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Interview with the MetaArchive Project, Page 2
How do you define "Southern" and how do you define "culture" for the purposes of this project? Is geography the most important factor in this definition?
The definition of Southern culture and history used in this project is constructed with broad strokes, with an eye toward capturing not simply people, places, events and folkways commonly associated with the South but also cultures and histories elided in traditional notions of the South and the Southern way of life. The Content Committee responsible for this definition owes a debt of gratitude to the editors of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture on whose introduction we relied heavily.
A discussion of Southern culture and history must always begin with clarification of the terms. "Southern" is a term that, to most, brings to mind a particular region. However, upon closer inspection, the South and its boundaries are not so easily mapped. One could begin and end with the 11 former Confederate states, though that excludes the four other slave states that remained part of the Union. One could consider the "census South": the Confederacy with the addition of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Oklahoma and the District of Columbia. There is also the Gallup organization’s South that includes the Confederate 11 plus Oklahoma and Kentucky, and the National Endowment for the Humanities includes Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in its South Atlantic Humanities Center. We understand the South as not simply a monolithic region but instead composed of many diverse sub-regions, such as the Black Belt, the Appalachian Mountains, the Piedmont and the Gulf Coast — a multitude of distinct Souths that resist easy encapsulation. Materials that shed light on these regions or that help to constitute the cultures and histories of those regions are of great interest to this project.
The South is also an identity. Southerners who move outside of the region, however defined, retain much of their culture and infuse their new locales with vestiges of their former homes. Conversely, people born outside of the South who come to live within the region find that their work and lives are influenced by their adopted home and themselves become a part of the evolving South.
As the Encyclopedia’s editors and authors did, we will rely on a cultural definition of the South more inclusive than not, focusing largely on the former states of the Confederacy but without excluding the margins of the region where different cultures of the South are evident. After careful contemplation of the meaning of "culture," the editors of the Encyclopedia planned their work "to carry out [T.S.] Eliot’s belief that ‘culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life.’" This project will preserve materials documenting change over time in all aspects of the Southern "way of life" and encompassing the multitudinous and co-existing cultures and histories in the South — all of which are valuable contributions to our collective sense of what it means to be Southern and to belong to the South.
Interview Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
