Herskovits and the Yoruba

Herskovits, on reading this letter, decides that this Shango worship could only be from the “Yoruba” people of Nigeria. Furthermore, “…it must represent an important body of direct African cultural retentions.” Thus starts the myth that those of African descent in Trinidad are largely Yoruba and that they continue to possess “an important body of direct African retentions”.

In 1975 Edward Braithwaite in an Introduction to a new edition of Herskovits’ life in a Haitian village, went further, “What made the American Black a distinct type” was that he was a “racially crossed individual” whose “…complex of values and responses (were) based on inheritances and retentions from Europe and Africa.” This genetic race culture, according to Braithwaite, was disclosed by Herskovits, who for Braithwaite takes his place among Delaney, Garvey and C?saire. But also Duvalier or Papa Doc of Haiti. I suspect that C?saire would not have liked this company, but anyway… Melville Herskovits was born in Ohio in 1895, studied under the founder of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. From 1923 to 1927, Herskovits was a Fellow of Biological Sciences of the National Research Council. The programme is of Physical Anthropology.

This was concerned with homogeneity, heterogeneity and Mendelian inheritance in race crossing. Well, we can guess the findings of this research in the USA of 1923 and 1907. He spent some time making physical measurement charts at Harvard University. These were fashionable at the time as proving racial types and intelligence. Studies of the Afro-American physical type, according to Herskovits, showed that it led to social problems of race. Herskovits moves out of Physical Anthropology but he never quite gives up the questions of homogeneity, heterogeneity and “race-crossing.”

Haiti

In 1934 he does field work in Haiti. It is published in 1937 as Life in a Haitian Valley. In a Haiti with its deeply divided society in terms of language, wealth, shade and access to France, Herskovits manages to spend less than two pages on social stratification. He is obsessed with what today would be called the clash of cultures.

Haitian instability he sees not as the result of Haitian “reparations” to France for ending slavery, nor yet the intervention of the USA, nor yet the inability of the Haitian ?lites to “manage” the institutions of the State.

Herskovits explains Haitian instability as “…the result of living in a culture where individuals must meet demands of two traditions which in many ways are in anything but accord”. All that Herskovits has done is to replace the “race-crossing” in Physical Anthropology with meeting “demands in two traditions”. The argument is the same, it is heterogeneity among people which leads to instability and social problems.

Toco

In 1939 the Herskovits return to Trinidad to look for “direct cultural retentions”. They decide that the purest Shango will be found in remote villages. They choose Toco to study the “direct cultural retentions”. They are disappointed: the village in Toco has no more Africanisms than would be found in almost any rural “Negro” community in the Southern United States.

But Herskovits finds paime an African dish. The time of breakfast, the time of lunch, is, he contends, African. Apprenticing is African, the 40 days ceremony after death he sees as fulfilling “the function of the African definitive burial, despite hymn-singing and other non-African aspects.” (Note: some African groups have first a provisional burial and sometime after, a final burial). Food contributed if a close relative dies is seen as African. Legal marriage and keepers are “a translation, in terms of the monogamic pattern of European mating, basic West African forms…”

Much of this was simply wrong. Paime is a maize dish associated with Amerindians.

Apprenticeship is also European and Asian. Forty days ceremonies after death are often Catholic. Food is contributed by family and friends when someone dies as much in some European cultures as in African and polygamous marriages anywhere are not keeper relationships.

By the time Herskovits died in 1963, Human Geneticists had taken over from Physical Anthropologists. Already as early as 1950 the preoccupations with race purity had been quietly dropped: there were no homogenous races. We were all race-crossed.

And the Yoruba? We have the African birth places of slaves in Trinidad in 1813. The major tribes were Ibo: 2,729, Congo: 2,449. There were only ten Yoruba. It is not the period of Yoruba enslavement. They are more likely to have been important in indentureship after slavery but never a majority population. Herskovits was wrong there as well!