Anthropology and Radical Humanism [electronic resource] : Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race / Jack Glazier.

East Lansing, Michigan : Michigan State University Press, [2020] (Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2015)

1 online resource.

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"Paul Radin, ethnographer of the Winnebago, joined Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student, Andrew Polk Watson, collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. Their texts represented the first systematic record of slavery as told by former slaves. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. Radin's manuscript on this research was never published. Utilizing the Fisk archives and the unpublished manuscript, the book revisits the Radin-Watson collection and allied research at Fisk. Radin regarded each narrative as the unimpeachable self-representation of a unique, thoughtful individual, precisely the perspective marking his earlier Winnebago work. As a radical humanist within Boasian anthropology, Radin was an outspoken critic of racial explanations of human affairs then pervading not only popular thinking but also historical and sociological scholarship. His research among African Americans and Native Americans thus placed him in the vanguard of the anti-racist scholarship marking American anthropology. The book sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of his discipline, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago"-- Provided by publisher.

Books / Online

English

January 15, 2020

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Project Muse.