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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glazier, Jack, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Radin, Paul, 1883-1959.

Radin, Paul.

Humanism--United States.

Humanism.

Winnebago Indians.

Slave narratives.

Anthropology--United States--History.

Anthropology.

History.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xv, 241 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [2020]

Summary:

"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 Utilizing the Fisk archives and the unpublished manuscript, the book revisits the Radin-Watson collection and allied research at Fisk.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.

Contents:

The unsettled career of a radical humanist

Our science and its wholesome influence: anthropology against racism

From object to subject: centering African American lives at Fisk University

The Radin-Watson Collection: narratives of slavery and transcendence

The Winnebago narrations: tradition and transformation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-234) and index.

ISBN:

9781611863505

1611863503

OCLC:

1120784490