Why I Teach About Dolly Parton

September 3, 2026

Sarah D. Phillips
Professor of Anthropology

Cultural Anthropology is the study of humans across space and time, in all their diversity. Anthropologists study culture and society from the ground up. We explore all the unique things that make us human: language, dress, religion, food, music, origin stories, and many others. How are these cultural markers similar or different across cultures and contexts, and what makes them so meaningful? How do they shape individual and social identities, and how and why do cultural shifts occur?

On my desk there’s an introductory Cultural Anthropology textbook. Key topics include ethnic groups and ethnicity, multiculturalism, social race, stratification (class), kinship and family, gender, sexuality, religion, pilgrimage, secular rituals, language (language diversity, speech contrasts), adornment, popular culture, legends, and myths. Anthropologists also study health, migration, people’s relationships to landscapes, cultural and historical memories of place, and the many meanings of home. At some point in my self-training as a Dollyologist, a term I believe was first proposed in 2018 by scholar Leigh H. Edwards, I realized Dolly Parton could help us explore each of these topics in considerable depth.

Looking at Dolly, you learn about regional identities, class divisions, workers’ rights, gender performance, sociolinguistics (how language varies across groups), and narrative biography (the stories people tell about themselves). You learn about feminism, parasocial relationships (e.g., fandoms), body cultures, women in business, commercialism, and philanthropy. Parton’s larger-than-life, rags-to-rhinestones story is uniquely American, it’s true. But she confronts us with questions about culture and society that are also universal—think back to those fundamentals of culture: language, dress, religion, food, music, origin stories... That’s why Dolly Parton’s life, career, and legacy are the perfect lenses for teaching cultural anthropology.

Inspired by this idea, in early 2025, I created a Topics in Anthropology of Culture and Society course at Indiana University called the “Anthropology of Dolly Parton.” Taught at the 200-level, topics courses introduce students to fundamentals of cultural anthropology for “understanding and developing anthropological approaches to questions about social, economic, political, and historical relationships among groups and individuals in contexts across the globe.” That’s a lot to ask for one course, let alone one semester-long case study. But when the case study is Dolly Parton, the course practically teaches itself. In fact, Parton’s example does more than teach students about cultural anthropology. The complex strands of her life and persona underscore for students that the social sciences, humanities, and the arts are inextricably linked.

Sarah Phillips teaching the Anthropology of Dolly Parton, spring 2026.

The source base for the course includes articles and book chapters by scholars and journalists, screenings of documentary and feature films, music videos, analyses of song lyrics and performances, and more. The course is partially structured around the nine episodes of Dolly Parton’s America, the marvelous WNYC Studios podcast from Jad Abumrad (a one-time CAHI guest at IU) and Shima Oliaee that explores Parton’s biography and popularity. Through interviews with Parton, country music scholars, and Dolly’s fans and fellow musicians, the podcast tackles topics as far-ranging as Parton’s status as a queer icon, Dolly’s unique brand of feminism, “Dollitics” (Dolly’s famous aversion to discussing politics in the media). her international popularity, and ways to understand Dollywood, Parton’s eponymous theme park.

In all of this, Dolly Parton is the hook that helps students ask questions about society, politics, and economics, and about themselves and their own communities. We explore stereotypes of Appalachia and how these shaped Parton’s life and career. How did she simultaneously lean into and subvert stereotypes of hillbillies (think Hee-Haw), and what other stars made similar (or different) choices? The film 9 to 5 and learning about the real-life “9 to 5” office workers’ movement that inspired it, is an opportunity to discuss labor issues, women’s rights, and labor movement music across space and time. Race and country music is another fruitful topic, as students explore the genre’s complex racial histories and ponder Parton’s unexpectedly deep connection with the Black community. Looking at Parton’s fandom, and the extremes some fans go to, we ponder her status as secular saint. Who belongs in the Church of Saint Dolly, Queen of Appalachia? The answer, we learn, is everybody.

Guided by Leigh H. Edwards and her book Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music, the class takes a deep dive into Parton’s audacious, career-long performance of gender. Parton’s LGBTQ+ allyship, her use of camp (artifice and playfulness in aesthetic style), and her evolving fashion sense all facilitate conversations about gender, authenticity, fandom, commercialism, and sincerity/artifice in show business. We don’t shy away from critiquing Dolly’s quest to stay forever young through plastic surgery, but we do ask what pressures made her drive to constantly nip, tuck, and suck, a viable choice. Parton’s business acumen and philanthropy also get considerable airtime in a unit on Dolly Parton, Our Lady of the Checkbook that is particularly popular with business school students in the class.

Of course, we focus on Parton’s music, and her role as poet, storyteller, songwriter, and bard. As Parton often noted, her greatest passion—the craft she cherished most—was songwriting. The author of over 3,000 songs, 25 of them number-one hits on Billboard Hot Country Songs (the most of any female artist in history), Parton was a writer at heart, as Tressie McMillan Cottom recently explained. Students analyze many of her lyrics, and Parton’s wonderful book with Robert K. Oermann, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics is immensely helpful here. Parton famously shied away from politics—she didn’t want to alienate anyone, she said, but she put her politics into her songs. Parton insisted that her music speaks for itself. Listen to the stories she tells and the voices of the people she channeled in her music, and you’ll see clearly Parton’s priorities: love, care, acceptance, empathy, and helping others in need.

Throughout the class, with the help of guest speakers we track Dolly’s own musical origin story as a balladeer from the Great Smoky Mountains. Guest speakers have included, among others, country music history expert Dr. Brandon Barker (he’s IU Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology) and IU alumna Dr. Micah Ling, an expert in music and material culture, especially dress (she’s Associate Director of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program). We explore Dolly’s direct and indirect influences on other performing artists, and how she blazed a trail for other women in country music. A special focus on the history of the song “Mule Skinner Blues” reveals how Parton revolutionized it as a female artist (a “lady mule skinner”). Writing assignments and class activities guide students to apply learnings and concepts to broader contexts as they learn from one another.

Collaborative final projects provide space for creative explorations of Parton’s influence and relevance. Projects are self-directed and tailored to students’ shared personal passions and curricular and career interests. One group recorded a terrific podcast exploring Parton’s early, unique brand of feminism. Two groups studied Parton’s musical oeuvre and performed or recorded their own unique arrangements of several songs, adding in instruments like the cello, harmonica, and Ukrainian bandura. Other projects have tracked Dolly’s decades-long influence as a fashion icon, and her subversion of dumb blonde, hillbilly, and sex pot stereotypes.

Students share their work at a public forum called “Dollyfest” where attendees vote on their favorite project. The winning team in May 2026 created a set of Dolly Parton tarot cards. They imagined Dolly as The High Priestess (intuition and inner knowledge led to home-based hit songs like “Coat of Many Colors” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home”), Strength (Parton’s rootedness in prayer and meditation), The Fool (her winking “dumb blonde” persona), The Tower (songs like “Jolene” signify the upheaval, emotional disruption, and vulnerability of The Tower), The Empress (Dolly’s bold forays beyond music into film and business symbolize growth, creativity and attraction), and all the other major arcana.

A graduate Associate Instructor (AI) lends invaluable expertise to the course. We all benefited in spring 2026 from AI Rachel Seymour’s strong background in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and her status as a Swifty (a Taylor Swift superfan) made Rachel the perfect fit for this course. At the request of a high school teacher in rural Pennsylvania, Rachel is working with IU’s Open Education Resource Librarian Haley Norris to create open access modules on the “Anthropology of Dolly Parton” for use in secondary schools and university classrooms.

Four undergraduate teaching assistants (UTINs) are integral members of the teaching team. Coming from different majors and life experiences, the undergraduate peer tutors enrich the course by designing and leading assignments and in-class activities for students to discuss, debate, and apply concepts through collaborative writing and other creative activities. UTIN Danin Richardson is an IU Cox Research Scholar focused on US popular culture; he led the UTINs’ effort to present their original research on Parton’s “soft political activism” at a student conference in spring 2026. Danin continues to curate the course’s very popular social media accounts on Instagram and Tiktok. The UTINs, now seasoned Dollyologists, are all heading to graduate programs in different fields: ethnomusicology, anthropology, neuroscience, and medicine.

In the wake of her death on August 25, 2026, many remembrances of Dolly Parton emphasized her legacy as a great unifier. She was the one thing most Americans could agree on, perhaps America’s last bipartisan icon. Parton’s generosity, her insistence on being thoroughly herself, her sharp wit, and her ethos of unconditional love and radical empathy—these are the qualities that make her universally beloved. At memorials and tributes across the world, people with radically different backgrounds and political views stand shoulder-to-shoulder to honor Dolly and her insistence that everyone belongs. Thanks to Dolly’s unanimous appeal, students from any major and background can identify with her on some level. The late anthropologist Ruth Benedict, one of the founding mothers of American anthropology, said, “The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.” That was a big part of Dolly Parton’s purpose, too.

So far, we have taught the “Anthropology of Dolly Parton” at IU twice, and we’ve graduated around 120 Dollyologists. These creative young people are moving on to careers in music, law, business, sports management, journalism, fine arts, social work, anthropology, medicine, and beyond. One Dollyologist even plays in the NFL. Wherever they go, these students will take Dolly with them, and with their Dolly-infused knowledge of what makes us human, they will be all the better for it.

Sarah D. Phillips is professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she teaches courses on medical anthropology, the anthropology of Ukraine, the social science of care, and the anthropology of Dolly Parton. She can be reached at sadphill@iu.edu.

Where is Po’pay?

August, 2026

Alex Lichtenstein
Professor of History and American Studies
Director, College Arts + Humanities Institute

Over the summer months, I spent five days in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In many ways, the self-designated “city different” is a charming destination. Bristling with art galleries and inventive restaurants, clustered around a beautiful 17^th-century central plaza, and home to constant cultural events and festivals, the small city makes much of its vibrant tricultural heritage. Art, architecture, cuisine, street fairs, and tourist attractions like museums all self-consciously draw on—and promote—both the Indigenous and Hispanic legacies that have shaped the city and the surrounding region for over a millennium. The city’s residents appear proud of the tolerance and openness to diverse cultures that characterizes Santa Fe—or at least “Santa Fe”—as a marketed tourist destination. 

And yet after wandering its streets over the course of my enjoyable visit, I realized that Santa Fe is in fact one of the least “decolonized” places I have ever visited. Even while celebrating the cultural influences of the region’s original inhabitants—the Indigenous people grouped under the imposed moniker of “Pueblo” peoples, and the Spanish conquerors who subjugated them for nearly 250 years—with few exceptions, very little of Santa Fe’s memoryscape acknowledges the double colonialism that profoundly shaped its history. Nor does there seem to be any local awareness of the uncomfortable fact that this cultural history appears to be marketed to an overwhelmingly Anglo audience.

The Pueblo first settled in this corner of New Mexico around 900 A.D., driven from the surrounding highland mesas to the west by that era’s climate change—in a word, drought.  The descendants of these Indigenes in the upper Rio Grande valley still maintain a vibrant village-based sovereignty in surrounding Pueblos, which help preserve their language, religious traditions and customs (often through syncretism with Catholicism), arts, and ceremonial practices. Multiple shards of this ancient culture are then sold in the art galleries, craft markets, and souvenir shops that spill out from the Spanish “Palace of the Governors” that still dominates Santa Fe’s central plaza.

That building, first erected in 1610, is one of the preeminent architectural symbols of the subjugation of the Pueblo by the Spanish, whose settlers first arrived in Santa Fe in the first decade of the 17^th Century. The other is the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, erected between 1869 and 1886 two blocks west of the Plaza on the site of an 17^th century mission established by the Franciscans—avid partners of the Spanish crown in the original subjugation of the Pueblo. 

By 1869, of course, Santa Fe had been part of the U.S. Territory of New Mexico for over two decades, seized by “Anglos” in the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 (which, not incidentally, made slavery legal in New Mexico Territory again after an independent Mexico had abolished it a decade earlier). The “Hispanic” culture assiduously promoted by the city is yet another layer of Santa Fe culture, marketed, packaged, and sold to visitors (like me). That’s not to say that this is entirely inauthentic; the food, the language, the built environment, and of course the population—half of the city’s residents today are Latino/a—are constant reminders that this region, like much of the Southwest, was once part of Mexico and before that the Spanish Empire. Yet, just as the Spanish influence is celebrated with scant awareness of its role in dispossessing the Pueblo, there is precious little acknowledgment that Anglos subsequently became the new colonizers of this territory, ultimately incorporating Hispanidad into a local blend of New Mexican culture rooted in the U.S.A.

In this long saga of displacement, subjugation, and appropriation, first of the Pueblo then of the Spanish/Mexicans, one highly significant interregnum stands out from the rest of the region’s history: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove out the Spanish conquerors and their Franciscan collaborator and restored Indigenous sovereignty (and religious practice) over this part of New Mexico for a dozen years. The revolt, led by a charismatic Pueblo shaman named Po’pay, burned down churches, slayed twenty-one Franciscans, mounted a siege of Santa Fe, and seized the Palace of the Governors as its own short-lived seat of power as the Spaniards temporarily retreated to El Paso, 300 miles to the South.

Yet this successful uprising, probably the single most important event in the town’s history, is barely commemorated. Or, worse, when and where it is acknowledged, it is to honor the martyrdom of the Spanish invaders, who then managed to retake the region in 1692-93. A few examples will suffice. On the top of a hill directly above the Plaza lies the “Cross of the Martyrs” (there is another one north of town), commemorating the deaths of the 21 Franciscans and the 380 other Spaniards who died in the 1680 Revolt and the siege of Santa Fe. On the grounds of the St. Francis Basilica—one of the most lovely and peaceful spots in the city—stands a four-sided bronze monument “commemorating the first European settlers of New Mexico,” depicted as an armed Conquistador, a Franciscan friar, and a settler family, all surrounded by the non-indigenous livestock they introduced to the area. If the tourist shops a few blocks away feature what Indigenous people have “given” to the present, Santa Fe’s memorial culture celebrates more what the Spanish originally took, or tried to. On the same basilica grounds, directly in front of the cathedral, is a small headstone associating Santa Fe’s original Spanish settlers with a martyred Jesus on a cross. Enough said.

I did find one specific rendering of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt on the grounds of the Basilica. The entrance to the church consists of a pair of magnificent heavy bronze doors carved with 20 bas-reliefs depicting the long history of Catholicism in Santa Fe from the Franciscans’ first encounter with the Pueblo until the dedication of the doors themselves in 1986 (the centenary of the existing Cathedral’s completion), nearly three centuries later. It is quite a saga, encompassing conversion, revolt, reconquest, war(s), annexation, the establishment of a Territorial archdiocese, statehood (in 1912), and more.

The unbroken narrative of a benign spread of Catholicism in the Santa Fe diocese and the beneficent conversion of the Pueblo  is only temporarily interrupted on the sixth panel on the left-hand door, which depicts a column of soldiers, men, women, and children fleeing Santa Fe after the bloody siege of 1680, with the burning mission church in the background. Of course, panel seven shows the restoration of order by empire and church a mere thirteen years later. There is, however, nothing in panel five suggesting the 70 years of ill-treatment of the Pueblo by their European  civic and religious masters that might make such a revolt explicable.  Moreover, Po’pay, the leader of the Pueblo Revolt, is nowhere to be found—not here on the door, nor as far as I could tell, anywhere else in town. It would be as if there were no statue of slave rebel Denmark Vesey in Charlestown, South Carolina (admittedly only erected, to controversy, in 2014). Let’s face it, if a MAGA partisan made a visit to Santa Fe—a proudly Democratic stronghold, by the way-- they would see nothing to complain about in its monuments and public memories.

To be fair, there remain some important exceptions to this stunning lack of cultural awareness. As an inveterate museumgoer, I visited several of the city’s many museums, including the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in the center of town near the Plaza. The O’Keefe Museum, naturally enough, is dedicated to the art and life of the artist who more than any other entered the stunning landscape of northern New Mexico into the visual consciousness of the twentieth century. That I understood, but what I had not fully realized was that O’Keefe actually cultivated an active disinterest in the people who had lived on this land for 1000 years before she claimed it as her own (in her words) through her artistic practice.

Not only does the museum acknowledge this important paradox, but when I was there the last two galleries exhibited the work of a dozen contemporary Indigenous artists “in dialogue” with some of O’Keefe’s works. The exhibition, “Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country”, does far more than “add” Indigenous artworks to the museum space; instead, it boldly destabilizes and questions some of O’Keefe’s operating assumptions about the land and its inhabitants. Among many examples, the most striking to me was Jason Garcia’s “Tewa Tales of Suspense,” a pair of semi-satirical action comic book covers offering their own interpretation of the history of northern New Mexico and its landscape. One illustrates the development of the atomic bomb in nearby Los Alamos; the other presents a heroic depiction of the Pueblo Revolt, led by a female warrior.

That’s the closest I came to finding Po’pay in Santa Fe.

Note: This is the first of what I hope will become an ongoing series of reflections about the arts and humanities, broadly understood, posted to the CAHI website on a regular basis. Acting Director of CAHI Debbie Cohn and I invite College faculty and graduate students to submit contributions to the blog. Short essays can consist of “what I did on my summer vacation” reflections as I have modeled above; commentary on recent cultural phenomena (The Odyssey anyone?); responses to recent books, art exhibitions, pieces of music, photographs, films, performances, whatever, that many of us encounter regularly; or engagement with current controversies (the censoring of the Smithsonian; the “Vanderbilt Report” on how postmodern relativists have allegedly destroyed the humanities; the alleged falsification of abolitionist history, etc.). Send potential contributions to me and Debbie.