Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who helped to first establish African and African Diaspora studies in American academia. He is known for exploring the cultural continuity from African cultures as expressed in African-American communities. He worked with his wife Frances (Shapiro) Herskovits, also an anthropologist, in the field in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. They jointly wrote several books and monographs.
Early life and education
Born to Jewish immigrants in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1895, Herskovits attended local public schools. He served in the United States Army Medical Corps in France during World War I.
Afterward, he went to college, earning a Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1920. He went to New York City for graduate work, earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University under the guidance of the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas. This subject was in its early decades of being developed as a formal field of study. Herskovits's dissertation, titled The Cattle Complex in East Africa, investigated theories of power and authority in Africa as expressed in the ownership and raising of cattle. He studied how some aspects of African culture and traditions were expressed in African-American culture in the 1900s.
Among his fellow students were future anthropologists Katherine Dunham, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Frances Shapiro. He and Shapiro married in Paris, France, in 1924. They later had a daughter, Jean Herskovits, who became a historian.
Career
In 1927, Herskovits moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, as a full-time anthropologist.
In 1934, Herskovits and his wife Frances spent more than three months in the Haitian village of Mirebalais, the findings of which research he published in his 1937 book Life in a Haitian Valley. In its time, this work was considered one of the most accurate depictions of the Haitian practice of Vodou. They meticulously detailed the lives and Vodou practices of Mirebalais residents during their three-month stay. They conducted field work in Benin, Brazil, Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria and Trinidad. In 1938, Herskovits established the new Department of Anthropology at Northwestern.
In the early 1940s, Herskovits and his wife Frances met Barbara Hadley Stein, who was in Brazil to do research on the abolition of slavery there. She introduced to them Stanley J. Stein, a graduate student in Latin American history at Harvard University. With advice from Herskovits, Stein and Stein started recording Jongo songs, which in 2013 received scholarly attention. Herskovits also influenced Alan Lomax, who collected African-American songs.
In 1948, Herskovits founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies at Northwestern University, with the aid of a three-year $30,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, followed by a five-year $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1951. The Program of African Studies was the first of its kind at a United States academic institution. The goals of the program were to "produce scholars of competence in their respective subjects, who will focus the resources of their special fields on the study of aspects of African life relevant to their disciplines." In 1957, Herskovits founded the African Studies Association and was the organization's first president.
After World War II, Herskovits publicly advocated independence of African nations from the colonial powers. He strongly criticized American politicians for viewing African nations as objects of Cold War strategy. Frequently called on as an adviser to government, Herskovits served on the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations in Chicago (1945) and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959–60).