‘We had lighter tongues’: Making and mediating Gullah/Geechee personhood in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Two historic institutions in the South Carolina Lowcountry, the Avery Institute/Avery Research Center and Penn School/Penn Center, played a central role in cultivating a complex Gullah community through the construction of construable and consumable Gullah identities. This ethnography explores how the ideological transitions undergone by these two institutions over the past 80 years have helped to shape conceptualizations of selfhood and belonging in local communities. These ideological transitions, initially mediated via formal schooling, and ‘translated’ in later years into cultural preservation and revitalization efforts, have engendered new and robust forms of Gullah selfhood and Gullah belonging in which Gullah ways of speaking, but not a bounded Gullah language—together with an idea of Gullah sincerity—have become key components in local community- and nation-building efforts.

► Two post-Civil War schools in South Carolina transformed into prominent cultural centers in the mid-20th century.
► As schools, the institutions did not explicitly advocate Gullah language and culture.
► As cultural centers, the schools mediated Gullah models of personhood by promoting Gullah language and cultural practices.
► The institutions’ ideological and functional shifts are reflected in fluid and heterogeneous Gullah communities.