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Thesis ID: CBB248207346

To Know The Soul Of the People: The Field Study of the "Folk Negro" and The Making of Popular Religion in Modern America, 1924-1945 (2015)

Emory University
Publication date: 2015
Language: English

URI: http://search.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/1749278044/C37ABFC1C9AF4527PQ/4

Publication Date: 2015
Physical Details: 189

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African Americans Science and race Religion Social sciences Folklore 20th century, early United States

To Know the Soul of the People provides an intellectual history of the study of race and religion in the developing social sciences and folk studies of early twentieth-century North America. It chronicles how the study of African American religions coalesced around social scientists and federal specialists' engagement in the political discussion about the future of the "Folk Negro" — African Americans who were typically low-income workers, inmates, semi-skilled and unskilled laborers. At the heart of my project is the notion that religious expressions of the "Folk Negro" became important scientific data to understand the unique behavioral traits that were purportedly in contradiction to the progressive ideals of modern America. The contemporary field of African American Religions has often used the term "folk" to capture a set of vernacular expressions and indigenous practices that characterized the lived or popular religions of southern African American communities apart from liberal Protestantism. Rarely has there been any attention to the actual social scientists and federal specialists who helped frame how we characterize the "Folk Negro" and their seemingly unorthodox and ecstatic forms of religious expressions in the everyday context of prayer meetings, revivals, cotton fields, labor camps and domiciles. To Know the Soul of the People takes up this neglected task by critically investigating the field works of Howard Odum, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Hurston, Alan Lomax and their institutional-affiliations (e.g. UNC-Chapel Hill, Fisk University, Columbia University and the Library of Congress). My research shows that a conglomerate of scientific and professional experts in these academic, philanthropic and governmental institutions helped to shape the way in which the field discusses southern and lower-class religious cultures in twentieth-century America.

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