Introduction

Appalachian dialects are different from Southern ones, Appalachian cuisine evolved with different cultural influences and to take advantage of different available foods, and folks in Appalachia have a different posture toward nineteenth-century American history than their Southern neighbors. For many people, Southerners and Appalachians are conflated into one identity. The markers of difference tend to be material, practical, and everyday, rather than literary or academic definitions of self or culture. Materiality is constitutive of religion, and we can learn as much by studying the material existences of persons in antiquity as we can learn by reading the texts they wrote. Judaism and Christianity were bordering identities, and the boundary between them was porous and easily traversed by those who wanted to traverse it, or who simply didn't notice or recognize a boundary. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.