Anmerkungen:
Also issued in print: 2022. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 14, 2021)
Beschreibung:
'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'.
"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"--