Guest Scholar Explores Relationship of Appalachian Religious, Musical History

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Gloria Goodwin Raheja

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Gloria Goodwin Raheja, professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, will present “For Christ Has a Union in Heaven, How Beautiful Union Must Be: Appalachian Coal Miners and Reconfiguration of Christianity in West Virginia in the Early 20th Century” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, in room 132 of the chemistry building.

No other region of the southern Appalachians was more deeply transformed by the coming of coal mining in the early decades of the 20th Century than southern West Virginia where violent labor struggles defined the region during 1910s and 1920s.

Raheja’s research explores the musical recasting of Christianity and its relationship to the religious and musical history of Appalachia and to the coming of industrial capitalism to the mountains, particularly in Logan County, West Virginia. Her observations focus on the injustices committed by the coal mining companies against coal miners and how miners fought against the companies.

“Logan County is an intriguing site because it was the scene of some of the most dramatic transformations in mountain music in the early 20th Century,” said Raheja. “It was a landscape in which issues of whiteness came to the fore in the 1920s, and it was the site of the most violent labor struggles at that time.”

Raheja earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. She has written numerous publications on a variety of topics and has received several academic awards for her research.

Raheja’s visit is sponsored by the religious studies program in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information on this event, contact the religious studies program at 479-575-4460 or rlst@uark.edu.