Questions of purity and authenticity haunt the broader discipline of cultural studies. The subjects of cultural studies in general are inevitably products of the interaction between their inherited ethnic traditions and the modern culture. Popular culture, in contrast, consists of traditions that develop from the bottom up in a society; this work concerns issues of the representation of popular culture by the official culture, and the social tensions that are revealed through popular festive forms. Cajuns gathered in southwestern Louisiana in the mid-eighteenth century after the British...