UPC: 9780190082697 | To Know the Soul of a People: Religion Race and the Making of Southern Folk (Paperback)

UPC lookup results for: 9780190082697 | To Know the Soul of a People: Religion Race and the Making of Southern Folk (Paperback)

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 revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses unsanitary privies and contaminated water scaly hands enlarged stomachs and malnourished bodies. However they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions chanted sermons ecstatic singing conjuration dreams and visions fortune-telling taboos and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations as well as the broader American public in the first half of the 20th century especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941 Charles Johnson Guy Johnson Allison Davis Lewis Jones and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as folk practices aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence fieldnotes and monographs Drake shows that social scientists use of folk reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental moral and cultural deficits of America s so-called folk population. Moreover these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the culture of poverty in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.