The Path Is Open: The Legacy of Melville and Frances Herskovits in African Oral Narrative Analysis

An unresolved tragedy is inherent in the task of translation. The translator knows that translation is at once impossible and necessary. That tragedy attains heroic proportions with anthropologists insofar as they are translators of entire cultures. Thus, anthropologists, at least the most honest and perceptive among them, are tragic heroes. This proposition became crystallized in my mind as an aphorism as I read the last sentence of Melville and Frances Herskovits's lengthy and challenging introduction to their Dahomean Narrative : "As spoken forms, the stories should preferably be read aloud." It is not by chance that this sentence concludes 122 pages of substantial analytical discourse in cultural anthropology. I see it as an impassioned call upon readers to displace themselves, as an invitation to leave their own world and inhabit the Fon cultural world. We are invited to read aloud, in English, Fon texts of various genres that were supposed to have been performed orally, then translated into French by Dahomean interpreters, and finally translated into English by the anthropologist authors. Only a hero indeed could cross so many borders successfully—but we do know that no such heroes ever existed. The reason is not far to find.

The project of anthropologists as cultural translators is essentially intransitive, even as their intention is transitive. How could a discipline with a colonial pedigree be transitive? Only naive scientism could expect anthropology to be transitive, that is, to actually promote an encounter on equal terms with an "object of study"—with the colonials—thereby renouncing the colonialist inspiration and agenda. As we move into the third millennium and hope to lay at last the foundations of a global human family, the foremost task confronting anthropology is, it seems to me, to courageously recognize and endorse its colonial pedigree in order to better exorcize it. In other words, it is by recognizing its intrinsic limitations as originally a colonial—therefore, ultimately endogamous—discourse, that anthropology, as translation of cultures, will create the optimal conditions for a new, second breath, indeed global breath anthropology, with the potential for effecting gradual and increasing transitivity and reciprocity between cultures. I am borrowing the concept of "second breath anthropology" from Michael Panoff's seminal work, Ethnologie: le second souffle , in which he suggested a second breath agenda for anthropology, defining it as "a simple way of enlightening our action hic et nunc with a view to changing the world." Melville Herskovits no doubt would have agreed with this proposition, for 1959, one year after the publication of Dahomean Narrative, he delivered the Lugard Memorial Lecture in London, with the significant title "Anthropology and Africa: A Wider Perspective." The works of Frances and Melville Herskovits are an anticipation of the second breath anthropology advocated above: in many respects, they constitute the highest degree of transitivity anthropological discourse could reach.

The distinctive feature of Dahomean Narrative, one that sets it apart among contemporary works, is that it is the issue of two disciplines and two sensibilities. It certainly would be simplistic to argue that Dahomean Narrative is the product of Melville the anthropologist and Frances the literata. Both Herskovitses possessed to various degrees the analytical tools of the anthropologist and the sensibility of the literary critic, with the attendant potential for harmony and tension. The ambition of anthropology in those days was totalizing. In the tradition of early European travelers, anthropologists sought to tell everything about a specific culture. In an effort, as it were, to make up for coming late in an old world, they endeavored to encapsulate the totality of a given culture in a "big book" for all to know and admire, as Melville Herskovits put it in his celebrated 1959 Lugard Lecture. On the other hand, the literatus, always by definition a hedonist, sought simultaneously to exhibit exemplars of the gems encountered in Fon...