Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of ... (ISBN 0803221878)

Follow The Money!:
Every anthropologists knows who Mellvile J. Herskovits is- -right? When one lists Franz Boas' most influential students, he is the one sandwiched somewhere between Kroeber, Lowie, Benedict and Mead. Herskovits founded the anthropology department at Northwestern, helped to organize the African Studies Association (ASA), and conducted ethnographic research in Suriname to document African survivals in the New World. Oh, yeah, didn't he have a wife that helped him conduct fieldwork among the Maroons? For the majority of anthropologists, this is the biographic outline that comes to mind. Historian Jerry Gershenhorn's brilliant new book simply explodes this flat and uninformed sketch by offering a detailed and textured portrait of a complex and energetic scholar who almost single handedly developed an uniquely American anthropology of Africans, on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the course of his career, he emerged as a particularly powerful figure in both anthropology and area studies, and while he was always shrewd, he never hesitated to publicly challenge or undermine such powerful figures as Gunnar Myrdal, E. Franklin Frazier, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Gershenhorn frames his powerful and lucid intellectual biography by identifying specific tensions and particular contradictions that arise from Herskovits's "embrace of cultural relativism, his attack on racial an cultural hierarchy, and his conceptualization of Negro studies" (p. 9). Meticulously researched, Gershenhorn develops a captivating narrative divided up into seven long but well executed chapters that document the major twists and turns within Herskovits's career. Focusing on the racial politics of knowledge, Gershenhorn provides more than a description of Herskovits's past, he gives the reader the tools, for example, to reconcile Johnnetta B. Cole's belief that "Herskovits had a special place in his heart for African American students," and St. Clair Drake's statement that he "never attempted to recruit and train Afro-Americans" (p.198). Above all, Gershenhorn provides answers and much needed context to better understand why the legacy of Herskovits remains so ambivalent within African American studies, ambiguous within anthropology, yet so well defined in African Studies. From the beginning of his career to the end, Herskovits's research agenda was set and shaped by the funding he could secure. Gershenhorn is at his best when he describes the tug of war between the research Herksovits wanted to pursue and the research he was forced to produce for the National Research Council, the Social Science Research Council, and the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations- -the major sources of his funds. For example, in 1923, Herskovits' first major research project was an assessment of "physical and psychological variability within a racially mixed population" of Negroes in Harlem. It was funded by the NRC, despite the fact he "never even took an anthropometry class at Columbia" (p. 29). Gershenhorn's most valuable contribution to the study of the history of anthropology involves his careful and creative description of the complicated debate over black culture, and the role of so-called "African survivals." After Melville and Frances completed two trips to Surinam, he wrote a "major interpretive essay in which he argued that African cultural influence extended throughout the Americas" (p.77). This was the first in a series of books and articles that pitted the well-meaning cultural relativist against established sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier who "throughout his career . . . rejected the influence of African culture on American blacks" (p.101). It also pitted him against funding agencies that consistently supported research which focused on U.S. race relations, not black people's culture. By following Herskovits's career, and the money that churned in its wake, one comes away with a stunning realization that both the foundations as well as AAA leadership made it clear that there was little interest in developing Negro anthropology in the Americas, while there was a compelling interest to develop anthropological research in Africa, especially in the context of the Cold War and the rise of area studies.