front cover of Anthropology and Radical Humanism
Anthropology and Radical Humanism
Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race
Jack Glazier
Michigan State University Press, 2020
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 Utilizing the Fisk archives, the unpublished manuscript, and other archival and published sources, Anthropology and Radical Humanism revisits the Radin-Watson collection and allied research at Fisk.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.
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front cover of Crashing Thunder
Crashing Thunder
The Autobiography of an American Indian
Edited by Paul Radin
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Paul Radin, one of America's first and most reputable professional anthropologists, lived among the Winnebago Indians for years, and for years he tried without success to interview the notorious younger son of the Blow Snake family, the Crashing Thunder of this book. At last Crashing Thunder agreed to tell Radin his life story, one that Radin calls "a true rake's progress."
 
Speaking through Radin, Crashing Thunder told of his childhood, stories of Winnebago gods, his appetite for women and beer, and his extraordinary friends and relatives, including his brother-in-law, Thunder Cloud, then in his third incarnation. Crashing Thunder also told of his redemption through his new religion, peyote.
 
To enhance understanding of the autobiography and its place in anthropology and literature, a new foreword, appendix, and index have been prepared by eminent Native American scholar, Arnold Krupat.
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