ISBN:
9780190082710
Language:
English
Pages:
1 online resource (289 pages)
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
DDC:
305.896073075
Keywords:
African Americans
;
African Americans-Folklore
;
African Americans-Study and teaching
;
African Americans Study and teaching
;
African Americans Religious life
;
African Americans Folklore
;
Poor African Americans Social conditions 20th century
;
Rural African Americans Social conditions 20th century
;
Folk religion
;
Ethnology History 20th century
;
Sociology History 20th century
;
Electronic books
;
Southern States Religious life and customs
;
Southern States Race relations 20th century
;
History
Abstract:
To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, framing the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices that needed to be reformed. Their framing of the religious cultures of rural blacks planted the seeds to the later idea of the "culture of poverty." To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that catalyzed the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.
Abstract:
cover -- Half title -- To Know the Soul of a People -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Dedication -- Preface: The Legacy of Hampton: Folk, Religion, and Classifying the Cabin People -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Before the Black Underclass Concept -- 1. Moralizing the Folk: The Negro Problem, Racial Heredity, and Religion in the Progressive Era -- 2. Assimilating the Folk: White Southern Liberals, Revival Religion, and Regional Isolation -- 3. Medicalizing the Folk: Superstitions, Family, and Germs in the Venereal Disease Control Program -- 4. Saving the Folk: Cultural Lag and the Southern Rural Roots of the Religion of Poverty -- 5. Preserving the Folk: Folk Songs and the Irony of Romanticism -- Conclusion: The Aftermath of the Religion of the Southern Folk -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Abstract:
"The folk category has often been used to highlight the vibrant religious cultures of marginal communities in the U.S. To Know the Soul of a People, though sympathetic to this perspective, shows how the category in the study of religion contributed to shaping the perceptions of black and lower-class communities in American social and political thought. From 1924 to 1941, a cadre of social scientists used the category in their field studies of black rural populations in the poor South. Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Lewis Jones, Alison Davis, Gunnar Myrdal and other second-generation male social scientists deployed the category to jettison biological views of racial inferiority in order to amplify prejudice and "stagnant" economy that they felt contributed to the social status of black (and white) rural communities in the Jim Crow south. But the reformist agenda of the social scientists took a detour away from prejudice and socioeconomic conditions to concentrate on the cultural and behavioral deficits of America's folk population. Perusing field-notes, correspondences, proposals, monographs, this book argues that these liberal-minded social scientists had a hand in the making of a folk population on the basis of their perceived antiquated and underdeveloped religious behaviors. Jamil W. Drake demonstrates how the religion of rural black communities in the social sciences laid the seeds to the ideas of the culture of poverty after World War II"--
Note:
Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources
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