In this article, I stage an analytic encounter between two Black female ethnographers, Leith Mullings and myself. Drawing on years of encounters with Dr. Mullings and her work, I explore the development of my research on the Black professional elite, particularly the experiences of cisgender married Black women. By examining my own trajectory from Black female doctoral student to professor, I think through how I first began working on the ethnographic research that became the foundation for my first book to show how we must think critically about the possibilities of choice for Black women who are thinking about work and family options. Through my interactions with Mullings when I was her student at the CUNY Graduate Center, I show how my understandings of the Black community were very different from and also shaped by many of the themes that her research engaged. I discuss how Mullings’s work with female‐headed households complicated my framework, where I interrogate how Black women’s “decisions” were mitigated by work, marriage, and motherhood. Building on Mullings’s groundbreaking work that identified the Sojourner Syndrome and Black women’s resilience and stress, my research highlights the intersectional impact of race and class when Black career women modify their relationship with work. Here, I think about how the space between our research as Black female ethnographers allows for us to fully embrace the complexity and nuance of divergent Black women’s experiences.
{"title":"On Our Own Terms: Building on Leith Mullings’s Transformative Black Feminist Ethnography","authors":"R. J. D. Barnes","doi":"10.1111/traa.12224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12224","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I stage an analytic encounter between two Black female ethnographers, Leith Mullings and myself. Drawing on years of encounters with Dr. Mullings and her work, I explore the development of my research on the Black professional elite, particularly the experiences of cisgender married Black women. By examining my own trajectory from Black female doctoral student to professor, I think through how I first began working on the ethnographic research that became the foundation for my first book to show how we must think critically about the possibilities of choice for Black women who are thinking about work and family options. Through my interactions with Mullings when I was her student at the CUNY Graduate Center, I show how my understandings of the Black community were very different from and also shaped by many of the themes that her research engaged. I discuss how Mullings’s work with female‐headed households complicated my framework, where I interrogate how Black women’s “decisions” were mitigated by work, marriage, and motherhood. Building on Mullings’s groundbreaking work that identified the Sojourner Syndrome and Black women’s resilience and stress, my research highlights the intersectional impact of race and class when Black career women modify their relationship with work. Here, I think about how the space between our research as Black female ethnographers allows for us to fully embrace the complexity and nuance of divergent Black women’s experiences.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"143 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46817711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article draws from Leith Mullings’s insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a “relationship of accumulation through dispossession” (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements are fitted into people’s previous understandings and experiences of sovereignty and security in Jamaica. I will argue that thinking through the frame of epochal shift requires that we reconfigure the forms of intimacy and notions of scale that have been normative within anthropology, and that we reevaluate our methods and the forms of evidence we mobilize. Ultimately, I suggest that the new organization of global political power must draw our attention both to the new dimensions of racism that are emerging and to the ways people are demanding new forms of accountability.
{"title":"An Anthropology of Epochal Shift; or, What Leith Mullings Teaches Us about Global Transformation","authors":"Deborah A. Thomas","doi":"10.1111/traa.12217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12217","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws from Leith Mullings’s insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a “relationship of accumulation through dispossession” (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements are fitted into people’s previous understandings and experiences of sovereignty and security in Jamaica. I will argue that thinking through the frame of epochal shift requires that we reconfigure the forms of intimacy and notions of scale that have been normative within anthropology, and that we reevaluate our methods and the forms of evidence we mobilize. Ultimately, I suggest that the new organization of global political power must draw our attention both to the new dimensions of racism that are emerging and to the ways people are demanding new forms of accountability.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"102 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49637194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Rebecca LouiseCarter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. v + 272 pp. (Cloth US$75.00; Paper US$25.00; E‐Book US$10.00–25.00)","authors":"Savannah Kosteniuk","doi":"10.1111/traa.12221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12221","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41611559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal. HannaGarth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. xv+ 214 pp. (Cloth US$85.00; Paper US$25.00)","authors":"A. Premat","doi":"10.1111/traa.12216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12216","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42657776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called “the marvelous power of amalgamation.” Boas’s study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented “The Real Race Problem,” in which he argued that the real problem was the “difference in type.” To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by “encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood.” American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism.
{"title":"The Racist Anti‐Racism of American Anthropology","authors":"L. Baker","doi":"10.1111/traa.12222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12222","url":null,"abstract":"In 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called “the marvelous power of amalgamation.” Boas’s study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented “The Real Race Problem,” in which he argued that the real problem was the “difference in type.” To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by “encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood.” American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"127 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47374363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leith Mullings and I were close colleagues and friends. Her work was insightful, substantial, progressive, and always humane. But when I remember Leith, I reflect on being privileged with sisterhood, beyond collegiality. She was a compa~ nera of a special kind whose relationships were nurtured for many years in the halls of a broad activist academy, in the society of activist scholars, as an alternative, if interacting, universe occupying the same space and time as meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). So I ask: How wonderful is that, to know a woman in the warmest way of shared ideas within the colder space of anthropology? I want to add these reminiscences of my sister to her lasting record. I met Leith as an expert on women’s health in Ghana, on medical anthropology there and in New York City, on racism and its pale multicultural shadow, and on the confluence of racism, sexism, and class with her late husband, Manning Marable. She was an advocate of public engagement as an extension of the long lineage of African diasporic activist scholarship she knew so well. Leith has left a body of literature to be explored, unpacked, and examined for future use. But the fact is, for Leith and me, such work was no more or less than the boat we sailed together as intellectually affective human beings. Leith and I were platonic lovers in the best and classic sense, sharing a deep affection for our common intellectual passions, aspirations for humanity, and an abiding respect for each other. We often each helped complete the other’s agenda. Our association was anthropology. While she and I had many other lives, our lives together were lived there. That is the story I will tell. How she entered the same space in which I and our compatriots were also situated to enjoy friendship and a common mission, is perhaps to arrive at the “conjuncture” or “concurrent configuration” of preceding events that Stuart Hall discussed at the University of the West Indies in 2004. He resolved Marx’s contradictory conclusion that history is determining, by adding that there are moments of “contingency” by which individuals and groups choose what they will do with the history they are given. That is what Leith, Manning, Johnnetta, Faye, A. Lynn, Ted, Sheila, Carlos, Lesley, Yolanda, Lee, Angela, Roger, Alaka, Steve, Irma, Pem, and so many others of the Decolonizing Generation (Allen and Jobson 2016) pondered with purpose. What, as anthropologists, can we do at our personal conjunctures to expose and remove the veil over the intersecting oppressions of our daily lives and those of our loved ones? Immediate among our concerns is anthropology’s complicit role (William Willis Jr.’s “skeletons in the anthropological closet” [1972] or Kathleen Gough’s “child of imperialism” [1968]) in the construction of that veil. Leith Mullings was great among these activist scholars, always finding “good trouble,” as the man said, and plenty of it. Her life was so much bigger tha
{"title":"Remembering Leith","authors":"M. Blakey","doi":"10.1111/traa.12215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12215","url":null,"abstract":"Leith Mullings and I were close colleagues and friends. Her work was insightful, substantial, progressive, and always humane. But when I remember Leith, I reflect on being privileged with sisterhood, beyond collegiality. She was a compa~ nera of a special kind whose relationships were nurtured for many years in the halls of a broad activist academy, in the society of activist scholars, as an alternative, if interacting, universe occupying the same space and time as meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). So I ask: How wonderful is that, to know a woman in the warmest way of shared ideas within the colder space of anthropology? I want to add these reminiscences of my sister to her lasting record. I met Leith as an expert on women’s health in Ghana, on medical anthropology there and in New York City, on racism and its pale multicultural shadow, and on the confluence of racism, sexism, and class with her late husband, Manning Marable. She was an advocate of public engagement as an extension of the long lineage of African diasporic activist scholarship she knew so well. Leith has left a body of literature to be explored, unpacked, and examined for future use. But the fact is, for Leith and me, such work was no more or less than the boat we sailed together as intellectually affective human beings. Leith and I were platonic lovers in the best and classic sense, sharing a deep affection for our common intellectual passions, aspirations for humanity, and an abiding respect for each other. We often each helped complete the other’s agenda. Our association was anthropology. While she and I had many other lives, our lives together were lived there. That is the story I will tell. How she entered the same space in which I and our compatriots were also situated to enjoy friendship and a common mission, is perhaps to arrive at the “conjuncture” or “concurrent configuration” of preceding events that Stuart Hall discussed at the University of the West Indies in 2004. He resolved Marx’s contradictory conclusion that history is determining, by adding that there are moments of “contingency” by which individuals and groups choose what they will do with the history they are given. That is what Leith, Manning, Johnnetta, Faye, A. Lynn, Ted, Sheila, Carlos, Lesley, Yolanda, Lee, Angela, Roger, Alaka, Steve, Irma, Pem, and so many others of the Decolonizing Generation (Allen and Jobson 2016) pondered with purpose. What, as anthropologists, can we do at our personal conjunctures to expose and remove the veil over the intersecting oppressions of our daily lives and those of our loved ones? Immediate among our concerns is anthropology’s complicit role (William Willis Jr.’s “skeletons in the anthropological closet” [1972] or Kathleen Gough’s “child of imperialism” [1968]) in the construction of that veil. Leith Mullings was great among these activist scholars, always finding “good trouble,” as the man said, and plenty of it. Her life was so much bigger tha","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"95 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43681668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Audrey Smedley, an African American pioneer in anthropology and African Studies and the leading scholar on the origin and worldview of race, passed away on October 14, 2020, in her home, surrounded by her loving family. She was one of the first eight Black women anthropologists to receive doctorates by the late 1960s. Dr. Smedley earned her BA and MA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her PhD fromVictoriaUniversity ofManchester (1967), now theUniversity ofManchester (UK). A product of the Detroit public school system, where she was taught by white teachers who begrudgingly gave her well-deserved top grades, Audrey Smedley attended the University of Michigan. In the 1950s, the campus gradually moved away from segregation, permitting Black students to live in dormitories, initially in separate rooms. As Smedley tells us, she became exhausted from the burden of racist experiences with both students and faculty. In her extraordinarily self-revealing essay published in Annual Review of Anthropology (Smedley 2001), she remarks that Black Americans learn to guard their behavior in relationships with the “white ‘others’” (xviii). During her junior-year semester abroad in Paris, she finally felt the meaning of “yearning to breathe free” (xviii). During her time in Paris, she met Africans and African-diasporic people from the Francophone world and found that “race” was of little importance visa-vis their respective cultures, which were much more significant for them and the “wholesome self-confidence” they embodied. For the young Audrey Smedley, this was critical for the next phase of her life. In hindsight, she remarked that “it takes an enormous effort to transcend the identities imposed on us and the stereotypes too many people deal us” (2001, xix). Returning to Ann Arbor, she changed her major to add history to her studies in letters and law. After earning an undergraduate degree, she entered the University of Michigan’s master’s program in anthropology. She continued to take courses in history, whose perspectives deeply influenced her later contributions to anthropology. Under the tutelage of Leslie White, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins, Smedley became a student of evolutionary change. The neo-evolutionary perspective saw culture as a phenomenon that should be “studied separately from the biological beings who carry specific cultures” (Smedley 2001, xx). Over time, she observed the contradictions between the science of culture, as White theorized it, and those approaches within the discipline that developed without questioning and being influenced by society’s prevailing racial ideology and its impact on how many Americans interpret human behavior. Smedley would come to conceptualize this phenomenon as a racial worldview (2001; Smedley and Smedley 2018). Following Michigan, Audrey Smedley went to Manchester to further her studies with one of the leaders of the structuralist-functionalist school, Max Gluckman. She found that social ant
{"title":"Audrey Smedley (1930–2020): A Leading Scholar in the Anthropology and History of Race","authors":"F. Harrison, A. L. Bolles","doi":"10.1111/TRAA.12200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/TRAA.12200","url":null,"abstract":"Audrey Smedley, an African American pioneer in anthropology and African Studies and the leading scholar on the origin and worldview of race, passed away on October 14, 2020, in her home, surrounded by her loving family. She was one of the first eight Black women anthropologists to receive doctorates by the late 1960s. Dr. Smedley earned her BA and MA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and her PhD fromVictoriaUniversity ofManchester (1967), now theUniversity ofManchester (UK). A product of the Detroit public school system, where she was taught by white teachers who begrudgingly gave her well-deserved top grades, Audrey Smedley attended the University of Michigan. In the 1950s, the campus gradually moved away from segregation, permitting Black students to live in dormitories, initially in separate rooms. As Smedley tells us, she became exhausted from the burden of racist experiences with both students and faculty. In her extraordinarily self-revealing essay published in Annual Review of Anthropology (Smedley 2001), she remarks that Black Americans learn to guard their behavior in relationships with the “white ‘others’” (xviii). During her junior-year semester abroad in Paris, she finally felt the meaning of “yearning to breathe free” (xviii). During her time in Paris, she met Africans and African-diasporic people from the Francophone world and found that “race” was of little importance visa-vis their respective cultures, which were much more significant for them and the “wholesome self-confidence” they embodied. For the young Audrey Smedley, this was critical for the next phase of her life. In hindsight, she remarked that “it takes an enormous effort to transcend the identities imposed on us and the stereotypes too many people deal us” (2001, xix). Returning to Ann Arbor, she changed her major to add history to her studies in letters and law. After earning an undergraduate degree, she entered the University of Michigan’s master’s program in anthropology. She continued to take courses in history, whose perspectives deeply influenced her later contributions to anthropology. Under the tutelage of Leslie White, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins, Smedley became a student of evolutionary change. The neo-evolutionary perspective saw culture as a phenomenon that should be “studied separately from the biological beings who carry specific cultures” (Smedley 2001, xx). Over time, she observed the contradictions between the science of culture, as White theorized it, and those approaches within the discipline that developed without questioning and being influenced by society’s prevailing racial ideology and its impact on how many Americans interpret human behavior. Smedley would come to conceptualize this phenomenon as a racial worldview (2001; Smedley and Smedley 2018). Following Michigan, Audrey Smedley went to Manchester to further her studies with one of the leaders of the structuralist-functionalist school, Max Gluckman. She found that social ant","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"6 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/TRAA.12200","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44451835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States. Kathryn A.Mariner. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xiii + 269 pp. (Cloth US$85.00; Paper US$29.95; E‐Book US$29.95)","authors":"Karen A. Scott","doi":"10.1111/TRAA.12205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/TRAA.12205","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"78-80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/TRAA.12205","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43136736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. Dána‐AinDavis. New York: New York University Press, 2019. v + 250 pp. (Cloth US$89.00; Paper US$30.00; E‐Book US$14.99)","authors":"Chelsey R. Carter","doi":"10.1111/TRAA.12206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/TRAA.12206","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"29 1","pages":"77-78"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/TRAA.12206","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41418859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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