Ron,
Why do you assume that "Appalachian folks carried many pagan European
ritual practices into the 20th century, where the same died out earlier
in North America."? Over the last thirty years, anthropologists,
folklife scholars, cultural geographers, economic and social historians,
and more recently archaeologists have been systematically deconstructing
the many myths regarding Appalachian isolation and cultural stagnation
which you suggest may leave discernable 'material markers' of
Southernness (like Denis, I thought the field had gotten past the search
for simplistic ethnic markers). Not to go into full lecture mode here,
but the region blithely termed 'Appalachia' (variously defined - eg. all
the eastern range of mountains from New England into Georgia, or as the
Southern Uplands only, or just the Appalachian plateau, or in common
stereotype only economically-deprived pockets of the rural upland South)
was settled by a panoply of individuals of various European and African
backgrounds, and later Asian, alongside the indigenous population. David
Hackett Fischer aside, no one truly believes in the notion of so-called
Appalachian culture as existing in a state of 'arrested development',
reflecting the 'purity' of the 'Anglo-Saxon' (or variously Celtic,
depending upon which nineteenth century geographer you prefer)
bloodlines of the early settlers. Even in non-urban, non-industrialised
portions of the upland South, the stereotype of the self-sufficient,
'Elizabethan' English speaking, banjo playing, ballad singing, moonshine
swilling, fueding mountaineer (created, I might add, mainly by
post-Civil War local color writers- read fiction!) simply do not stand
up to even the most superficial scrutiny.
As for 'Appalachian' folks possessing a distinctive, recognisable
hillbilly material culture, I am afraid that in my own experience
working in the Virginia Blue Ridge, there was no overwhelming dominance
of banjo strings in the material assemblages from 88 sites across three
mountain hollows. Instead, the archaeological, documentary, and oral
historical evidence all pointed to active, if varied, engagement with
local, regional, and national markets. This is not to say that there
wasn't, and isn't, a distinctive local identity, there clearly is and
was, but those identities were community based, and kinship based,as
well as being fluid and variable, rather than being ethnically based or
pre-determined by geographical isolation. Differences between the hollow
communities were clearly visible in the material culture, providing far
greater insight into the complexity of life of 19th and 20th century
settlement in 'Appalachia' rather than merely revealing a monolithic and
static Appalachian culture predicated upon isolation and a maintenance
of so-called European 'pagan' rituals. (Define 'pagan' please??)
Rather than turning to the folklorists and geographers of the 1930s and
1940s (many of whom found only what they were looking for, and some of
whom were provided with the stereotype by savvy mountaineers accustomed
to being studied by 'outsiders'), I would instead direct attention to
more recent studies. The classic deconstruction of the Appalachian myth
is Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on our Mind, (UNC Press 1978), followed by
a host of other studies, eg. Allen Batteau's The Invention of
Appalachia, (U. Arizona 1990), or Wilma Dunaway's excellent economic
history The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in
Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860 (UNC Press 1996). The pages of
Appalachian Journal are similarly brimming with evidence for the
complexity of the 'region's' past and present, its intellectual creation
in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the persistence of beliefs in
Appalchian distinctiveness/backwardness/folk purity/ etc etc in the
present, particularly as perpetuated through the media.
Attempting to employ nineteenth century notions about Appalachian
distinctiveness to a 21st century intellectual effort to explore the
linkages between material culture/foodways/etc and Southern identity is
simply not justifiable nor defensible. Appalachian identity is a
many-splendored thing. Similarly, Southern identity, as with any
identity, can be expressed in many ways, or suppressed in many ways, and
will never be 'boiled' or 'fried' down to the presence or absence of
internationally-recognised foodways.
Now back to my own marmite and grits.
Audrey Horning
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