Caroline Bond Day was an African-American physical anthropologist and writer whose work served to break down racist stereotypes of Black and mixed-race individuals during the early 20th century.
Day was born in 1889 in Montgomery, Alabama to Georgia and Moses Steward. She was considered mixed-race and had Black, White, and Indigenous heritage.
She received her first BA at Atlanta University in 1912. She then studied physical anthropology at Radcliffe college (pictured below: Fay House and Gym, circa 1904), the female counterpart to the (at the time) all-male Harvard, and earned her second BA in 1919.
After graduating she had careers in various community and education related jobs such as: working with and supporting black veterans and their families, working as the Dean of Women at Paul Quinn College, and then heading the English department at Prairie View State College. She then began teaching at her alma mater, Atlanta University in 1922 and started publishing short stories and essays.
One of her most famous works “The Pink Hat” is a narrative about a Mulatto woman undergoing a journey toward understanding the nuances of her mixed-race heritage through a social experiment centered around her white-passing skin tone. Ultimately, after realizing that society and people will always treat her as inferior once they recognize the traits of her blackness (demonstrated by her hair previously concealed by wearing a pink hat) the protagonist decides to fully embrace her identity as an African American woman.
After leaving Atlanta University in 1929, she started focusing on her own research with advisor Earnest Hooton and graduated with an MA in anthropology in 1932. In the same year she published her most renowned anthropological work and thesis “A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States.”
In this study, Day analyzed 346 mixed-race families confirmed to have Black and White ancestry (Example of the Brown-Wilkins family pictured below from Bond’s study). She utilized the methodologies of physical, biological, and sociocultural anthropology in order to better understand the experience of mixed-raced individuals in America. In the tradition of physical anthropology she still took physical measurements of her participants. By doing this she used the language and understanding of white male anthropologists to help disprove myths that African American individuals were physically and socially inferior to white Americans
Her ideology was influenced by minds such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas, famous thinkers and academics working in the fields of sociology and anthropology respectively. These ideologies were not without their flaws and ideas of categorization of race based on physical assessments are not relevant in current anthropology. Anthropologists, sociologists, and anyone who studies race recognizes that the concept is much more complex and difficult to understand especially within our own contemporary moment.
Day occupied a privileged position as a member of the Harvard anthropology academic circle and as a part of the broader middle and upper classes of the African-American community. Recognizing this, her intentions with her research were to confront the racist history of anthropology and use outdated methodologies as tools in positively changing the academic narrative of black lives.
Toward the end of her life Day continued to teach at schools such as Howard University (Pictured below) and at North Carolina College for Negroes. She died in 1939 of heart illness, the same year she started her final appointment at an academic institution.
Her achievements and contributions to the field of anthropology are extremely important, especially as a black female voice within a discipline that has been incredibly racist toward black people since its inception. However, Day’s legacy as an educator is an aspect of her life that should be celebrated as well.
There is no shortage of male perspectives in the early years of the field of anthropology, and having a black female teacher to offer alternative ways of knowing and understanding is crucial in the development of a new generation of academics and thinkers. These are the kinds of people who go forth to reshape the boundaries of academic knowledge. People like Caroline Bond Day were, and are still, necessary within all subfields of anthropology and social sciences as a whole.
Refs:
“Caroline Bond Day (1889-1948).” Association of Black Anthropologists - ABA Is a Section of the American Anthropological Association, aba.americananthro.org/caroline-bond-day-1889-1948/.
Caroline Bond Day. 23 Feb. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Bond_Day.
Curwood, Anastasia C. “Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology.” AnthroSource, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 13 Mar. 2012, anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01145.x.
Musser, Judith. “African American Women’s Short Stories in the Harlem Renaissance: Bridging a Tradition.” MELUS, vol. 23, no. 2, 1998, pp. 27–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468010. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
Heidi Ardizzone (2006) ‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day, Visual Studies, 21:2, 106-132, DOI: 10.1080/14725860600944971
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About the podcast: The I Dig It Podcast was created by Alyssa and Michaela in March of 2020. Our goal for this podcast was to provide archaeology enthusiasts with insight into the student perspective of navigating the world of academia and the job market for archaeology and anthropology. Guests on the podcast include people from all different parts of their career, including highschool, undergrad, grad school, post doc, and early career!
Happy National Women’s History Month 🌊 This month (and every month), we’re excited to celebrate indigenous women authors from the Pacific and beyond! 💫 Here are just a few of them:
The legendary Leslie Marmon Silko is a major figure who helped spearhead the Native American literary and artistic renaissance in the 1960s 📚
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer holds a special place in our heart because Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants was the first book we read for our book club 🥰
Lurline Wailana McGregor’s advocacy to increase Pacific Islander programming on PBS is not only inspiring, but so necessary for younger generations to see themselves on screen 🤩
You’ve probably heard of Joy Harjo. Her expansive body of work ranges from poetry to plays to children’s books to memoirs to music. We’re excited to experience her work no matter what medium it may be in 🎙️
PS: We can’t fit them all in carousel! Who did we miss? Let us know down below! ⬇️
Nakane Chie was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1926 and spent her childhood in Beijing, China. This greatly influenced her interest in cultural comparisons since after returning to Japan she found herself noting the differences between Japanese and Chinese atmospheres and behaviors.
She has an incredibly robust list of institutions she attended, studied, and worked at.
Nakane first attended Tsuda College for undergrad as an anthropology major and graduated in 1947. She was interested in cross-cultural comparisons, and specifically focused on China and Tibet during her graduate research at the University of Tokyo in 1952.
Following her graduation she conducted fieldwork in Assam, India from 1953 through 1957. In the succeeding years she then moved to Europe to analyze her data and further her studies at the London School of Economics and with Dr. Giuseppe Tucci, a noted authority of TIbet at the time. [Of course this detail comes with my own personal opinion that there is a much larger conversation to be had about white western academic men being seen as experts on cultures that were largely still considered ‘other’]
Additionally, Nakane was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago from 1959-1960, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London from 1960 to 1961. [The name of this institution college definitely seems a little problematic on several levels (IN MY OWN OPINION) due to the implication that it appears to have been created in order to study two broad, diverse, and dynamic cultural regions through a white elite western academic ideology, together??? ] Additionally, she was a professor at Osaka University, the National Museum of Ethnology, and a visiting professor at Cornell from 1975 to 1980.
In 1970, Nakane became the first female professor at the University of Tokyo, and from 1980 to 1982 she served as director of the Institute of Oriental Culture. She retired from the University of Tokyo in 1987. Then in 1995 she became the first female member of the Japan academy, an organization modeled after contemporary western academies that would bring together distinguished groups of academics and scientists. To this date Nakane, as far as I know, is the only woman to have been made a member of the academy. She was also made an honorary member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI).
Nakane’s most famous work is the 1970 book Japanese Society. Prior to being translated it originally was an essay published in 1967 and titled: Tate-shakai no ningen-kankei-Tanitsu-shakai no riron (Personal Relations in a Vertical Society - A Theory of Homogeneous Society). This book has now been translated into various languages including English, Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and 7 others (I actually couldn’t figure out what those editions were but it was in fact 13 languages in total…absolutely wild!).
This seminal work discusses and strives to understand the structure of Japanese society through the framework of objective cross-cultural comparison, particularly with India. She bases her discussion and analysis on two criteria, the first being ‘attribute’ which is defined as something acquired at birth or earned through achievement. The second criterion is ‘frame’ which indicates a particular relationship or locality that binds individuals together. It happens to be an English translation of the Japanese ba, which means ‘location’. This is most definitely an oversimplification of the work as a whole, but the bottom-line is this was groundbreaking and transformative within Japanese anthropology and anthropology as a whole.
Nakane unquestionably furthered scholarship of the theory of societal structure within both Japanese and Western academia. She is incredibly celebrated and in 1990 was awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor which is given to those who have contributed to academic or artistic accomplishments and developments. She was also awarded the Order of Culture in 2001, which is given to those who have made significant contributions to culture such as science, art, and technology.
Her impact was monumental and she is truly still a pioneering woman in anthropology. Nakane is currently 94 years and Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Tokyo.
Refs:
Hendry, Joy. “An Interview with Chie Nakane.” Current anthropology 30.5 (1989): 643-649.
En.wikipedia.org. 2021. Chie Nakane - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chie_Nakane> [Accessed 1 June 2021].
Nakane, Chie. Japanese society. Vol. 74. Univ of California Press, 1970.
Prabook.com. 2021. Chie Nakane. [online] Available at: <https://prabook.com/web/chie.nakane/201999> [Accessed 1 June 2021].
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About the podcast: The I Dig It Podcast was created by Alyssa and Michaela in March of 2020. Our goal for this podcast was to provide archaeology enthusiasts with insight into the student perspective of navigating the world of academia and the job market for archaeology and anthropology. Guests on the podcast include people from all different parts of their career, including highschool, undergrad, grad school, post doc, and early career!
