Give Me That Old-Time Religion: Southern Pastimes in Black and White

• In Event: Roundtable Session 68
  In Roundtable Session: Place, Posterity, and Possibility: Writing the Past, Imagining the Future

Abstract

Studies on the culture of the South typically focus on people, traditions, practices, and relationships that construct the uniqueness
of place that is called "the South." Both hunting and football are practices that have played a key role in structuring and communicating ideas about race, class, and gender in the South but have been widely ignored in the literature of cultural curriculum studies. Both popular pastimes embody tradition and sport. In surveying the culture of the South it is critical that one consider
the impacts that such pastimes have had in shaping people as individuals and as social beings. We submit that both hunting and football have become cultural mechanisms through which values and heritage unique to the South is
preserved. These pastimes have operated to produce divisions in race, class, and gender in a culture that is largely oriented towards preserving a social structure rooted in inequality.

Authors

• Sean Fretwell, Georgia Southern University

• Ben Horner, Georgia Southern University