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Books > History > American history
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To Know the Soul of a People - Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk (Paperback)
Loot Price: R731
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To Know the Soul of a People - Religion, Race, and the Making of Southern Folk (Paperback)
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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.
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