This presentation combines an insider, scholarly perspective (based on lived, ancestral experience of upper East Tennessee) to offer the concept of ‘Appalachian animism’ as an appropriate conceptual, theoretical and methodological model for articulating the ways in which a diverse range of Appalachian religionists understand, relate to, know, and hear their place. Reflecting on aspects of “The Place Speaks” exhibition, the talk draws out some of the relationships that locals (to East Tennessee) have with their
mountains, rivers, woodlands and plants. Bringing animism into conversation with scholarship in material religion, local folkways and cosmologies, environmental initiatives, revitalisation movements, mountain culture (including stories, tales, and yarns), and the living place itself, it asserts that the place not only speaks
through human cultures but has a voice all its own.

Originally from the mountains of Northeast Tennessee, Dr. Amy Whitehead is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Programme Coordinator for Museum Studies at Massey University in Aotearoa New Zealand. As an anthropologist of religion/scholar in the study of religions, her research and publications are primarily concerned with the material and performance cultures (or material religions) of Indigenous religions, Afro-Caribbean and Catholic traditions, New Religious Movements, and Earth Traditions. Geographical focuses include the UK, Spain, Cuba, and New Zealand. Amy has also developed new methodological and theoretical approaches to animism, within which sits at the heart of her latest research about the rich and varied social, ritual, and healing lives of plants in Appalachian and other religious cultures.