The earlier reviewer makes some good points about the book, but I find it problematic that the reviewer's reference to "blacks" in the mix of racial-class strata analyzed in the book, is monolithic rather than reflective of the class-differentiated segregated community that the ethnography depicts so brilliantly. The field research and ethnographic analysis made such an important contribution to social science in good part because it went against the grain of conventional studies that treated race as though it were situated outside of the complex matrix of domination in which it's always been embedded. In DEEP SOUTH blacks were also characterized in terms of their class-based heterogeneity, with poor, middle-class, and elite whites recognizing these intraracial distinctions in many situations in everyday life. The white vs. colored bipolarity of Jim Crow's social structure was complicated in more ways than was apparent from surface observations, the signs marking the racialization of public space, and the stereotype-reinforcing talk about racial difference. The use of the concept of caste served to underscore that race was not biology, that it was a social phenomenon constructed through social and historical forces very much mediated by power and by structurally-grounded interests and positioning within political economy.

The research team that did the study comprised five people: three men, two women; three of them African American. Two married couples, one black, the other white; with a younger black male researcher recruited later to do fieldwork among lower-class blacks. Moving across class lines, particularly that dividing the upper crust and middle class from folks in the lowest statram within the black caste was much more complicated than Allison and Elizabeth Davis had originally anticipated. So Allision Davis, the senior researcher, invited his former Hampton Institute student to join them. Only three of the team members, not four as stated in the earlier review, were authors of the 1941 book (Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner) although the others (Elizabeth Davis and St. Clair Drake) also provided important input.

Despite the ethnography's significance both conceptually and methodologically, it didn't get the attention that Dollard's and Powdermaker's books received. This issue has been addressed in recent work on the sociology and politics of canon formation. AFRICAN-AMERICAN PIONEER IN ANTHROPOLOGY (Ira Harrison and Faye Harrison, eds.) is one place where this issue is examined. There is an excellent chapter in the book, thanks to Dallas Browne, on W Allison Davis and the DEEP SOUTH project from the vantage of his life and career. Kudos to the University of South Carolina Press for deciding to publish a new edition and for keeping DEEP SOUTH in print after the UCLA Center for African American Studies issued a reprint several years earlier. New generations of students, scholars, and interested lay readers need to have the chance to read this important book and assess its continued relevance for today.

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Rating	4.7 (150 ratings)
Price	$19.25
Category	Anthropology

Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class