![]() The archive concerning the Herskovitses in Brazil is generous. I will focus here on a number of less known aspects of the Herskovitses’ field trip to Brazil and their entanglement with Brazilian scholars, intellectuals and politicians as well as, more generally, with the making of anthropology in Brazil. Was black culture and family structure the result of slavery and later the adjustment to poverty ? Or was it the result of Africanisms, the survival of traditional African forms of life and culture adapted to life in the New World ? Beyond these two approaches there were, of course, different perspectives on the antiracist struggle as well as very different types of networks in Brazil. Īlready at that time the style and language of sociologists and anthropologists (and linguists) were different – drier or soberer for the former and emphatically romantic for the latter – related to radically different approaches to the same phenomenon, in this case, the “origins” and causality of black cultural forms in the New World. It is the story of tensions between a black American sociologist and a white Jewish American anthropologist, both using the services of Brazilian intermediaries and gatekeepers, who were themselves interested parties in the contention. The debate highlighted interesting aspects regarding the way anthropology, different from sociology, defines itself as a discipline, as well as the construction of Afro-Brazilian studies as an academic field. Frances had already co-written books with Melville and had accumulated considerable fieldwork experience in Surinam, Dahomey and Haiti.įrazier and Herskovits’s opposing visions reached a large readership through the publication in the American Sociological Review of an article by Frazier, followed by a response by Herskovits and a counter response by Frazier (Herskovits 1943d Frazier 19). Frazier came from Howard University, Turner from Fisk University and Herskovits from Northwestern. Turner was a friend of Frazier, but his scholarly theories were closer to those of Herskovits. In between the two of them was black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, who already had considerable experience in researching African survival in Black speech in the US and would later publish his seminal book on African influences in Gullah (Turner 1949), the language spoken by the people of the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States. To make things even more complex, they shared part of their informants : the povo de santo (the members) of the same candomblé houses of worship in Salvador – mostly the prestigious and “traditional” Gantois terreiro, of the Ketu/Yoruba nation. Franklin Frazier, the most famous black sociologist of the time, who had already published The Negro Family in the United States in 1939, was locked in an argument with the equally famous anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the “origins” of the so-called black family and more generally on the weight of African heritage on black cultures in the Americas (see Mintz and Price 1992). Each of them had a special encounter with Bahia and such experience was to be relevant for the rest of their career, even if none of them actually came back to that field as each of them had planned. Herskovits and his wife Frances relied on a different and somewhat more conventional network, interwoven with the local political and intellectual elites. Frazier and Turner trailed the path already laid by Donald Pierson and Ruth Landes in 1936-38. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Frances and Melville Herskovits. Four important US scholars carried out fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, in the years 1940-42 : E. Salvador even became the site of the battle between two different perceptions of black integration in the United States and of the place of Africa in this process. Between 19, the city of Salvador, Bahia received different degrees of attention by a large number of foreign scholars and intellectuals, all of them impressed – if not seduced – by the “magic” of this city, largely the result of its black popular culture : Donald Pierson (1900-1995), Robert Park (1864-1944), Ruth Landes (1908-1991), Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890-1972), E.
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