Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners represents an important contribution because it places before us some critical assumptions and questions that contemporary scholars of culture, identity, community, and regional studies need to consider in the production of their scholarship for the twenty-first century. -- Journal of Southern Religion [ A] concise but stimulating volume. -- Journal of Southern History This book goes a long way toward showing the fascinating ways in which we all hold beliefs about language and behave according to them. -- Southern Cultures Valuable as powerful evidence that there is no such thing as the Souththat instead there are many Souths, each with its own demographics, history, cultural traditions, processes of change and adaptation, and (indeed) internal racial, class and cultural variations. -- Journal of Appalachian Studies