Melville J. Herskovits | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1895-09-10)September 10, 1895 Bellefontaine, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | February 25, 1963(1963-02-25) (aged 67) Evanston, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago Columbia University |
| Known for | African-American studies African studies |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Jean Herskovits |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology |
| Institutions | Northwestern University |
| Doctoral advisor | Franz Boas |
| Doctoral students | William Bascom,Erika Eichhorn Bourguignon |
Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an Americananthropologist who helped to first establishAfrican andAfrican Diaspora studies in Americanacademia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from African cultures as expressed in African-American communities. He worked with his wife Frances (Shapiro) Herskovits, also an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. They jointly wrote several books and monographs.
Born toJewish immigrants inBellefontaine, Ohio, in 1895, Herskovits attended local public schools. He served in theUnited States Army Medical Corps in France duringWorld War I.[1]
Afterward, he went to college, earning aBachelor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Chicago in 1920. He went toNew York City for graduate work, earning hisM.A. andPh.D. inanthropology fromColumbia University under the guidance of the German-born American anthropologistFranz Boas. This subject was in its early decades of being developed as a formal field of study. Herskovits'sdissertation, titledThe Cattle Complex in East Africa, investigated theories ofpower and authority in Africa as expressed in the ownership and raising of cattle. He studied how some aspects of African culture and traditions were expressed inAfrican-American culture in the 1900s.
Among his fellow students were future anthropologistsKatherine Dunham,Ruth Benedict,Margaret Mead,Elsie Clews Parsons, and Frances Shapiro. He and Shapiro married inParis, France, in 1924. They later had a daughter,Jean Herskovits, who became a historian.
In 1927, Herskovits moved toNorthwestern University inEvanston, Illinois, as a full-time anthropologist.[2] In 1928 and 1929 he and his wife Frances Herskovits did field work in Suriname, among theSaramaka (then called Bush Negroes), and jointly wrote a book about the people.[3]
In 1934, Herskovits and his wife Frances spent more than three months in theHaitian village ofMirebalais, the findings of which research he published in his 1937 bookLife in a Haitian Valley. In its time, this work was considered one of the most accurate depictions of the Haitian practice ofVodou. They meticulously detailed the lives and Vodou practices of Mirebalais residents during their three-month stay. They conducted field work in Benin, Brazil, Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria and Trinidad. In 1938, Herskovits established the new Department of Anthropology at Northwestern.[2]
In the early 1940s, Herskovits and his wife Frances metBarbara Hadley Stein, who was in Brazil to do research on the abolition of slavery there. She introduced to themStanley J. Stein, a graduate student in Latin American history atHarvard University. With advice from Herskovits, Stein and Stein started recordingJongo songs, which in 2013 received scholarly attention.[4] Herskovits also influencedAlan Lomax, who collected African-American songs.
In 1948, Herskovits founded the first major interdisciplinary American program inAfrican studies at Northwestern University, with the aid of a three-year $30,000 grant from theCarnegie Foundation, followed by a five-year $100,000 grant from theFord Foundation in 1951. The Program of African Studies was the first of its kind at a United States academic institution.[5] The goals of the program were to "produce scholars of competence in their respective subjects, who will focus the resources of their special fields on the study of aspects of African life relevant to their disciplines."[2]
The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, established in 1954, is the largest separateAfricana collection in the world. To date, it contains more than 260,000 bound volumes, including 5,000 rare books, more than 3,000 periodicals, journals and newspapers, archival and manuscript collections, 15,000 books in 300 differentAfrican languages, extensive collections of maps, posters, videos and photographs, as well as electronic resources.[2][6] In 1957, Herskovits founded theAfrican Studies Association and was the organization's first president.[6]
Herskovits's bookThe Myth of the Negro Past is about African cultural influences on African Americans; it rejects the notion that African Americans lost all traces of their past when they weretaken from Africa and enslaved in America. He traced numerous elements expressed in the contemporary African-American culture that could be traced to African cultures. Herskovits emphasizedrace as a sociological concept, not a biological one. He also helped forge the concept ofcultural relativism, particularly in his bookMan and His Works. This book examines in depth the effects of westernization on Africans of diverse cultures who were brought during slavery to the Americas, and who then developed a distinctly different African-American culture as a product of this displacement. AsLeRoi Jones has commented on this text, some believe that the introduction of these Africans to Christianity is what propelled such westernization.[citation needed] Christian concepts shifted slave narratives from an emphasis on travelling home to their African countries of origin to traveling home to see their Lord, in Heaven. The development of African-American Christian churches, which served as one of the only places to provide these peoples with access to social mobility, further established a distinctly western culture among Africans in America. Along with these churches came Negro spirituals, which are cited as likely the first kind of music native to America made by Africans. Nonetheless, the development of such spirituals included direct influence from the African roots. This became apparent in a number of aspects of the spirituals, from the inclusion of call and response lines and alternate scales to the varied timbres and rhythms. All of this goes to show that Herskovits's claims in this book carry much truth and accuracy in regards to the establishment of the African American identity as descendant of that of the African, and how music played into such shifts.
Herskovits debated with sociologistE. Franklin Frazier on the nature of cultural contact in theWestern Hemisphere, specifically with reference to Africans, Europeans, and their descendants. Frazier emphasized how Africans had adapted to their new environment in the Americas. Herskovits was interested in showing elements of continuity from African cultures into the present community.[7]
AfterWorld War II, Herskovits publicly advocatedindependence of African nations from the colonial powers. He strongly criticized American politicians for viewing African nations as objects ofCold War strategy. Frequently called on as an adviser to government, Herskovits served on the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations in Chicago (1945) and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959–60).[2]
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