Dr. Mark Auslander (Department of Anthropology, Oxford College
& MARIAL Faculty, Emory University)
Something We Need to Get Back To: Mythologies
of Origin and Rituals of Solidarity in African American Working
Families
Wednesday, February 13, 2002, 3:00 p.m.
This paper explores the remarkable rise in interest
over the last three decades among African American families
in researching genealogy and holding formal, planned family
reunions.
In the paper’s first half, I seek to characterize and explicate
two linked, processes that appear to have taken place broadly
in many different U.S. families, largely independent of race:
(1) as North American women have become less materially dependent
on kinship bonds and the family has become less organized according
to the material interdependence of its members, there seems to
have been a deepening emphasis on marked rituals of family solidarity
that bring that mythic, originary time into the present;
(2) as women have moved more extensively into the full-time middle
class labor force, and sought to balance a new set of work and
domestic responsibilities, there has been a corresponding routinization,
formalization and commercialization of familial remembrance, a
domain that had earlier been primarily the taken-for-granted,
informal responsibility of women.
In the paper’s second half, I consider how
much of a difference race makes in organizing the particular forms
taken by these widespread memory processes. Have the particular
historical trajectories experienced by many African American families
– including the legacies of slavery and American apartheid,
close dependence on white families for domestic labor and related
employment, the relative historical infrequency of women’s
exclusion from the labor market, long-term matrifocal tendencies
in many African American families, and growing income disparities
between middle class and lower class kith and kin – contributed
to specific configurations of mythic and ritualized family memory?
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Mark Auslander, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
at Oxford College of Emory University, is a core faculty member
of the MARIAL Center.
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The MARIAL Center
Emory West, 4th Floor, Room 415E
Open to the public
Refreshments will be served
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DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER
The MARIAL Center is located on the 4th floor of
the main building of Emory's Briarcliff Campus, 1256 Briarcliff
Rd. There is ample parking close to the building. Alternatively,
you may take the Emory shuttle (Route A). The shuttle leaves every
20 minutes from the main campus and is a 5- to 10-minute ride.
Route A shuttle stops are located at the corner of Asbury Circle
and Pierce Drive, along Pierce Drive, and in front of the Administration
Building. For the shortest travel time, board the shuttle in front
of the B. Jones Center.
Please tell the receptionist at the front window
that you are here for the MARIAL Center lecture.
