Audrey, Carl and Ron and HISTARCH [I know I am not the list this time!]:

        Audrey's commentson Appalachia were beautifully written, well grounded in
research and probably in the main correct. They were
fully appropriate for HISTARCH. Horning, as most of you know, was the
second recipient of the John L. Cotter Award given to her in part because
of her research on West Virginia.

        However (!), I am suspicious. Audrey, have you ever thought of
how you now attack scholars such as Folklore and earlier anthropological
researchers for generating a mythical Appalachia - "they found want they
set out to find" - that 50 years from now new researchers on the South
will say about your generation, "O, those scholars at the turn of the
century, they went to Appalachia and found what they set out to find."

Appalachia = a powerful, dynamic cultural (?) area, pluralistic, well
connected to national systems and patterns with its people only
identifying with their families or immediate community (= not ethnicity,
no special regionalism). Indeed, perhaps no Appalachia at all.

I would suggest that Appalachia (the whole or part of the Upland region
of the South) is:

        (1) a set-off natural region [I am not advocating environmental
                determinism, by the way]

        (2) it is very likely a visible sub-culture area of the the
                South (which, in turn, is set off, at least in the 19th
                and 20th centuries, from the rest of America),

        (3) there is a relationship here between environment and
                culture history - marginal or partially marginal
                agricultural zones relative to adjacent areas,

        (4) there are at least three "Appalachias" - a prehistoric
                agricultural one [in Paleo-Indian days there may,               indeed,have been no
Appalchia, a colonial (early national)          region and a very different
situation after the arrival
                of the Industrial Revolution, especically because it
                does arrive directly in the form of coal mining,,

        (5) much that has been said until recently about Appalachia
                is partially mythical - but let us not subtitute one
                myth for another - but the assumption that Appalachia
                is a visible culture subregion is better than assuming
                it is just a slightly different version of the national
                level or is too pluralistic to have any form,

        (6) we need to empirically find out what Appalachia really
                is in cultural-historical and evolutionary terms and
                this is where archaeological research such as Audrey
                is doing could be very informative.

        So, with Appalchia on my mind - and I do not claim any real
knowledge of the region, and with a memory of a recent speaker at
Penn who talked about cancer and other disease rates in Kentucky
and when her map crossed into counties considered to be in Appalchia
the rates shot up (poverty, culture history ?? remember povery is
a cultural not a natural phenomenon), I will shut up!

                                        RL Schuyler


At 09:48 AM 3/21/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>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
>
Robert L. Schuyler
University of Pennsylvania Museum
33rd & Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA l9l04-6324

Tel: (215) 898-6965
Fax: (215) 898-0657
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