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Deep south: a social anthropological study of caste and class

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublication details: The University of South Carolina Press 2009 ColumbiaDescription: xl, 557 pISBN:
  • 9781570038150
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 305.5122 D2D3
Summary: First published in 1941, Deep South is the cooperative effort of a team of social anthropologists to document the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South through a study of a representative rural Mississippi community. Researchers Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi, as they investigated how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. This Southern Classics edition of their study offers contemporary students of history a provocative collection of primary material gathered by conscientious and well-trained participant-observers, who found then—as now—intertwined social and economic inequalities at the root of racial tensions. Expanding on earlier studies of community stratification by social class, researchers in the Deep South Project introduced the additional concept of caste, which parsed a community through rigid social ranks assigned at birth and unalterable through life—a concept readily identifiable in the racial divisions of the Jim Crow South. As African American researchers, Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with his assistant St. Clair Drake, were able to gain unrivaled access to the black community in rural Mississippi, unavailable to their white counterparts. Through their interviews and experiences, the authors vividly capture the nuances in caste-enforcing systems of tenant-landlord relations, local government, and law enforcement. But the chief achievement of Deep South is its rich analysis of how the southern economic system, and sharecropping in particular, functioned to maintain rigid caste divisions along racial lines. In the new introduction to this edition, Jennifer Jensen Wallach situates this germinal study within the field of social anthropology and against the backdrop of similar community studies of the era. She also details the subsequent careers of this distinguished team of researchers. https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2009/3815.html
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Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Book Book Ahmedabad General Stacks Non-fiction 305.5122 D2D3 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 198251
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First published in 1941, Deep South is the cooperative effort of a team of social anthropologists to document the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South through a study of a representative rural Mississippi community. Researchers Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi, as they investigated how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. This Southern Classics edition of their study offers contemporary students of history a provocative collection of primary material gathered by conscientious and well-trained participant-observers, who found then—as now—intertwined social and economic inequalities at the root of racial tensions.

Expanding on earlier studies of community stratification by social class, researchers in the Deep South Project introduced the additional concept of caste, which parsed a community through rigid social ranks assigned at birth and unalterable through life—a concept readily identifiable in the racial divisions of the Jim Crow South. As African American researchers, Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with his assistant St. Clair Drake, were able to gain unrivaled access to the black community in rural Mississippi, unavailable to their white counterparts. Through their interviews and experiences, the authors vividly capture the nuances in caste-enforcing systems of tenant-landlord relations, local government, and law enforcement. But the chief achievement of Deep South is its rich analysis of how the southern economic system, and sharecropping in particular, functioned to maintain rigid caste divisions along racial lines.

In the new introduction to this edition, Jennifer Jensen Wallach situates this germinal study within the field of social anthropology and against the backdrop of similar community studies of the era. She also details the subsequent careers of this distinguished team of researchers.


https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2009/3815.html

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