Background
Ray, Rebecca Celeste was born on September 6, 1967 in Tampa, Florida, United States. Daughter of William Wood Ray and Anna Jean Dickey.
(Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfath...)
Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and to more than two hundred other locations across the country to attend Scottish Highland Games and Gatherings. There, kilt-wearing participants compete in athletics, Highland dancing, and bagpiping, while others join clan societies in celebration of a Scottish heritage. As Celeste Ray notes, however, the Scottish affiliation that Americans claim today is a Highland Gaelic identity that did not come to characterize that nation until long after the ancestors of many Scottish Americans had left Scotland. Ray explores how Highland Scottish themes and lore merge with southern regional myths and identities to produce a unique style of commemoration and a complex sense of identity for Scottish Americans in the South. Blending the objectivity of the anthropologist with respect for the people she studies, she asks how and why we use memories of our ancestral pasts to provide a sense of identity and community in the present. In so doing, she offers an original and insightful examination of what it means to be Scottish in America.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807849138/?tag=2022091-20
( These case studies explore how competing interests amon...)
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. A case study on identity tells why a segment of the Cajun population has appropriated the term "coonass," once widely considered derogatory. 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 charismatic community members can play when a community compromises its heritage or even denies it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820324728/?tag=2022091-20
Ray, Rebecca Celeste was born on September 6, 1967 in Tampa, Florida, United States. Daughter of William Wood Ray and Anna Jean Dickey.
Bachelor in Anthropology, University Florida, 1988. Master of Arts in Cultural Resource Management, University Edinburgh, Scotland, 1991. Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology, University North Carolina, 1996.
Associate professor, chair University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, since 1996.
(Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfath...)
( These case studies explore how competing interests amon...)
Member of Southern Anthropol. Society (president since 2004).