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This provocative collection draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to shed light on the role that public ceremonies play in affirming or debunking cultural identities associated with the South. W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its lost cause tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecom-ings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves. The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically Solid South. Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich creole of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism. This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes. Celeste Ray is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, and author of Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South.

A timely, comprehensive reevaluation of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. One of the most venerable concepts in Southeastern archaeology is that of the Southern Cult. The idea has its roots in the intensely productive decade (archaeologically) of the 1930s and is fundamentally tied to yet another venerable concept—Mississippian culture. The last comprehensive study of the melding of these two concepts into the term Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) is more than two decades old, yet our understanding of the objects, themes, and artistic styles associated with the SECC have changed a great deal. New primary data have come to light that bear directly on the complex, requiring a thorough reanalysis of both concepts and dating. Recent publications have ignited many debates about the dating and the nature of the SECC. This work presents new data and new ideas on the temporal and social contexts, artistic styles, and symbolic themes included in the complex. It also demonstrates that engraved shell gorgets, along with other SECC materials, were produced before A.D. 1400.

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness. Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

Delamar Valley is a unique landscape located in southern Nevada that contains places associated with ceremony and Southern Paiute Creation. This ceremonial landscape is composed of volcanic places, a large Pleistocene Lake, and an underground hydrological system that allows for the movement of spiritual beings known as water babies between Delamar Valley and neighboring Pahranagat Valley. Paiute shamans traveled to Delamar Valley to interact with the portals along a volcanic ridge that allowed them to travel to a mirrored ceremonial landscape in another dimension of the universe. While in this mirrored landscape, shamans engaged with elements of Creation. This essay examines the ways in which Paiute shamans interacted with various components of the physical and spiritual landscapes.

A clash of cultures on the North American continent.   With a focus on indigenous cultural systems and agency theory, this volume analyzes Contact Period relations between North American Middle Atlantic Algonquian Indians and the Spanish Jesuits at Ajacan (1570–72) and English settlers at Roanoke Island (1584–90) and Jamestown Island (1607–12). It is an anthropological and ethnohistorical study of how European violations of Algonquian gift-exchange systems led to intercultural strife during the late 1500s and early 1600s, destroying Ajacan and Roanoke, and nearly destroying Jamestown.      

Explores the social treatment of death in South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions. Includes material on women and marginalized groups.

This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.

Kilbride comments on how travel in Europe simultaneously allowed planters to situate themselves in the English genteel tradition of the Grand Tour, engaged them in a secular pilgrimage to quasi-sacred sites of Western culture, and empowered them selectively to differentiate themselves from this tradition in ways that affirmed their own nation's superiority. Both a highly meaningful event and a conventionalized practice, travel had the potential to reshape individual and group identity, since European tourism, as a quintessentially ruled-governed and culturally sanctioned activity, encouraged planting women and men to reflect upon their social and individual identities.

Examined are the reasons why women continue to be excluded from two state-supported military colleges in the South. Observations reveal that the cadets' annual rituals resemble the process of childbirth, although the participants are all heterosexual men. Because these highly gendered initiation rituals fit Arnold Van Gennep's (1909) tripartite scheme of separation, liminality, & reaggregation, it can be argued that the cadets are not fighting to keep women out of their domain so much as they are fighting to keep in place a system of patrilineal descent. 2 Photographs, 19 References. M. Maguire