Melville Herskovits emerged as a widely recognized and often controversial figure in the academic discipline of anthropology. His innovative research on African folk practices revolutionized the way scholars approached the study of culture and folklore.
Born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on September 10, 1895, Herskovits was a first-generation American. His father emigrated from Hungary and his mother from Germany. After residing in several American states as a youth, Herskovits served in the Army Medical Corps during World War I. Upon returning to the United States, he earned a degree in history from the University of Chicago, graduating in 1920.
At this point, Herskovits remained unsure what career to pursue. He did not enroll in his first course in anthropology until age twenty-six, at which time he became captivated by the emerging academic field of cultural studies. Herskovits studied at the University of Chicago (PhB, 1920) and Columbia University (PhD, 1923), where he worked with one of the best-known anthropologists of the era, Franz Boas. His dissertation was published in 1926 as The Cattle Complex in East Africa. This work addressed the issues of cultural influence and authority.
Herskovits also studied with anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser and sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen at the New School for Social Research. This influence may help explain Herskovits’s keen interest in the development of economic anthropology, as is apparent in his subsequent publication of The Economic Life of Primitive People (1940) and Economic Transition in Africa (1964). Herskovits took part in a lively discourse about culture in New York City. During this period, he counted among his classmates and partners in inquiry such notable figures as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. While in New York, Herskovits also made contact with those involved in an unprecedented explosion of artistic and scholarly activity known as the Harlem Renaissance. A piece by Herskovits, “The Negro’s Americanisms,” even appeared in one of the seminal collections associated with that cultural movement, Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925).
In 1924, Herskovits married his colleague, Frances Shapiro. They continued to collaborate as researchers, co-authoring works such as Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana (1934), Suriname Folk Lore (1936), Trinidad Village (1947), and Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (1958). Their favorite collaboration, a daughter born in 1935, grew up to become a professor of African history at SUNY Purchase.
Herskovits created his legacy as a scholar at Northwestern University from 1927 to 1963. In 1931, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1935 he became a full professor. Originally a faculty member of the sociology department, he was initially the only anthropologist on campus. Herskovits’s efforts played a major role in establishing anthropology as an autonomous department. While at Northwestern, he founded the nation’s first higher education program in African Studies in 1951. Ten years later, Herskovitz became the chair of African Studies. Herskovits also taught at Columbia University and Howard University.
Over the course of his career, Melville Herskovitz conducted cultural fieldwork at a variety of sites, including locations in Benin, Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, Suriname, and Trinidad. He is best recognized, however, for his ethnographic and ethnological work in Africa. His interests included ethnopsychology and aesthetics. His work has stimulated lively scholarly debate regarding questions of race and privilege. His research ultimately triggered a debate over who is entitled to participate in constructing the cultural narrative of a people, their struggles, and their triumphs.
One of Herskovits’s central assertions was that black culture in the United States was not “pathological,” meaning derivative of the dominant white culture. He insisted that descendants of Africans in the United States possessed a culture with integrity and rooted in African traditions. This effort to take African American culture seriously and to engage it on its own terms was an important contribution to the study of the folklore of various nationalities and races in the United States. In this sense, Herskovits helped promote a notion of cultural identity that placed cultures on fully equal terms. This context-sensitive approach to studying people-groups, as an alternative to using one’s own culture as an implied standard by which to measure other cultures, came to be known as cultural relativism.
In addition to public addresses, articles, and book chapters, his publications include The American Negro (1928), The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Man and His Works (1948), and The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1962). His colleagues adopted some of his volumes as textbooks, thereby helping to ensure that Herskovits would shape the next generation’s thought and research.
Herskovits went on to found the African Studies Association (ASA) in 1957, serving as the group’s first president. In recognition of his pivotal role in both the organization and the discipline of anthropology, the ASA now confers the Herskovits Award, given annually “to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year.” Herskovits was also active in a variety of other professional organizations, including the American Folklore Society, American Anthropological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Anthropology Congress. In 1954, Northwestern University established the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. This Africana collection is the world’s largest separate holding. Melville Herskovits’s papers are available for study at Northwestern University’s University Archives.
Beyond his influence on the field of anthropology, Melville Herskovits also had an impact on cultural movements within the United States. For example, the Black Panther Party invoked Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) as a resource in their struggle. If an intellectual’s measure may be taken in the variety, longevity, and passion of the debates he stimulated, then Melville Herskovits may be without rival. He not only contributed to the field of cultural anthropology, he inspired other researchers to engage deeply the oral and written folklore traditions of the various ethnic and racial groups in a nation characterized by bewildering cultural diversity.
Linda S. Watts
See also Bettelheim, Bruno; Campbell, Joseph; Hazard, Thomas Robinson; Hughes, Langston; Hurston, Zora Neale; Lomax, Alan
Further Reading
Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Jennifer Burton. 1998. Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies. New York: W. W. Norton.
Herskovits, Melville J., and Frances S. Herskovits. 1936. Suriname Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press.
Roberts, John W. 1990. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Simpson, George Eaton. 1973. Melville J. Herskovits. New York: Columbia University Press.