The Punishment Monopoly. Pem Davidson Buck

       Acknowledgments

      The first sentences of The Punishment Monopoly were written early one fall morning of 2012 on the porch of a little camping cabin my husband and I had rented, along with a horse stall, for a weekend of driving my Haflinger horse and cart on the rugged trails of East Fork, Tennessee. But the book actually had its birth years earlier, although I didn’t know it then, when my foster sister, Deborah St. Amant Narboni, and I began tracking down Davidson ancestry together, until cancer finally stopped her. She was an honorary Davidson, and a wonderful buddy for what we termed “our adventures.” So it is she whom I must first acknowledge.

      Much of my research involved trips to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, where the librarians were both helpful and extremely patient with my repeated requests for volumes stored in back rooms. Without interlibrary loans much of my research would have been impossible—my thanks in particular to Sarah Jones of the Elizabethtown Community and Technical College Library for all her effort in tracking down obscure volumes. My thanks also to the South Central Kentucky Cultural Center in Glasgow, Kentucky, to the Hart County Historical Society, to the County Clerk’s Offices of Barren County, Kentucky, and of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and to the curators at the Dingwall Museum in Dingwall, Scotland. Without the clues provided by the anonymous family researchers who made their discoveries public on Ancestry.com—accurate or not—the task of searching out Davidson and Radford genealogy would have been much harder. Elizabethtown Community and Technical College has supported my efforts, funding trips to American Anthropological Association meetings until my retirement, where I presented papers analyzing and theorizing issues related to various chapters, receiving valuable feedback and encouragement. After my retirement, support continued in the form of Professor Emerita access to college facilities and the use of my old office. Donna Hester, secretary to the Social and Behavioral Sciences Division, was both a source of good cheer and a resource in my attempts to untangle computer messes. Perhaps most important in this list of the institutions I wish to acknowledge is the Association of Black Anthropologists, my intellectual home within anthropology, a vital source of support, stimulation, and critique.

      My approach to The Punishment Monopoly has benefitted immensely from my involvement with a group of anthropologists who have taken the issue of mass incarceration head on, connecting it to the state, to governance, and to local communities. I am particularly grateful to Mieka Polanco, Karen Williams, Andrea Morrell, and to the participants in sessions related to incarceration at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2017. Melissa Burch’s suggestions of books and articles, many of which now appear in my bibliography, were extremely helpful. My thanks to Nina Glick Schiller, editor at Anthropological Theory, for raising my consciousness of the way in which the concept of dispossession was central to my writing. Derrick Hodge’s critique of the introduction and first chapter was invaluable, as was Rachel Buck Pradeep’s support of the route I eventually took for the introduction. Then there is Vicki Reenstra, the cousin who told me about her family mythology, instigating my pursuit of Radfords, Jamestown, and Powhatans, and who, along with Jonathan Davidson, encouraged me in “chasing the ancestors.”

      Contextualizing those ancestors and the documents that carry clues to their lives would have been impossible without the scholars—anthropologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers—on whose work I have depended. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the people who gave me their support throughout the whole long process of writing this book. Faye Harrison’s support has been foundational for me as an anthropologist, first at the University of Louisville, where her teaching and guidance set me on the anthropological trajectory I have pursued ever since, and later as colleague and friend. Yvonne Jones made research trips to Louisville a pleasure, both for her hospitality, which included long evenings discussing a huge range of anthropological subjects (and not so anthropological subjects—although she generally brought anthropological theory to bear on them as well), and for her critique of and support for every chapter I wrote. Naomi Buck Palagi did a marvelous job of copy editing and commenting. Ann Kingsolver’s friendship and encouragement over many years, starting long before I had conceived of this book, has mattered enormously. And she did a marathon read of the book, with numerous perceptive comments and suggestions, for which I am deeply grateful. By the time she was done, I felt it was safe to send the book off to Monthly Review Press.

      And at Monthly Review Press, my book and I were taken in hand by a wonderful team. My thanks in particular to Martin Paddio, who shepherded me through the publication process with patience and good humor. Gloria Jacobs was both editor and interlocutor, with both a fine eye for detail and an overview of the project as a whole that led her to ask searching questions and push me to address issues I had side-stepped. Working with her was both eye-opening and fun.

      Last, but very far from least, is the support and the intellectual stimulation of my family, Rachel Buck Pradeep, Naomi Buck Palagi, Jason Palagi, and most important of all, David Buck, who debated issues with me, read every word, often many times in varying iterations, without whom this book would not exist.

      May the next generation of my Davidson and Radford descendants, Janakhi and Rose Pradeep, Nicolas and Callista Palagi, find a world in which The Punishment Monopoly is no longer relevant.