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Paul Radin, famed ethnographer of the Winnebago, joined Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. Their texts represent the first systematic record of slavery as told by former slaves. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. Radin's manuscript focusing on this research was never published. Utilizing the Fisk archives, the unpublished manuscript, and other archival and published sources,
Anthropology and Radical Humanism revisits the Radin-Watson collection and allied research at Fisk. Radin regarded each narrative as the unimpeachable self-representation of a unique, thoughtful individual, precisely the perspective marking his earlier Winnebago work. As a radical humanist within Boasian anthropology, Radin was an outspoken critic of racial explanations of human affairs that pervaded not only popular thinking but also historical and sociological scholarship. His research among African Americans and Native Americans thus places him in the vanguard of the anti-racist scholarship marking American anthropology.
Anthropology and Radical Humanism sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of his discipline, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago.
About the author
JACK GLAZIER is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Oberlin College. A former president of the Central States Anthropological Society, he is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute. He collaborated with Arthur L. Helweg on the inaugural volume,
Ethnicity in Michigan, of the series Discovering the Peoples of Michigan. His previous books include
Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History and Memory in Western Kentucky and
Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America.
Summary
That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. His research among African Americans and Native Americans thus places him in the vanguard of the anti-racist scholarship marking American anthropology.
