Between 1935 and 1943, the city of Salvador, Bahia, received the attention of numerous foreign scholars and intellectuals, all of them impressed – if not seduced – by its “magic”, largely the result of its black popular culture. They included Donald Pierson (1900–1995), Robert Park1 (1864–1944), Ruth Landes (1908–1991), Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890–1972), E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), Stefan Zweig2 (1881–1942), Frances Shapiro Herskovits (1897–1975) and Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963). Frazier, Turner, Melville Herskovits and Frances Shapiro Herskovits carried out fieldwork there from 1940 to 1942. Frances was an anthropologist in her own right, but in those days her scholarship was not recognized as such and she was seen as Melville’s assistant.3 Somewhat hiding in her husband’s shadow throughout this book, she will come to the fore in Chapter 3.
This book is a reading of the making of Afro-Brazilian studies and, to a lesser extent, African studies and African-American studies, through the interrelated and transnational trajectories mainly of four scholars – Turner, Frazier and Melville and Frances Herskovits. If there is originality in this piece of work, it sits in the comparison of the journey, style and agenda of these four different and yet somehow converging scholars, and in the attempt to relate them to the Brazilian intellectual context, which in those days was much smaller and less organized than the US equivalent. It is, therefore, a double comparison: between four Americans, and between Americans and scholars based in Brazil.
The research for this book was spread out over two decades, from 2000 to 2020, in the archives that host the papers of these four outstanding intellectuals.
Frazier and Turner trailed the path already laid by Donald Pierson and Ruth Landes from 1935 to 1938. Herskovits and his wife Frances relied on a different and somewhat more conventional network, interwoven with the local political and intellectual elites. Each of the researchers had a memorable encounter with Bahia, and this experience would be relevant for the rest of their careers, even though none of them returned to the field as they had planned. Franklin Frazier, the most famous black sociologist of the time, who had already published The Negro Family in the United States in 1939, was locked into an argument with the equally renowned anthropologist, Melville Herskovits,6 on the “origins” of the so-called black family and the weight of African heritage on black cultures in the Americas in general (see Mintz and Price 1992 [1976]).7
The linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner had already had considerable experience in researching African survivals in black speech in the US. Turner would later publish his seminal book on African influences in Gullah (Turner 2003 [1949]), the language spoken by the people of the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the US. Turner was a friend of Frazier, but his scholarly theories were closer to Herskovits’. Frazier came from Howard University, Turner from Fisk University and Herskovits from Northwestern. Frances had already co-written books with Melville and had accumulated considerable fieldwork experience in Suriname, Dahomey and Haiti.
This book is the story of, among other things, tensions between an American sociologist and an American anthropologist, both using the services of Brazilian intermediaries and gatekeepers, who were themselves interested parties in the contention. Frazier’s and Herskovits’ opposing visions reached a large readership through the American Sociological Review, which published an article by Frazier, followed by a response by Herskovits and a counter-response by Frazier. The debate highlighted exciting arguments about how anthropology defined itself as a discipline, different from sociology, and about the construction of Afro-Brazilian studies as an academic field.
This research also shows how, already at that time, the style and language of sociologists and anthropologists (and linguists) – drier or more sober for the former and emphatically romantic for the latter – related to radically different approaches to the same phenomenon, in this case, the “origins” and causality of black cultural forms in the New World. Were black culture and family structures the result of slavery and later the adjustment to poverty? Or were they Africanisms, the survival of traditional African forms of life and culture adapted to life in the New World? As we shall see throughout this book, beyond these two approaches there were different perspectives of the antiracist struggle, and this debate anticipated a critical issue that would come up again in the 1970s and, as part of the discussion about multiculturalism, in the 1990s: the political use of cultural diversity and ethnic essentialism in the struggle for emancipation from anti-black racism. Moreover, with Julio Simões, I argue that:
Bringing this debate to the fore helps one understand what soon becomes a keynote of Afro-Bahian studies (and even Afro-Brazilian studies): the
Simões 2022outsider views benefit from the empirical relevance of the field but hardly engage the local debate. For Frazier and Herskovits, the dispute over Bahia was a ‘proxy battle.’ Consolidating a perspective on the black question in such place, one of America’s most recognizably Africanized regions, represented the ultimate test of their theories – the continental generalization of their US-made models on black heritage.
The choice of Brazil and Bahia as the “ideal” site for such large-scale and politically relevant research on black culture and race relations in the New World was the result of a long process that began in the 1930s (Romo 2010). It corresponded to the synergy between the cultural politics of the Estado Novo (the name given to the populist dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas) and the introduction of sociology and anthropology as academic disciplines in Brazilian universities. It was also the period in which, for the first time, the African origins of much of Brazilian popular culture and religion were, to a degree, symbolically incorporated into the official cultural representation of the nation by the Vargas regime. This development made Brazil an even more exciting place to come to and research the Afro-Brazilian population.
As we shall see, the debate already had an early winner. Herskovits’ views were more than welcome for the Brazilian elite who yearned for cultural modernization. While the visits of Frazier and Turner were quickly forgotten, Herskovits’ fieldwork consolidated his legacy in Afro-Brazilian studies and the Brazilian social sciences in general. He played a prominent role in structuring the first social science courses in Brazil. Before his arrival, he accompanied and made recommendations to the first chair of anthropology at the University of the Federal District (Rio de Janeiro), his correspondent, Gilberto Freyre.8 During his visit to Brazil, Herskovits was the opening patron of the Faculty of Philosophy of Bahia, headed by the young medical doctor and ethnographer, Thales de Azevedo. In São Paulo, he was in contact with the two main centres in the field of social sciences – the School of Sociology and Politics, through Donald Pierson, and the University of São Paulo, through Roger Bastide. He would be the most influential Boasian in Brazil, and his concepts of acculturation and Africanisms would become a primary reference for the cultural debate of a generation of social scientists.
Herskovits’ influence was undoubtedly also due to his long commitment to Brazil and several Brazil-based scholars. As we will see later on, the
Reconstructing the research of the Herskovitses, Frazier and Turner in Brazil, especially on the city of Salvador in Bahia, drew on very different archives. As we will see, Herskovits left a substantial and detailed record of his research in Brazil, a country with which he kept in touch for approximately twenty years, from 1935 to at least the mid-1950s, through a sustained exchange of correspondence with pivotal Brazilian scholars. For Frazier and, even more so, Turner, the archive is much poorer and replete with absences and losses. Investigating the Brazilian research of these two scholars requires quite a degree of imagination, if only to bridge the several gaps in the documentation.
The reconstruction was essential to understand the period that preceded the choice of Bahia, and Brazil in general, as the site for the first extensive research project by UNESCO in the early fifties and, soon afterward, its transformation into a critical “field station” for US social scientists, primarily anthropologists. To many North American (and European) observers, Brazil was made even more enticing by the US’s Good Neighbor Policy (GNP), which undoubtedly contributed to the fact that many foreign scholars, especially Americans and Germans who were escaping either racial segregation or Nazism, bought into the official depiction of Brazil as a colour-free and class-centred democracy. As the book edited by David Hellwig in 1992 demonstrated, starting from the 1920s, many scholars (even black intellectuals based in the US) represented Brazil as an alter ego of the segregationist United States. Apart from reading Hellwig’s book, one can browse the letters addressed by W.E.B. Du Bois
In the US, Rüdiger Bilden (1929) was the first great propagator of the notion of Brazil’s exceptional racial status and its relative cordiality (Pallares-Burke 2005, 2012; Borges 1995). Such a notion, of course, had existed before, and it was the core of Gina Lombroso’s report on Brazil in 1908 (Sansone 2020 and 2022). But it was formulated for the social sciences only later on, with Bilden and, a few years later, Freyre, who was a friend of Bilden. The notion also found favour with the growing Latin American modernism and its relatively generous and antiracist (when compared to the past) representation of “the people”, no longer as a problem but rather a “solution” to the dilemmas of the future nation.10 From the correspondence between Bilden and MJH at Northwestern, one can see that Bilden was the scholar who put Herskovits in touch with Freyre and later Arthur Ramos and Édison Carneiro, and who, more generally, especially in his position at Fisk, became the hub for scholars interested in Brazil, like Donald Pierson (Pereira da Silva 2012). Pierson became a close colleague at Fisk, along with Richard Pattee, Lorenzo Turner and Ruth Landes.11
Since the beginning of my research about twenty years ago, scholarship on race relations, the making and reinterpreting of Afro-Bahian culture, the tension between tradition and innovation (or is it Atlantic modernity?), and Afro-Brazilian religious systems has come a long way, and much for the better (Sansi 2007; Parés 2020; Romo 2010; Ickes 2013, 2013a; Castillo 2008). Herskovits’ trajectory as organizer (and gatekeeper) of Negro studies in the 1930s and 1940s, and of African studies afterwards, has been critically scrutinized, sometimes in vitriolic fashion (Gershenhorn 2004; Allman 2020), and even the quality of his and Frances’ fieldwork has been questioned (Price and Price 2003). New
Let me conclude this introduction with a triple radical statement. Firstly, there is no history of anthropology and related disciplines outside the geopolitics of knowledge that includes studying the conditions for coloniality in academic life and practice (Quijano 2000) at the receiving end of global anthropological flows. Secondly, I believe that the success and continuity of a specific scientific paradigm in Afro-Brazilian, African-American and African studies is not the result of any intrinsic scientific correctness but depends on political convenience and the relationship of power it manages to establish and maintain (Yelvington 2007). Class, race, gender and region are, of course, the main variables through which such power is constituted. Both enmity and friendship have been, thus, part and parcel of the formation and consolidation of the scientific field of Afro-American and Afro-Brazilian studies (Oliveira 2019). The third point also suggests two tensions, in the intellectual exchange between the local and global and between a global North and a global South. Both strains come with giving and receiving ends, and the scholar’s position in this exchange reveals their approach and agenda. However, as Sansi puts it (2007:8), “It is important to understand that this process of objectification of other cultures as ‘Culture’ has not been a unidirectional movement in which the West has produced ‘Culture’ and it has exported it to the Rest.” The process is, of course, complex.
In the (too) long process of writing this book, I have little by little discovered that the relationship of South–North in our field of study is too complicated and, often, painful to be “resolved” by simple tricks of social and intellectual engineering, as I had somehow believed twenty years ago. For a start, there is a hierarchical entanglement (Seigel 2009) that is especially noticeable in Afro-American studies and transnational black identity formation. Therefore, while one must not deny agency on the part of Brazilian scholars at all levels (Merkel 2022) – from those with a formal degree to regional scholars and black
Secondly, in the case of Brazil and more especially Bahia, the presence and gaze of foreign scholars and academic-political agendas established elsewhere not only influenced the world of Candomblé from the late 1930s and black activism from the 1970s, but even became part and parcel of these social phenomena as well as of the academic field of Afro-Brazilian studies more generally. On several occasions, social scientists, especially anthropologists, were mouthpieces for the Candomblé houses and associations, particularly those considered by in- and outsiders as purer and more authentically African. This entanglement between social scientists, Candomblé religion, black activism and the antiracist struggle has created a very specific, one could say very Brazilian, set of relations and tensions. It is as old as the field of Afro-Brazilian
Thirdly, in the United States, African studies – as a proper field of academic research – originated within African-American studies. Brazil, and especially the state of Bahia, which has the highest percentage of people of African descent in the country, was crucial in this process. The style, jargon, priorities, fashions and methodology of African studies and African-American studies were therefore interrelated, especially in the period between 1930 and 1960.
Around the mid-1960s in the US, African studies and African-American studies parted in many ways. This had to do with a set of particular reasons: during the heyday of African decolonization new research agendas were set in the African countries themselves; the development of area studies in the midst of the Cold War was a process of increase in specialization and narrowing of focus in research, with much less emphasis on the progressive agenda of Pan-Africanism or the identity politics across the Black Atlantic; and the priorities of the civil rights and black power movements made inroads in the social sciences in the US and, to a certain extent, throughout the Black Atlantic, thoroughly influencing a new process of identity politics and raising black consciousness (Sansone 2019, 2022). Such a process, of course, brought into question the authority of non-black social scientists (such as myself) in speaking about black cultures in the New World and the scarce presence of black and African scholars in key positions in the field of African studies in the US. The following text, while limiting itself to the place of Brazil and especially Bahia in these processes, hopes to corroborate the above three statements or to shed light on some facets in the transnational making of African-American, Afro-Brazilian and African studies that have remained in the shadows thus far.
In Chapter 1, we follow the trajectory of the work of the four scholars in Brazil. In the second chapter, their fieldwork style and methodology are compared, exploring differences but also a few important similarities. If Frances remains relatively underlit in the first two chapters, the third chapter deals with what follows from their visit to Brazil and especially Bahia in the period until 1967, when Frances went back there. The book ends by drawing general conclusions while critically scrutinizing the styles, impact and tensions in the field. The postface deals, somewhat autobiographically, with a number of bottlenecks in the practice of the social sciences in a location such as Bahia, the conundrum of (digital) repatriation and the difficulty of subverting the established politics of the archive.
On the important role of Robert Park, then professor at Fisk, in attracting American scholars to Bahia, see Valladares (2010) and Maggie (2015).
Jewish Austrian writer Zweig was extremely popular in Brazil (Dines 2009; Davis and Marshall 2010). His classic celebration of Brazil, Brazil Country of the Future, included a chapter on his visit to Bahia in 1941 in which Zweig expands on the popular Bonfim feast (Zweig 1941).
Frazier and Herskovits were two of the contributors to the anthology The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke: Frazier, with the chapter “Durham: capital of the black middle class” (pp. 333–340) and Herskovits, the only white contributor to the book, with the chapter “The Negro’s Americanism” (pp. 353–360). Lorenzo Turner was not included, his proximity to the spirit of the book notwithstanding. I believe this had to do mostly with the fact that Turner’s career as a linguist developed only in the 1930s.
See List of Repositories. My research, furthermore, attempted a careful reading of footnotes, introductions, book reviews and acknowledgements relating to anything Brazilian in the work of Lorenzo Turner (Lorenzo), Melville Herskovits (Mel, his nickname, or MJH) and E. Franklin Frazier (Frazier). I conducted a number of personal interviews with the late Jean Herskovits, the late Lois Turner and her son Lorenzo Jr., Josildeth Consorte, Waldir Freitas and Julio Braga (the last two on Frances Herskovits).
The following two letters are evidence of it: “I am sorry to hear, in a letter from Njisane, that you have been in the hospital. He says that you were only in for a short stay and were getting along in good shape. This is just to hope, therefore, that the word is correct and that you are now quite yourself again” (MJH to Frazier, January 28, 1959); “I don’t get to Washington too often these days, but one of these times when I do, I’ll give you a ring. I hope things go well with you and that you are feeling yourself” (MJH to Frazier, March 28, 1961).
Herskovits, who had been a student of Franz Boas, was of Jewish background and his biographers argue that this made him particularly sensitive to racial discrimination against African Americans. In the 30s and 40s, many Jewish intellectuals militated against racism against blacks and other minorities in the US. See Kevin Yelvington, “Herskovits’ Jewishness” (2000).
This debate would be revamped from the late 60s in the US, especially after the creation of various departments of Black studies and the move of black activists to make the African Studies Association more open to their presence and priorities, starting from the tumultuous Montreal annual conference in 1968. Standing witness to the influence of the search for Africanism at the heart of the social sciences and Afro-American studies were several publications: the editions of The Myth of the Negro Past and especially that of 1990, with a powerful introduction by Sidney Mintz (1990); the milestone compilation Afro-American Anthropology, by Whitten and Szwed (1969), which centralizes Herskovits’ oeuvre; and the little but seminal book, Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective, by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976), which was published again in 1992 with the more militant title, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective.
See MJH to Freyre, Herskovits Papers, Box 7, Folder 40.
W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, 1868–1963, Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
Such symbolic incorporation was not free from contradictions, of course, as Dain Borges correctly pointed out: “With the important exception of musicians, Modernista intellectuals rarely elaborated Afro-Brazilian concepts” (1995:72).
Bilden, a German immigrant, was very happy to get, at long last, a (temporary) position at Fisk because of the chances he had to work with black scholars and students there. He held all the colleagues mentioned above in high esteem, except for Landes. According to Bilden as well as his black colleagues at the university, Landes was considered “a disgrace” because of her sexual involvement with men of colour, which in Tennessee was severely condemned (Rüdiger Bilden to MJH, December 6, 1937).
Olivia Gomes da Cunha’s (2020) recent book makes a great contribution to a comparative reading of the trajectory of these scholars, to which she adds, correctly, Donald Pierson.
In a recent and excellent study of the reception of ideas from abroad in Brazil, which goes beyond the obvious entanglement – the new magic word in the transnational history of the social sciences in Brazil – and focuses on the encounter of agendas, Merkel (2022) shows that cosmopolitan, nationalist, Brazilian intellectuals used French culture and its academics as a tool in their modernist project: French social sciences at some point became instrumental to the Brazilian project. Rather than being a one-way system, though, the exchange was (according to this author) based on a combination of entanglement and revolving doors. In return, “Brazilian ideas” and certain representations of Brazil as the country of almost unlimited possibility in terms of social engineering were important in France, especially before and during the Second World War and, albeit in a more selective fashion, in the period between the end of WWII and the independence of Algeria. Often it is unclear who was using who and whether it was a win-win relationship throughout. The (young) French scholars benefited in many ways (for example, with a status equal to low-ranking diplomats, their travel – first-class! – was paid for by the Brazilians). Another field of tension was in both imagining Brazil as a space of liberty and new possibilities, and placing Brazil in time. The French scholars often stated that they were travelling back into the past by visiting Brazil, which for them was the country of the past and the future. Lévi-Strauss remembered Brazil in Tristes Tropiques as a land of opportunity, professionally and experientially. Distanced from the country geographically, the French scholars nonetheless found Brazil a useful place to think with, or as Lévi-Strauss would later say, “bon à penser” – the ideal location for “Proustian ethnography”. It follows that theirs was not only an academic project but also an aesthetic one.