Been Coming through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky

Preface

Preface This story has several beginnings. The most recent occurred in the summer of 2001. I had just completed my thirtieth year of teaching anthropology at Oberlin College, where much of what I taught was shaped by my research experiences, first in East Africa, and then from the 1980s forward, the United States, particularly in regard to immigrants and immigration. I had taken something of a break from writing and research following the publication at the end of the 1990s of a book that was several years in the making. Following my completion of an earlier book and related articles on East Africa in the mid-1980s, I asked myself, “What next?” and in 2001 asked the same question. Among the social sciences and humanities, anthropology is a peculiar kind of discipline, both vocation and avocation, as the great savant Claude Levi-Strauss has told us. Its style of research, participant-observation, over a long term within a community is deeply personal. Eschewing questionnaires and other mediating devices of the social sciences, cultural anthropologists prefer instead to make themselves the primary data-gathering instrument and in so doing are apt to learn as much about themselves as about the people with whom they live and build relationships. The best anthropology gains its substance from these two very different but related levels of understanding. As a veteran producer and reader of anthropology, I am much more interested in the story the anthropologist has to tell about other people than about himself. The excesses of narcissism in the United States, brilliantly identified by Christopher Lasch in the 1970s, regrettably remain very much with us, and anthropology particularly, among the human sciences, has indulged itself in a sometimes unseemly exhibitionism. Still, the anthropologist remains a presence in his text, especially given the personal nature of the research, and some reasonable acknowledgment is desirable, which this preface intends. The aim of this book, however , is to illuminate the lives of others, not to trade on reflexivity, personal discovery , or other self-absorbed conceits of the postmodern world. xii preface My research in East Africa centered on a rural community of small farmers and herders whose practices and beliefs challenged my abilities to understand and to live in an utterly unfamiliar place, which after all is what anthropologists do. After many months, my friendships across a vast cultural divide enabled me to comprehend the dramatic changes and human issues facing the community. Yet documenting and interpreting that way of life as objectively as possible left little room or relevance for including anything personal beyond my detached narrator’s voice. Even my identification with generous and welcoming informants and neighbors was the kind of fiction deeply embedded in my profession, for I would ultimately take my leave from these relationships in order to return to the familiar cultural patterns of home. In a very different vein, following my last field trip to Kenya, I began research and writing on the early twentieth century immigration to the United States and the ensuing dilemmas of belongingness and alienation faced by the newcomers and especially their children. I was as spare in my use of the first person as I had been in my earlier ethnographic research in a Kenyan community. Yet my identification with the subject matter of immigration was nearly complete . My Russian-born parents had settled in Indianapolis, a relentlessly “all American city,” predominantly white and Protestant, with relatively few immigrants. Their seven children felt the recurrent sting of second-generation marginality and the continuing pressure to negotiate a life in two worlds. We succumbed to the nearly irresistible pressures to assimilate as much as possible into a mainstream that at the same time lost few opportunities to tell us who we really were—Jews from the other, alien side of Europe with shallow roots in the new country. The elder Glazier sons, entering World War II combat in Europe, encountered in those particularly ironic circumstances, menacing reminders from other American servicemen that Jews were nothing but “Clorox niggers.” Nonetheless, in fits and starts, we were on our way to becoming “white.” Another person in my family was neither Jewish nor European. Her roots in American soil could not have been deeper. Neither white nor on her way to becoming so, she exercised a formative and enduring influence on the lives of the younger Glazier siblings. Idella Bass was born in 1891 in southwestern Kentucky in Hopkinsville , some twenty miles from the Tennessee border. Her father...