French traditions in America do not live solely in Louisiana. Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée travels to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, to mark the Franco-American traditions still practiced in both these Midwestern towns. This Franco-American cultural identity has continued for over 250 years, surviving language loss, extreme sociopolitical pressures, and the American Midwest's demands for conformity. Ethnic identity presents itself in many forms, including festivals and traditional celebrations, which take on an even more profound and visible role when language loss occurs. On New Year's Eve, the guionneurs, revelers who participate in the celebration, disguise themselves in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century costume and travel throughout their town, singing and wishing New Year's greetings to other members of the community. This celebration, like such others as Cajun Mardi Gras in Louisiana, Mumming in Ireland and Newfoundland, as well as the Carnaval de Binche, belongs to a category of begging quest festivals that have endured since the Medieval Age. These festivals may have also adapted or evolved from pre-Christian pagan rituals. Anna Servaes produces a historical context for both the development of French American culture as well as La Guiannée in order to understand contemporary identity. She analyzes the celebration, which affirms ethnic community, drawing upon theories by influential anthropologist Victor Turner. In addition, Servaes discusses cultural continuity and its relationship to language, revealing contemporary expressions of Franco-American identity.

“History as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book.”—from the foreword by Carl J. Ekberg Settled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis. Located in an alluvial valley near towering limestone bluffs, which inspired the village’s name—French for “prairie of the rock”— Prairie du Rocher is the only one of the seven French colonial villages that still exists today as a small compact community. The village of Prairie du Rocher endured governance by France, Great Britain, Virginia, and the Illinois territory before Illinois became a state in 1818. Despite these changes, the villagers persisted in maintaining the community and its values. Margaret Kimball Brown looks at one of the oldest towns in the region through the lenses of history and anthropology, utilizing extensive research in archives and public records to give historians, anthropologists, and general readers a lively depiction of this small community and its people.

Dr. Ekberg's masterwork on the old French town south of St. Louis brings into sharp focus life in colonial America. Ekberg has rendered a rich portrait of community life on the most fascinating of American frontiers, the composite world of French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley. This is an important book and a good read to boot. That's how Yale University's John Mack Faragher praised this book.

Since the mid-1980s, whimsical, brightly colored wood carvings from the Mexican state of Oaxaca have found their way into gift shops and private homes across the United States and Europe, as Western consumers seek to connect with the authenticity and tradition represented by indigenous folk arts. Ironically, however, the Oaxacan wood carvings are not a traditional folk art. Invented in the mid-twentieth century by non-Indian Mexican artisans for the tourist market, their appeal flows as much from intercultural miscommunication as from their intrinsic artistic merit. In this beautifully illustrated book, Michael Chibnik offers the first in-depth look at the international trade in Oaxacan wood carvings, including their history, production, marketing, and cultural representations. Drawing on interviews he conducted in the carving communities and among wholesalers, retailers, and consumers, he follows the entire production and consumption cycle, from the harvesting of copal wood to the final purchase of the finished piece. Along the way, he describes how and why this "invented tradition" has been promoted as a "Zapotec Indian" craft and explores its similarities with other local crafts with longer histories. He also fully discusses the effects on local communities of participating in the global market, concluding that the trade in Oaxacan wood carvings is an almost paradigmatic case study of globalization.

This book, which includes 308 tune transcriptions, is organized around individual fiddlers who typically combine Appalachian-style fiddling with rags, pop standards, Midwest-style fiddling and sometimes a touch of Western swing to create a style often identifiable as Ozarks. Thirty Ozarks fiddlers and their lives are highlighted with biographical sketches, photographs, and tune histories. Another 50 great Ozarks fiddlers are presented in a similar manner but with less detail. the book and accompanying CD (with 37 tunes, many recorded in the field) emphasize the older fiddling traditions connected to the square dances and community events more than those connected to bluegrass music and modern contest fiddling. Some of the tunes in the collection are old standbys such as Bile Them Cabbage while others such as Finley Creek Blues are unique to the region.The book is the result of years of work by two respected researchers. Gordon McCann won the prestigious Missouri Arts Award in 2002 for his decades of work documenting, studying, and accompanying Ozarks fiddle music. Drew Beisswenger, a music librarian at Missouri State University with a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, has published three other works about fiddle music and is known for his strong transcription and analysis skills.

The complex relationship between heritage places and people, in the broadest sense, can be considered dialogic, a communicative act that has implications for both sides of the ‘conversation’. This is the starting point for Heritage and Tourism . However, the ‘dialogue’ between visitors and heritage sites is complex. ‘Visitors’ have, for many decades, become synonymous with ‘tourists’ and the tourism industry and so the dialogic relationship between heritage place and tourists has produced a powerful critique of this often contested relationship. Further, at the heart of the dialogic relationship between heritage places and people is the individual experience of heritage where generalities give way to particularities of geography, place and culture, where anxieties about the past and the future mark heritage places as sites of contestation, sites of silences, sites rendered political and ideological, sites powerfully intertwined with representation, sites of the imaginary and the imagined. Under the aegis of the term ‘dialogues’ the heritage/tourism interaction is reconsidered in ways that encourage reflection about the various communicative acts between heritage places and their visitors and the ways these are currently theorized, so as to either step beyond – where possible – the ontological distinctions between heritage places and tourists or to re-imagine the dialogue or both. Heritage and Tourism is thus an important contribution to understanding the complex relationship between heritage and tourism.

Three novels trace the interrelationships between the members of a French Canadian, working class family who have settled in Providence, Rhode Island