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Faye V. Harrison
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Introduction
W.E.B. Du Bois was an exceptional intellectual with distinguished
mastery over multiple disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. His
race and his political orientation as a vindicationist defender of the Black
race precluded his recognition by the Euro-American intelligentsia as the
major pioneer that he indeed was. Post-Civil Rights Movement American
academia, largely owing to the mobilizations and vigilance of Black
students and scholars, has, however, bestowed some degree of recognition
and honor upon his memory and legacy. Over the past two decades a
considerable literature has grown attesting to the profound political and
intellectual significance of Du Bois’ contributions. Robinson (1983) and
Bond (1988) are among those who emphasize his role as an historian. His
The Suppression of the the African Slave Trade to the United States of
America, 1638-1870 (1896) and Black Reconstruction (1935) clearly
demonstrate his skills as an historiographer with keen abilities in develop-
ing a theory of history that could stand ’as a critique of American
historiography with its racial biases, domineering regionalisms, and
distorting philosophical commitments’ (Robinson 1983:277). However,
although holding a PhD in history from Harvard, Du Bois’ scholarly
versatility is clearly reflected in a body of work that crosses over the
conventional boundaries of several social science and humanities disci-
plines. His oeuvre ranges from historiography, philosophy, and political
analysis to sociology, ethnography, and fiction. Despite his enormous
breadth and salience, Du Bois’ intellectual contributions and gifts have not
been sufficiently acknowledged nor engaged by American scholarship,
neither its mainstream nor critical variants.
Green and Driver (1976,1978) and Key (1978) have brought attention to
Du Bois’ sociological writings and to his rightful place as a ’founding father’
of American sociology. Anthropologist St Clair Drake (1987) pointed out
Critique of Anthropology © 1992 (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New
239
I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I
believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying,
through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in
no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite
Irene Diggs
One anthropologist whose intellectual ties to Du Bois can be easily
determined is Irene Diggs (see Bolles 1989). Diggs studied sociology and
anthropology at Atlanta University and received the university’s first
Allison Davis
Allison Davis was drawn away from a promising academic career in
English literature to social anthropology because the latter seemed to
promise analytic tools that could be applied to the fight against racism, the
fight to free the race from the ideological and structural chains of White
supremacy, particularly as they were manifested during the depression.
Trained at the London School of Economics under Bronislaw Malinowski,
and at Harvard and later Chicago under W. Lloyd Warner, Davis earned
his PhD in 1941 from the University of Chicago. He was hired not by an
anthropology department but by the School of Education at the University
of Chicago. Like the majority of early Black anthropologists, his major
contributions were absorbed into sibling social sciences and interdisciplin-
ary topical areas; in Davis’ case, educational psychology and childhood
socialization.
While Davis’ 1930s Deep South research project was clearly influenced
by Warner’s concern with social class as the principal integrative structure
of American societies, and his later work in personality development and
intelligence influenced by Freudian and behavioral psychologies, his work
as a whole also evidenced strong influences from Du Bois. In fact, in his
1983 book, Leadership, Love, and Aggression, published in the year of his
death, he himself noted Du Bois’ profound influence upon his generation
of Black scholars. In the book’s acknowledgments section, Du Bois was
mentioned ’for his profoundly tragic understanding of the Negro people
entombed in the American &dquo;glass cage&dquo;’ (1983:xi). Davis asserted that Du
Bois was one of the first to utilize the concept of social class in investigating
Black life and probably the first to describe accurately the psychological
effects of Blacks’ pariah caste status upon both Blacks and Whites
(1983:150, 151).
Davis was the senior author of Deep South: A Social Anthropological
Study of Caste and Class (1941), one of the earliest full-fledged, self-
identified anthropological community studies in the US. This classic
race, personality, and social status. Davis and Dollard considered socializ-
ation research critical for developing a theory of and a plan of action for
social change.
Children of Bondage demonstrated the centrality of social class in the
socialization processes affecting Black children. Davis and Dollard
pointed out that human habits are conditioned by the sanctions of class
position enforced by family, clique, and the larger class environment
(1940:259). They differentiated social class from the concept of economic
class, although the two certainly intersect. They defined social class as
those empirically identified groups wherein people associate intimately
(1940:261). They explained that people are of the same class when they
normally:
1. eat or drink together as a social ritual;
2. freely visit one another’s families;
Davis was well aware that in family and age-privilege hierarchies children
eventually grow up and assume the privileged status of adults. However,
the derogation of feminine status within the family remains constant
(1960:36). This lifelong inferiority represents a cultural attack on the
female ego. Sexual and color-caste statuses are the only lifelong forms of
rank (Ibid. :38).
Davis’ devotion to early childhood and adolescent socialization seems to
reflect his interest in the emotional and psychological consequences of
St Clair Drake
St Clair Drake’s debt to Du Bois’ activist intellectual legacy is made quite
explicit in his Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and
Anthropology, Volume I (1987) and in his interview with George Bond
(1988). In response to Bond’s query about the major intellectual influences
on him after his Hampton Institute experience, Drake pointed to
Quakerism, Marxism, and added ’I also read the The Crisis and was shaped
by Dr Du Bois’ (Bond 198:767). Later in the interview he amplified this
point when discussing his contact with several Black intellectuals at the
University of Chicago. He remarked that ’Dr Du Bois, through The Crisis,
was of course the most influential black intellectual among young activists’
(Bond 198:771).
Drake joined the ranks of American anthropology owing to the
encouragement and example of Allison Davis, who had taught him English
literature at Hampton Institute (see Drake 1974). Although heartened by
what the Boasians were doing, he felt that they did not go far enough in
combatting racism. He became an anthropologist in hopes of employing
anthropological perspectives as instruments of change (see Baber 1990;
Harrison 1990a, 1990b; and Jordan 1990). Drake underwent his initiation
into the profession while a research assistant with the Deep South project in
Natchez, Mississippi (see Drake 1974). His charge was to study ’the
bottom’, the Black lower class. Unlike his colleagues, he was dissatisfied
with restricting his activities to research. Consequently, he involved
himself in grassroots efforts to organize sharecroppers against the in-
vidious agrarian system that shaped or misshaped their lives. Later when
studying and doing research in Chicago, he participated in efforts to
organize unemployed workers. Inspired by Du Bois and other Pan-
Africanists, including his own father who had been an international
organizer for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Associ-
ation, Drake later taught, administered a sociology department, and
conducted policy- and development-related research in Ghana during the
early post-colonial period (see Brokensha 1985; Drake 1960; Drake and
Omari 1963). There he worked with Kwame Nkrumah and his Pan-
Africanist advisor George Padmore. Among the policy-related problems
Drake ended his inquiry with the sixteenth century - ’a historic watershed
in global relations between black and white people. [He considered] that
before that time neither White Racism nor racial slavery existed, although
color prejudice was present in places’ (1987:xxiii). Drake brought an
impressive body of data and an erudite command of social science and
humanistic methodologies to bear on the discourse concerned with the
historical development of racism.
Three months before Drake died in 1990, the Society for Applied
Anthropology bestowed upon him its Bronislaw Malinowski Award. Now
is the time to redress the virtual negation of Drake’s contribution to
anthropology and to the study of the Black World as well as to unveil Du
Bois’ legacy in the anthropology that African-Americans have helped to
produce.
Conclusion
Recently Lutz (1990) has pointed out that much of women’s scholarship
has been erased by canon-setting patterns (e.g. citations and literature
reviews in journals like Annual Review of Anthropology) within pro-
fessional anthropology. Earlier Harrison (1988) discussed a similar pattern
of peripheralization with respect to the contributions of African-American
and radical scholars. She argued that the core-periphery relations that
obtain among scholars have had a differential effect on careers as well as
influenced the very character of anthropological discourse and practice.
These relations of unequal authority and power are constituted within the
NOTES
I would like to acknowledge and thank a number of people for the helpful comments,
references, manuscripts, and books that they shared with me to help make this
article possible: Hubert Ross, Irene Diggs, George C. Bond, A. Lynn Bolles, Karen
Brodkin Sacks, Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, and Donald and Tola Epperson. Much of
the inspiration that led me to write this article came from what the late St Clair Drake
taught his students about anthropology and the Black experience.I am forever
indebted to his teachings and, indirectly, to those passed down from his mentor,
Allison Davis.
1. Boas’ relationship with Du Bois needs to be more closely examined in order to
assess the extent to which he may have been influenced by Du Bois and other
African-American intellectuals. Thanks to Walter Jackson’s research (1986), we
now know more about the ongoing dialogue that Melville Herskovits had with
African-American scholars, who challenged him to transcend the assimilationism
that informed and limited his early research on African Americans.
2. Du Bois probably encouraged Day to acquire skills and credentials from
Harvard’s physical anthropology program rather than Hooten’s theoretical and
ideological approach, which stressed the biological differences between ’radically
different races’ (Ross 1983:3).
3. It is noteworthy that a small number of what Moore (1988) has called ’third phase’
feminists (e.g. Caulfield 1979 and Sacks 1989), concerned with de-essentializing
gender and explicating how it is conditioned by class, race, and ethnicity, have
been more inclined to acknowledge and build upon the contributions of peoples
of color. Such an appreciation of Black and other ’Third World’ scholarship is
conspicuously absent, for instance, in Ulin’s (1991) portrayal of the critical
anthropological project of late capitalism. For further discussion on the Eurocen-
tric bias of much critical anthropological discourse, see Harrison (1991).
4. Anthropologists such as Wolf (1982), who have utilized and reinterpreted Marxian
categories and perspectives, have succeeded in ’mainstreaming’ some of the
issues originally put on the anthropological agenda by those working within a
variegated Marxist/Neo-Marxist tradition, an intellectual periphery. Due in great
measure to the influence of Marxists, anthropologists of varying theoretical
persuasions are now concerned with the impact of external determinants upon
cultures and social systems.
REFERENCES -
Anderson, Nels (1923)
The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Baber, Willie (1990)
’A Tribute to St Clair Drake: Activist and Scholar’, Transforming Anthropology
1(2):18-24.
Benedict, Ruth (1934)
Patterns of Culture. New York: Mentor [1959].
Bernal, Martin (1987)
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol I, The Fabrication
of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bolles, A. Lynn (1989)
’Ellen Irene Diggs’, in Ute Gacs et al. (eds) Women Anthropologists: Selected
Biographies, pp. 59-64. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.