Moonshine, Mountaineers, and Modernity: Distilling Cultural History in the Southern Appalachian Mountains

Abstract

We would like to thank Dr. James Overholt for his help in contacting interview subjects involved in the moonshine trade. Without his enthusiastic support, and without the generous participation of the people of Cocke County, this project would never have been possible. Appalachia is a region richly mythologized in U.S. culture, and in many ways, the moonshiner represents the pinnacle of this imaginary Appalachia. Using Cocke County, Tennessee, as a case study, we explore the ways in which moonshine has historically emerged simultaneously both as a significant cultural referent to the "outside world," and as a vehicle for social integration and cultural reproduction within Appalachia. In particular, we examine the ways in which a strategy of economic livelihood becomes a strategy of cultural reproduction and how the criminalization of the former is inextricably linked to the marginalization of the latter. In the process, we suggest the ways in which moonshining has contributed to the creation of Appalachia as a counterpoint to mainstream U.S. and the modernity that it represents.

Trans-mountain Moonshine: Liquor, Identity, and Resistance in the Appalachian and Carpathian Mountains

“…While the internationalization of liquor, therefore, goes back hundreds of years it also remains an intensely local practice (Peine and Schafft 2012). Despite the importance of cross-cultural influence in distilling technology, liquor itself is deeply tied to place, to land, to climate and to culture (Stoll 2017;Venkatesh 2019;Daiches 1969).…”