gre阅读练习每日一篇(十八)_GRE阅读

gre阅读练习每日一篇(十八)

　　Gutman recreates the family and extended kinship structure mainly through an ingenious use of what any historian should draw upon , quantifiable data, derived in this case mostly from plantation birth registers. He also uses accounts of ex-slaves to probe the human reality behind his statistics. These sources indicate that the two-parent household predominated in slave quarters just as it did among freed slaves after emancipation. Although Gutman admits that forced separation by sale was frequent, he shows that the slaves preference, revealed most clearly on plantations where sale was infrequent, was very much for stable monogamy. In less conclusive fashion Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese had already indicated the predominance of two-parent households; however, only Gutman emphasizes the preference for stable monogamy and points out what stable monogamy meant for the slaves cultural heritage. Gutman argues convincingly that the stability of the Black family encouraged the transmission ofand so was crucial in sustainingthe Black heritage of folklore, music, and religious expression from one generation to another, a heritage that slaves were continually fashioning out of their African and American experiences.

　　Gutmans examination of other facets of kinship also produces important findings. Gutman discovers that cousins rarely married, an exogamous tendency that contrasted sharply with the endogamy practiced by the plantation owners. This preference for exogamy, Gutman suggests, may have derived from West African rules governing marriage, which, though they differed from one tribal group to another, all involved some kind of prohibition against unions with close kin. This taboo against cousins marrying is important, argues Gutman, because it is one of many indications of a strong awareness among slaves of an extended kinship network. The fact that distantly related kin would care for children separated from their families also suggests this awareness. When blood relationships were few, as in newly created plantations in the Southwest, fictive kinship arrangements took their place until a new pattern of consanguinity developed. Gutman presents convincing evidence that this extended kinship structurewhich he believes developed by the mid-to-late eighteenth centuryprovided the foundations for the strong communal consciousness that existed among slaves.