Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class

TLDR

Deep South documents the economic, racial, and cultural stratification of a rural Mississippi community, highlighting how class and caste structures underpinned Jim Crow-era inequalities and racial tensions. The authors employed immersive participant‑observation, conducting interviews and daily life immersion in Natchez, Mississippi, to map caste‑enforced tenant‑landlord, governmental, and law‑enforcement dynamics. The study shows that sharecropping and the broader southern economy sustained rigid caste divisions that reinforced racial hierarchies.

Abstract

This is a landmark study in Southern social stratification. First published in 1941, Deep is the cooperative effort of a team of social anthropologists to document the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South through a study of a representative rural Mississippi community. Researchers Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi, as they investigated how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. This Southern Classics edition of their study offers contemporary students of history a provocative collection of primary material gathered by conscientious and well-trained participant-observers, who found then - as now - intertwined social and economic inequalities at the root of racial tensions. Expanding on earlier studies of community stratification by social class, researchers in the Deep South Project introduced the additional concept of caste, which parsed a community through rigid social ranks assigned at birth and unalterable through life - a concept readily identifiable in the racial divisions of the Jim Crow South. As African American researchers, Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with his assistant St. Clair Drake, were able to gain unrivaled access to the black community in rural Mississippi, unavailable to their white counterparts. Through their interviews and experiences, the authors vividly capture the nuances in caste-enforcing systems of tenant-landlord relations, local government, and law enforcement. But the chief achievement of Deep is its rich analysis of how the southern economic system, and sharecropping in particular, functioned to maintain rigid caste divisions along racial lines. In the new introduction to this edition, Jennifer Jensen Wallach situates this germinal study within the field of social anthropology and against the backdrop of similar community studies of the era. She also details the subsequent careers of this distinguished team of researchers.