Declared Defective

Native Americans, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow

Robert Jarvenpa (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

258 Seiten

2018
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
9781496202000 (ISBN)

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The anthropological history of an outcaste community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. Declared Defective exposes the pseudoscientific zealotry and fear mongering of Progressive Era eugenics while exploring the contradictions of race and class in America.

Declared Defective is the anthropological history of an outcaste community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. Based on their investigations of an obscure rural enclave in upstate New York, the biologists were repulsed by the poverty and behavior of the people in Nam Hollow. They claimed that their alleged indolence, feeble-mindedness, licentiousness, alcoholism, and criminality were biologically inherited.

Declared Defective reveals that Nam Hollow was actually a community of marginalized, mixed-race Native Americans, the Van Guilders, adapting to scarce resources during an era of tumultuous political and economic change. Their Mohican ancestors had lost lands and been displaced from the frontiers of colonial expansion in western Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century. Estabrook and Davenport’s portrait of innate degeneracy was a grotesque mischaracterization based on class prejudice and ignorance of the history and hybridic subculture of the people of Guilder Hollow. By bringing historical experience, agency, and cultural process to the forefront of analysis, Declared Defective illuminates the real lives and struggles of the Mohican Van Guilders. It also exposes the pseudoscientific zealotry and fearmongering of Progressive Era eugenics while exploring the contradictions of race and class in America.

Robert Jarvenpa is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Albany and a research associate at the New York State Museum. He is the coauthor of Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood: A Comparative Ethnoarchaeology of Gender and Subsistence (Nebraska, 2006) and author of Northern Passage: Ethnography and Apprenticeship among the Subarctic Dene.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Series Editors’ Introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Menace in the Hollow
1. Native Americans and Eugenics
2. Border Wars and the Origins of the Van Guilders
3. A “New” Homeland and the Cradle of Guilder Hollow
4. From Pioneers to Outcastes
5. The Eugenicists Arrive
6. Deconstructing the Nam and the Hidden Native Americans
7. Demonizing the Marginalized Poor
Conclusion: The Myth Unravels
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.04.2018
Reihe/Serie	Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology
Zusatzinfo	9 photographs, 1 illustration, 3 maps, 2 tables, 8 charts, index
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9781496202000 / 9781496202000
Zustand	Neuware