Curating the Mountaineer: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Representation of Mountain Communities in Appalachia and the Georgian Caucasus

By drawing comparisons between similarly marginalized and romanticized mountain regions, this paper instantiates Appalachia’s inclusion in a greater global materially-driven culture of identity representation. This paper examines the representation of Appalachian art and craft culture within a global context through the exploration of similarly represented mountain communities in the Republic of Georgia. Appalachia and the mountain provinces of Georgia continue to be represented as their respective regions’ natal culture, an illustration of a common, primordial past left intact by mountain isolation. National museum systems and regional institutions have consistently represented Appalachian and Georgian cultures through a pervasive connection of folk art and craft culture to the understanding of the region’s culture and the production of underlying, unifying narratives. Institutional curating practices, manifested in museums, government programs, and craft associations, place emphasis on “folk” material culture in order to produce these narratives of regional identity attractive to tourist enterprises. This paper suggests historical and contemporary parallels between museum curation methods, government craft sponsorship and the persistence of folk art and artists as regional signifiers in order to introduce the possibilities of future cross-cultural dialogue between mountain communities in Appalachia and the Caucasus