John Langston Gwaltney

Welcome to the publication, “Representations.” This is a project designed to bring the perspectives of a wider variety of groups to the forefront of the anthropology classroom. To celebrate Black History Month, we are covering the accomplishments of 28 Black anthropologists across 28 days. Learn more about our project; read on for the amazing accomplishments of John Langston Gwaltney.

John Langston Gwaltney was an American Anthropologist who lived from 1928–1998 who was best known for his work on Urban and Native Anthropology.

Within the first two months of his life, Gwaltney was completely blind. His mother, Mabel Gwaltney, was extremely devoted to her son’s welfare. When she learned of her son’s blindness, she sought help from many — from medical doctors to faith healers. When she resigned herself to the fact that her son was permanently blind, she quickly sought to find potential career paths for him. Due to this, John Gwaltney was skilled in many arts, such as playing the piano and wood carving. Even though he later settled on anthropology, his childhood educational environment influenced his interests in the social sciences. Ritualistic wood carving would become one of Gwaltney’s keen interests in his career as an anthropologist. When it came time to go to school, Gwaltney’s mother wrote to the first lady of the United States at the time, Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped him get placed in a program for blind children.

He was born second youngest among five children, with three older sisters and a younger brother. Gwaltney’s work, particularly his research topics, was always influenced by his cultural and familial background. His father, who was a sailor, told him stories of travel during Gwaltney’s youth, which is part of the reason why travel during his later fieldwork appealed to him. His eldest sister, Lucy, was seven years his senior and a large influence on Gwaltney during his childhood — she taught him how to cook and make perfume. Reflecting on their relationship later in life he said that she, “was a prime mover in my introduction to almost everything that is excellent in life and creditable in character.” (Johnson-Simon 2018, 104). He dedicated his most well-known book to her, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (1980). It was common for Gwaltney to acknowledge his family in his published works, as they helped and inspired him immensely throughout his life.

After he graduated high school, John Gwaltney went to Upsala College for a BA, and later on received a scholarship to get a Master’s for Social Research in New York City. He received his Ph. D in Anthropology at Columbia University in 1967, where he received mentorship under Margret Mead, who said his dissertation was “one of the most brilliant Ph.D. oral examinations in my long experience” (Johnson-Simon 2018, 106).

During his career as an anthropologist, he did fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico and the urban United States. In 1956 Gwaltney married his wife, Judith Lucille Jacobson, the same year that he started his fieldwork in Mexico. This fieldwork led to his dissertation and later first book called: The Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness and Other Disasters in a Mexican Community (1970) where he studied onchocerciasis or river blindness. He was one of few Black anthropologists and likely the only blind one. Gwaltney’s own culture as a Black American directed his course of research, as he frequently wrote on black Americans and those who had similar backgrounds to himself. Gwaltney said that his book Drylongso was created because he believed that “EuroAmerican Anthropology” failed to capture Black American culture, “in terms other than romantic… we have traditionally been misrepresented by standard social science” (Cole 1999, 614). Gwaltney’s innovation of the “folk seminar” became the basis for Drylongso, where he put together forums in churches and taverns to legitimize the “integrity of core black culture and to dismiss historical images of black people as marginal or exotic beings” (Rodriguez 1998, 71). Gwaltney also regularly contributed to the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) with his own written articles and was very supportive of the organization. He received a Distinguished Achievement Award in 1989 from the ABA.

Bibliography

Cole, Johnnetta B. “John Langston Gwaltney (1928–1998).” American Anthropologist, vol. 101, no. 3, 1999, pp. 614–616., doi:10.1525/aa.1999.101.3.614.

“John Langston Gwaltney (1928–1998).” Association of Black Anthropologists — ABA Is a Section of the American Anthropological Association, aba.americananthro.org/john-langston-gwaltney-1928–1998/.

Johnson-Simon, Deborah. “The Development of a Core Black Ethnography and Museology.” University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 99–113. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctv9b2vtr.11. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.

Rodriguez, Cheryl R. “Gwaltney’s Influence on African American Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 7. 2 (1998): 71–72.