24. Comrades That so Long Have Gone
25. The Last Start
26. Once the Roof Goes
27. Cain't Cry
28. Signs and Portents
29. Death Just Got Out of This Truck
30. Decoration Day 2025
31. Anything at All
32. The Chance of It

Acknowledgments

Über Autor(innen)

Amy Olberding is, for a little while longer, Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She lives on her family's farm in the southern Missouri Ozarks with her husband, her dog, and too many groundhogs.