Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

Among the courses taught by Earlham Professor of Sociology/Anthropology and African and African American Studies Stephen Butler is the popular “Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports and the American Dream.” He says an example from baseball in the 1940s and ‘50’s suggests the kind of “fusion” he anticipates may come from the social upheaval caused recently by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

RICHMOND, Ind. — Since August most media coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita understandably has focused on the immediate horror, tragedy and loss endured by so many Americans. But, as the nature of the successive disasters begins to ease from crisis into recovery, some social scientists have begun to urge taking a longer view. History suggests that no small measure of good also will come from the recent upheaval.

Already there are sporadic reports: the occasional change-up story about New Orleans jazz musicians displaced by Katrina finding a welcome in Memphis, Tenn., and the intriguing “flavor” those new ingredients have added to the musical scene in the home of the blues and Elvis Presley. In a neat segue, several newscasts also recently reported on hurricane-exiled Cajun and Creole chefs cooking up fresh storms of their own in restaurant kitchens from New York to San Francisco, Toronto to Sydney.

It is entirely likely, observes Earlham Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Stephen Butler, that in generations to come, musical historians may trace the root of a new musical genre or sub-genre to the mix of styles occurring today in the clubs along Beale Street. Or that culinary judges, art critics, book reviewers, political columnists, essayists and other surveyors of the cultural scene will one day identify Katrina’s coming ashore as the start of a many important social shifts in America.

Because it’s talked about so much in terms of time, days and dates, “we tend to think about history like a clock,” says Butler. “We think about it like a machine, as regular …” The “march of time,” for instance.

“But, we’re really talking about a process,” Butler continues, “a fusion of different things happening at different times that ends up creating something that didn’t exist before.”

Few forces conjured by Mother Nature can match the concentrated power of a Category Five hurricane like Katrina. Over time, however, Butler says the furious energy unleashed by the storm on the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama will seem as nothing compared to the sum of that expended by the hundreds of thousands of residents dispatched by the maelstrom as they work to reclaim their lives wherever, ultimately, the gales deposit them.

In anthropological terms, what began in the Central Gulf Coast region in the days leading up to and after Katrina making landfall on Aug. 29, and what is taking place now in various degrees in all 50 states is known as diaspora: a dislocation of a people, language or culture that was formerly centered in one place. The great historical precedent is the scattering of Jews from Palestine following the Babylonian conquest of the Judean Kingdom in the 6th century B.C.E. (and a subsequent dispersion after the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.). Though likely more familiar to many Americans is the Irish diaspora of the mid-1800s. In the midst of “The Great Hunger” — the 1845-49 potato famine in Ireland — nearly one million men, women and children decamped the Emerald Isle for the United States, the vast majority of them settling in the cities of Boston and New York. By 1850, it was reported, there were more citizens of Irish birth living in Gotham than in Dublin.

Today the progeny of the Irish diaspora number some 80 million, a tide that in the intervening years has inarguably and indelibly altered the political, economic and social fabric of the country. And while it took nearly three generations — until the election of James Michael Curley as mayor of previously Puritan Boston in 1914 — before the full effects of the surge in immigration started to make themselves known, already modern day electoral officials are weighing what impact up to 1.5 million former Gulf Coast residents, many of them black and poor and feeling frustrated, may have on the mid-term Congressional elections in 2006 and the 2008 presidential campaigns starting shortly thereafter. There hasn’t been a similar mass move in U.S. population since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, note historians.

Stephen Butler
Professor of Sociology/
Anthropology and African and African American Studies

Yet, Butler stresses it isn’t only the flood that reshapes the landscape. Sometimes the curious eddies and currents along the edges leave lasting marks, too. He indicates an example of this can be found in baseball.

“In the old Negro Leagues,” specifically, says Butler, who teaches the popular course ‘Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports and the American Dream’ at Earlham.

While the integration of major league baseball in 1947 was one of the defining moments in the momentous civil rights struggle of 20th century America, it was the resulting disintegration of the Negro Leagues that changed America’s game itself, Butler says.

“When the leagues broke up, [major league] baseball realized it had to incorporate the style of play used in the leagues in order to interest a new audience,” explains Butler. “Plus, there were then all these other great ballplayers around. So, in that way there was introduced a certain, new level of speed to the game, which we see today.”

While some of his colleagues bemoan the demise of the predominantly southern Negro Leagues as a cultural “loss,” Butler dismisses the notion.

“Culture is not something you lose, like a dollar,” says the Columbia University-trained social scientist. “I like the idea of fusion in music better. It’s become part of American culture, as a whole — you know, ‘seizing victory from the jaws of defeat’ — to have all these different elements fused into society.

“If the lords of music today were really smart in terms of looking at what’s coming out of there right now,” Butler says, meaning Memphis, Kansas City, Portland, Ore., and other communities that have assimilated some of the talented musicians displaced by Katrina, “they wouldn't be worried about the ‘loss’ of New Orleans jazz. They’d be thinking about how things come together in the creation of new formats and how, maybe, they can market that.”

Contact:
Stephen Butler, professor of sociology and anthropology
765/983-1662 — E-Mail Stephen