yelvington - melville j herskovits theory of folklore

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Melville J. Herskovitss Theory of Folklore

by

Kevin A. YelvingtonDepartment of Anthropology

University of South Florida

Presented to the Workshop on Folklore and the Politics of Belief in the CaribbeanMellon Seminar on Caribbean Cultural History

Department of History

University of California at Los AngelesMay 14, 2009

To understand Melville J. Herskovitss theory of folklore we must understand, as with

everything Herskovits did, Franz Boass approach to the subject. As is well known, Boas sought

to distinguish his approach to anthropology from that of the cultural evolutionists, and especially

that of E.B. Tylor. He accomplished this over a ten-year period at the end of the nineteenth

century, culminating with his article The Limitations of the Comparative Method of

Anthropology (Boas 1896). What is not always remembered is that he used folklore as a

platform for this critique. The Limitations article was indeed a study of the distribution of folk-

tale elements, and Boas used folklore to make his main points about culture: He argued that the

student of culture must see elements in relation to the whole, that is, the development and use of

such specimens as cooking utensils, weapons, and musical instruments needed to be seen in

relation to their surroundings, that is, the physical environment, the history of the people, and

the peoples with whom the people in question came into contact. These specimens, often the

decontextualized vehicles for the evolutionists arguments about the levels of culture read as

civilization, for Boas had to be seen in relation to the cultural whole. The same thing with

folklore which, too, was related to the culture as a whole and was one of the avenues of


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expression for the members of the culture. Further, toward the end of the century Boas used

folklore to work through his interest in the affects of one culture upon another. In 1898 he wrote

about tribal mythologies: The mythologies of the various tribes as we find them now are not

organic growths, but have gradually developed and obtained their present form by the accretion

of foreign material. While, sometimes, this material was adopted as-is, this foreign material was

adapted and changed in form according to the genius of the people who borrowed it (quoted in

Stocking 1974:5).

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Boas, again arguing from the example of

folklore, wrote that folklore was founded on events that reflect the [everyday] occurrences of

human life, particularly those that stir the emotions of the people. At the same time, because the

power of imagination in man was rather limited it was case of people preferring to operate

with the old stock of imaginative happenings than invent new ones. Thus, their imaginations

played with a few plots, which were extended by means of a number of motives that have a

very wide distribution, which each group selectively borrows, adopts and adapts under the

stress of a dominant idea or set of social practices characteristic of their own culture (quoted in

Stocking 1974:6). As Stocking sums up, although Boas was here concerned with folklore per se,

by implication he suggested something about the general dynamics of cultural processes the

processes by which the genius of a people acted to mold borrowed elements to a traditional

pattern (Stocking 1974:6).

By the time Herskovits was becoming one of his students, Boas was codifying his view

of the primary aim of his anthropology in a 1920 article entitled The Methods of Ethnology:

American scholars are primarily interested in the dynamic phenomena of cultural change, and to


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try to elucidate cultural history by the application of the results of their studies (Boas 1920:314).

This fit in well with his on-going critique of evolutionism: The history of human civilization

does not appear to us as determined entirely by psychological necessity that leads to a uniform

evolution the world over. We rather see that each cultural group has its own unique history,

dependent partly upon the peculiar inner development of the social group, and partly upon the

foreign influences to which it has been subjected. He further held that There have been

processes of gradual differentiation as well as processes of leveling down differences between

neighboring cultural centers, but it would be quite impossible to understand, on the basis of a

single evolutionary scheme, what happened to any particular people (Boas 1920:317). He then

went on to point to the studies of Elsie Clews Parsons, Alfred Kroeber, and Leslie Spier on the

acculturation process on the Zui, where, in contrast to the psychological explanation offered

by Frank Hamilton Cushing, misleading if plausible as it was, Dr. Parsons studies prove

conclusively the deep influence which Spanish ideas have had upon Zui culture, and, along with

Dr. Kroebers investigations, give us one of the best examples of acculturation that have come to

our notice. The historical study shows an entirely different picture compared to the

psychological explanation, a picture in which the unique combination of ancient traits (which

in themselves are undoubtedly complex) and of European influences, have brought about the

present condition (1920:317).

Despite Boass critique of evolutionism (see Stocking 1968:195-233) this did not mean

that he was completely at odds, consciously or unconsciously, with some of the assumptions of

the social evolutionists like Herbert Spencer or E.B. Tylor. His perspective entailed the

utilization of a key concept in the evolutionists schema: that of cultural survivals. Tylor


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defined survivals in Primitive Culture as processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which

have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which

they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition

of culture out of which a newer has been evolved (Tylor 1871:16; cf. Hodgen 1936). Boas,

writing in 1898 on the myths of primitive people, again maintained that the material of which

they are built up is of heterogeneous origin, and that much of it is adopted ready-made. The

peculiar manner in which foreign and indigenous material is interwoven and worked into a

somewhat homogeneous fabric depends to a great extent upon the social conditions and habits of

the people. The oft-repeated actions, habits and customs of a people, especially to the extent

that they are enshrined in ritual, could be expected to be more stable than those not so established

via repetition in a proscribed form and via ritual:

Discrepancies between the two...belong to a class of phenomena that are called

survivals. The discrepancy may consist in the preservation of earlier customs in

traditions, or in fragments of early traditions under modified social conditions. The

survivals themselves are proof of the gradual process of assimilation between social

conditions and traditions which has wrought fundamental changes in the lore of mankind.

[Boas 1940 [1898]:423].

Nearly thirty years later Boas again took up the question of Tylors evolutionism, and

again he wanted to preserve the idea of survivals. According to Boas, Tylor wrongly assumed

that the antiquity of one particular type is essentially due to a classification in which the form

that appears as the simplest from any one point of view is considered at the same time as

historically the oldest. Tylor felt the weakness of this assumption when he tried to support his


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thesis by the study of survivals which indicate the character of earlier developmental stages.

The problem was that it cannot be claimed that a systematic attempt has ever been made to

substantiate the theory of a definite evolutionary sequence on the basis of the study of survivals.

All that can be said is that fragments of earlier historical stages are bound to exist and are found

(Boas 1924:342). Boas illustrated the existence of these fragments with a discussion of the

survival of matrilineal forms of kinship in patrilineal society. But this, however, does not by any

means provide that everywhere matrilineal society must have been the earlier form (Boas

1924:343).

In developing his approach to the folklore of the Afro-Americas, Herskovits drew upon

these fundamental Boasian ideas. The way was left open for Herskovits to pursue the idea of

cultural survivals. Indeed, Boas had written to Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 suggesting that

African mannerisms were retained by African Americans (cited in Baron 1994:105; and in

Gershenhorn 2004:253-254, note 38).1

Herskovits pursued a project that he saw as the

1Thus it seems not to be the case that, as Jackson argues, Boas believed that African

culture had been lost by blacks in America, even if he stressed the importance of educating

black Americas about African culture as a way of increasing race pride and countering the

strong feeling of despondency among the best classes of the Negro (Jackson 1986:98).

Herskovits had written to Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel about

Hurston, his research assistant in his physical anthropological project on race mixing and the

American Negro. Although she was more White than Negro in her ancestry, Herskovits said,

her manner of speech, her expressions, in short, her motor behavior were what would be


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identification and documentation of African cultural survivals, within the theoretical tradition of

Boasian historical-cultural particularism and thus it might be said that Herskovits inherited

Boass incomplete critique of social evolutionism and with an eventual emphasis on

acculturation (see Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936). After all, under acculturation it was

still the geist, or genius of a people, that molded borrowed elements to a traditional pattern.

Somewhat ironically, then, Herskovits began his cultural anthropological investigations

of African Americans in the early 1920s, and went from a perspective that emphasized the

assimilation of African Americans to their wider cultural surroundings, at the same time denying

the possibility of African cultural survivals (e.g., Herskovits 1925, 1927), a position, it must be

said, that was consonant with aspects of Boass thought, to taking up a position he would hold

for the rest of his life that these survivals underlay the behavioral repertoires of African

Americans (Baron 1994; Gershenhorn 2004; Jackson 1986; Yelvington 2006). This occurred

because of the interactions of a number of forces, including the personal influence of folklorist

Elsie Clews Parsons, a close associate of Boas and a teacher of Herskovits. Parsons collected

folklore in the Caribbean (e.g., Parsons 1918, 1933, 1936, 1943), she financed many of Boass

students and their publications, and along with Boas was active in the American Folk-Lore

Society and itsJournal of American Folk-Lore, exhibiting with Boas a great interest in Afro-

American folklore where between the both of them they put together several Negro Numbers

termed typically Negro and he suggested that these movements, observed by Herskovits when

Hurston was singing spirituals, had been carried over as a behavior pattern handed down thru

imitation and example from the original African slaves who were brought here (Herskovits to

von Hornbostel, June 10, 1927, quoted in Jackson 1986:107).


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as the issues of theJournal were affectionately called (Baker 1998, 2000; Deacon 1997;

Zumwalt 1992). Boas and others had founded the American Folk-Lore Society in 1888 and Boas

served as president in 1900, 1932, and 1934, and was the editor of theJournal of American Folk-

Lorebetween 1908 and 1923, and in all was on the editorial board for forty-four years. As Baker

shows (1998:143-167), Boas effected an alliance between black intellectuals and anthropologists

in the collection and publication of the folklore of the Afro-Americas. Thus, even though he

might have disavowed such a position, here was Boas facilitating the use of folklore for political

reasons, a tradition rooted in the German romanticism of Herder (Wilson 1973), a tradition of

which he was a part (Bunzl 1996),and where folklore was useful in nationalist constructions and

identity politics (Bendix 1997; Linke 1990; Zumwalt 1988).

Parsons traced folktales in quest for their points of origin, which she thought could be

discerned. About her work on Andros Island in the Bahamas, she said Whatever may have been

the provenience of the tales in Africa, Portuguese or other, I have no doubt that by far the greater

number of the Bahama tales were learned there, learned, not in America, but in Africa

(Parsons 1918:xii). She advocated that the lore which is a part of an intimate knowledge of

island life should be studied for an appreciation of the relations between African cultures and

the Negro in America (Parsons 1933:vii-viii). It was Parsons, with this orientation, who as early

as 1927 suggested through Boas to Herskovits immediately on the heels of Herskovitss

writings emphasizing the cultural assimilation of African Americans into the US mainstream

that Herskovits seek in the Suriname bush among the Bush Negro tribes there African

cultural continuities manifest in the New World in their purest, most unadulterated forms.

Herskovits wrote to Parsons in April, 1927 to say Dr. Boas told me of your very kind


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suggestion regarding field work in Suriname, and to say that he looked forward to talking with

her about the matter (Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University, (hereafter H.P.N.),

Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, April 30, 1927). By June, he was reporting on his

appointment to Northwestern University, and said I hope that, once established, the way will be

clared [sic] for some research on the Bush Negroes (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to

Parsons, June 29, 1927). Parsonss replied by saying simply Congratulations on the first step

towards the Bush Negroes! (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Parsons to Herskovits, July 14, 1927).

Parsons played a pivotal role in Herskovitss thinking and in his academic career. She paid for

his first ethnological fieldwork trips, to Suriname in 1928 and 1929 and to Dahomey in 1931,

paying, as well, for the publication ofSuriname Folk-Lore, published by Columbia University

Press (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936), one of the two major volumes to come out of the

Suriname fieldwork (Simpson 1973:9; Zumwalt 1992:317). Upon hearing from Boas of Parsons

underwriting his first fieldwork trip to Suriname, Herskovits wrote to Parsons to thank her and

enthusiastically asserted Suriname seems to be a sort of an ethnological happy hunting-

grounds (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, December 6, 1927).

The fieldwork Melville Herskovits and his wife, anthropological partner, and co-author

Frances S. Herskovits conducted in Suriname in the summers of 1928 and 1929 was arduous for

them (Gershenhorn 2004:70-78; Price and Price 2003), but certainly yielded an enormous

amount of folklore material. Melville Herskovits, at least, regarded the ethnographic data he

collected in the bush among the Saramaka Bush Negroes with characteristic positivism and

empiricism, writing in his field diary in Suriname that Its an ethnological gold-mine here and

that the material is here so thick that it will take a steam-shovel to gather it in (Melville J. and


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Frances S. Herskovits Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York

Public Library, Suriname Field Trip Diary, entries of July 25 and July 28, 1928).2

Here,

Herskovits was referring to his ethnological interviews, but presumably he also held the same

view of the folklore material Frances was collecting in Paramaribo, the coastal capital of the

Dutch colony. Because of his fears for her safety, and the fears of Boas and Parsons,3

Frances

remained in the city during the first fieldwork trip of 1928, while Melville, along with guides,

ventured into the bush. However, it was Melville who worked up the material Frances

2In folklore, Herskovits came to complain that the folklore of the Afro-Americas was

presented as selected according to preconceived categories (e.g., Herskovits 1943), as if the

materials were already out there simply to be collected and not in correspondence to an

existing theoretical schema.

3See Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Boas to

Herskovits, December 3, 1927, where Boas wrote to Herskovits saying I talked over the plan of

your Surinam trip with Elsie and she says that she is willing to support it. In talking over the

matter both of us are doubtful as to whether it would be advisable for you to bring Frances along.

It is no joke travelling [sic] in the tropics and particularly when you leave the towns and go into

the woods it will be very hard for her. So that both of us dissuade very decidedly a joint trip.

Melville became ill and was bedridden before he could start his journey into the rainforest to

start ethnographic fieldwork among the Saramakas. Frances started her folklore collecting right

away. See Price and Price (2003). For Melvilles reply to Boas where he justifies Francess

attendance and participation, see ibid., Herskovits to Boas, December 6, 1927.


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collected (see H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Frances S. Herskovits to Parsons, November 6, 1928).

Disavowing any idea of his newfound theoretical orientation being prepared for him, in

several places Herskovits retrospectively presented his Suriname fieldwork as a matter of

scientific discovery. For example, at the beginning ofThe Myth of the Negro Past(1941),

Herskovits that the first hand investigation of New World Negro societies outside the United

States led to the abandonment of his initial views. Further, he claimed that this research was not

designed to look for Africanisms, or African cultural survivals, and that only incidentally were

they encountered: It was the investigation on this broader base, wherein the problem of

Africanisms in present-day Negro behavior was only incidental, that forced revision of an

hypothesis which, in the initial stages of research, there was no tendency to question (1941:6).4

Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Yelvington 2006), the Boasian tradition, the influence of

Parsons, and his developing relationships with ethnologists and folklorists in Latin America and

the Caribbean, such as Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, and Arthur Ramos in

4Frances Herskovits wrote in an edited volume of Melvilles work, His field experience

in Suriname in 1928 and 1929 had a profound influence on his thinking, and though he was

scarcely conscious of this at the time, the findings in both the Bush and the city of Paramaribo

began shaping his concepts on acculturation. In the Guiana Bush, among the Saramacca peoples,

he saw, as he often told his students, nearly all of western sub-Saharan African represented, from

what is now Mali to Loango and into the Congo and the Loango chief who came to our base

camp invoked both the Great God of the Akan of the Gold Coast,Nyankompon, and the Bantu

Zambi (1966:vii-viii).


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Brazil, all of whom shared Herskovitss emerging theoretical orientation and intention document

what they defined as African cultural survivals in the national context albeit for varied

political purposes which can only be alluded to here. As with Herskovits, the study of folklore

was central to their enterprise.5

This was the era in the Caribbean as elsewhere when folklore

was used as a plank in nationalist arguments. In Puerto Rico, for instance, Antonio S. Pedreira

(who had studied at Columbia University in the 1920s) was developing a view of Puerto Rican

national identity centered around the image of thejbaro, or peasant, and Spanish cultural

heritage, and in this movement the Herderian study of folklore as revelatory of the national soul

became important (e.g., Pedreira 1935; cf. Flores 1979; Guerra 1998). Price-Mars, who had

railed against the social and cultural effects of the US occupation of Haiti and who had urged his

fellow Haitians to look to the folklore for the authentic Haitian culture rather than to be imitative

of France or North America (Price-Mars 1928), in Formation Ethnique, Folk-Lore et Culture de

Peuple Hatien he referred readers to the work of the Herskovitses as examples of how folklore

should be studied in order to be useful. He defined folklore as the sum of beliefs, superstitions,

legends, tales, songs, riddles and customs on which lie the life of a primitive people and

constitute the foundations of their culture. He went on:

5I will not cite the extensive works of these scholars here. The recent critical literature on

them includes but is not limited to the following: On Price-Mars, see Averill (2008); Largey

(2006); Magloire and Yelvington (2005); Ramsey (2002); on Ortiz, see Bronfman (2004);

Bremer (1993); Font and Quiroz (2005); Moore (1994, 1997);Palmi (2002); Rodrguez-

Mangual (2004); Sant (2002); on Ramos, see Barros (2000); Lange (2008); Romo (2007).


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There is no country which possesses as rich a well of oral tradition as ours. And these

traditions, profound and marvelous, date back to the origins of the race. Throughout

thousands of years, they embody the annals transmitted from one generation to the next

and by which the gestures of the past and the paths of the present are justified. They will

compact with steadfast patience the materials on which history will uproot much later

with hypotheses of its construction. During thousands of years, they were the deposits of

obscure thoughts of our ancestors, the discrete guardians of the recipe by which the

enigmas of the world are explained. And for a people deprived of archives, lacking a

written language, they consist in themselves of the inestimable worth of documents laden

with the secret of expired ages that await their alert interpreters (1956 [1939]:50-51, my

translation; see, also, Price-Mars 1951).

Yet, as with the ethnology coming out of Price-Mars, Ortiz, and Ramos, and others,

Herskovits found no difficulty in incorporating their arguments into his own as he constructed or,

rather, imbibed what was for him an apparently new paradigm as he entered into dialogue with

these scholars. He did not reflect at this point on the political dimensions of folklore scholarship

as he went about making unacknowledged nationalist arguments of his own.6

In an early

6Later, he acknowledged that in various countries the study of folklore has always been

marked by a strong nationalistic emphasis, and its investigation, often conducted under

governmental subsidies, has been focused on local or regional areas within specific domains

(1946:92), but he did not connect in print at least this observation with his own work nor to that

of those scholars on whose work he drew.


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published statement of this new program, the 1930 article The Negro in the New World: The

Statement of a Problem, Herskovits proposed that the study of the descendants of Africans in

the New World should be concerned with what was retained from African culture, what was

discarded, what was learned in the New World context and under what conditions culture could

be seen to maintain itself under strain. Here he called for more knowledge of African cultures, so

that we shall have an adequate basis to investigate the affiliation of those cultural traits with

American Negro has retained in his contact with white and Indian civilizations, and, on the

other hand, he assured that further investigation on this side of the Atlantic must result in more

data from which to draw conclusions as to the nature of the African cultural survivals which are

manifest in the behavior of the Negro in the Caribbean, the United States, and in South

America. He went on to say that it would be possible on the basis of then-current knowledge to

make a kind of chart indicating the extent to which the descendants of Africans brought to the

New World have retained Africanisms in their cultural behavior, with more in one locale in one

area of culture, and less in another place (1930:149).7 The decade of the 1930s was bookended

by the publication ofThe Myth of the Negro Past(1941), which sought to make the argument

that once the citizens, white and black, of the United States knew of the African cultural

background and that African Americans were like other immigrant groups in that they continued

to use the traditions of the motherland as they adapted to the new land then racism and

prejudice against African Americans would decrease.

Folklore figured prominently in this new theoretical orientation. Folklore was conceived

7Fifteen years later he did make such a chart. See Herskovits (1945).


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by Herskovits as one element of culture, such as religion or kinship, that could survive more or

less intact or be modified as it traveled. This view of folklore was consonant with the conception

of culture as a bundle of discernable traits. Folklore, then, for Herskovits could be used in

understanding the African cultural baseline as well as what had survived the Middle Passage.

Further, folklore was perhaps the Africanism par excellence, and it survived because it could for

a number of historical reasons. As he wrote in Life in a Haitian Valley, The trait of African

culture that has survived most tenaciously in all the New World, even when European influence

has been strongest, is that of folk-literature of tales, proverbs, and riddles (1937:264). Thus

there was for Herskovits more than a mere passing interest in folklore. In the key career years

between when he first began teaching a course on folklore in his second semester at

Northwestern, during the 1927-1928 school year (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to

Parsons, September 26, 1927),8

to when he became the president of the American Folklore

Society in 1945, were crucial for his career and theoretical development.

The fieldwork in Suriname resulted in two books and in a number of articles. Rebel

Destiny (Herskovits and Herskovits 1934) had the feel of a travel account; Suriname Folk-Lore

(Herskovits and Herskovits 1936) consisted of a long Notes on the Culture of the Paramaribo

Negroes (pp. 1-113), followed by hundreds of pages of Anansi stories, proverbs, including

8Gershenhorn (2004:137-138) has Herskovits teaching folklore by the 1930s when he

formed a separate Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. However, according to my

evidence Herskovits was teaching folklore from the very beginning of his appointment as the

lone anthropologist in Northwesterns Department of Sociology.


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those about the head kerchiefs worn by the older women of Paramaribo, and riddles collected

mainly by Frances. The fieldwork in West Africa in 1931 solidified Herskovitss core theory of

folklore entailing the view of folklore again, including narrative, proverbs, and riddles as

oral folk-literature, as something somehow arising out of but distinct from cultural custom

(Herskovits and Herskovits 1958; see Baron 2004). The field methods consisted of hiring paid

informants to provide information in response to questions, and the Herskovitses attending

ceremonies and storytelling events of various types. The emphasis was on folklores function in

the moral education of the young, especially proverbs, on audience participation, including more

or less scripted interruptions of storytellers, multiple narrative forms, the role of improvisation,

the use of double entendre, especially in riddles where the lewd and obscene could be disguised

from those listeners too young to understand, and the use of indirection in speech, especially for

social and community control. Rather than a focus on folklore as texts, performance style and the

contexts in which folklore was performed were crucial for the understanding of folklores

meaning and function. InRebel Destiny, based on the 1928 and 1929 fieldwork, there was

already an emphasis on context. The Herskovitses wrote of a story-telling session that the

speakers message was not the most important aspect (at least to the Herskovitses): What really

mattered, however, was the way in which the intervals in the story-telling were dramatized

(1934:103).

In the 1930s, Melville Herskovitss attention was drawn to the possibilities of the

theoretical advancement of the discipline through the use of the concept of acculturation (see

Redfield, Linton, and J. Herskovits 1936). This impacted his view of folklore under the

conditions of acculturation. Writing on the effects of acculturation on folklore, Herskovits


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lamented that these effects were given explicit statement in but a few studies. He

acknowledged the painstaking investigations that tracked how themes from various sources

have been combined in the tales of Indo-European peoples, but comparable analyses of

primitive tribes were lacking. The exceptions were work done by American folklorists whose

interests were focused solely on American Indians and African Americans and whose collection

of stories showed European and the occasional African motifs. Yet this stopped short of

the approach Herskovits advocated: Their elements are ordinarily not broken down as to show

how incidents of foreign derivation were worked into the aboriginal tales; still less information is

available as to the relationship between these stories and their social setting (Herskovits

1938:106). Further, with respect to New World Negro lore, rather than the conventional

approach of the folklorists, which consisted in referring to those folk from whom the same

motifs have been collected, Herskovits said effort should be put into showing the manner in

which these literary products have been subject to the process of repatterning and recombination

that is so especially subject to observation in the field and he referred to the work of Parsons,

Martha Beckwiths Jamaica research (Beckwith 1929), the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne

Comhaire-Sylvain (1937), as well as his own in Suriname (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936), as

positive examples of this sort of scholarship (Herskovits 1938:107).

As Baron (2003) shows, Herskovits revised his conceptual metaphors through the years.

For example, African cultural survivals, which could be seen as quaint antiquated traits, later

became seen as retentions, with the implication that effort went into their retention and where,

in a more active conceptualization, behaviors were reinterpretations of African cultural traits


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and traditions (see, especially, Herskovits 1946:97; Herskovits and Herskovits 1947).9

Further,

retentions and reinterpretations were later preferred because the idea of survivals could suggest

that these traits no longer had a function where Herskovits was keen to emphasize that

Africanisms defined as retentions and reinterpretations were fully functioning, and functional, in

and for Afro-American cultures and not, as he put it, seen as cultural curiosities (Herskovits

1943:3). Now, not all of the Boasian baggage he took on became transformed and, indeed, one

could argue that the idea of retentions and reinterpretations was only a slight variation on the

idea of survivals. In some ways, Herskovits simply renamed Boasian concepts but retained their

meaning and utility. For instance, the idea of a people being preoccupied with a small range of

interests and who expended their energies in some cultural institutions at the expense of others

became cultural focus (see Herskovits 1947:542-560). And the idea of a people molding

borrowed cultural elements according to their traditional pattern, their particular cultural

genius, was Herskovitss own unremarked upon use of the Boasian principle of the geist. With

regards to folklore, it seems Herskovits did move beyond Boas in his emphasis on the social

setting and the performance of narratives (see Baron 1994, 2004).

In this light, we should look at some of his last explicit programmatic statements on

folklore. In the special issue of the Journal of American Folklore to commemorate the death of

Parsons, Herskovits weighed in on what he saw as Some Next Steps in the Study of Negro

Folklore. He surveyed the developments in the field due to Parsonss influence, which he

9It is possible that Herskovits reconsidered his position after reading Hodgens (1936)

critique.


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identified as collecting tales without the use of preconceived categories, the recording of stories

as narrated and the identity of the storyteller and other information on the context, the

importance of the use of the catch phrase in the folklore of the Afro-Americas which was

especially valuable in comparative analysis, and Parsonss anthropological point of using

folklore to study the larger problems of cultural form and cultural dynamics. Folklore, Parsons

had explained in conversation, permitted the study of diffusion in process (1943:1-2).

Herskovits stressed the need for the following next steps: The need for better

definitions, the need for additional data, especially from certain key geographical areas, the need

for a re-analysis of existing materials, and the need to more fully understand the social contexts

of folklore performance. He was anxious to differentiate between folklore as folk literature and

folk custom. He decried the emphasis on folk custom to the expense of folk literature in many

studies, and pleaded for defining more sharply the very word folklore, in terms of the

distinction between folk literature and folk custom (1943:4). Yet his reasoning continued to

betray an underlying evolutionism: The tales, proverbs and riddles which in many regions are

today the most purely African aspects of the life of the Negroes, have been put aside by students

of the Negro for the study of other phases of Negro life more difficult to access and less

amenable to identification (1943:3). Here the notion of being today more or less purely

African implies that culture is something that can be eroded more here or less there with the

passing of time. As a reminder, the social evolutionists like Spencer and Tylor felt that culture

was something to be achieved and that there were groups who possessed more or less of it. And

just as culture could be attained, it could also be lost and a kind of cultural regression could set

in. He went on to emphasize the need for talks, proverbs and riddles to be understood in relation


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to the cultural setting out of which they arose, and that the social setting of folklore is of

particular importance for the scientific analysis of materials from Negro societies (1943:7).

In his retiring presidential address at the American Folklore Societys meetings at the end

of 1945, Herskovits sought to define a modern approach to folklore and lauded the approaches

arising out of the US (as opposed to European) tradition. Stating that folklore was but one

manifestation of human culture (1946:94), he said If we refuse to consider the folk as

quaint, or backward, or ignorant, but use the term to designate any people or class in any society

that as a group exhibit identifiably distinctive modes of life; if we then concentrate our efforts on

the study of their literary expression, folklore becomes a field concerned with realities of life and

not with the relics of a dead past (1946:99). This literary expression was primarily oral, and

thus he advocated the study of oral literature as our primary concern (1946:100). These

positions are repeated at greater length in his textbook,Man and His Works (Herskovits

1947:414-426).

In sum, I believe it is important to consider Herskovitss researches in folklore for the following

reasons:

1. He represents an important figure not only in US anthropology of the middle twentieth

century. Not only that, he is rightly considered a pioneer of Caribbean anthropological research.

2. Because of his transnational scientific networks with Latin American and Caribbean scholars.

Herskovitss work was used to inform the use of folklore in nationalism , nationalist scholars

such as Ortiz, Price-Mars, and Ramos.

3. His students went on to take up his mantle in doing folklore research. These included his


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informal students like Zora Neale Hurston as well as those with whom he had an official capacity

as teacher, such as Katherine Dunham and Daniel Crowley in the Caribbean, and a number of

other students doing research in Africa.

4. For his Influence on other scholars, who had a similar orientation, such as Harold Courlander

and Alan Lomax.

As the Herskovitses recorded in Suriname (1936:144), the stylized completion of a story-telling

is often No tori kom kaba the story is at an end.

References

Manuscript Sources

American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Franz Boas Papers

Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois

Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Africana Manuscripts 6.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York

Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits Papers, MG 261

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yelvington - melville j herskovits theory of folklore

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