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Melville J. Herskovitss Theory of Folklore by Kevin A. Yelvington Department of Anthropology University of South Florida Presented to the Workshop on Folklore and the Politics of Belief in the Caribbean Mellon Seminar on Caribbean Cultural History Department of History University of California at Los Angeles May 14, 2009

To understand Melville J. Herskovitss theory of folklore we must understand, as with everything Herskovits did, Franz Boass approach to the subject. As is well known, Boas sought to distinguish his approach to anthropology from that of the cultural evolutionists, and especially that of E.B. Tylor. He accomplished this over a ten-year period at the end of the nineteenth century, culminating with his article The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology (Boas 1896). What is not always remembered is that he used folklore as a platform for this critique. The Limitations article was indeed a study of the distribution of folktale elements, and Boas used folklore to make his main points about culture: He argued that the student of culture must see elements in relation to the whole, that is, the development and use of such specimens as cooking utensils, weapons, and musical instruments needed to be seen in relation to their surroundings, that is, the physical environment, the history of the people, and the peoples with whom the people in question came into contact. These specimens, often the decontextualized vehicles for the evolutionists arguments about the levels of culture read as civilization, for Boas had to be seen in relation to the cultural whole. The same thing with folklore which, too, was related to the culture as a whole and was one of the avenues of

expression for the members of the culture. Further, toward the end of the century Boas used folklore to work through his interest in the affects of one culture upon another. In 1898 he wrote about tribal mythologies: The mythologies of the various tribes as we find them now are not organic growths, but have gradually developed and obtained their present form by the accretion of foreign material. While, sometimes, this material was adopted as-is, this foreign material was adapted and changed in form according to the genius of the people who borrowed it (quoted in Stocking 1974:5). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Boas, again arguing from the example of folklore, wrote that folklore was founded on events that reflect the [everyday] occurrences of human life, particularly those that stir the emotions of the people. At the same time, because the power of imagination in man was rather limited it was case of people preferring to operate with the old stock of imaginative happenings than invent new ones. Thus, their imaginations played with a few plots, which were extended by means of a number of motives that have a very wide distribution, which each group selectively borrows, adopts and adapts under the stress of a dominant idea or set of social practices characteristic of their own culture (quoted in Stocking 1974:6). As Stocking sums up, although Boas was here concerned with folklore per se, by implication he suggested something about the general dynamics of cultural processes the processes by which the genius of a people acted to mold borrowed elements to a traditional pattern (Stocking 1974:6). By the time Herskovits was becoming one of his students, Boas was codifying his view of the primary aim of his anthropology in a 1920 article entitled The Methods of Ethnology: American scholars are primarily interested in the dynamic phenomena of cultural change, and to

try to elucidate cultural history by the application of the results of their studies (Boas 1920:314). This fit in well with his on-going critique of evolutionism: The history of human civilization does not appear to us as determined entirely by psychological necessity that leads to a uniform evolution the world over. We rather see that each cultural group has its own unique history, dependent partly upon the peculiar inner development of the social group, and partly upon the foreign influences to which it has been subjected. He further held that There have been processes of gradual differentiation as well as processes of leveling down differences between neighboring cultural centers, but it would be quite impossible to understand, on the basis of a single evolutionary scheme, what happened to any particular people (Boas 1920:317). He then went on to point to the studies of Elsie Clews Parsons, Alfred Kroeber, and Leslie Spier on the acculturation process on the Zui, where, in contrast to the psychological explanation offered by Frank Hamilton Cushing, misleading if plausible as it was, Dr. Parsons studies prove conclusively the deep influence which Spanish ideas have had upon Zui culture, and, along with Dr. Kroebers investigations, give us one of the best examples of acculturation that have come to our notice. The historical study shows an entirely different picture compared to the psychological explanation, a picture in which the unique combination of ancient traits (which in themselves are undoubtedly complex) and of European influences, have brought about the present condition (1920:317). Despite Boass critique of evolutionism (see Stocking 1968:195-233) this did not mean that he was completely at odds, consciously or unconsciously, with some of the assumptions of the social evolutionists like Herbert Spencer or E.B. Tylor. His perspective entailed the utilization of a key concept in the evolutionists schema: that of cultural survivals. Tylor

defined survivals in Primitive Culture as processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved (Tylor 1871:16; cf. Hodgen 1936). Boas, writing in 1898 on the myths of primitive people, again maintained that the material of which they are built up is of heterogeneous origin, and that much of it is adopted ready-made. The peculiar manner in which foreign and indigenous material is interwoven and worked into a somewhat homogeneous fabric depends to a great extent upon the social conditions and habits of the people. The oft-repeated actions, habits and customs of a people, especially to the extent that they are enshrined in ritual, could be expected to be more stable than those not so established via repetition in a proscribed form and via ritual: Discrepancies between the two...belong to a class of phenomena that are called survivals. The discrepancy may consist in the preservation of earlier customs in traditions, or in fragments of early traditions under modified social conditions. The survivals themselves are proof of the gradual process of assimilation between social conditions and traditions which has wrought fundamental changes in the lore of mankind. [Boas 1940 [1898]:423]. Nearly thirty years later Boas again took up the question of Tylors evolutionism, and again he wanted to preserve the idea of survivals. According to Boas, Tylor wrongly assumed that the antiquity of one particular type is essentially due to a classification in which the form that appears as the simplest from any one point of view is considered at the same time as historically the oldest. Tylor felt the weakness of this assumption when he tried to support his

thesis by the study of survivals which indicate the character of earlier developmental stages. The problem was that it cannot be claimed that a systematic attempt has ever been made to substantiate the theory of a definite evolutionary sequence on the basis of the study of survivals. All that can be said is that fragments of earlier historical stages are bound to exist and are found (Boas 1924:342). Boas illustrated the existence of these fragments with a discussion of the survival of matrilineal forms of kinship in patrilineal society. But this, however, does not by any means provide that everywhere matrilineal society must have been the earlier form (Boas 1924:343). In developing his approach to the folklore of the Afro-Americas, Herskovits drew upon these fundamental Boasian ideas. The way was left open for Herskovits to pursue the idea of cultural survivals. Indeed, Boas had written to Zora Neale Hurston in 1927 suggesting that African mannerisms were retained by African Americans (cited in Baron 1994:105; and in Gershenhorn 2004:253-254, note 38).1 Herskovits pursued a project that he saw as the

Thus it seems not to be the case that, as Jackson argues, Boas believed that African

culture had been lost by blacks in America, even if he stressed the importance of educating black Americas about African culture as a way of increasing race pride and countering the strong feeling of despondency among the best classes of the Negro (Jackson 1986:98). Herskovits had written to Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel about Hurston, his research assistant in his physical anthropological project on race mixing and the American Negro. Although she was more White than Negro in her ancestry, Herskovits said, her manner of speech, her expressions, in short, her motor behavior were what would be

identification and documentation of African cultural survivals, within the theoretical tradition of Boasian historical-cultural particularism and thus it might be said that Herskovits inherited Boass incomplete critique of social evolutionism and with an eventual emphasis on acculturation (see Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936). After all, under acculturation it was still the geist, or genius of a people, that molded borrowed elements to a traditional pattern. Somewhat ironically, then, Herskovits began his cultural anthropological investigations of African Americans in the early 1920s, and went from a perspective that emphasized the assimilation of African Americans to their wider cultural surroundings, at the same time denying the possibility of African cultural survivals (e.g., Herskovits 1925, 1927), a position, it must be said, that was consonant with aspects of Boass thought, to taking up a position he would hold for the rest of his life that these survivals underlay the behavioral repertoires of African Americans (Baron 1994; Gershenhorn 2004; Jackson 1986; Yelvington 2006). This occurred because of the interactions of a number of forces, including the personal influence of folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons, a close associate of Boas and a teacher of Herskovits. Parsons collected folklore in the Caribbean (e.g., Parsons 1918, 1933, 1936, 1943), she financed many of Boass students and their publications, and along with Boas was active in the American Folk-Lore Society and its Journal of American Folk-Lore, exhibiting with Boas a great interest in AfroAmerican folklore where between the both of them they put together several Negro Numbers

termed typically Negro and he suggested that these movements, observed by Herskovits when Hurston was singing spirituals, had been carried over as a behavior pattern handed down thru imitation and example from the original African slaves who were brought here (Herskovits to von Hornbostel, June 10, 1927, quoted in Jackson 1986:107).

as the issues of the Journal were affectionately called (Baker 1998, 2000; Deacon 1997; Zumwalt 1992). Boas and others had founded the American Folk-Lore Society in 1888 and Boas served as president in 1900, 1932, and 1934, and was the editor of the Journal of American FolkLore between 1908 and 1923, and in all was on the editorial board for forty-four years. As Baker shows (1998:143-167), Boas effected an alliance between black intellectuals and anthropologists in the collection and publication of the folklore of the Afro-Americas. Thus, even though he might have disavowed such a position, here was Boas facilitating the use of folklore for political reasons, a tradition rooted in the German romanticism of Herder (Wilson 1973), a tradition of which he was a part (Bunzl 1996),and where folklore was useful in nationalist constructions and identity politics (Bendix 1997; Linke 1990; Zumwalt 1988). Parsons traced folktales in quest for their points of origin, which she thought could be discerned. About her work on Andros Island in the Bahamas, she said Whatever may have been the provenience of the tales in Africa, Portuguese or other, I have no doubt that by far the greater number of the Bahama tales were learned there, learned, not in America, but in Africa (Parsons 1918:xii). She advocated that the lore which is a part of an intimate knowledge of island life should be studied for an appreciation of the relations between African cultures and the Negro in America (Parsons 1933:vii-viii). It was Parsons, with this orientation, who as early as 1927 suggested through Boas to Herskovits immediately on the heels of Herskovitss writings emphasizing the cultural assimilation of African Americans into the US mainstream that Herskovits seek in the Suriname bush among the Bush Negro tribes there African cultural continuities manifest in the New World in their purest, most unadulterated forms. Herskovits wrote to Parsons in April, 1927 to say Dr. Boas told me of your very kind

suggestion regarding field work in Suriname, and to say that he looked forward to talking with her about the matter (Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Northwestern University, (hereafter H.P.N.), Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, April 30, 1927). By June, he was reporting on his appointment to Northwestern University, and said I hope that, once established, the way will be clared [sic] for some research on the Bush Negroes (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, June 29, 1927). Parsonss replied by saying simply Congratulations on the first step towards the Bush Negroes! (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Parsons to Herskovits, July 14, 1927). Parsons played a pivotal role in Herskovitss thinking and in his academic career. She paid for his first ethnological fieldwork trips, to Suriname in 1928 and 1929 and to Dahomey in 1931, paying, as well, for the publication of Suriname Folk-Lore, published by Columbia University Press (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936), one of the two major volumes to come out of the Suriname fieldwork (Simpson 1973:9; Zumwalt 1992:317). Upon hearing from Boas of Parsons underwriting his first fieldwork trip to Suriname, Herskovits wrote to Parsons to thank her and enthusiastically asserted Suriname seems to be a sort of an ethnological happy huntinggrounds (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, December 6, 1927). The fieldwork Melville Herskovits and his wife, anthropological partner, and co-author Frances S. Herskovits conducted in Suriname in the summers of 1928 and 1929 was arduous for them (Gershenhorn 2004:70-78; Price and Price 2003), but certainly yielded an enormous amount of folklore material. Melville Herskovits, at least, regarded the ethnographic data he collected in the bush among the Saramaka Bush Negroes with characteristic positivism and empiricism, writing in his field diary in Suriname that Its an ethnological gold-mine here and that the material is here so thick that it will take a steam-shovel to gather it in (Melville J. and

Frances S. Herskovits Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Suriname Field Trip Diary, entries of July 25 and July 28, 1928).2 Here, Herskovits was referring to his ethnological interviews, but presumably he also held the same view of the folklore material Frances was collecting in Paramaribo, the coastal capital of the Dutch colony. Because of his fears for her safety, and the fears of Boas and Parsons,3 Frances remained in the city during the first fieldwork trip of 1928, while Melville, along with guides, ventured into the bush. However, it was Melville who worked up the material Frances

In folklore, Herskovits came to complain that the folklore of the Afro-Americas was

presented as selected according to preconceived categories (e.g., Herskovits 1943), as if the materials were already out there simply to be collected and not in correspondence to an existing theoretical schema.
3

See Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Boas to

Herskovits, December 3, 1927, where Boas wrote to Herskovits saying I talked over the plan of your Surinam trip with Elsie and she says that she is willing to support it. In talking over the matter both of us are doubtful as to whether it would be advisable for you to bring Frances along. It is no joke travelling [sic] in the tropics and particularly when you leave the towns and go into the woods it will be very hard for her. So that both of us dissuade very decidedly a joint trip. Melville became ill and was bedridden before he could start his journey into the rainforest to start ethnographic fieldwork among the Saramakas. Frances started her folklore collecting right away. See Price and Price (2003). For Melvilles reply to Boas where he justifies Francess attendance and participation, see ibid., Herskovits to Boas, December 6, 1927.

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collected (see H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Frances S. Herskovits to Parsons, November 6, 1928). Disavowing any idea of his newfound theoretical orientation being prepared for him, in several places Herskovits retrospectively presented his Suriname fieldwork as a matter of scientific discovery. For example, at the beginning of The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovits that the first hand investigation of New World Negro societies outside the United States led to the abandonment of his initial views. Further, he claimed that this research was not designed to look for Africanisms, or African cultural survivals, and that only incidentally were they encountered: It was the investigation on this broader base, wherein the problem of Africanisms in present-day Negro behavior was only incidental, that forced revision of an hypothesis which, in the initial stages of research, there was no tendency to question (1941:6).4 Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (Yelvington 2006), the Boasian tradition, the influence of Parsons, and his developing relationships with ethnologists and folklorists in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, and Arthur Ramos in

Frances Herskovits wrote in an edited volume of Melvilles work, His field experience

in Suriname in 1928 and 1929 had a profound influence on his thinking, and though he was scarcely conscious of this at the time, the findings in both the Bush and the city of Paramaribo began shaping his concepts on acculturation. In the Guiana Bush, among the Saramacca peoples, he saw, as he often told his students, nearly all of western sub-Saharan African represented, from what is now Mali to Loango and into the Congo and the Loango chief who came to our base camp invoked both the Great God of the Akan of the Gold Coast, Nyankompon, and the Bantu Zambi (1966:vii-viii).

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Brazil, all of whom shared Herskovitss emerging theoretical orientation and intention document what they defined as African cultural survivals in the national context albeit for varied political purposes which can only be alluded to here. As with Herskovits, the study of folklore was central to their enterprise.5 This was the era in the Caribbean as elsewhere when folklore was used as a plank in nationalist arguments. In Puerto Rico, for instance, Antonio S. Pedreira (who had studied at Columbia University in the 1920s) was developing a view of Puerto Rican national identity centered around the image of the jbaro, or peasant, and Spanish cultural heritage, and in this movement the Herderian study of folklore as revelatory of the national soul became important (e.g., Pedreira 1935; cf. Flores 1979; Guerra 1998). Price-Mars, who had railed against the social and cultural effects of the US occupation of Haiti and who had urged his fellow Haitians to look to the folklore for the authentic Haitian culture rather than to be imitative of France or North America (Price-Mars 1928), in Formation Ethnique, Folk-Lore et Culture de Peuple Hatien he referred readers to the work of the Herskovitses as examples of how folklore should be studied in order to be useful. He defined folklore as the sum of beliefs, superstitions, legends, tales, songs, riddles and customs on which lie the life of a primitive people and constitute the foundations of their culture. He went on:

I will not cite the extensive works of these scholars here. The recent critical literature on

them includes but is not limited to the following: On Price-Mars, see Averill (2008); Largey (2006); Magloire and Yelvington (2005); Ramsey (2002); on Ortiz, see Bronfman (2004); Bremer (1993); Font and Quiroz (2005); Moore (1994, 1997);Palmi (2002); RodrguezMangual (2004); Sant (2002); on Ramos, see Barros (2000); Lange (2008); Romo (2007).

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There is no country which possesses as rich a well of oral tradition as ours. And these traditions, profound and marvelous, date back to the origins of the race. Throughout thousands of years, they embody the annals transmitted from one generation to the next and by which the gestures of the past and the paths of the present are justified. They will compact with steadfast patience the materials on which history will uproot much later with hypotheses of its construction. During thousands of years, they were the deposits of obscure thoughts of our ancestors, the discrete guardians of the recipe by which the enigmas of the world are explained. And for a people deprived of archives, lacking a written language, they consist in themselves of the inestimable worth of documents laden with the secret of expired ages that await their alert interpreters (1956 [1939]:50-51, my translation; see, also, Price-Mars 1951). Yet, as with the ethnology coming out of Price-Mars, Ortiz, and Ramos, and others, Herskovits found no difficulty in incorporating their arguments into his own as he constructed or, rather, imbibed what was for him an apparently new paradigm as he entered into dialogue with these scholars. He did not reflect at this point on the political dimensions of folklore scholarship as he went about making unacknowledged nationalist arguments of his own.6 In an early

Later, he acknowledged that in various countries the study of folklore has always been

marked by a strong nationalistic emphasis, and its investigation, often conducted under governmental subsidies, has been focused on local or regional areas within specific domains (1946:92), but he did not connect in print at least this observation with his own work nor to that of those scholars on whose work he drew.

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published statement of this new program, the 1930 article The Negro in the New World: The Statement of a Problem, Herskovits proposed that the study of the descendants of Africans in the New World should be concerned with what was retained from African culture, what was discarded, what was learned in the New World context and under what conditions culture could be seen to maintain itself under strain. Here he called for more knowledge of African cultures, so that we shall have an adequate basis to investigate the affiliation of those cultural traits with American Negro has retained in his contact with white and Indian civilizations, and, on the other hand, he assured that further investigation on this side of the Atlantic must result in more data from which to draw conclusions as to the nature of the African cultural survivals which are manifest in the behavior of the Negro in the Caribbean, the United States, and in South America. He went on to say that it would be possible on the basis of then-current knowledge to make a kind of chart indicating the extent to which the descendants of Africans brought to the New World have retained Africanisms in their cultural behavior, with more in one locale in one area of culture, and less in another place (1930:149).7 The decade of the 1930s was bookended by the publication of The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), which sought to make the argument that once the citizens, white and black, of the United States knew of the African cultural background and that African Americans were like other immigrant groups in that they continued to use the traditions of the motherland as they adapted to the new land then racism and prejudice against African Americans would decrease. Folklore figured prominently in this new theoretical orientation. Folklore was conceived

Fifteen years later he did make such a chart. See Herskovits (1945).

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by Herskovits as one element of culture, such as religion or kinship, that could survive more or less intact or be modified as it traveled. This view of folklore was consonant with the conception of culture as a bundle of discernable traits. Folklore, then, for Herskovits could be used in understanding the African cultural baseline as well as what had survived the Middle Passage. Further, folklore was perhaps the Africanism par excellence, and it survived because it could for a number of historical reasons. As he wrote in Life in a Haitian Valley, The trait of African culture that has survived most tenaciously in all the New World, even when European influence has been strongest, is that of folk-literature of tales, proverbs, and riddles (1937:264). Thus there was for Herskovits more than a mere passing interest in folklore. In the key career years between when he first began teaching a course on folklore in his second semester at Northwestern, during the 1927-1928 school year (H.P.N., Box 18, Folder 3, Herskovits to Parsons, September 26, 1927),8 to when he became the president of the American Folklore Society in 1945, were crucial for his career and theoretical development. The fieldwork in Suriname resulted in two books and in a number of articles. Rebel Destiny (Herskovits and Herskovits 1934) had the feel of a travel account; Suriname Folk-Lore (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936) consisted of a long Notes on the Culture of the Paramaribo Negroes (pp. 1-113), followed by hundreds of pages of Anansi stories, proverbs, including

Gershenhorn (2004:137-138) has Herskovits teaching folklore by the 1930s when he

formed a separate Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. However, according to my evidence Herskovits was teaching folklore from the very beginning of his appointment as the lone anthropologist in Northwesterns Department of Sociology.

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those about the head kerchiefs worn by the older women of Paramaribo, and riddles collected mainly by Frances. The fieldwork in West Africa in 1931 solidified Herskovitss core theory of folklore entailing the view of folklore again, including narrative, proverbs, and riddles as oral folk-literature, as something somehow arising out of but distinct from cultural custom (Herskovits and Herskovits 1958; see Baron 2004). The field methods consisted of hiring paid informants to provide information in response to questions, and the Herskovitses attending ceremonies and storytelling events of various types. The emphasis was on folklores function in the moral education of the young, especially proverbs, on audience participation, including more or less scripted interruptions of storytellers, multiple narrative forms, the role of improvisation, the use of double entendre, especially in riddles where the lewd and obscene could be disguised from those listeners too young to understand, and the use of indirection in speech, especially for social and community control. Rather than a focus on folklore as texts, performance style and the contexts in which folklore was performed were crucial for the understanding of folklores meaning and function. In Rebel Destiny, based on the 1928 and 1929 fieldwork, there was already an emphasis on context. The Herskovitses wrote of a story-telling session that the speakers message was not the most important aspect (at least to the Herskovitses): What really mattered, however, was the way in which the intervals in the story-telling were dramatized (1934:103). In the 1930s, Melville Herskovitss attention was drawn to the possibilities of the theoretical advancement of the discipline through the use of the concept of acculturation (see Redfield, Linton, and J. Herskovits 1936). This impacted his view of folklore under the conditions of acculturation. Writing on the effects of acculturation on folklore, Herskovits

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lamented that these effects were given explicit statement in but a few studies. He acknowledged the painstaking investigations that tracked how themes from various sources have been combined in the tales of Indo-European peoples, but comparable analyses of primitive tribes were lacking. The exceptions were work done by American folklorists whose interests were focused solely on American Indians and African Americans and whose collection of stories showed European and the occasional African motifs. Yet this stopped short of the approach Herskovits advocated: Their elements are ordinarily not broken down as to show how incidents of foreign derivation were worked into the aboriginal tales; still less information is available as to the relationship between these stories and their social setting (Herskovits 1938:106). Further, with respect to New World Negro lore, rather than the conventional approach of the folklorists, which consisted in referring to those folk from whom the same motifs have been collected, Herskovits said effort should be put into showing the manner in which these literary products have been subject to the process of repatterning and recombination that is so especially subject to observation in the field and he referred to the work of Parsons, Martha Beckwiths Jamaica research (Beckwith 1929), the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain (1937), as well as his own in Suriname (Herskovits and Herskovits 1936), as positive examples of this sort of scholarship (Herskovits 1938:107). As Baron (2003) shows, Herskovits revised his conceptual metaphors through the years. For example, African cultural survivals, which could be seen as quaint antiquated traits, later became seen as retentions, with the implication that effort went into their retention and where, in a more active conceptualization, behaviors were reinterpretations of African cultural traits

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and traditions (see, especially, Herskovits 1946:97; Herskovits and Herskovits 1947).9 Further, retentions and reinterpretations were later preferred because the idea of survivals could suggest that these traits no longer had a function where Herskovits was keen to emphasize that Africanisms defined as retentions and reinterpretations were fully functioning, and functional, in and for Afro-American cultures and not, as he put it, seen as cultural curiosities (Herskovits 1943:3). Now, not all of the Boasian baggage he took on became transformed and, indeed, one could argue that the idea of retentions and reinterpretations was only a slight variation on the idea of survivals. In some ways, Herskovits simply renamed Boasian concepts but retained their meaning and utility. For instance, the idea of a people being preoccupied with a small range of interests and who expended their energies in some cultural institutions at the expense of others became cultural focus (see Herskovits 1947:542-560). And the idea of a people molding borrowed cultural elements according to their traditional pattern, their particular cultural genius, was Herskovitss own unremarked upon use of the Boasian principle of the geist. With regards to folklore, it seems Herskovits did move beyond Boas in his emphasis on the social setting and the performance of narratives (see Baron 1994, 2004). In this light, we should look at some of his last explicit programmatic statements on folklore. In the special issue of the Journal of American Folklore to commemorate the death of Parsons, Herskovits weighed in on what he saw as Some Next Steps in the Study of Negro Folklore. He surveyed the developments in the field due to Parsonss influence, which he

It is possible that Herskovits reconsidered his position after reading Hodgens (1936)

critique.

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identified as collecting tales without the use of preconceived categories, the recording of stories as narrated and the identity of the storyteller and other information on the context, the importance of the use of the catch phrase in the folklore of the Afro-Americas which was especially valuable in comparative analysis, and Parsonss anthropological point of using folklore to study the larger problems of cultural form and cultural dynamics. Folklore, Parsons had explained in conversation, permitted the study of diffusion in process (1943:1-2). Herskovits stressed the need for the following next steps: The need for better definitions, the need for additional data, especially from certain key geographical areas, the need for a re-analysis of existing materials, and the need to more fully understand the social contexts of folklore performance. He was anxious to differentiate between folklore as folk literature and folk custom. He decried the emphasis on folk custom to the expense of folk literature in many studies, and pleaded for defining more sharply the very word folklore, in terms of the distinction between folk literature and folk custom (1943:4). Yet his reasoning continued to betray an underlying evolutionism: The tales, proverbs and riddles which in many regions are today the most purely African aspects of the life of the Negroes, have been put aside by students of the Negro for the study of other phases of Negro life more difficult to access and less amenable to identification (1943:3). Here the notion of being today more or less purely African implies that culture is something that can be eroded more here or less there with the passing of time. As a reminder, the social evolutionists like Spencer and Tylor felt that culture was something to be achieved and that there were groups who possessed more or less of it. And just as culture could be attained, it could also be lost and a kind of cultural regression could set in. He went on to emphasize the need for talks, proverbs and riddles to be understood in relation

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to the cultural setting out of which they arose, and that the social setting of folklore is of particular importance for the scientific analysis of materials from Negro societies (1943:7). In his retiring presidential address at the American Folklore Societys meetings at the end of 1945, Herskovits sought to define a modern approach to folklore and lauded the approaches arising out of the US (as opposed to European) tradition. Stating that folklore was but one manifestation of human culture (1946:94), he said If we refuse to consider the folk as quaint, or backward, or ignorant, but use the term to designate any people or class in any society that as a group exhibit identifiably distinctive modes of life; if we then concentrate our efforts on the study of their literary expression, folklore becomes a field concerned with realities of life and not with the relics of a dead past (1946:99). This literary expression was primarily oral, and thus he advocated the study of oral literature as our primary concern (1946:100). These positions are repeated at greater length in his textbook, Man and His Works (Herskovits 1947:414-426).

In sum, I believe it is important to consider Herskovitss researches in folklore for the following reasons: 1. He represents an important figure not only in US anthropology of the middle twentieth century. Not only that, he is rightly considered a pioneer of Caribbean anthropological research. 2. Because of his transnational scientific networks with Latin American and Caribbean scholars. Herskovitss work was used to inform the use of folklore in nationalism , nationalist scholars such as Ortiz, Price-Mars, and Ramos. 3. His students went on to take up his mantle in doing folklore research. These included his

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informal students like Zora Neale Hurston as well as those with whom he had an official capacity as teacher, such as Katherine Dunham and Daniel Crowley in the Caribbean, and a number of other students doing research in Africa. 4. For his Influence on other scholars, who had a similar orientation, such as Harold Courlander and Alan Lomax.

As the Herskovitses recorded in Suriname (1936:144), the stylized completion of a story-telling is often No tori kom kaba the story is at an end. References Manuscript Sources American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Franz Boas Papers Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois Melville J. Herskovits Papers, Africana Manuscripts 6. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits Papers, MG 261 Secondary Sources Averill, Gage 2008 Ballad Hunting in the Black Republic: Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37. Caribbean Studies 36(2):3-22. Baker, Lee D. 1998 From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954.

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