Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Materiality and Material Culture in Appalachia: Part 2
Session Abstract or Summary
Material culture, or the physical world of objects and things integral to the constitution of social life, has always been strongly connected to both Appalachian lifeways and representations of the region in unique and diverse manners. However, material culture often operates ‘behind the scenes’: unnoticed, yet strongly implicated in our lives and the way we discuss Appalachian economies, ecologies, identities, and places. Artifacts make tangible, personal, emotional connections between individuals, communities (both geographic and imagined), and regions. Material culture studies offer a unique way to expand our narratives of lives, people, and places, to challenge hegemonic discourse, such as stereotypes about Appalachian backwardness, and to reconsider the material realities of everyday life. Critical studies of materiality, or the qualities, meanings, actions, and identities enacted in the dialectical relationship between people and material culture, thus have the potential to weave emancipatory discourse in Appalachia. This multidisciplinary session broadly explores connections between material culture, Appalachian lives, representations, histories, and futures.
Presentation #1 Title
Physical artifacts used in stance-taking: Constructing an Appalachian identity
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper looks at data from interviews conducted in the Blue Ridge area of western North Carolina in order to highlight the ways in which speakers enact authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances to construct individual identity. In this data, we find a subtle interplay between the content of explicit statements, narrative content, and the use of grammatical features associated with Appalachian English (e.g. a -prefixing, nonstandard past tense), and the use of physical artifacts as sources of stance-taking. This article focuses on two speakers’ use of (present and not-present) physical artifacts (a placemat, a Civil War era sword, a lock of hair, and a piece of wood with a bullet hole in it) to enact stances that construct their individual versions of an Appalachian identity. What this analysis suggests is that it is not just linguistic choices that contribute to stance enactment, but physical objects as well.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Allison Burkette is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Mississippi. Her research interests include language variation and its connection to cultural factors, which is the subject of her books, Language and Material Culture (John Benjamins, 2015) and Language and Classification (Routledge, forthcoming).
Presentation #2 Title
Nine-Dollar Shawls and Forty-Dollar Bills: Materiality, Reading, and the Problem of Interpretation
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
All too often when considering folksongs, methods of literary interpretation render insignificant specific material referents in order to construct “deeper” levels of figurative or symbolic meaning. But it’s precisely these textual details – cross-ties and hammers, say, or greenback dollars – that we should insist on making meaning, for no other reason than they offer compelling sightlines for imagining not just the world as it is but the world as it might be. In this paper, I read the “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” a song first commercially recorded by North Carolina's Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1924, as a song that both registers the historical facts of industrialization as well as dreams of alternatives at work within that very rapidly transforming world.
With all this in mind, perhaps it is not surprising that a piece of clothing and a powerful greenback animate one of the most common verses of the song:
Oh, Tempy wants a nine-dollar shawl.
Yes, Tempy wants a nine-dollar shawl.
When I come o’er the hill with a forty-dollar bill,
It's, “Baby, where you been so long?
The material fact of a “nine-dollar shawl” – that is, an item that would have heretofore been made by the women of a mountaineer family, though in this verse clearly positioned as an outrageously expensive status commodity – as well its remedy – the forty-dollar bill – are, to say the least, historical ones. By attending “literally” to material objects of the verses, I use this song as an occasion to show that, as Joanna Brooks has argued, folksongs document “bodies of experience and memory” not readily legible in other, more formal historical records or accessible to traditional methods of social science research. What is more, I will go onto to insist that in this song we have an experiential- historical perspective of the “miners, millhands, and mountaineers” of the region—in other words, those laboring, rural and mountain people that, while fully embedded in and adjusting to processes of change and industrialization, are most often left out of its narratives as subjects and change-agents of precisely those histories In doing so, my paper engages debates that not only involve materiality, reading and interpretation, but also the stakes of what scholars have come to call the “making of Appalachia.”
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Originally from central WV, John Conley lives in Bowling Green, KY and teaches in the School of University Studies at Western Kentucky University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota.
Presentation #3 Title
Doors Unmarked: A Qualitative Study of Blue-Collar Invisibility in Rural Appalachia
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
Blue-collar labor is often typified and misunderstood as unskilled and non-professional in the American labor market. I argue that populations of manual laborers are thus made “invisible” in American popular culture, as well as within discourse on professionalism. Overlooking and labeling professional workers as “non-skilled” has implications not only for the economic status of working class individuals, but also for the workers’ positioning in the United States professional market and social map. Many laboring bodies occupy a precarious and overlooked position in a social system of professions, while simultaneously providing an indispensable backbone of support to all activity in our society. In “Doors Unmarked,” I search to better expatiate the sociological issues present in professional manual laborers within contemporary American society. My ethnography’s focus is on the janitorial labor performed by custodians at a large institution in rural Appalachia. Custodians manage the waste and detritus of their customers, as well as provide “above and beyond” support for their coworkers and customers alike through their social networks. In doing so, custodians resist larger forces of institutional invisibility while on the job.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Babz Jewell is a visual sociologist, roller derby enthusiast, and educator. She teaches and lives in Athens County, Ohio.
Presentation #4 Title
The Old Deery Inn & Museum: Cultural Symbolism and the Tourism Marketplace
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
This paper uses qualitative ethnographic research methods to present a case study that explores the multiplicity of meanings and representations that are attached to the Old Deery Inn & Museum in Blountville, Tennessee. Within the community, the Inn functions as a center for cultural memory, with the physical structure itself acting as an artifact that holds community identity and reflects important social connections that place residents among the “culturally enlightened” early landholders in the region. In contrast to this unofficial narrative, tourism entities market the Inn as essentially Appalachian, through a comprehensive media campaign that relies on an iconicized representation of Appalachian culture that has its origins in local color writing of nineteenth century. These contrasting narratives situate the Inn within a complex and intricately constructed identity of place that is shaped by lived experiences as well as perceived cultural markers. By unraveling the narratives that surround the Inn, this study illuminates a disconnect between the State of Tennessee’s official marketing campaign and the local community’s sense of identity, which both figure into the development of current interpretation and management efforts at the Inn.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
A native of East Tennessee, Rebecca Proffitt is a folklorist, self-taught artist, classically trained musician, and educator who has spent much of her professional life researching and teaching folk traditions from around the globe. More recently, her public folklore projects have explored the use of community identity through the unofficial historical narrative and the impact of cultural stereotyping on the regional tourism marketplace.
Physical artifacts used in stance-taking: Constructing an Appalachian identity
This paper looks at data from interviews conducted in the Blue Ridge area of western North Carolina in order to highlight the ways in which speakers enact authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances to construct individual identity. In this data, we find a subtle interplay between the content of explicit statements, narrative content, and the use of grammatical features associated with Appalachian English (e.g. a -prefixing, nonstandard past tense), and the use of physical artifacts as sources of stance-taking. This article focuses on two speakers’ use of (present and not-present) physical artifacts (a placemat, a Civil War era sword, a lock of hair, and a piece of wood with a bullet hole in it) to enact stances that construct their individual versions of an Appalachian identity. What this analysis suggests is that it is not just linguistic choices that contribute to stance enactment, but physical objects as well.
