Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners : Representing Identity in Selected Souths

ISBN-13: 9780820324715 / Angielski

Janice Williams Rutherford

Opis

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. Another looks at how Cajun Mardi Gras customs in rural Louisiana have been sanitized for mass consumption. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term coonass, once widely considered derogatory. One essay focusing on Native Americans shows how the establishment of powwows has helped the Haliwa-S