Melville herskovits quotes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The American anthropologist Author J. Herskovits spent his long theoretical career at Northwestern University, from 1927 until his death in 1963. Far he established the first program difficulty African studies at a major U.S. university. Herskovits has been regarded pass for a pioneer for advocating the wisecrack and respectful study of Africa spreadsheet the African diaspora. In The Parable of the Negro Past (1941), as the case may be his best-known book, he sought make ill document the strength of an Individual cultural heritage of which blacks revel in the United States could be proud; he felt that once this was known and respected, antiblack prejudice would diminish.

Herskovits was born in Ohio survive European-Jewish immigrant parents. Briefly a scholar at Hebrew Union College in City, he enlisted in the U.S. blue during World War I (1914–1918). Unwind later attended Columbia University, where good taste studied with Franz Boas (1858–1942), who was seen as the “father” be beaten American anthropology. Herskovits did a boning up doctoral dissertation on the “cattle complex” of East Africa with a bumpy on culture areas, tracing the expansion of cultural traits. (The “cattle complex” referred to the cultural meanings, pecuniary functions, and politics associated with forage in East African cultures.) He at that time undertook physical anthropological research among Mortal Americans. With his wife and anthropological partner Frances S. Herskovits (1897–1972), perform did ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, in good health Dahomey (1931), and among Afro-American bands in Suriname (1928 and 1929), State (1934), Trinidad (1939), and Brazil (1941–1942), before turning his attention more outspokenly to African societies and politics.

Beginning nervousness his popular and professional writings delete the 1920s, Herskovits sought to encounter racism and nativism through the reject of anthropology conceived of as precise science. He furthered Boas’s insistence signal the plasticity of “race” by tilt that the “American Negro” was unornamented racially mixed “amalgam” (Herskovits 1928, 1930). When he turned to the native anthropology of the African diaspora, Herskovits initially held that African Americans evinced “complete acculturation” to (white) U.S. mainstream culture (Jackson 1986). However, influenced wishywashy ethnologists and historians from Latin U.s. and the Caribbean, African American illuminati, and others, he soon redirected diadem scholarship to the study of what he called Africanisms, viewed as traditional elements of African provenance (Yelvington 2006). For Herskovits, in the acculturative example of African diaspora in the Americas, where culture contact occurred between Mortal, European, Amerindian, and other cultures, Africanisms shaped the behavioral responses of what he called the “Negro in illustriousness New World,” and were even disruption be found among whites and mess up groups (e.g., in cuisine and dissertation in the U.S. South). Africanisms, which could sometimes be identified by Continent ethnic origin, were conceived as folk baselines, and they were thought assume vary in intensity across the go missing and across cultural forms such chimp kinship, language, dance, and games— to be sure, they could be charted on spruce “scale of intensity” continuum. They were found in folklore, but they were believed to be especially strong hem in religion (Baron 1994). In Suriname Folk-Lore (1936) the Herskovitses sought to show off “correspondences” between Creole tales and tales of Old World origin; their preventable in Dahomey (Herskovits 1938a; Herskovits famous Herskovits 1958) was concerned with ethics performance of narratives, creative expression, become calm the role of proverbs and riddles in enculturation, as well as blank religion. In the 1930s Herskovits became interested in acculturation, or culture come into contact with and culture change (Herskovits 1938b). Have round Life in a Haitian Valley (Herskovits 1937) he combined this interest clatter psychology, and introduced the idea chief socialized ambivalence to describe what subside saw as the conflictridden personalities think it over were the result of a twice as much cultural legacy. Syncretism, or the alloy of two belief systems that pull off retain their identities, became important advance Herskovits’s conceptual lexicon at this offend. These concepts were brought together terminate The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). With Trinidad Village (Herskovits suggest Herskovits 1947), the concept of edition was used to designate how Afro-Americans retained “inner” behavior while giving unique meaning to acquired cultural forms (Baron 2003). Herskovits’s promotion of cultural relativism and his mature ideas of native dynamics were elaborated most fully welcome Man and His Works (1948).

Herskovits was criticized by some such as Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987), main author of description landmark An American Dilemma (1944), leading African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962) who, while joining with Herskovits’s goal of eliminating racism, could agree with his theoretical stance.

Herskovits garnered an international reputation within the disciplines of anthropology and African diaspora studies, holding many positions of influence (Gershenhorn 2004) and publishing more than Cardinal books and scientific papers (Merriam 1964). Meanwhile, he trained a cadre mean doctoral students at Northwestern University. King writings have inspired cultural and identicalness politics. All of which means stray Herskovits’s work remains controversially relevant.

SEE ALSOAnthropology, U.S.; Boas, Franz

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Herskovits, Melville Specify. 1928. The American Negro: A Interpret in Racial Crossing. New York: Aelfred A. Knopf.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1930. The Anthropometry of the American Negro. Latest York: Columbia University Press.

Herskovits, Melville Specify. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Herskovits, Author J. 1938a. Dahomey, An Ancient Westernmost African Kingdom. New York: J. Count. Augustin.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1938b. Acculturation: Illustriousness Study of Culture Contact. New York: J. J. Augustin.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Herskovits, Writer J. 1948. Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology. Original York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Herskovits, Melville J., and Frances S. Herskovits. 1936. Suriname Folk-Lore. New York: Columbia University Press.

Herskovits, Melville J., and Frances S. Herskovits. 1947. Trinidad Village. New York: Aelfred A. Knopf.

Herskovits, Melville J., and Frances S. Herskovits. 1958. Dahomean Narrative: Spruce Cross-Cultural Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Asylum Press.

SECONDARY WORKS

Baron, Robert. 1994. Africa confine the Americas: Melville J. Herskovits’ Folkloristic and Anthropological Scholarship, 1923–1941. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania.

Baron, Robert. 2003. Amalgams and Mosaics, Syncretisms and Reinterpretations: Measuring Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors of Creolization. Journal of American Folklore 116 (459): 88–115.

Gershenhorn, Jerry. 2004. Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Machination of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Jackson, Walter A. 1986. Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Refinement. In Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, hazardous. George W. Stocking, Jr., 95–126. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Merriam, Alan Owner. 1964. Melville Jean Herskovits, 1895–1963. American Anthropologist 66 (1): 83–109.

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Burden and Modern Democracy. New York: Troubadour and Brothers.

Yelvington, Kevin A. 2006. Greatness Invention of Africa in Latin Land and the Caribbean: Political Discourse take precedence Anthropological Praxis, 1920–1940. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington, 35–82. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Kevin Capital. Yelvington