Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge

Series Editors' Introduction

xi Series Editors’ Introduction M elville j. herskovits was and remains a controversial figure in understanding West African and African diasporic (African American) cultures. Like some other of the later students of Franz Boas at Columbia, such as his friend Margaret Mead, Herskovits did some research within the United States but also carried Boasian cultural relativism and antiracism to analyzing cultural traits and lifeways beyond the borders of the United States. Herskovits’s dissertation research, like Mead’s, was library ethnology, in his case, on cattle complexes in East Africa. He then followed Boas in using a primary tool of racist science, head-form measurements, to undercut claims about race as a stable category and about a ‘‘natural’’ hierarchy of races. Having completed a major piece of research in what was then called ‘‘physical anthropology’’ (and now would be called ‘‘biological anthropology ’’), Herskovits returned to analysis of cultural traits. The work for which he is most remembered insisted on the viability of ‘‘survivals’’ from what Herskovits considered a homogeneous West African culture. He visited Dahomey (now Benin) and stressed continuities between the West African homeland and the diaspora, making observations (though not doing sustained participant-observation fieldwork) in Brazil, Suriname , Haiti, Trinidad, and the American South. The interpretation that African Americans were still to significant degrees African rather than American has, over the years, been welcome to those maintaining barriers to assimilation, first to white segregationists, then to Black Power separatists, that is, both to those seeing people of African origins as essentially backward and to those seeing spiritual superiority in an (always singular) African heritage. Although generally endorsing Herskovits’s positions, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles criticism Series Editors’ Introduction xii from Herskovits’s contemporaries during the struggle for black civil rights. Herskovits maintained the atomizing focus on cultural traits and trying to sort out the origins of particular traits that was a characteristic of the research program of Boasians trained before him. His e√orts to identify traits as ‘‘African’’ or ‘‘European’’ paralleled those of, for instance , Elsie Clews Parsons trying to sort out what was Spanish and what indigenous in the cultures of Mesoamerica and South America. Herskovits stressed that acculturation was not one-way, specifically that southern (United States) white ways were influenced by African ways of speaking, and so forth, but did not make the move from attempting to sort out historical origins and subsequent movement of traits to holistic, synchronic analysis of functioning contemporary cultures. He remained a Boasian of the sort that predated his education rather than focusing on cultural integration as many of his contemporaries did (functionalists as well as Boasian contemporaries like Margaret Mead, Ruth Landes, and their near-contemporary who was also his and their mentor, Ruth Benedict). There is ongoing and heated discussion of The Myth of the Negro Past and Herskovits’s claims about ‘‘African survivals’’ in the New World. Gershenhorn puts this phase of Herskovits’s work in the context of his earlier work challenging the fixity of separate Negro and Caucasian ‘‘races’’ in the United States and his later work in building a program of research on Africa at Northwestern University. That Northwestern was where Africanists were produced is widely known. Less well known is how Herskovits blocked from the means of production (publication and research funding) those not indebted to him or not supporting his positions (and position of primacy) during the era when area studies was heavily funded by the U.S. government and foundations (particularly the Ford Foundation). Beyond maintaining his primacy as a gatekeeper for Africanist research while wrapping himself in a mantle of ‘‘objectivity,’’ Herskovits very much sought to be a public intellectual and to guide U.S. policy toward Africa. However, he was more successful in gaining and maintaining control of African studies than he was in directing U.S. foreign policy. To no apparent e√ect, he criticized support for colonial and white supremacist regimes, and he was generally unable to dissuade Cold Warriors from policymakers’ conflating assertions of African independence Series Editors’ Introduction xiii from incipient siding with the Soviet Union in a bipolar world. The tale of attempting to influence policy that Gershenhorn tells is a depressing one for those who seek to transform expertise about cultures into policies that take account of realities of di√erent ways of understanding the world instead of sorting everything into Manichean binaries of good (pro...