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-Saponi of
North Carolina affirm both their tribal and wider ethnic identity.
Finally, 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
charismaticcommunity members can play when a community compromises
its heritage or even denies it.
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