ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the social construction thesis by examining the understanding of slave culture in the United States that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Cultural theory begins from the premise that the world is socially constructed. To claim that the world is socially constructed is to say more than just that the world is filtered through categories rather than directly experienced. To draw attention to the ways in which contemporary research on slave culture has been fueled by an egalitarian cultural bias is not to suggest that egalitarians’ descriptions of slave culture are without validity. The slave experience was, to be sure, extremely varied; there certainly was no single slave culture. Slaves on small agricultural units sometimes worked side by side in the field with their masters; those on larger estates might only infrequently get a glimpse of their master.
