Download or read book Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners written by R. Celeste Ray and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These case studies explore how competing interests among the keepers of a community's heritage shape how that community both regards itself and reveals itself to others. As editors Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter note in their introduction, such stakeholders are no longer just of the community itself, but are now often "outsiders"--tourists, the mass media, and even anthropologists and folklorists. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South. Arranged around three themes that have often surfaced in debates about public folklore and anthropology over the last two decades, the studies consider issues of representation, identity, and practice. One study of representation discusses how Appalachian Pentecostal serpent handlers try to reconcile their exotic popular image with their personal religious beliefs. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term "coonass," once widely considered derogatory. Essays on practice look at an Appalachian Virginia coal town and Snee Farm, a National Heritage Site in lowland South Carolina. Both pieces reveal how dynamic and contradictory views of community life can be silenced in favor of producing a more easily consumable vision of a "past." Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners offers challenging new insights into some of the roles that the media, tourism, and charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it.
Download or read book Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners written by Antoinette Jackson and published by . This book was released on 2017-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers challenging new insights into some of the roles that the media, tourism, and charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South.
Download or read book Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners written by R. Celeste Ray and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These case studies explore how competing interests among the keepers of a community's heritage shape how that community both regards itself and reveals itself to others. As editors Celeste Ray and Luke Eric Lassiter note in their introduction, such stakeholders are no longer just of the community itself, but are now often "outsiders"--tourists, the mass media, and even anthropologists and folklorists. The setting of each study is a different marginalized community in the South. Arranged around three themes that have often surfaced in debates about public folklore and anthropology over the last two decades, the studies consider issues of representation, identity, and practice. One study of representation discusses how Appalachian Pentecostal serpent handlers try to reconcile their exotic popular image with their personal religious beliefs. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term "coonass," once widely considered derogatory. Essays on practice look at an Appalachian Virginia coal town and Snee Farm, a National Heritage Site in lowland South Carolina. Both pieces reveal how dynamic and contradictory views of community life can be silenced in favor of producing a more easily consumable vision of a "past." Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners offers challenging new insights into some of the roles that the media, tourism, and charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it.
Download or read book Cajun Women and Mardi Gras written by Carolyn E. Ware and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women’s contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition’s integrity but also women themselves from the event’s rowdy, often drunken, play. Throughout the past twentieth century, and especially in the past fifty years, women in some prairie communities have insisted on taking more active and public roles in the festivities. Carolyn E. Ware traces the history of women’s participation as it has expanded from supportive roles as cooks and costume makers to increasingly public performances as Mardi Gras clowns and (in at least one community) capitaines. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork interviews and observation in Mardi Gras communities, Ware focuses on the festive actions in Tee Mamou and Basile to reveal how women are reshaping the celebration as creative artists and innovative performers.
Download or read book Invitation to Anthropology written by Luke Eric Lassiter and published by AltaMira Press. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lassiter's accessible introduction to anthropology encourages students to evaluate its relevance in our increasingly complex world. Part I focuses on the underlying assumptions and concepts that have driven anthropological theory and practice since its modern inception. Part II explores cross-cultural human issues showing how anthropological studies offer relevant insight into human beings and valuable models for thinking and acting. Invitation to Anthropology is an ideal text for undergraduate students, easily supplemented with case studies in anthropology.
Download or read book Cajun Breakdown written by Ryan Andre Brasseaux and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya." Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan André Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey.
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Celeste Ray and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcending familiar categories of "black" and "white," this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture complicates and enriches our understanding of "southernness" by identifying the array of cultures that combined to shape the South. This exploration of southern ethnicities examines the ways people perform and maintain cultural identities through folklore, religious faith, dress, music, speech, cooking, and transgenerational tradition. Accessibly written and informed by the most recent research that recovers the ethnic diversity of the early South and documents the more recent arrival of new cultural groups, this volume greatly expands upon the modest Ethnic Life section of the original Encyclopedia. Contributors describe 88 ethnic groups that have lived in the South from the Mississippian Period (1000-1600) to the present. They include 34 American Indian groups, as well as the many communities with European, African, and Asian cultural ties that came to the region after 1600. Southerners from all backgrounds are likely to find themselves represented here.
Download or read book The New Invitation to Anthropology written by Luke Eric Lassiter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born within and against the violence of European colonial conquest, anthropology has aspired to understand the diversity of human experience in ethical and transformative ways. The New Invitation to Anthropology is a fresh and accessible text that takes students to the heart of the discipline and reveals the ongoing relevance of anthropology today. The New Invitation to Anthropology, Fifth Edition has an intimate touch that invites students in and helps them understand the historical roots of anthropology and its connection to recent social and political issues. Part I covers the history of the discipline, the emergence of the concept of culture, and ethnographic field methods in relation to European imperialism and discourses on race. Part II illustrates how the concept of culture shaped specific domains of anthropological study, including ecological adaptation, social class, gender, family, marriage, religion, and medicine.As a timely and engaging “non-textbook,” The New Invitation to Anthropology explores anthropological perspectives on real-world problems, helping students think like anthropologists and become better citizens of the world. New To This Edition Significantly revised Chapter 1, “The Origins of North American Anthropology,” demonstrates how modern anthropology emerged out of 19th century theories of race and social evolutionism and develops critical understandings of modern forms of racism New sections on social class and globalization in Chapter 4 offer insights into the complexities of modern global problems like climate change New elaborations of intersectionality in Chapter 5, “Sex, Gender, and Inequality” reinforces discussions of gender-based inequality Chapter 7 on religious experience now incorporates healing and medicine to expand a framework of studying belief and experience
Download or read book Native Southerners written by Gregory D. Smithers and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond. In the Native South, as in much of North America, storytelling is key to an understanding of origins and tradition—and the stories of the indigenous people of the Southeast are central to Native Southerners. Spanning territory reaching from modern-day Louisiana and Arkansas to the Atlantic coast, and from present-day Tennessee and Kentucky through Florida, this book gives voice to the lived history of such well-known polities as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, as well as smaller Native communities like the Nottoway, Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Biloxi-Chitimacha, Natchez, Caddo, and many others. From the oral and cultural traditions of these Native peoples, as well as the written archives of European colonists and their Native counterparts, Smithers constructs a vibrant history of the societies, cultures, and peoples that made and remade the Native South in the centuries before the American Civil War. What emerges is a complex picture of how Native Southerners understood themselves and their world—a portrayal linking community and politics, warfare and kinship, migration, adaptation, and ecological stewardship—and how this worldview shaped and was shaped by their experience both before and after the arrival of Europeans. As nuanced in detail as it is sweeping in scope, the narrative Smithers constructs is a testament to the storytelling and the living history that have informed the identities of Native Southerners to our day.
Download or read book Negotiating Difference in French Louisiana Music written by Sara Le Menestrel and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara Le Menestrel explores the role of music in constructing, asserting, erasing, and negotiating differences based on the notions of race, ethnicity, class, and region. She discusses established notions and brings to light social stereotypes and hierarchies at work in the evolving French Louisiana music field. She also draws attention to the interactions between oppositions such as black and white, urban and rural, differentiation and creolization, and local and global. Le Menestrel emphasizes the importance of desegregating the understanding of French Louisiana music and situating it beyond ethnic or racial identifications, amplifying instead the importance of regional identity. Musical genealogy and categories currently in use rely on a racial construct that frames African and European lineage as an essential difference. Yet as the author samples music in the field and discovers ways music is actually practiced, she reveals how the insistence on origins continually interacts with an emphasis on cultural mixing and creative agency. This book finds French Louisiana musicians navigating between multiple identifications, musical styles, and legacies while market forces, outsiders’ interest, and geographical mobility also contribute to shape musicians’ career strategies and artistic choices. The book also demonstrates the decisive role of non-natives’ enthusiasm and mobility in the validation, evolution, and reconfiguration of French Louisiana music. Finally, the distinctiveness of South Louisiana from the rest of the country appears to be both nurtured and endured by locals, revealing how political domination and regionalism intertwine.
Download or read book Transatlantic Parallaxes written by Anne Raulin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.
Download or read book French North America in the Shadows of Conquest written by Ryan André Brasseaux and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Québécois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.
Download or read book The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography written by Luke Eric Lassiter and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-08-25 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collaboration between ethnographers and subjects has long been a product of the close, intimate relationships that define ethnographic research. But increasingly, collaboration is no longer viewed as merely a consequence of fieldwork; instead collaboration now preconditions and shapes research design as well as its dissemination. As a result, ethnographic subjects are shifting from being informants to being consultants. The emergence of collaborative ethnography highlights this relationship between consultant and ethnographer, moving it to center stage as a calculated part not only of fieldwork but also of the writing process itself. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for this shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. Luke Eric Lassiter charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism, humanistic anthropology, and critical ethnography. On this historical and theoretical base, Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship. A comprehensive and highly accessible handbook for ethnographers of all stripes, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography will become a fixture in the development of a critical practice of anthropology, invaluable to both undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike.
Download or read book Linguistic Diversity in the South written by Margaret Clelland Bender and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together work by linguists and linguistic anthropologists not only on southern varieties of English, but also on other languages spoken in the region. The contributors, who often draw from their own involvement in language maintenance or linguistic heritage movements, engage several of the fields’ most pressing issues as they relate to the southern speech communities: tension between linguistic scholarship and linguistic activism; discourse genres; language contact; language ideology; and the relationship between language shift, language maintenance, and cultural reproduction. Acknowledging the role of immigration and settlement in shaping southern linguistic and cultural diversity, the volume covers a range of Native American, African American, and Euro-American speech communities. One essay explores the implementation of “dialect awareness programs” and the ethics of the relationship between researchers and North Carolina’s Lumbee and Ocracoke communities. Another essay focuses on a single Appalachian community to explore the interplay between linguistic variables commonly associated with Appalachian speech and others commonly associated with African American speech. Other essay topics include Creek language preservation efforts by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the history of language contact and linguistic diversity in the Carolinas, and the changing relationship between English and Mvskoke in Oklahoma. Also covered are the stereotypes, varied realities, and language ideologies associated with Appalachian speech communities; the mobilization of dialect by Cajun English speakers for creating humor, expressing solidarity, and setting boundaries; and the creative use of academic and religious discursive models in the construction of Melungeon and Appalachian Scotch-Irish discourses and identities.
Download or read book Speaking for the Enslaved written by Antoinette T Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations. Viewed through the lens of four distinctive plantation sites—including the one on which that the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama lived—everyday acts of living, learning, and surviving profoundly challenge the way American heritage has been constructed and represented. A fascinating, critical view of the ways culture, history, social policy, and identity influence heritage sites and the business of heritage research management in public spaces.
Download or read book Bayou Harvest written by Helen A. Regis and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To inhabitants of the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, food is much more than nourishment. The acts of gathering, preparing, and sharing food are ways to raise children, bond with friends, and build community. In Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana, Helen A. Regis and Shana Walton examine how coastal residents deploy self-reliance and care for each other through harvesting and sharing food. Pulling from four years of fieldwork and study, Walton and Regis explore harvesting, hunting, and foraging by Native Americans, Cajuns, and other Bayou residents. This engagement with Indigenous thinkers and their neighbors yields a multifaceted view of subsistence in Louisiana. Readers will learn about coastal residents’ love for the land and water, their deep connections to place, and how they identify with their food and game heritage. The book also delves into their worries about the future, particularly storms, pollution, and land loss in the coastal region. Using a set of narratives that documents the everyday food practices of these communities, the authors conclude that subsistence is not so much a specific task like peeling shrimp or harvesting sassafras, but is fundamentally about what these activities mean to the people of the coast. Drawn together with immersive writing, this book explores a way of life that is vibrant, built on deep historical roots, and profoundly threatened by the Gulf’s shrinking coast.
Download or read book Participatory Development in Appalachia written by Susan Emley Keefe and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often thought of as impoverished, backward, and victimized, the people of the southern mountains have long been prime candidates for development projects conceptualized and controlled from outside the region. This book, breaking with old stereotypes and the strategies they spawned, proposes an alternative paradigm for development projects in Appalachian communities-one that is far more inclusive and democratic than previous models. Emerging from a critical analysis of the modern development process, the participatory development approach advocated in this book assumes that local culture has value, that local communities have assets, and that local people have the capacity to envision and provide leadership for their own social change. It thus promotes better decision making in Appalachian communities through public participation and civic engagement. Filling a void in current research by detailing useful, hands-on tools and methods employed in a variety of contexts and settings, the book combines relevant case studies of successful participatory projects with practical recommendations from seasoned professionals. Editor Susan E. Keefe has included the perspectives of anthropologists, sociologists, and others who have been engaged, sometimes for decades, in Appalachian communities. These contributors offer hopeful new strategies for dealing with Appalachia's most enduring problems-strategies that will also aid activists and researchers working in other distressed or underserved communities. Susan E. Keefe is professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University. She is the editor of Appalachian Mental Health and Appalachian Cultural Competency: A Guide for Medical, Mental Health, and Social Service Professionals.
