Herskovits, Melville Jean
Herskovits, Melville Jean
Melville Jean Herskovits (1895–1963) was an American anthropologist. Two points are central in understanding his conception of anthropology: first, he was a humanist concerned with the total range of cultural behavior and, second, he believed that the inductive method is the only valid methodology for anthropology. In both he revealed the pervasive influence of Franz Boas, his teacher at Columbia University.
The most complete presentation of Herskovits’ views is found in Man and His Works (1948), revised and abridged as Cultural Anthropology (1955). Culture was the inclusive concept for him, comprehending the behavioral and the ideational, the group and the individual. His humanistic orientation was apparent in his interest in the individual, whom he viewed as an active participant in the shaping of culture. As the individual was important in his view of culture, history was important in his ideas of culture change. Acculturation, reinterpretation, retention, and syncretism are concepts which he helped formulate and each has its historical dimension.
The continuity of past and present was a frequent theme of Herskovits’ studies of Africa and of the Negro in the New World. It was his thesis in The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) that New World Negroes reveal their west African heritage in motor habits, codes of behavior, social institutions, family organization, religion, language, and art. In opposition, sociologists argued that synchronic factors adequately explain American Negro behavior and that it is unwise to link the Negro so directly to his origins in west Africa [see the biography ofFrazier], Although the book stimulated interest in Africa among some students of the New World Negro, it did not achieve general attention for almost two decades, when some of the facts about Africa became better understood.
Herskovits’ approach to cultural change was theoretical as opposed to practical in its orientation. He was always critical of applied anthropology and, in this as well as in his historical approach, was at variance with much of the work of British anthropology in Africa. His views on these points were summarized in Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (1938a), which was the subject of a rejoinder by Malinowski (1939) in behalf of functionalism and administration-oriented anthropology that appeared in Africa.
Herskovits’ opposition to applied anthropology was to a large extent based in cultural relativism. Although he in no sense originated the concept, in Man and His Works and in subsequent writing he became one of its most uncompromising spokesmen. He derived relativism from the enculturative experience through which standards of judgment are learned, and from this he concluded that judgmental evaluations of cultures are culture-bound. This, of course, does not abrogate comparison but implies that the bases of comparison are culturally determined and should be made explicit. He insisted that the concept of relativism had relevance to all cultural learning and called attention to the influence of culture on perception. He felt that it was important to distinguish between “absolutes,” which vary from culture to culture, and “universals,” which are consequences of the human condition; and he concluded, “To say that there is no absolute criterion of value or morals, or even, psychologically, of time or space, does not mean that such criteria, in differing forms, do not comprise universals in human culture” (1948, p. 76). Cultural relativism led him to reject the term “primitive,” though he had used it extensively, as a pejorative, to indicate a lack of unity of custom, tradition, belief, or institution. He subsequently used “nonliterate,” a term which he felt was more neutral and descriptive.
Consistent with his humanistic interests, Herskovits was interested in religion, music, graphic and plastic arts, and folklore, particularly in African cultures. Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-cultural Analysis (1958), written with Frances S. Herskovits, who collaborated with him throughout his career, is a detailed group of tales assembled during their first African field trip. It is an important work because it carefully relates the narratives to their cultural matrix and abstracts from them items of comparative theoretical interest. Herskovits was interested in the ways culture influences the arts, as well as the ways the arts validate culture. He used both religious and aesthetic data to document African retentions among New World Negroes.
If Herskovits was often humanistic in his orientation he was not narrowly so, and he did not neglect the social aspects of culture. One of his earliest interests was in the field of economics, and The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (1940) was the first general text in that field. It stressed the importance of the cultural context of economic behavior and the limitations of a conception of economics based exclusively upon experience in Western society. However, he adopted the conventional, “formal” definition of economics, the application of scarce means to given ends, and, in the main, tried to follow the categories of academic economics in ordering his data. This compromise is most apparent in the first chapter of the revised edition, entitled Economic Anthropology (1940). While Polanyi and his followers (Polanyi et al. 1957) proposed a more sociological, “substantive” definition of economics, Herskovits, typically, objected that their approach seems to deny the role of individual choice and concluded that “we must not reject Economic Man only to substitute Society as an exclusive formula for understanding economic behavior and as a base-point for analysis” ([1940] 1952, p. 8). Polanyi was even more skeptical than Herskovits about the application of traditional economics to nonliterate behavior. His followers have suggested that the characteristics of markets, money, and surpluses in industrial society are so peculiar that the terms are scarcely applicable in nonliterate societies. While Herskovits saw the difference between the economies of nonliterate and industrial society as being one of degree, followers of Polanyi, like George Dalton, see them as differing in kind. It is worth noting that the field of economic anthropology has developed along the general directions of Herskovits’ pioneering efforts. [SeeEconomic Anthropology; Exchange and Display; Trade and Markets; and the biography ofPolanyi.]
Africa was an early interest of Herskovits; his doctoral thesis was on the cattle complex of east Africa. His culture area mapping (1924; see also Bascom & Herskovits 1959) has been used extensively. Many early American Africanists were trained in the program of African studies that he founded and directed at Northwestern University. As interest in Africa expanded, the African Studies Association was formed with Herskovits as its first president. One of his last books, The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1962), is a summary of his encyclopedic knowledge of the continent, his interest in culture change, and his humanistic orientation.
James H. Vaughan, Jr.
[For the historical context of Herskovits’ work, see the biography ofBoas; for discussion of the subsequent development of Herskovits’ ideas, seeFolklore; Historiography, article onAfrican Historiography; Primitive Art.]
WORKS BY HERSKOVITS
1924 A Preliminary Consideration of the Culture Areas of Africa. American Anthropologist New Series 26: 50–64.
1928 The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing. New York: Knopf.
(1937) 1964 Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Octagon Books.
(1938a) 1958 Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith.
1938b Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. 2 vols. New York: Augustin.
(1940) 1952 Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Knopf. ? First published as The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Norton.
1941 The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper. ? A paperback edition was published in 1958 by Beacon.
1948 Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology. New York: Knopf.
1955 Cultural Anthropology. New York: Knopf. ? An abridged revision of Man and His Works, 1948.
1958 Herskovits, Melville J.; and Herskovits, Frances S. Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-cultural Analysis. Northwestern University African Studies, No. 1. Evanston, III.: Northwestern Univ. Press.
(1959) 1962 Bascom, William R.; and Herskovits, Melville J. (editors) Continuity and Change in African Cultures. Univ. of Chicago Press. ? See especially page 37 in the 1959 edition.
1962 The Human Factor in Changing Africa. New York: Knopf.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Malinowski, Bronislaw 1939 The Present State of Studies in Culture Contact: Some Comments on an American Approach. Africa 12:27–47.
Merriam, Alan P. 1964 Melville Jean Herskovits, 1895–1963. American Anthropologist New Series 66:83–109. ? Includes a bibliography of 479 items by Herskovits, compiled by Anne Moneypenny and Barrie Thorne.
Polanyi, Karl; Arensberg, Conrad M.; and Pearson, Harry W. (editors) 1957 Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economics in History and Theory. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.