Dr. William Baber
Professor, Department of Anthropology
Dr. Baber earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1979 and held positions at Tuskegee University, Purdue University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro before coming to the University of Florida in 2004.His most recent research is on race, caste, and class in Sri Lanka, African American masculinity and HIV risk behavior. He also is working on a book-length manuscript, “The Social Ecology of Booker T. Washington,” based on research funded by the Department of the Interior from 1997 to 1999 and research conducted at the Booker T. Washington National Monument in Franklin County, Virginia.
Tamil and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka
Neosynthesis Research Centre (NSRC ) works to improve the lives of
small farmers in various parts of Sri Lanka. The NSRC Board met in
June of 2010, just outside of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in conjunction with
launching ties to international Landcare in Sri Lanka. I serve on the
NSRC Board of Trustees.
For the most part, Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country with much cross-cultural pluralism, but also a fundamental division of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese, a division that led to civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983. The war ended in 2009. The structural dynamic of race known as "North Atlantic" appears embedded in the Tamil versus Sinhalese conflict (through British colonialism) but the concept of "race" is not used to articulate any of it. In fact, the avoidance of any discussion whatsoever, publically, is noticeable and partially hidden by a general acceptance of cross-cultural caste or class distinctions instead of racial ones. The socio-political basis of difference among Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese is directly observable as arbitrary with respect to human biology and appearance, often taken for granted in North Atlantic forms of racism. A comparison of ethnic and political differences of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese is a forthcoming project that I propose to develop with insights drawn from Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Race, Caste, and Class, and the perceptions of Jaffna intellectuals.
Booker T. Washington and Unilineal Evolutionism
I began the work described below in 2005 and developed it each year with the teaching of Up From Slavery, a course in African American Studies. I will teach Up From Slavery for the final time, Fall 2010.
In an ethnographic overview and assessment of Booker T. Washington National Monument, completed for the National Park Service, I discovered an 1847 deed that changed the cultural interpretation of the Monument, and that prompted an alternative analysis of Booker T. Washington. Much of what is known about Booker T. Washington is framed within the works of Louis R. Harlan, who proposed the original interpretation of Booker T. Washington National Monument. In Harlan’s contribution, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery is an embellishment of fame for self-serving reasons, full of contradictions elaborated upon by many scholars to this day, rather than a legitimate contribution to the slave narrative. Therefore, Washington’s brief reminisces of his life with the Burroughs, who owned him, are distorted for political reasons. However, if slave narratives are defined in part by resistance to slavery, then Up From Slavery is a form of resistance which forces the researcher to analyze the text in light of Washington’s political motives. These motives were shaped by unilineal evolutionism of the era, and Washington’s program of resistance is framed against this. By the time Harlan began his work on Booker T. Washington in the 1960s, unilineal evolutionism had been defeated, as indicated by the reversal of Plessey versus Ferguson (1896) in 1954 (Brown versus Board of Education). Booker T. Washington died of hypertension in 1915. Thus, I find that the historiography of Washington is framed by the defeat of unilineal evolutionism, rather than by its heyday and the time in which Booker T. Washington lived. It also turns out that the 1847 deed, missed by Harlan and a legion of others, supports Washington’s reminisces of the Burroughs landscape noted in Up From Slavery and elsewhere, and independently of his politics. Harlan’s original interpretation of Booker T. Washington National Monument is flawed, but survived for this long because Up From Slavery was discredited as a slave narrative.
