Mined for French-language folktales since the 1930s by Joseph Carrière and his successors, the French-American communities of the mid-Mississippi Valley have suffered general neglect of much of the rest of their traditions. The river-spanning stretch of land anchored by Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and Prairie de Rocher, Illinois, is best known to outsiders for a New Year’s festival know as La Guiannée, which has attracted folklorists’ attention in dribbles since the 1940s. Anna Servaes’s Franco-American Identity, Community, and La Guiannée marks a substantial contribution to the documentation and study of this festival and its prominent role in projecting and sustaining the French-American self-identification of the families most involved in its performance and promotion.

Examining La Guiannée in its community contexts, Servaes builds broadly and thoughtfully upon a slim foundation of preceding scholarship, including work by Joseph Carrière, Kent Beaulne, and, most importantly, Cajun anthropologist Ray Brassieur, who, along with Barry Jean Ancelet, could be perceived as godfather to this study. Most of her building is on new ground: her own ethnographic observations and interviews, the drawing of parallels with festivals in French Louisiana and French Canada, and the application of ideas about identity and collective memory developed by historians and social scientists in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

The book’s aim is extraordinarily ambitious: to show “how [Guiannée communities] renew their heritage and their identity by expressing an historical mentality through celebration”—and thus to demonstrate “that a mentality can indeed endure despite the loss of its language” (13). The mentality to which Servaes refers is a French-American identity, especially as constructed in contrast to the surrounding Anglo-American culture: the laid-back Guiannée communities pride themselves on greater friendliness, honesty, interdependence, joie de vivre, and loyalty than they attribute to their neighbors.

Servaes centers her study on one community each from Illinois and Missouri. The bulk of her fieldwork and interviewing was conducted in the Prairie du Rocher area from 2006 to 2008; but some significant work was also done in Ste. Geneviève. She prefaces her introduction with brief bios of twenty-eight named festive “participants,” twenty-four from Illinois and the rest from Missouri. In addition to quoting these Guionneurs at length in the text that follows, she notes and draws upon the participants’ collections of newspaper articles, photos, posters, and other sources that are so often invaluable for tracing the past of under documented festivals. The roles of “folk archivists” in ethnographic study are becoming increasingly prominent in folklorists’ research, and this book makes good use of them. Servaes also inserts herself into her narrative in a modest and respectful way. Her introduction, six of the twelve chapters, and the conclusion all begin with first-person accounts that put the reader in the author’s place as a witness. These self-revealing sections also go far to explain the depth of Servaes’s self-identification with the festival and its participants: she lives in French-American Louisiana among communities that have been similarly influenced by English colonizers and the engulfing presence of Anglo-American culture.

Following an introduction that sketches her plan, Servaes executes it in three parts. The first, Historical Context, comprises three chapters that, respectively, examine the earliest records of colonial settlements to trace the development of “the French mentality” (17-31), an account of major events and identity-shaping forces from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and a chapter devoted specifically to the historical development of La Guiannée.

Part Two moves from the history books to the ethnographic stage to analyze the current festival as observed by the author and remembered by her interviewees; five chapters devote themselves in turn to the place of the La Guiannée in the seasonal cycle of celebrations and daily life, an overall functional analysis of the festival, the elements of masking and costuming, the festival’s processional nature, its foodways, and the rite-of-passage pattern enacted in the day’s play. In this section, Servaes draws fruitfully on observations and ideas presented in Henry Glassie’s work on Irish mumming and Barry Jean Ancelet’s Mardi Gras research, among others.

The third section, Cultural Continuity: Collective Memory and Community Identity, relies most heavily on the recorded words of her interviewees, who speak proudly and passionately about their French heritage and the importance of La Guiannée in that heritage, as well as in their family and neighborhood ties and history. These reflections are followed by two appendices containing the lyrics and translations of a number of variants of the Guiannée song.

A definitive study of a living festival is an impossibility, but this book takes a good shot at being the next-best thing. It is admirable in its commitment to examining La Guiannée both in deep historical context and close synchronic observation; it excels at times in foregrounding the voices of the festive participants.

It must be noted that the book bears marks of carelessness, most obviously in the bibliography. There are some outright errors: for example, citing Roger D. Abrahams as co-author of Cajun Country (the correct identification is Barry J. Ancelet). There are some strange omissions, as when Servaes cites Stephen Kalberg’s introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism without giving the book’s full title or naming Max Weber as its author (though Weber and his book receive full citation elsewhere). These are glitches, but more serious is the omission of the largest preceding Guiannée publication of which I am aware: Kent Beaulne and Natalie Villmer’s La Guillonée: A French New Year’s Custom and Song (2004); at 49 pages, this text cannot really challenge Servaes’s claim to being “the first book” to study La Guiannée (https://vimeo.com/144651416), but a study of this ambition owes its readers a full bibliography. To my mind, the most serious omission is volume 1, part 7, of Arnold van Gennep’s compendious Manuel de folklore franc?ais contemporain (1958), which presents a detailed survey of the regional variations of New Year’s festivals throughout France. Although van Gennep’s work is based on observations and memories of cognate festivals principally as they were enacted in the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (well after French colonials arrived in the mid-Mississippi Valley), the book gives such good evidence for local variation that his sources could be factored into Servaes’s discussion of regional antecedents for the New World celebrations.

The shortcomings must be recited because of the book’s status: it is—and is likely to remain for some time—the one indispensable book-length treatment of La Guiannée. Servaes has brought together a large range of carefully considered sources and listened attentively to the festival’s living participants. The result is easily the best single source for studying La Guiannée in terms of the communities that practice it.

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[Review length: 1099 words • Review posted on May 24, 2017]