Melville J. Herskovits  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Herskovits)
Jump to: navigation, search

"More than one ethnographer has reported the experience of showing a clear photograph of a house, a person, a familiar landscape to people living in a culture innocent of any knowledge of photography, and to have the picture held at all possible angles, or turned over for inspection of its blank back, as the native tried to interpret this meaningless arrangement of varying shades of gray on a piece of paper." --Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works, Alfred A.Knopf, 1948, p.381.

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Melville Jean Herskovits (September 10, 1895 – February 25, 1963) was an American anthropologist who firmly established African and African-American 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 together.

He also helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, particularly in his book Man and His Works.

Legacy and honors

  • The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University was named in his honor; it is based on his collection of materials as chairman of the department.

Works

  • The Cattle Complex in East Africa, PhD Dissertation, 1923 (published as a book in 1926)
  • "The Negro's Americanism", in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro, 1925
  • The American Negro, 1928
  • Rebel Destiny, Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, 1934, with Frances Herskovits
  • Suriname Folk Lore, 1936, with Frances Herskovits
  • Life in a Haitian Valley, 1937
  • Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (2 vols), 1938
  • Economic Life of Primitive People, 1940
  • The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941
  • Trinidad Village, 1947, with Frances Herskovits
  • Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology, 1948
  • "Les bases de L'Anthropologie Culturelle", Payot, Paris, 1952
  • Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, 1958, with Frances Herskovits
  • Continuity and Change in African Culture, 1959
  • The Human Factor in Changing Africa, 1962
  • Economic Transition in Africa, 1964

Further reading

  • Alan P. Merriam, Melville Jean Herskovits, 1895-1963, American Anthropologist, Vol. 66, No. 1, 1964, p. 83-109.
  • Jerry Gershenhorn: Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (2004). ISBN 0-8032-2187-8.
  • Samuel J. Redman. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2016.






Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Melville J. Herskovits" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools