American South Is Still Down There, but Dixie Seems to Be Shrinking : Sociology: Its residents are virtually a distinct ethnic group, some experts argue. But it’s as much a state of mind as a place.

Sociologist John Shelton Reed has spent a lifetime asking what seems to be a dumb question: Where is the South?

His most recent conclusion: It all depends.

For one thing, it appears that Dixie is shrinking. At least that’s what the phone books tell Reed, who toils in the field of folk geography, the still inelegant attempt to identify American regions and their occupants by such gimmicks as looking for the number of “Dixie” listings in phone books--be it the Dixie Doo (a beauty parlor), the Dixie Git ‘n Go (a convenience store) or the Dixie Diner (a honky-tonk).

By defining a region, a sociologist like Reed, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, can ask questions about the people in it, their values, prejudices and hopes. Reed and others argue, for instance, that Southerners are a distinct American ethnic group, like Italian-Americans or Mexican-Americans, because Southerners have a group identity based on their shared history and their cultural distinctiveness.

So, if your interest is Southerners, you have to know where to find them. Alabama, all agree, is prime habitat. So are Mississippi and Georgia. But what about Atlanta? And how about Florida? Is Texas the South? Arkansas? West Virginia? Kentucky? Louisiana?

“It’s the edges that interest me, the changes over time,” Reed said. “Because if you can define what is and what isn’t the South, you can learn something about where the South has been and where it might be going.”

For example, in the early 1970s, Reed combed phone books, counting the number of listings of “Dixie” and “Southern.” He did it again in the late 1980s.

“Southern is holding up just fine,” Reed said. “Though you do see a contraction.” For instance, based on the appearance of the word “Southern” in the phone books, the South seems to be moving east in Texas and north in Florida and south in Virginia. “But inside the core area,” Reed said, “the term Southern is doing quite well.”

The same is not true for the Dixie listings. “Dixie has just fallen to pieces,” Reed said. “There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie--in Alabama--Dixie is slipping. They’ve stopped using the word in commercial listings.”

Why? Migrants from other regions don’t like it. Maybe more important, Reed suggests, blacks don’t like the term either, because of its strong association with the Confederacy. Whites have gotten the message.

The South’s boundaries depend on the questions asked. In his essay “The South: Where is It?” (published in “The South for New Southerners”), Reed cites a dozen examples.

The South could, for example, be defined by its predominant vegetation. The kudzu vine, the ubiquitous invader that grows in warm humid climes, pretty well blankets the classic Deep South, but is absent from most of Florida and Texas. The region’s defining crop, cotton--once the source of its ascendancy and slavery--is still grown through much of the region. Cotton, however, doesn’t make much of a showing in hilly Tennessee, which is surely Southern.

If one associates the South with a particularly violent brand of racism, a researcher could map the locations of reported lynchings, which is just what the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching did. The Mississippi valley and Georgia had the densest concentration of lynchings from 1900 to 1930.

The South traditionally has been poorer than other parts of the country, and so the region also can be defined by indicators of poverty. Reed notes that two of three Southerners today are urban, and that even rural residents often work for industries. But still there linger pockets of poor blacks and whites.

One measure of poverty is the prevalence of dentists and indoor toilets. The scarcity of both is greatest in the core region of the South, but also in West Virginia. The same region also has the greatest illiteracy.

Not all marks of the South are negative. For one thing, classically Southern states have comparatively low rates of burglaries, except Florida. Southern states also take their college sports more seriously, at least based on the number of colleges and universities that publish their own sport magazines. The states that host two or more magazines devoted to college sports are Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and the Carolinas.

One also could define the South as the place where people who identify themselves as Southerners live.

“We could say,” Reed writes, “that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ‘possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch (if they drink at all) are likely to be Southerners. It isn’t necessary that all or even most Southerners do these things, or that other people do them; if Southerners just do them more often than other Americans, we can use them to locate the South.”

Old Gallup polls, for example, asked people whether they liked the Southern accent, liked Southern cooking or thought that Southern women were “better looking” than women in other regions. The states where people answered “yes” to all the above were Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia (there was no data for Mississippi). People were less likely to answer yes to all three questions if they lived in Texas, Florida and Kentucky. People in New England were likely to answer “no” to all three.

In another attempt to find the South, scholars have plotted the birthplaces of country music notables born between 1870 and 1960, and found the densest concentrations in Tennessee and Kentucky, with hundreds, compared to the handful in other states. Another researcher looked at states named in the lyrics of country music. The most named? Texas, Tennessee and Louisiana.

What does all this mean? Reed contends that across the United States, regional identities are still strong. Apparently, regionalism is not boiling away in the great melting pot. And while the South, as a concept, might not be as geographically large or with feelings as strong as they once were, Reed concludes that the South is still a place all its own, where people share lifestyles, manners, food, speech and the still defensive reaction at how they are represented in the media as rubes, racists or rednecks.

Moreover, Reed has detected that shared tastes in food and manners may be overriding the Civil War and white supremacy as the defining elements of the South. Some proof of change might be found in people’s perception of the label of “Southerner.” In 1964, blacks who were polled frequently took the word Southerner to mean a white Southerner. By 1976, blacks considered the label big enough to include both whites and blacks.

“I found that very heartening,” Reed said. Whether it really means anything, Reed said, “I ain’t so sure.”