Catching Sense: African American Communities on a South Carolina Sea Island.

Patricia Guthrie. Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. 156 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by

John Stewart University of California, Davis 

From time to time we rub the wound of slavery to vitalize our connectedness to the past and through it to each other. In doing so we often encounter the genius that was our ancestors coming through the storm intact enough to keep themselves together and to give life and offspring to the voracious experiment that is America, while holding tenaciously to an original space in the moral universe. To read Catching Sense is one such excursion. Anthropologist Pat Guthrie describes the community system among African Americans on St. Helena Island as she encountered it during various stretches of field research between 1975 and 1992. She went to the Sea Islands as both an anthropologist bent on collecting ethnographic data and as an African American on pilgrimage to a culturally sacred site.

How is everyday life conducted in this semi-isolated enclave? What fundamental values and meanings are to be found among those who regard themselves as native to the island? What is the design of their principal social networks, and how are these maintained? These were the general questions of interest in the early stages of her anthropological fieldwork. Guthrie found that in the local dialect, forms of worship, farming practices, and social manners Sea Island culture remains anchored in a set of practices and principles from the plantation past that have come to be regarded as traditional for that part of the South. Geographically, the principal unit in land organization is still the plantation, and the island is divided into forty-two of them. Old plantation names and boundaries have been retained, and Islanders still think of themselves and each other as belonging to particular plantations. Intrigued by the relationship between plantation and identity, Guthrie determined to excavate the condition of belonging, and this would become the research issue of central importance in her work. How does one come to belong to and sustain membership in a plantation community? How are plantation communities themselves maintained? What are the processes through which plantation communities are integrated into the larger structure of coastal society? As she pursued these questions, Guthrie would discover that membership in particular plantation communities is achieved and maintained through the practice and recognition of catching sense - a pattern of affiliation that confers unbreakable ties between individuals and the terrain where they achieved adulthood in the eyes of the community.

Developed as an alternative to genealogical connectedness when slave families were regularly broken up and scattered to a degree that made it impossible for individual members to maintain contact or look after the children, catching sense served as a way through which kinless individuals could acquire a respected place in the community. As ex-slave plantation communities acquired the land on which they lived, catching sense also came to serve as the basis for establishing user rights over land as well. Along with user rights over land came the other duties, privileges, and responsibilities that comprise the structure and maintenance of home communities. Catching sense, Guthrie tells us, survives not merely as some sentimental link with past tradition, but as the basis of social structure and meaning in the present. Members take pride in the plantation to which they belong, and there is great warmth, friendship, and cooperation among those who caught sense on the same plantation. Families, churches, praise houses - all public structures of community honored by Islanders recognize catching sense as the basic criterion for individual identity and status. Plantation members take their plantation identities with them into marriage and other forms of congregational activities, and in so doing bring plantation communities into a closely knit social structure.

Guthrie's ethnography reminds us that African slaves confronted the angst of alienation not only in song and imaginative narrative, but as well in tightly structured social rituals of belonging. The praise house is well described as a traditional site for such rituals. In addition, a certain cultural separateness was cultivated by which these rituals confirmed the slaves' transcendent existence as full-fledged moral and social beings. This very early adaptation to a dual cultural heritage is sustained in the separate roles played by church and praise house. While churches are the domain where Christian religious preference and affiliation are openly expressed, praise houses are hidden sites where practices that precede the adoption of Christianity dominate. Praise houses have as their central value maintenance of a moral and self-sufficient community. Islanders hold continued and simultaneous membership in both church and praise house.

As is the case with many ethnographies, much of the ethnographic present is of a time in the past - both distant and recent in this case. The system of community in which catching sense holds a central role is passing. Shopping malls, contemporary urban media, the steady loss of land to development projects, and invasive taxation all are eroding the steady, slow-paced, self-sufficient community Islanders had created for themselves. The suburban enterprise that privileges individual alienation is making rapid inroads, and the sacred place of memory for a people who came through slavery with dignity and survived the many generations in prideful community is undergoing change. The creative will that drew on deep spiritual resources to forge a stance against dehumanizing plantation slavery and contemporary marginalization now must face the challenge of crack cocaine, AIDS, and the emergence of affluent, gated communities. Islanders face a pattern of expropriation that strikes at the very basis of the traditional cultural self: Everyone is well aware that many individuals lose their property on the Sea Islands because they can no longer afford the taxes. By 1992 community was coming to replace plantation as the site of belonging, and by 1993 the island had only one remaining praise house building. Although praise house membership remains intact, Guthrie reports, traditional committees are being reduced in their influence and responsibilities.

How does catching sense fare in these new circumstances? Although a pattern of continuity is implied, the work stops short of addressing this question directly. In this, the book shares a quality with the people and the culture described. Sea Islanders are masters of the oblique. The romanticism of tradition and cultural survival aside, these folk have had a trying time of it, and one of their great responding tropes has been evasion. They are fiercely protective of the backstage of their social lives, and even as the web of memberships, significant rituals, and the daily rounds are richly presented, one senses that there are more profound layers to the culture that are not accounted for in this text.

In addition to the social history and the participant observer's report - both very well done - one wishes that some deeper indigenous interpretation of this Island world were accessible. We have the sense that the Islanders lead profound lives, but the terms of this profundity remain shrouded. The actual experience of catching sense is illustrated less clearly in the data on Islanders than in the personal experience of the researcher herself, as particular Islanders picked her up and carried her through the process of field research. The personal odyssey of the researcher, guided by an unabashed search for her cultural roots, is presented in a series of short italicized passages that are distributed throughout the book. They are intended as windows to the research process that would enable readers to accompany her on the anthropological quest. The strategy of parallel texts between the same covers is a tried and acceptable practice in anthropological reporting, but it is employed here with only partial success. The narrative of the researcher at work, as a totality, is incomplete, and the italicized passages often merge as continuities into the general discourse on cultural knowledge. At the same time, the work is vibrant in those passages in which the research question and the personal quest intersect. Can one truly connect here in spirit with the past, and experience the rootedness of one's culture? Catching Sense is a warmly positive answer to that question.

Ever since the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, T. J. Woofter, Lorenzo Turner, and others, the Sea Islands have come to be regarded as a special site where the unique patterns of adaptation through which Africans established themselves as African Americans can be most clearly encountered. Much of the research done here has focused on music, language, and folk customs. Guthrie's work is among the few that grapple with detailing the dense social system. As such, it is a most welcome addition to the corpus.