Background
Melville Herskovits was born in Belefontaine, Ohio, on September 10, 1895.
(An authoritative view of the extent to which the African ...)
An authoritative view of the extent to which the African culture has survived in the New World setting."--New York Times his book is a precious document in the intellectual history of the black Americas. Its author was surely the first academically respectable white scholar to take seriously the cultural achievements of Afro-Americans, throughout the Hemisphere. His influence is still keenly felt, within and beyond his discipline
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(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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(When this book was first published in 1958, Melville Hers...)
When this book was first published in 1958, Melville Herskovits, with his wife and collaborator, Frances, had spent over twenty years studying the social networks, religion, music, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the major site of their Africa work, is in the country now known as the Republic of Benin. This volume, published now as a companion piece to Northwestern University Press's best-selling West African Folktales, has two goals: to provide basic texts of material collected in the field; and to show how they were collected, analyzed, and theorized in the anthropological and folklore disciplinary traditions of Herskovits's day. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.
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(Treface THE pages that follow describe scenes in the live...)
Treface THE pages that follow describe scenes in the lives of a Negro people living in isolation in the interior of Dutch Guiana, South A merica. These Negroes are the descendants of runaway slaves imported from A frica, who took refuge in the dense Guiana bush and established African villages along the rivers whose rapids are their fortifications. The end of the seventeenth century already found these Negroes in constantly growing numbers up the Suriname River, and before the middle of the next century they were sufficiently organized to make repeated raids on the plantations for guns and gunpowder, for machetes and women. Several campaigns were conducted against them, but eventually final treaties were concluded with the Dutch owners of the colony, which guaranteed them their freedom. Today when a Bush Negro drinks with a white man his toast is Free! Three tribal groups go to make up this Bush Negro population. The Saramacca tribe, of whom we write, is found in the heart of the colony along the upper reaches of the Suriname River (called by the Bush Negroes the Saramacca, and hence so named in this book), and farther south along the Gran Rio and the Pikien Rio. This tribe has had the least contact with outside influences, and it is the Saramacca language which differs most from that spoken by the Negroes of the coastal region. The second is the A wka tribe, found mainly along the Marowyne (M aroni) River, which forms the boundary between French and Dutch Guiana; there are in addition several A wka villages on the lowerS (Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.) About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology. Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writ
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Melville Herskovits was born in Belefontaine, Ohio, on September 10, 1895.
He received his education at Columbia University.
He founded the program of African studies at Northwestern University, where many of the first American African specialists were trained. When the African Studies Association was formed, he became its first president.
Herskovits is chiefly famous for his much-debated thesis that African American culture owes much to the African way of life, expressed in his Myth of the Negro Past (1941). The "myth" that he tried to destroy was that the ancestral cultures of blacks were primitive, with Africans making no contribution to the history of the world, and that under the slave regime of the antebellum South virtually all traces of African culture—except, perhaps, certain survivals in music and the dance—had been destroyed. Not only did Herskovits maintain that Africanism existed in a black American subculture, but he argued that certain of these cultural traits had been transmitted to the whites.
Herskovits held that African survivals were less common in the United States than in Brazil or the Caribbean because of the higher proportion of whites to blacks in the American South and the absence of mountain or jungle retreats where escaped slaves could have developed stable communities without white interference. African survivals were thus strongest among the inhabitants of the coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia because of their relative isolation. He tried to show that their speech and syntax, once thought to be derivative from archaic dialects of 16th-century England, were derived from Africa. Although the African influence upon black music and dance, both of which in turn influenced white culture, was recognized and accepted, Herskovits contended that much of black folklore, magic, and folk medicine could also be traced to African origins, as could their mutual aid societies and funeral practices.
African American scholars and liberal whites involved in bettering race relations at first opposed Herskovits's thesis on the existence of a black subculture in North America. The inescapable implication of his thesis was that African Americans were an unassimilable group, unable to adjust to white middle-class society, a group immalleable to the "melting pot. " In opposition to Herskovits's thesis, his antagonists attempted to explain the existence of the black pattern of culture not on the basis of African derivations but on the basis of social oppression and economic degradation. With the rise of the black power ideology and such movements as the Black Panthers, the difference or uniqueness of African Americans was gloried in, and the notion of a black subculture was exalted. Herskovits's theories thus enjoyed a tremendous revival as African Americans sought the origins of their identity. Thus it appears that the validity of his theories remains to be determined at a time when they are not so emotionally involved in contemporary political movements.
Herskovits is also known as one of the leading exponents of ethical relativism in politics, the position that maintains that there is no objective order of justice, but that what is just in one culture may be unjust in another. Thus he wrote that "the relativist point of view brings into relief the validity of every set of norms for the people whose lives are guided by them. " One of the objections made to this position is that it would make the set of norms which guided the lives of most Germans under Hitler valid. Thus, it would be "immoral" to judge another culture (such as Nazi Germany) by one's own moral norms since morality is determined by the culture, and a member of that culture could not do other than what he did do.
(When this book was first published in 1958, Melville Hers...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Treface THE pages that follow describe scenes in the live...)
(An authoritative view of the extent to which the African ...)
Among his fellow students was future anthropologists Frances Shapiro. He and Shapiro married in Paris in 1924. They later had a daughter, Jean Herskovits, who became a historian as an adult.
She was an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
She is a research professor of history at the State University of New York at Purchase specializing in African (particularly Nigerian) history and politics.
