Melville Jean Herskovits

Melville Jean Herskovits , 1895-1963, American anthropologist, b. Bellefontaine, Ohio; educated at the Univ. of Chicago (Ph.B., 1920) and Columbia (Ph.D., 1923). After teaching at Columbia and at Howard Univ. he went to Northwestern Univ., where he taught anthropology from 1927. He did ethnographic research in Suriname, Haiti, Trinidad, and Brazil, but his most important work was done in Africa. Herskovits pioneered in the application of the principles of modern cultural anthropology to black ethnology. Among his works are The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (1928), Dahomey (1938), The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Man and His Works (1949; reissued 1955 as Cultural Anthropology ), Franz Boas (1953), Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (1958, with his wife, Frances S. Herskovits), and The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1962).

Bibliography: See study by G. E. Simpson (1973).

Herskovitz, Melville Jean (1895–1963) An American economic anthropologist who was influenced by Franz Boas and A. A. Goldenweiser during his studies at Columbia University, and himself taught at Northwestern University. He is probably best known for his research into the retention of Africanisms in Afro-American culture (see The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941
) and his writing on economic anthropology (Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics, 1952). He criticized the early theory that the individual must be the starting-point of economic analysis, without himself retreating to economic determinism, and pointed to the importance of looking at how individuals make an economic choice in the face of social constraints and resources and cultural values.