Signing sounds of the South: Representing culture and performing heritage in Appalachian Virginia.

摘要

This thesis disentangles the multiple semiotics at work in the political-economic and cultural terrain of Virginia's Blue Ridge and in the contemporary practice of regional forms of music. I analyze the former through a case study of heritage tourism, particularly in the form of The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail. The latter is read through my ethnographic encounters and live old time and bluegrass music performance in the Blue Ridge Plateau, New River Valley, and Southwest Virginia more generally. The result is a demonstration of the interrelations among political-economic issues, representations of regional "culture," investments in Appalachian Virginia as a uniquely American place, and a multifarious domain of live music performance.I argue that heritage tourism attempts to generate interest by offering to potential tourists a different orientation to space and place, that is, an alternative to what has come to be seen as the homogenized American landscape of mass consumption. This anxiety about homogenization that heritage tourism discourse draws on registers locally, and especially in Floyd County, as anxiety about commercial and residential over-development. The discourse of heritage tourism and the place-based culture concept it both requires and constructs tacks back and forth between the past and the present. For example, the older the heritage the better, and yet there is an insistence on pronouncing tradition "living." Similarly, in Floyd what people see in and want from that place straddles a cusp between a local past, often idealized, and a future on track with a narrative of progress, equated with development, that is lamentably inevitable to some and to others negotiable through efforts at aesthetic preservation.Interpreting examples of live regional music performance, this dissertation also describes semiotic relationships of a different order than those found both in the discourses of heritage tourism and in the talk of preserving the authenticity of a place like Floyd, where representations of "culture" foreground certain aesthetics and performances (musical and otherwise) as tokens of a generalizable type. That is to say, I analyze certain singularities, of personal histories, individual charisma and virtuosity, of immediate context-dependent humor, and perhaps most important, the indexical signs -- visual cues, rhythm, bodily contiguity and movement in dancing -- that make a given live performance a communal event, as well as representational dynamics and techniques of mediation, technological as well as discursive, which cannot be adequately understood in the performance realm as simply attempts at or negotiations of some kind of authenticity.