Melville J. Herskovits and the Institutionalization of Afro-American Studies
Kevin A. Yelvington
University of South Florida

Abstract

It is now clear that in the history and philosophy of science we can no longer abide by the purely “internalistic” and “idealistic” approaches that focus exclusively on ideas as scientific paradigms. At the same time, a resort to an “externalism” prioritizing social context runs the risk of reductionism. By contrast, an approach to social scientific institutions pays epistemological and practical dividends. The advantages of such a position are as follows. Institutions can be conceived of as a point of dialectical contradictions and mediations. Here we can maintain a concern with multi-level causative mechanisms to explain the shape and nature of the institutions themselves, at the same time as conceiving of particular products such as social scientific treatises, programmatic, and descriptive works as having a history and reality of their own. However, social scientific ideas do not, therefore, have to be seen as merely the outcome or consequences of conceptual systems within science. Thus, we may maintain a concern with explanation along with a perspective likely to be consonant with anthropology where the actors’ concerns with institution-building, organization, and disciplinary boundary-maintenance are put in the foreground and become part of the explanation for the outcomes defined as social science. In this paper, I look at the experience of the North American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963) and his attempts to construct Afro-American studies as a subdiscipline within anthropology (and beyond). I begin by discussing Herskovits’ early involvement with the physical anthropology of “race” in the United States, funded by the National Research Council in the 1920s, as well as his unsuccessful attempts to secure funding for a large research project on the “New World Negro” at this time. I show how Herskovits was marginalized from the Carnegie Corporation’s “Negro in America” study. I then move to his directorship of the Committee on Negro Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies in the 1940s, his role in the short-lived Institute of Afroamerican Studies in Mexico, and the successful establishment of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University in 1948. While he had a long involvement with Brazilian anthropologists and did fieldwork in Brazil in 1941-42, Herskovits was not directly involved as an investigator with the UNESCO project in Brazil. Nevertheless, he exerted a considerable influence in terms of his anthropological perspective and his recommendations regarding research staff. A question remains, though: Why was Herskovits not more directly involved with the project?

Introduction

It was of course Foucault’s point that intellectual production is not the result of the struggles of the heroic individual scientist or the result of the unchanging Cartesian ego, but, rather, like all else, intellectual production is the result of collective social life. What makes intellectual production possible is not so much the talent and originality of individual intellectuals but the ability to follow rules so sedimented that they have become unconscious and taken for granted by those who are initiated, are authorized, and are practicing under their purview. Pointing out these rules for Foucault was the crucial first step in exposing the ideological edifice of intellectual production, and investigating the rules for these rules, and then showing how these rules became, in the longue durée, an epistemological force and power of their own that could dictate various systems of knowledge and perspective was the central focus of Foucault’s entire oeuvre. Here, attitudes and discourses become institutions that come to embody and constitute knowledge and discipline. Power is intimately involved in the production of knowledge within these institutions, and in the resistance to institutionalized ways of seeing that come to reward that considered acceptable and normal and to punish that considered abnormal and stigmatized. Yet, one cannot help to feel that ultimately Foucault engages in a kind of “projectionism,” where ideas are projected onto institutions which are in turn seen as the result of ideas, where these institutions embody discourses of science, the normal, the sane, the immoral, the insane, and so forth. This perspective is consonant with that of “constructivism” in the philosophy, sociology, and history of science. “Constructivism” is the thesis that all of science is constructed by social actors and that social science must be viewed as a reality-creating force. This is somewhat stronger than “social constructionism,” where social actors are seen to construct their world using cognitive structures. Constructivism holds that not only the form but the content of science is socially constructed. This is associated with, for example, the work of Bruno Latour ^[1] and Karin Knorr-Cetina. ^[2] The focus is upon the internal practices of science, on the conflicts, negotiations, and resolutions between scientists that lead to conceptual orders, facts, and knowledge. Constructivism entails a projectionism in that science is seen as being the result of the agency of actors in scientific fields. Receiving less attention in this schema are the underlying structures and causal mechanisms that determine the shape and functioning of scientific institutions such as universities and research institutes, scientific associations, funding organizations, and the like. I am not saying that constructivists are complete idealists about society. But they do tend to see reality as existing in science only in ways defined by science. For them, there are real effects, but not necessarily a reality to causes. Causes for the constructivists are defined by the conceptual systems within a particular science.

            It is now clear that in the history and philosophy of science we can no longer abide by the purely “internalistic” and “idealistic” approaches that focus exclusively on ideas as scientific paradigms. At the same time, a resort to an “externalism” prioritizing social context runs the risk of reductionism. Further, staking out a choice between “internalism” and “externalism” is, as Bourdieu among others has argued, is itself no longer tenable. ^[3] Bourdieu suggests that we look at the structure of the distribution of capital held by protagonists in competition with each other in a particular scientific “field,” struggles that are both social and symbolic. This perspective has much potential because an emphasis on the acquisition of cultural, social, and symbolic capital encompasses the scarce resources of  prestige, funding, positions, training and initiating new members of the guild, and so forth, as well as the control over the representations of what science is. This has the virtue of showing the kinds of resource competition endemic to the so-called “scientific community.” However, Bourdieu does not specify how the scientific field is linked, and by what mediations, to the social totality. For this we need a dialectical theory. And Bourdieu, in his emphasis on the search for the autonomy of intellectual practice — autonomy from political considerations and compromises — does not indicate the role of ideology in the representation of scientific practice. Here, by ideology I mean a collection of evaluative representations — evaluative of the practices of ensuring interests — that are a medium through which struggles for power and legitimacy are conducted, both within scientific fields and between scientific fields and other parts to the social totality.

            By contrast, an approach that focuses to social scientific institutions pays epistemological and practical dividends. The advantages of such a position are as follows. Institutions can be conceived of as a point of dialectical contradictions and mediations — dialectical because institutions are the site of the unity of diverse phenomena and mediations because they act as linkages in various ways to determinate structures. Here we can maintain a concern with multi-level causative mechanisms to explain the shape and nature of the institutions themselves, at the same time as conceiving of particular products such as training and initiation programs such as degrees and titles, as well as social scientific treatises, programmatic, and descriptive works, as having a history and reality of their own. Social scientific ideas do not, therefore, have to be seen as merely the outcome or consequences of conceptual systems within science. Thus, we may maintain a concern with explanation along with a perspective likely to be consonant with anthropology where the actors’ concerns with institution-building, organization, and disciplinary boundary-maintenance, and the authorization of knowledge are put in the foreground and become part of the explanation for the outcomes defined as social science. In this paper, I look at the experience of the North American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963) and his attempts to construct Afro-American studies as a subdiscipline within anthropology and as an inter-disciplinary and multinational and transnational scientific endeavor in order to provide the context of the UNESCO project in Brazil, and to understand his role in that project.

Herskovits and Institution-Building

Herskovits, born in Ohio to Jewish European immigrants to the United States, considered becoming a rabbi before volunteering for the U.S. Army medical corps in World War I. Returning from the war in France, he enrolled in the University of Chicago for a degree in history and then went to New York where he became a student of Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941), Alexander Goldenweiser (1880-1940), and Thorsten Veblen (1857-1929) at the New School for Social Research, and of Franz Boas (1858-1942) at Columbia University, where he did his Ph.D. under Boas with a library dissertation on the culture areas of Africa. ^[4] In 1923, Boas succeeded in having him named to a three-year fellowship to the Board of Biological Sciences of the National Research Council (NRC) — itself formed in 1916 ostensibly for research in the war effort but in the context of anti-immigrant and anti-labor politics. Up until the early 1920s the NRC had been the site of struggles within anthropology between “scientists,” including eugenicists, and the Boasians (along with fellowships for Herskovits there were those for Margaret Mead (1901-1978) for her work on Samoan adolescence and psychologist Otto Kleinberg (1899-1992) for his work on the question of “race” and intellectual differences). ^[5] These developments served to further the Boasian program. In the case of Herskovits, the research problem was directly related to Boas’s earlier work on the plasticity of physical features in the presence of acculturative forces in the US context. It has been argued that Boas’s anthropological perspective on “race” was paradoxical, especially as it related to supposed “racial” differences between whites and African Americans, but his views were mitigated by his liberal humanitarianism. Boas criticized the racial typology of his day, but operated as if “races” existed and could be distinguished even if their distinguishing features overlapped. ^[6] Herskovits was to inherit much of this tendency. The NRC fellowship enabled Herskovits to engage in a physical anthropological research project on the effects of race-crossing on the bodily form of African Americans. Herskovits’s research was conducted in three places: in Harlem, where his field assistants were Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) and Louis E. King (1898-1981), who also took measurements for Herskovits in rural West Virginia, and at Howard University, where he also taught during 1925, engaging in intellectual exchanges with philosopher Alain Locke (1886-1954), biologist Ernest E. Just (1883-1941), sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), and economist Abram L. Harris (1899-1963) who assisted him in measuring Howard students. In his two books ^[7] and many articles arising from this research, he argued that the “American Negro” was a racially-mixed “amalgam” that was “distinctive among human beings,”in the process of forming their own “definite physical type,” a “homogeneous” population of “low variability” that, because of North American racism, was becoming more “Negroid.” Thus, he argued as Boas had done before him that it was ultimately American cultural forces that affected “race.” Boas, in fact, made an argument much like the branquearimiento arguments of Latin American nationalism. ^[8] He advocated “race-mixing,” and compared the plight of African Americans to that of Jews: “it would seem that man being what he is, the negro problem will not disappear in America until the negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-Semitism will not disappear until the last vestige of the Jew as a Jew has disappeared.” ^[9] At the same time,  Herskovits used culture to dispel popular racist misconceptions and to counter the nativism of the 1920s in a number of articles in the popular press, but he did so as a liberal and certainly not as a radical.

            Herskovits started as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University in 1927. He sought funding from a number of funding sources for an ambitious study of what he came to call the “New World Negro,” combining fieldwork in various locations in the America and in Africa. These grants were turned down, so he relied on the patronage of Parsons for grants for fieldwork in Suriname (1928 and 1929) and in Dahomey (1931), and small foundation grants for summer fieldwork in Haiti (1934) and Trinidad (1939). He received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a year’s fieldwork in Brazil (1941-42). After early writings on Harlem that emphasized the “assimilation” of African Americans to mainstream US culture, he subsequently sought to document African cultural  “survivals” in several programmatic statements. ^[10] This dramatic shift in focus was the result, as I argue elsewhere, of the influences of Parsons and of interlocutors such as Jean Price-Mars (1876-1969) in Haiti, Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) in Cuba, Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) in Brazil, and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908-1996) in Mexico. ^[11] But his activities did not only consist in writing, but, rather, no less the attempt to organize and define a subdiscipline within anthropology — by subdiscipline I mean the definite development of a specialization within an academic discipline, with specialized knowledge and training being specified, with core texts being identified, authorized histories being written, and bodies of specialists being identified, all of which implies boundary maintenance ^[12] — and, what is more, a whole interdisciplinary research effort under the rubric the “New World Negro.” In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote a number of unsuccessful grant applications to fund large fieldwork projects and program development. In 1938, he founded the anthropology department at Northwestern, becoming its chair and recruiting graduate students who worked on the Afro-Americas and in Africa.

            In 1936, Herskovits applied for a large grant for funding a substantial research project on Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, to Frederick P. Keppel (1875-1943), president of the Carnegie Corporation. Herskovits did not know that Keppel at this time was in the midst of trying to choose someone to head a major study of the American Negro. Herskovits was considered to direct the study, but then rejected when Keppel heard that he was hard to work with. Keppel wanted a foreign researcher in the mold of an Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), and he asked Herskovits for suggestions. Herskovits said it was important that if a foreign scholar be appointed to direct the project, it was important for that foreign scholar to be from a country without a history of colonialism, and he suggested his friend the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux (1902-1963). Herskovits conspired with his friend, sociologist Donald Young (1898-1977), to become part of the project and direct a team of social scientists from the United States; they also advocated the inclusion of African Americans on the research team such as Abram Harris. ^[13] Eventually Keppel decided that someone like Métraux wrote for a specialized academic audience while what was needed was someone familiar with policy implementation. And so it was Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) who was named to direct the project that resulted in the classic book An American Dilemma (1944). ^[14] Herskovits was angry that he was not named to head the study. As his former student Alvin W. Wolfe (b. 1928) recalled, Herskovits felt Myrdal was appointed “on the principle that ignorance is equivalent to objectivity.” ^[15] Ultimately, Myrdal did not care for Herskovits’s approach to African cultural “survivals,” and Herskovits himself disapproved of a policy orientation to scholarship. Myrdal hired 31 researchers to write memoranda, including Frazier, who went on to do fieldwork in Brazil, and Ruth Landes (1908-1991) who had just returned. A number of African-American scholars were included. Myrdal decided to include Herskovits for reasons of academic politics. Herskovits’s memorandum turned out to be his classic work, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), ^[16] completed in under one year with the significant assistance of his wife and collaborator Frances S. Herskovits (1897-1972).

            While basically excluded from the Carnegie project, Herskovits was approached by Waldo G. Leland (1879-1966), the secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), to establish a conference on Negro Studies. This was in order to counter the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) which had been advising the Carnegie Corporation on the Myrdal Negro project. The idea for the conference, which was held at Howard University in 1940, and the formation of the ACLS’s Committee on Negro Studies, was to promote the ACLS’s view of the humanities. ^[17] Herskovits was named the chair of a committee of eight scholars, including Young, Klineberg, historian Richard Pattee of the US State Department, the friend of Ramos and translator of Ramos’s O negro brasileiro, ^[18] and friend of Ortiz and Price-Mars. Only three committee members were black, including linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner (1895-1972), who did fieldwork in Brazil in the 1940s. Most of these scholars’ theoretical views accorded with those of Herskovits. When Herskovits tried to expand his empire by trying to create a joint committee on African and Negro studies with the ACLS, the SSRC, and the NRC, the attempt failed when the SSRC refused to join, and therefore the ACLS limited the committee’s purview to the history, literature, and culture of black people in the Americas. During the decade the committee was in existence, during which it added and lost some members, some of the black members pushed for a more activist approach to research and to organize a conference on discrimination against black scholars. When this happened, Herskovits and the committee disbanded in 1950. This was somewhat ironic, given Herskovits’s views of applying anthropology. He held a dim view of applied anthropology when it was undertaken on behalf of an organization or group. This he felt would challenge the anthropologist’s scientific objectivity. ^[19] But the whole point of his The Myth of the Negro Past was to provide documentation to that would provide blacks with pride in their past and inform whites of this past which “will influence opinion in general concerning Negro abilities and potentialities, and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial tensions.” ^[20]

            During the 1940s, Herskovits was involved with Pattee, Ortiz, and others to establish the  short-lived Institute of Afroamerican Studies in Mexico City and the journal Afroamérica of which only two issues appeared. He became president of the American Folklore Society (1945) and the editor of the Journal of American Folklore. From 1948-1952,  he was the editor of the American Anthropologist. He was the chair of the NRC’s Committee on International Cooperation in Anthropology (1945-1946) and in 1950 edited the International Directory of Anthropologists. ^[21] He was the president of the African Studies Association in 1958. That he was never the president of the American Anthropological Association might point to the effects of anti-Semitism in the academy. ^[22] During World War II, Herskovits advised the US State Department on Africa, and later ran a training course for diplomats. In 1948 he established the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University with a grant from Carnegie and where a number of grants from foundations such as the SSRC, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Fulbright program enabled him to send graduate students to West Africa. This did not take away his attention from the New World Negro; he saw African research as key to the studies of the Afro-Americas, ^[23] and he contributed a defining overview of the field in 1951. ^[24]

            Throughout this time, Herskovits patrolled the boundaries of “New World Negro” studies, assisting those who shared his culturalist theoretical perspective. He sent students to Ortiz, Ramos, Price-Mars, and others and put each in touch with the other. He formed a circle between those he considered trained and those he considered “amateurs.” ^[25] By contrast, he undercut those who did not share his views or who were seen to be encroaching on his fieldwork territory. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) had proposed to edit an Encyclopedia of the Negro starting back in 1931, but Herskovits, worried that activists would be involved and thus be less than scientific, engaged in a letter-writing campaign behind the scenes to undermine the project even though he was on good personal terms with Du Bois and Herskovits had used his personal library when researching his Ph.D dissertation. ^[26] King, his assistant in his NRC study, applied for a position under Du Bois at Atlanta University but Herskovits wrote a very letter critical of King’s abilities, ^[27] effectively ending any chance for an academic career for King. ^[28] And Herskovits was initially supportive of Katherine Dunham (1909-) and her fieldwork in the Caribbean, but was not once she became an initiate in the Vodou religion; he was not encouraging of Hurston in her studies of Jamaica and Haiti. ^[29] These were all African-Amercans and this raises the question of whether Herskovits felt that black scholars could be objective enough to do anthropology in the Afro-Americas. ^[30] But not only blacks were excluded. With Ramos, Herskovits worked to exclude Landes and her competing perspectives. ^[31] Ramos was asked to review her memo for the Myrdal project and did so in extremely critical terms. ^[32] Herskovits was equally dismissive. ^[33] While this might be interpreted in more personal terms, as did Landes herself, ^[34] what was really at stake in all of this was the creation and defense of a particular scholarly preserve, the closing of ranks, and the struggle over meaning. In short, the imposition of orthodoxy.

Herskovits, Brazilian Anthropologists, and the Anthropology of Brazil

In many ways, Herskovits’s introduction to the anthropology of Brazil came via his friend Rüdiger Bilden, the student of Boas and the associate of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987). Bilden had written about Brazil being a “laboratory of civilization” and had endorsed the nationalist ideology of democracia racial. ^[35] And when Donald Pierson (1900-1995) was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he was the president of the sociology club and in 1933 he asked Herskovits to give a talk at the university. Pierson then called on Herskovits for advice on studying the Negro in Brazil, saying he had become “interested in the apparent absence of prejudice in Portuguese-Negro relations in Brazil” ^[36] and later Pierson provided Herskovits with translations of the chapter summaries of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues’s (1862-1906) Os africanos no Brasil (1932). ^[37] Freyre invited Herskovits to contribute to the first Afro-Brazilian congress in 1934, and he sent two contributions of already-published material but did not attend. ^[38] It was Freyre ^[39] who suggested to Ramos that Ramos contact Herskovits. They exchanged letters and publications, and there were mutual influences in each other’s work, especially vis-à-vis the concept “acculturation.” ^[40] In 1937, Herskovits sent an already-published contribution to the second Afro-Brazilian congress where he utilized some of Ramos’s work. ^[41] Herskovits’s assisted Ramos to obtain a grant to travel to the United States and lecture at Louisiana State University, and they finally met when Ramos came to Northwestern University to give a joint talk with Herskovits on “The Race Problem in Brazil and the United States.” ^[42] Herskovits conducted fieldwork in Bahia in 1941-1942, ^[43] receiving offers of assistance by Pierson and Charles Wagley (1913-1991) before his trip. ^[44] His work in Bahia was central for his debate with Frazier over the role of “Africanisms” in the Afro-American family. ^[45] He made a number of anthropological connections at various conferences and he trained three Brazilian anthropologists at Northwestern: Octavio da Costa Eduardo did his master’s in 1943 and Ph.D. in 1945, René Ribeiro (1914-1990) his master’s in 1949, and Ruy Galvão de Andrade Coelho earned his Ph.D in 1955. ^[46]

Herskovits and the UNESCO Project in Brazil

In studies of the UNESCO project in Brazil, the focus is not directly upon Herskovits perhaps because he was not officially part of the project. ^[47] But he did influence the course of the investigations directly and indirectly. Herskovits was consulted often by those within and associated with the UNESCO bureaucracy. In 1947, for instance, he was asked to contribute the draft of the UNESCO statement on the Rights of Man. ^[48] He was also asked to consult on the staff for a project on education in the Marbial Valley, Haiti. Herskovits suggested scholars who might work on the project ^[49] that was eventually directed by Métraux and included  his wife Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1914-) and others. ^[50] Herskovits was consulted on the establishment of the Hylean Amazon Institute in Brazil that would launch investigations in a number of fields, from ecological conditions to the educational needs of the indigenous populations; Herskovits suggested that ethnological surveys of indigenous groups be extended to include groups of blacks and their relations with whites in the area. ^[51] Herskovits was asked to provide suggestions for an anthropologist on the project and he suggested Ralph Beals (1901-1985) and Octavio Eduardo as an alternative possibility when Beals could not accept the post. ^[52] Herskovits was also consulted on UNESCO’s famed “Statement on Race.” ^[53] However, as editor of American Anthropologist he did not publish a discussion of the statement, as did the British journal Man. ^[54]

            For the UNESCO project in Brazil, Herskovits was consulted by a number of staff members. Kleinberg asked for his advice on statements made by Brazilian and other anthropologists on “race.” ^[55] Ramos, now head of UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences, told Herskovits in 1949 about the formation of the race committee he was establishing, but did not name those he chose for the committee. At the same time he told Herskovits he wanted to start a permanent division devoted to “the study of the backward people of our world to whom the benefits of Unesco are not yet extended” and that he also wanted to start a program in African studies, involving a collaboration between Northwestern University and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Herskovits was pleased, and sought through Ramos to obtain UNESCO funding for the PAS. ^[56] He also proposed that the ACLS Negro committee could be used to put together a program of research projects on the Afro-Americas. ^[57]

            Ramos died in October, 1949, and by April, 1950, Métraux was the head of a newly-created Division for the Study of Race Problems within UNESCO. Métraux advocated for anthropology to have a key part in UNESCO projects, and Herskovits published his short report on the role of anthropology in the American Anthropologist. ^[58] Ramos had not chosen Herskovits as part of his research team for the study of race, and Métraux also chose not to include Herskovits in the project directly. Herskovits’s views were represented by Ribeiro, who as part of the project did research on the role of religion in racial relations in Recife after Freyre had requested his Instituto Joaquim Nabuco be included in the project . ^[59] And Herskovits had a direct influence when he suggested his student Coelho over the African-American anthropologist St. Clair Drake (1911-1990), who had been a part of the Myrdal study. ^[60] Once the plans for the project had been drawn up, Métraux said he would be sending Herskovits the research plan for the Brazilian project, which was written by Klineberg and Coelho, for Herskovits’s comments and criticisms, saying “After all, you are the ‘great old man’ in this field.” ^[61]

            Perhaps the question should be: Why was Herskovits not more directly involved with the project? Asking this question avoids a kind of teleology often present in the history of science, and accords agency to historical actors. Herskovits certainly saw “race relations” within his area of theoretical expertise. From 1929 until 1933 reviewed the state of “race relations” in the American Journal of Sociology. ^[62] And he was sympathetic to the democracia racial argument, which clearly animated the project from the perspective of Ramos and Métraux. ^[63] As early as 1925 he compared the Brazilian situation to the “color line” in the United States, writing that “there is no race problem in Brazil.” ^[64] And he was certainly on friendly personal terms with both Ramos and Métraux. An apparently devoted friend and colleague, Métraux reported the difficulties he was having intervening with the publisher Payot in the French translation of Herskovits’s textbook Man and his Works. ^[65] He and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) looked for translators and then reviewed the translations despite mounting pressures at work, ^[66] with Métraux writing that he had “devoted to it every spare hour I had in many weeks” ^[67] and that he was sorry he “could only devote to your text a few hours at night, most of the time in bed.” ^[68]

            An evolution in the thinking of both Ramos and Métraux could be seen. Ramos became more and more outspoken against racism during the War and advocated an applied social science perspective ^[69] and similarly with Métraux after his few years with UNESCO. Métraux wrote to Herskovits saying he hoped Herskovits would recognize that the Maribal project “represents also a worthwhile contribution to the science which you have created.” ^[70] Herskovits’s reaction to the Maribal work perhaps demonstrates the emerging differences between Herskovits and the policy-oriented social science at UNESCO. Métraux was responding to Herskovits’s 1951 article “The Present Status and Needs of Afroamerican Research” when he hoped for acknowledgment of his contribution to Afro-American anthropology from the one who had been able to define the terms and ways of seeing of the field — who had “created” the “science.” Herskovits responded that when the “scientific findings” of the study were made available he would “be the first to acknowledge their contribution.” He continued: “I do think however, as you know, that there is a difference between research that is carried on for the purpose of correcting a given situation and research that is done for the purpose of extending the boundaries of knowledge.” ^[71] Métraux responded by saying “My dear Melville,” “In Haiti, during the two years I spent in the Maribal Valley, I felt I wanted to do scientific work, and I never allowed myself or my collaborators to be influenced by the fact that the result of our work might find a practical use. I am primarily a scientist, and never shall I carry out a survey, only as a basis for a practical programme.” ^[72] Later, Herskovits softened his stance, saying he looked forward to discussing with Métraux “the matter of practical versus nonapplied research,” stating ironically “Certainly I am not one to quarrel over a classification.” And when he received the Maribal book said “It is a fine piece of work, and will be a basic point of reference in all further studies of the economy of the Haitian peasant.” ^[73]

            Finally, in 1951, Alva Myrdal (1902-1986) was appointed head of UNESCO’s Department of Social Science. While on good personal terms with Herskovits — the Herskovitses had offered to take care of the Myrdal children when Gunnar and Alva were to return to Sweden at the start of World War II — it is possible that given her activist role and her new institutional position this development would not have worked in Herskovits’s favor. In any event, the project had already begun with a line-up of different investigators.

Conclusions: Institutions and Intellectual Practice

I would like to conclude by making three points.

            First, I hope that an approach to academic institutions within anthropology is an approach that recommends itself. Considerations of institutional structures have found their way into histories of Anglo-North American anthropology. For example, it is now argued that the establishment of the fieldwork method by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) as a foundational methodological strategy owes itself more to Malinowski’s entrepreneurial efforts in securing funding and his organizational efforts than simply to the power of his ideas. ^[74] And when the interpretations of Navajo religion by Gladys Reichard (1893-1955) contrasted with those of the Boas student A. L. Kroeber (1876-1960), Kroeber had the institutional resources, the differences of which are linked, it has been recognized, to gender inequalities, to put his views into circulation. Kroeber taught at Harvard where there was a recognized anthropology program and the resources to support extensive projects that trained graduate students and thus Kroeber was able to institute his interpretations whereas Reichard was not. ^[75]

            Second, however, the task of understanding scientific institutions requires a number of different theoretical approaches all at once. For the UNESCO project, we need to understand the role of international organizations in the context of the Cold War, as Stolcke has suggested. ^[76] And we also have to be able to understand the interaction of local/national political agendas, such as that of the elites of Bahia and of Brazil and their interest in the project, with the functioning of academic institutions conceived of as fields of competition and hierarchy. In the United States, the history of anthropology has been concerned with a “historicism” that professes to be atheoretical. ^[77] This implies a judgmental relativism. At the same time, Anglo-North American history of anthropology has also focused primarily on developments in the United States and in Europe. But clearly, even to understand the development of North American anthropology, as in the work of Herskovits, we need to understand his transnational connections in what I have been calling an “intellectual social formation.” ^[78] The history of anthropology in Brazil is much stronger in this regard, including the work of Florestan Fernandes, ^[79] and, more recently, especially the work of Mariza Corrêa, ^[80] Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha, ^[81] Mariza Peirano, ^[82] and Marcos Chor Maio among others writing on anthropology, and Sérgio Miceli more generally. ^[83]

            And finally, we should remember that critical reflections on social science, even on social science such as the UNESCO project, need not preclude a belief in the role for the social sciences in human emancipation. Indeed, it is the primary standard to which we should apply to our own intellectual praxis.

Kevin A. Yelvington

Department of Anthropology

University of South Florida

4202 E. Fowler Avenue SOC107

Tampa, FL 33620-8100

EE. UU.

(813) 974-0582 (telefone)

(813) 974-2668 (FAX)

yelvingt@cas.usf.edu (correio eletrônico)

                                                                         Notes