You have to find yourself a place: Religion and the French-Canadian songs of departure for the United States

Abstract

This project undertakes the study of a collection of French-Canadian folk songs arising from the experience of the emigration of French-Canadians to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The primary methodological tools employed in this study stem generally from the field of the history of religions, and specifically from the work of Charles H. Long. Religion here is understood as a mode of orientation that locates an individual or group meaningfully in the world in relation to ultimate reality. Religion can arise from situations of cultural contact and, therefore, is fundamentally important to issues of community and identity. As such, these songs articulate a mode of negotiating modernity that recognizes the homogenizing and silencing character of its discourse while simultaneously suggesting an understanding of human communities based on the recognition of the exchange of matter that served as the locus of the identity of Franco-Americans.