Two for Tuesday: An Archaeology of Black Pseudoarchaeology

When scholars think of an archaeology of pseudoarchaeology they’re as likely to think of Foucault as, say, archaeology of the contemporary world or historical archaeology. There’s a long tradition of heresy hunting in academia and the general approach to pseudoarchaeology has followed a model of tracing problematic ideas through the muck and determining their origins. In many narrative, a Foucauldian pseudoarchaeology typically passes through Fascist Europe and ends in places like Blavatsky. 

There is, of course, another kind of archaeology, the kind that focuses on material culture qua material culture rather than ideas. Recently archaeology has started to take a more serious interest in the “Great Migration” of Blacks from the American South and the Caribbean to northern cities. Jane Peterson and Michael M. Gregory’s article in the last issue of the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, “Preserving Chicago’s Great Migration Legacy through Archaeology and Public Engagement” is a solid example of this kind of scholarship as is Paul Mullins’ work on interwar Indianapolis (and elsewhere; some of which is captured here) and Krysta Ryzewski’s groundbreaking work on Detroit. 

There is also the work of generations of sociologists and anthropologists (especially those early on associated with the famed Chicago School of urban studies). This appreciation of how the urban fabric shaped the range of lived experience in northern US cities produced studies laced with evidence for the material conditions of newly arrived urban Blacks from the American south.

Erdmann Doane Beynon showed in his classic study of the earliest days of the Nation of Islam (then known, tellingly, as a “voodoo cult”) in the 1938 American Journal of Sociology, the urban context provides a key lens for understanding the rise in groups like the Nation of Islam (or, say, Moorish Science). He shows how many Black migrants to Detroit experienced alienation from their tight knit communities in the often rural south. In its place, emerged new forms of urban community anchored in their shared employment (often in the auto industry in Detroit), new religious experiences, and various manifestations of consumer culture (especially centered on status marking expressed through musical tastes, automobiles, and clothing). It is telling, for example, that the founder of the Nation of Islam, (variously named, but most frequently known as) Wallace Fard Muhammad initially spread his message and got to know the Detroit community by working as traveling salesman. Through his time spent going door-to-door and building commercial relationships in the community, he ingratiated himself particularly to women who felt the effects of social isolation in Great Migration Detroit in particularly acute ways. Just as a traveling salesmen introduced certain consumer goods to status conscious new urbanites by sharing their neighbors’ tastes and purchasing history, they also provided a connection between the often alienated individuals on a spiritual and religious level. These individuals would have then reinforced these connections and consumer choices as well as religious forms during their periodic returns to the south where they could demonstrate their newly found status and beliefs to the relatives and friend who resided in other cities and similar struggled to assert state and build a sense of community.

The connection between consumerism and community was not the only way that Beynon demonstrated the role the material culture played in activating the spread of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and Nation of Islam. Both groups’ focus on the body and diet connected food to the growing health problems associated with the cramped and unsanitary conditions of urban life. Fard Muhammad connected avoiding certain foods, particularly pork, alcohol, and tobacco, not only with traditional religious prohibitions in Islam and Judaism, but also in bodily health. The Nation of Islam likewise promoted cleanliness as a way to demonstrate attentiveness to the home (especially by women), but also healthy living. In many cases, the savings gained through eliminated the expenses of alcohol and smoking allowed Nation of Islam members to acquire other forms of status-defining goods including better clothing, housing, and cars. In a city as deeply embedded in automobile culture as Detroit (along with other cities in the industrialized, urban north), driving the latest car offered a distinctive form of display. More nuanced reading of many of these same phenomena appear in Stephen C. Finley’s, In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (2022) and, to be honest, I missed them in my initial reading of his study and I need to return to his book again.

This short post is to suggest, first, that we can learn a good bit about the materiality of Great Migration period from sociological and anthropological studies of the time without the need to do fieldwork. This is hardly a revelation and the next book on my list is another classic: Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (1944). It is notable the John Szwed authored the introduction to the 2001edition. 

What is more interesting (to me) is that consumer culture, new forms of material expression, and attention to the body during the Great Migration provided media through which religious ideas travelled. Again, this is not a novel observation by any means. In fact, right now, I’m also reading  Deidre Helen Crumbley’s, Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia. (2012) which offers vaguely similar arguments in her urban ethnography of a Great Migration period storefront church. 

My modest contribution to this conversation could be to link the material worlds of Great Migration Black religion to the emergence of the distinctive strains of Black pseudoarchaeology. It would be simplistic to reduce all forms of pseudoarchaeological thought to the displacement and alienation associated with migration (as tempting as it may be). In fact, the causes of these migrations — systematic, institutional racism, for example, in the Jim Crow south and economic opportunities in the industrialized and rapidly modernizing north — may have exerted as much an influence on the character of Black pseudoarchaeological thought as the migration itself. Moreover, there are obvious links to the various distinctive form of spirituality long cultivated by Black communities as well as broader trends in early-20th century modernism. While these influences certainly shaped the distinctive expression of Black pseudoarchaeology, by acknowledging the broader trends in globalization, migration, and modernism, which all exist in material contexts, we can situated Black pseudoarchaeological thinking alongside such famous expressions as the Kensington Runestone. It seems to me that this attention to objects and materiality creates the basis for “an archaeology of pseudoarchaeology” that goes beyond the traditional genealogical approach favored by many contemporary critics and offers a space to bring it into conversation with the historical archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary world.