Vol. 36, No. 4, Fall 2014 37 PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY By Jennifer R. Wies In many cases, a primary problem in poor rural areas is the very fact that they’re rural- remote, miles from major highways and plagued by substandard infrastructure… The queasy answer that econo- mists come to is that it would be better to help the people than the place- in some cases, helping people leave the place. — Lowrey 2014:MM13 …It is likely to be a long and confusing struggle at every level- personal, regional, national. Opposition is formidable, inertia is great, ambivalence is deep. But if there is hope in the present movement, it lies in its attempt to resolve the ambivalence and to assess for the frst time the real cost of loyalty. — Whisnant 1973:124 T his article explores how indig- enous Appalachian students create meaning systems related to poverty, and how they move towards liberating themselves from hegemonic discourses of the transglobal political economy through engaged ethnography. In so doing, I accomplish two goals. First, I outline a pedagogical process for including indigenous Appalachian students in engaged ethnography and how that process can be layered to accomplish multiple aims. Secondly, to understand how indigenous Ap- palachian students construct meaning systems related to poverty, I examine here the ways that they describe their encounters with two key mechanisms for coding poverty: people and place. Through the practice of anthropology frameworks and methods, this article outlines an applied anthropology ap- proach that recognizes the radiating impacts of engaged ethnography. ENGAGED ETHNOGRAPHY IN APPALACHIA: INDIGENEITY, RESISTANCE, AND LOYALTY Engaged Ethnography Since the fall of 2012, I have delivered a service-learning class at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) in Medical Anthropology with an emphasis on health inequalities. The ates, and only 7.5 percent of people over the age of 25 possess a bachelor’s degree or higher. The epicenter of our ethnographic work is Manchester, the county seat of Clay County. Formed in 1807, the area was once a hub of salt mining activity “This article explores how indigenous Appalachian students create meaning systems related to poverty, and how they move towards liberating themselves from hegemonic discourses of the transglobal political economy through engaged ethnography.” students with whom I work are pre- dominantly indigenous Appalachian residents. This means that they came to EKU from one of the 23 counties in our service region, comprised of the southeastern corner of our com- monwealth. With 86 percent of the student body originating in Kentucky, the majority of the students have a connection via land or kin to federal- ly-designated Appalachian counties as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission (2014). Our engaged ethnographic course- work takes place in Clay County, in the federally-recognized Appalachian region of Kentucky. Named the “un- healthiest county in the nation” by the Washington Post in 2010 (Haygood 2010), Clay County residents represent a disproportionately high rate of pover- ty, with 34.4 percent of the population living in poverty and a median house- hold income of $20,175. According to United States Census data (2012), 58.9 percent of Clay County residents over the age of 25 are high school gradu- and later coal mining. Coal mining throughout eastern Kentucky subsumed manufacturing, due to the higher levels of energy found in the Appalachian Coal Basin as compared to coal deposits elsewhere (Harvey 1977). However, the rise in natural gas as a fuel resource and the opening of a global energy market has led to a de-emphasis on Kentucky’s coal (Lewis 1991; Maggard 1994). Signifcant to the impoverishment of the Appalachian region today is the historic and purposeful deinvestment in the economic development of the region (Caudill 1962) and an extraction of natural resources dictated by a global market, rather than community-based or regional need. Clay County, like most of Appalachia, has been deeply affected by transglobal neoliberal economic policies. Under the Reagan White House, the United States experienced tax cuts and social service cutbacks, while watching the transfer of responsibility for poor countries’ debts from developed countries to international fnancial institutions. In