2. 职称英语
  3. In his 1976 study of slavery in the United States, Herbert Gutman, like Foge

In his 1976 study of slavery in the United States, Herbert Gutman, like Foge

游客2025-04-19  3
问题     In his 1976 study of slavery in the United States, Herbert Gutman, like Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese, has rightly stressed the slaves’ achievements. But unlike these historians, Gutman gives plantation owners little credit for these achievements. Rather, Gutman argues that one must look to the Black family and the slaves’ extended kinship system to understand how crucial achievements, such as the maintenance of a cultural heritage and the development of a communal consciousness, were possible. His findings compel attention.
    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 of—and so was crucial in sustaining—the 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.
    Gutman’s 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 structure—which he believes developed by the mid-to-late eighteenth century—provided the foundations for the strong communal consciousness that existed among slaves.
    In sum, Gutman’s study is significant because it offers a closely reasoned and original explanation of some of the slaves’ achievements, one that correctly emphasizes the resources that slaves themselves possessed. [br] Which of the following statements concerning the marriage practices of plantation owners during the period of Black slave in the United States can most logically be inferred from the information in the passage?
选项 A、These practices began to alter sometime around the mid-eighteenth century.
B、These practices varied markedly from one region of the country to another.
C、Plantation owners usually based their choice of marriage partners on economic considerations.
D、Plantation owners often married their cousins.
答案 D
解析 推理题。根据第三段内容“Gutman discovers that cousins rarely married，anexogamous tendency that contrasted sharply with the endogamy practiced by the plantationowners．”可知，Gutman发现在黑人中表亲之间不会通婚，异族通婚的趋向与农场主主张的同族通婚截然相反。由此可知农场主之间可以同族通婚。所以正确答案是D选项。
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