3069216

The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions
Author(s): Kevin A. Yelvington

Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 30 (2001), pp. 227-260
Published by: Annual Reviews
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3069216
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2001. 30:227-60

Copyright () 2001 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF AFRO-LATIN AMERICA
AND THE CARIBBEAN: Diasporic Dimensions

Kevin A. Yelvington
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620-8100;
e-mail: yelvingt@chumal .cas.usf.edu
Key Words African diaspora, blackness, history of anthropology, "race,"

ethnicity, nationalism, creolization
* Abstract The contributions of a number of First and Third World scholars to
the development of the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and
the Caribbean have been elided from the core of the discipline as practiced in North
America and Europe. As such, the anthropology of the African diaspora in the
Americas can be traced to the paradigmatic debate on the origins of New World black
cultures between Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African
American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The former argued for the existence of
African cultural continuities, the latter for New World culture creations in the context of
discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African

descent, in light of slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial contexts. As a result, subsequent positions have been defined by oppositions in every subdisciplinary specialization and area of interest. Creolization models try to obviate this bifurcation, and newer
dialogical theoretical perspectives build upon such models by attempting to combine
revisionist historiography with social/cultural constructionist approaches to identity,
especially around the concept of blackness understood in the context of cultural identity
politics.
INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENCE OF

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL PAST
The current anthropological concern with processes of globalization,

migration, and transnationalism, citizenship; with colonialism, the his
opment of cultures, cultural hybridity, cultural politics and the politics
difference and disjuncture; with resistance, structure and agency can
as "new," "cutting edge," or "hot topics" only by eliding and implicit
ing foundational scholarship on the anthropology of the African dias
Americas, such as that of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), St. Clair D

1990), Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960), Katherine Dunham (b. 1909),
Mars (1876-1969), R6mulo Lachataiere (1909-1952), or Arthur A.
0084-6570/01/1021-0227$14.00
227
228 YELVINGTON
(1874-1938), to name only a few. The Haitian anthropologist A

(1850-1911), whose writings on "race" [Firmin 2000 (1885)] pre
Franz Boas and were in direct opposition to contemporaneous ra
Gobineau, placed himself and his work squarely within a frame
exchanges but can nowhere be seen as an anthropological ancest
recent works from a number of disciplines aimed at defining dias
ing and justifying its use as a theoretical concept do so from a par
that relegates the African diaspora in the New World to the statu
Although this is not the forum to write or right such a history, w
or redemptionist, nor a place to cite chapters and ignored verse

forgotten founders, a mention of this vanquished scholarship
understand the following remarks on the history of the study
aspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, allowing us to paus
wonder aloud what connection exists between the fact that these scholars them-
selves were of African descent and the minor role they played in anthropological
canon-making (see for example Baker 1998; Drake 1980, 1990; Fluehr-Lobban
2000; Harrison 1992; and the chapters in Harrison & Harrison 1999).
The anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean
was born out of the elision of these scholars and their scholarship and continues to
be shaped by its paradigmatic formation as an anthropological specialization dating
back to the 1930s. In the debate begun then, the opposing sides were exemplified
by the work of Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963)
and African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962). Their debate
has in many ways continued to define the terms of reference for the production
of anthropological knowledge (Yelvington Forthcoming a). With the publication
of The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovits is credited with legitimating
the study of black cultures within anthropology. He aimed at exploding racist de-
pictions of New World blacks by maintaining the Boasian conceptual separation

of "race" and culture. He did so by utilizing a number of tropes and conceptual
devices in order to trace what he saw as "Africanisms" (see Cole 1985) in religion,
language, the family, and other cultural forms and institutions transported to the
New World with the slaves from what he called the West African-Congo "cultural
area." While in his early work on African Americans (e.g., Herskovits 1925) he
emphasized the process of assimilation to American culture, by 1930 Herskovits
was defining his project as that of "The Negro in the New World" (Herskovits 1930;
cf. Jackson 1986). After early physical anthropological work on African Americans, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork on this research problem with his wife
and collaborator Frances S. Herskovits (1897-1972) in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti,

Trinidad, and Brazil (Baron 1994, Gershenhor 2000, Simpson 1973, Yelvington
Forthcoming b).
Some of the concepts Herskovits employed have explicitly or unintentionally
in different guises become part of the perspectives of subsequent generations of
anthropologists of the African diaspora in the Americas, including "cultural tenacity," "retentions," "reinterpretation," and "syncretism," all under the overarching
AFRO-LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
229
rubric of "acculturation." For Herskovits, even improvisation was an

trait, and "psychological resilience" he saw as a "deep-rooted African
of adaptation" (Herskovits 1948; cf. Apter 1991). Herskovits's position w
ical extension of Boasian historical and cultural particularism. He com
advocacy of anthropology as a dispassionate scientific mode of inquir
radical cultural relativism. His thought was also (in)formed by the patr
American folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941), whose work exem
a similar quest for ultimate origins, as well as by his relations with t
neering Latin American and Caribbean anthropologists and ethnologis
study of the "African presence" in their societies predated Herskovits'
Their studies were congruent with his approach, occurring within the
diverse local nationalist projects (distinct from Herskovits's) that were
showing the black element in national culture and the black contribut
nation, and that suggested public policies relating to blackness (see, am
ers, Bastide 1974; Coronil 1995; Correa 1998,2000; Davis 1992; Fernand
Iznaga 1989; Moore 1994; Morse 1996; Palmie 2001; Peirano 1981; Shann
Simpson 1973; Yelvington Forthcoming b). These pioneers included Art
(1903-1949) in Brazil and Ferando Ortiz Femrandez (1881-1969) in C
followers of the Brazilian Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906)], Pr
in Haiti, and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran (1908-1996) in Mexico. This
tual social formation" engaged in setting the field's parameters; Hers

Ramos, for example, worked to exclude the work of American anthropo
Landes (1908-1991), whose take on Afro-Brazil diverged somewhat fro
own (Landes 1947; cf. Cole 1994, 1995, Healey 1998, Landes 1970, Y
Forthcoming b).
Herskovits felt that the disparaging of "the Negro past" and cultura
on the part of the dominant society sustained racism and the oppression o
Americans. In order to reverse this, he provided evidence for what h

Africanisms in New World Negro culture that reached back beyond, an
through, the ignominy of slavery. These Africanisms were seen as su
African cultures that existed in more or less transmuted variants in the Americas
existing beneath the surface cultural forms blacks had adapted. He believed he
could chart the intensity of Africanisms, and specifically their origin in African
"nations" or ethnicities (Herskovits 1933), versus other cultural legacies in various
institutions and practices across the societies of the Americas (see Table 1).
Frazier (e.g., 1939), the Chicago School sociologist, utilized a more structural
approach and argued that African slaves in the United States were dispossessed of
their cultures in the enslavement process and were best viewed as disadvantaged
Americans. Placing his work in opposition to Herskovits, Frazier maintained that
"as regards the Negro family, there is no reliable evidence that African culture has
had any influence on its development" (1939, p. 12). For him, "probably never
before in history has a people been so nearly completely stripped of its social
heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America." They had, "through force
of circumstances," to "acquire a new language, adopt new habits of labor, and take
TABLE 1 Herskovits's "Scale of Intensity of New World Africanisms"l
Social Non-kinship
Technology Economics organization institutions Religion Mag
Guiana (bush)2
Guiana
a
a
(Paramaribo)
Haiti (peasant)
Haiti (urban)
Brazil
(Bahia-Redife)
Brazil
(Porto
Brazil
Alegre)
(Maranhao-rural)
Brazil
(Maranhao-urban)
Cuba
Jamaica (general) e
Honduras c
Jamaica (Maroons) c
Jamaica
a
a
(Morant Bay)
(Black Caribs)3
Trinidad
(Port
Trinidad
Mexico
U.S.
(Toco)
U.S.
'Only
(rural
c
e
c
b
c
c
Islands
North)
greatest
South)
(urban
the
(Choc6)
Islands
(Gullah
U.S.
Spain)
(Guerrero)
Colombia
Virgin
of
degree
d
e
of
e
e
retention
is
2The derivations of the listings given in Table 1 are as follows:
Guiana, Brazil (Bahia and southern Brazil), Trinidad, and Haiti; field research and various published work
Brazil (north-urban and rural); unpublished reports of fieldwork by Octavio Eduardo in Maranh5o.
Jamaica; first-hand contact with the Maroons and other Jamaican Negroes, though without opportunity for detailed field
by Martha Beckwith.
Cuba, various works by E Ortiz, particularly his Los negros brujos, and on R. Lachataier6'sManual de santeria.
Virgin Islands, the monograph by A.A. Campbell entitled, "St Thomas Negroes-a study of Personality and Culture"
field materials of J.C. Trevor.
Gullah Islands, field-work by W.R. Bascom, some restults of which have been reported in a paper entitled, "Accultura
1941,pp.
United
3Carib
43-
States,
Indian
Source:
ma
infl
Herskovit
232 YELVINGTON
over, however imperfectly, the folkways of the American environ
the habits and customs as well as the hopes and fears that charac
their forebears in Africa, nothing remains" (1939, pp. 21-22).
The contrasting perspectives of Herskovits and Frazier have in
tated the approaches of subsequent researchers in all fields of th
the African diaspora in the Americas (see the discussions in A
1983, Whitten & Szwed 1970, Yelvington Forthcoming a). Thes
duced more correctly, perhaps, overdrawn idealizations of thei
in the pages of the American Sociological Review over the black
indicates well their different approaches (Frazier 1942, 1943;
But Frazier adhered to a Herskovitsian view of acculturation (
243-46): Citing Herskovits, he was willing to admit that African

in the Caribbean and Latin America, especially in religion (Fraz
and he attributed the uniqueness of the United States in this reg
pp. 7-8, 1957, p. 336) to the contrasting effects of the differing
the other hand, Herskovits never diminished the power of the ens
in "stripping from the aboriginal African culture" their "larger in
the more intimate elements in the organization of living" (Hersko
1947, p. 7). Nevertheless, today scholars tend to be identified (ev
explicitly self-identify) with one of two competing camps: the n

versus "creationist" or "creolization" theorists. These latter em
creativity, cultural blending and borrowing, cultural adaptation
stances, and ethnogenetic processes.
In terms of a politics of reception, Frazier's views have fallen

ogy's purview. Although Herskovits's notions of Africanisms w
part rejected by African-American intellectuals in the pre-Civil
Herskovits's work continues to loom large and many anthropologis
diaspora in the Americas are liable to locate themselves within t

tisans may allow themselves a broad canvas in art or philosophy
cf. S. Price, Forthcoming) or they may confine themselves to a
institution, such as family land in the Caribbean (e.g. Carnegie

1987). A search for "pre-contact" culture in contexts that assu
definition fits, after all, anthropology's search for the pristin
Thus, the anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbea
what Bourdieu might call a "field" (champ), and is a discrete and in
with its own "logic," within which the imposition of one group's
results in the production of a "natural order" that tends to uphold
"ways of seeing." Furthermore, the relationship between the ant
anthropologists' personal questions of identity is crucial (Frank

2000). Scott rightly insists that "a critical anthropology of the
has to be constituted through a close attention to the history of i
and to the extent to which it assumes their transparency" (1999, p
rarely acknowledged as such by anthropologists of the African
America and the Caribbean. This is because few working anthro
233
historians of anthropology. Fewer still are anthropologists who attempt o
and explicitly to place themselves and their theoretical approach within s

traditions. One notable exception is Harrison (Harrison 1992, Harrison &
1992), a Caribbeanist who sets her approach in relation to Du Bois's anth

ogy in calling for an anthropology of the African diaspora (Harrison 19
advocating anthropology as a tool of liberation (Harrison 1991).
The foregoing is not merely historical background to the anthropologica
of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean; rather it sig
extent to which this anthropology continues to be framed by these foun
paradigms and politics (Szwed 1972). With this in mind, I provide an adm
narrow focus in what follows, concentrating on the social and cultural anthr
of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean inasmuch as this scholarship e
the concept of diaspora or shows how Afro-Americans are conscious of be

diaspora; my review has a bias toward recent work. This unfortunately lea
a number of important studies of black communities in the Americas sout
Rio Grande. To compensate, I attempt to make this review interdisciplinar
sense that I refer (albeit too briefly) to work from other disciplines that is ei
thropological in orientation or speaks directly to questions that have been
by social and cultural anthropologists-namely, the work of ethnomusico

historians, linguists, cultural theorists, and writers and literary critics.
GEOGRAPHIES OF BLACKNESS: DELINEATING DIASPORA
Even though Du Bois (e.g., 1939), Drake (e.g., 1982), and others oper
what can be called a diasporic frame of reference, their marginali
that the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has bee
various theoretical terms and not always explicitly as "diaspora." Mo
decades ago, when commenting on the Herskovits-Frazier debate, t
anthropologist M.G. Smith (1921-1993) called for an approach that
social and cultural perspectives (1957). Perhaps the best exemplific
is the widely cited work of Mintz & Price (1992 [1976]), who, taking
the question of survivals versus cultural creation, argue "it is less
West (and Central) Africa as a broad culture area" than "the levels
would have to seek confirmation of this postulated unity," adding:
cultural heritage, widely shared by the people imported into any new
have to be defined in less concrete terms, by focusing more on value

sociocultural forms, and even by attempting to identify unconsciou
cal' principles, which may underlie and shape behavioral response"

10). These principles are "basic assumptions about social relations"
assumptions and expectations about the way the world functions ph
cally." They posit that "certain common orientations to reality may
the attention of individuals from West and Central African culture
lar kinds of events, even though the ways for handling these even
234 YELVINGTON
quite diverse in formal terms," suggesting that "the comparative
attitudes and expectations about sociocultural change... might re

underlying consistencies" (1992, p. 10). While Mintz & Price admi
derlying principles will prove difficult to uncover," they point t
attempts "to define the perceived similarities in African (and A

song style, graphic art, motor habits, and so forth," asserting that
similarities are real, there must exist underlying principles (wh
unconscious) that are amenable to identification, description, an

Thus, "in considering African-American cultural continuities, it
the more formal elements stressed by Herskovits exerted less

nascent institutions of newly enslaved and transported Africa
common basic assumptions about social relations or the workings
(1992, p. 11).
Drawing on work on the history of the slave trade, Mintz & Price emphasize
the ethnic heterogeneity of New World slave populations, which, perhaps counterintuitively, they see as an invitation to inter-African syncretism and an interactive
creolization process that began in the first moments of the creation of New World
slave societies. They dispute the approach that infers historical connection between a single, specific culture in West Africa and one in the New World based
on putative similarities (such as lexical items), arguing that, besides being at odds
with historical data, such a model is committed to a view of culture as an undifferentiated whole: "Given the social setting of early New World colonies, the
encounters between Africans from a score or more different societies with each
other, and with their European overlords, cannot be interpreted in terms of two
(or even many different) 'bodies' of belief and value, each coherent, functioning, and intact. The Africans who reached the New World did not compose, at
the outset, groups. In fact, in most cases, it might even be more accurate to view
them as crowds, and very heterogeneous crowds at that." The slaves could only
become communities "by processes of cultural change": "What the slaves unde-
niably shared at the outset was their enslavement; all-or nearly all-else had
to be created by them" (1992, p. 18). This being the main thrust of their model,
Mintz & Price are careful to point to differences in slave regimes and relative
concentration or dispersal of slaves belonging to the same ethnic/cultural group
as historical questions; they do not dispute the influence of later-arriving African
ethnic groups on the direction of a particular locale's Afro-American culture. They
point to "immensely important continuities of many kinds with ancestral civilizations; and [they] must add that the history of Afro-America is marked by renewals
of identification on many occasions." They say they "recognize that many aspects
of African-American adaptiveness may themselves be in some important sense
African in origin" (1992, pp. 94, 95).
The influence of the model has been wide, stimulating work in the "culture
of slavery" (e.g., Palmie, 1995a) and on play and popular culture (e.g., Burton
1997). Price & Price, for example, drawing on their extensive work on AfroAmerican arts, followed up this more programmatic statement with a tour de
235
force on Saramaka (Suriname maroon) aesthetics (1999). Citing the mo

approval, Trouillot (1998, p. 9) cautions against theories that "seize cr
as a totality, thus one level too removed from the concrete circumstanc
the individuals engaged in the process" and insists that the "historical
of cultural production" become "a fundamental and necessary part" of
Maurer (1997) also criticizes notions of creolization and hybridity that
metaphors of biological reproduction and genetic recombination. R. P
strongly urged anthropologists to take account of parallel work by con
Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, Maryse Cond6, Edouard
George Lamming, and Derek Walcott (1998). These writers actively en
and often criticize the anthropology (Scott 1999). The Martinican playw
cultural critic Glissant writes:
One of the most terrible implications of the ethnographic approach is the insistence on fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the
tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated
survival. This is how those generalized projections of a series of events that

obscure the network of real links become established. The history of a trans-
planted population, but one which elsewhere becomes another people, allows
us to resist generalization and the limitations it imposes. Relationship (at the
same time link and linked, act and speech) [needs to be] emphasized over
what in appearance could be conceived as a governing principle, the so-called
universal 'controlling force' (1989, p. 14).
On the other hand, Price & Price (1997) show how some intellectuals emphasize
"creolism" (creolite) as part of elite ethnic and class politics.
The Mintz and Price creolization model comes out of and has inspired (both
for and against) work in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean languages. Confronted with extreme, even bewildering, linguistic heterogeneity in the region (see
Table 2), linguists and linguistically oriented anthropologists have poured a significant amount of effort into investigations of creoles, pidgins (Jourdan 1991),
and the development of African-influenced languages in the New World (e.g., Perl
& Schwegler 1998). There is little agreement on the very categories of analysis
(see e.g., Schieffelin & Doucet 1994 on Haitian kreyol). Mintz (1971) warned as
early as a 1968 conference on pidgins and creoles held at the University of the
West Indies in Jamaica that the characteristic shape of a language cannot be seen
outside of its sociological context and the processes of historical change. Still,
investigations are often couched in terms of locating "Africanisms" (Mufwene
1993). The continuity versus creativity debate is alive here too. This body of work
has also imbibed all of the controversies associated with the study of pidgins and
creoles generally, e.g., differentiating between pidgins and creoles themselves,
monogenesis versus polygenesis debates, (African) substrata versus (European)
superstrata versus universalist hypotheses of creole genesis (the latter of which
includes Bickerton's controversial "bioprogram hypothesis," and the applicability of pidginization-creolization-decreolization creole continuum models), and the
236 YELVINGTON
TABLE 2 Caribbean language situations
Multilingual: Trinidad has standard and nonstandard forms of Englis

French-based creole, nonstandard Spanish, Bhojpuri, Urdu, and Yoru
Suriname has Dutch, Sranan, Saramaccan, Ndjuka, Javanese, and Hin
Bilingual: St. Lucia, Dominica, and Grenada have standard and nons
forms of English and a French-based creole. The Netherlands Antill
Dutch and Papiamentu (with English and Spanish widely used).
Diglossia: In Haiti and the French West Indies, French and a French-b
creole exist but are kept relatively separate.
Continuum: Guyana, Antigua, Jamaica, Montserrat, and St. Kitts hav
different graded levels of language beginning with a polar variety co
called "creole" or "patois" and moving through intermediate levels t

standard norm of English at the other pole.
Monolingual: Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto
have a standard and a nonstandard form of European languages (Eng

in the first case, Spanish in the others).
Source: Alleyne 1985:166.
New or the Old World as the site of creole genesis (Jourdan 1991;
1997). Maroon societies are often the privileged site of inves
Schwegler 1996; cf. Price 1975). A common problem occurs when

to extend their model to "culture at large." Most models between
poles (and polemics) have given way to those that in one way or
account for an interaction of influences (Jourdan 1991). Speech ac
and expressive culture incorporating ambiguity and indirection
common Afro-American culture, whether conceived in retentionis
terms (Abrahams 1983; cf. Wilson 1973). But many anthropologi

to focus on issues of identity, language use, and language choice (M
Schnepel 1993), and on language use in religious practices (Bilby 19
Rastafarianism (Homiak 1995, Pulis 1993).
A number of recent treatments of the African diaspora in the New
Martinez Montiel 1992, Rahier 1999a), especially by historians an
oriented scholars (e.g., Byfield 2000, Conniff & Davis 1994, H
1999, Jalloh & Maizlish 1996, Okpewho et al 1999, but see the ea
Harris 1982 and Crahan & Knight 1979), have surmounted the nece
sufficient procedure of documenting rather mechanically the origi
tions of the slaves and the dispersals of peoples of African descen
that received roughly 90% of all enslaved Africans landed in the
Mintz 1974, pp. 1-32). New syntheses by historians of the slave tr

the provenience, direction, and ethnic identities of enslaved Afric
2000, Eltis & Richardson 1997, Lovejoy 2000a,b; see Table 3). Man
in this vein challenge the Mintz & Price model by affirming the p
237
African "nations"/ethnicities (variously defined) to shape particular Ne

slave societies (e.g., Thornton 1992, Palmer 1995, cf. Scott 1999). In pro
"Africa-centred" focus, Lovejoy (2000b, pp. 16, 17) argues that Mintz a
model results in a "depersonalized" view of slaves, and he charges that

sion "telescopes" and represents a "hypostatization" of the creolizatio
Eltis (2000, p. 245), however, finds their idea that enslaved Africans on
dle passage were a "crowd" rather than a cultural grouping to be "ove

because of data that indicate the nonrandom arrivals of Africans in the Ameri-
cas. Both Lovejoy and Eltis misrepresent the Mintz & Price model in the process.
Anthropologists accepting colonial data on slave ethnicities as unproblematic do
so by making unwarranted assumptions about the nature of colonial knowledge
(Scott 1999). The most illuminating studies on the Americas in this genre are those
dealing with specific times and contexts, such as Thorton's on African soldiers
and ideologies in the Haitian Revolution (1991, 1993). In contrast, historians of
the Americas such as Berlin (1998), Morgan (1998), and Palmie (1995a) tend to
affirm the model by pointing, depending on the historical and regional context, to
material showing inter-African creolization, resident-forced immigrant creolization, re-Africanization, recreolization, and the invention of tradition at work in
the creation of ethnic/national labels and identities in the Americas. On this last
score they have received backing from Africanist historians (Law 1997). Similar
divisions exist in the archaeology of the African diaspora in the region (see Orser
1998).
Attempts at conceptualizing the diaspora come from many directions these
days. But the work of major cultural studies theorists such as Hall (1990, 1999)
and Gilroy (1993, cf. Helmreich 1993, Scott 1999) not so much obviates as complicates anthropological concerns. They both make important points against the
racial and cultural essentializing of blackness and tout a perspective on cultural
hybridity. The diaspora experience is defined "not by essence or purity, but by the
recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora
identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves
anew, through transformation and difference ..." (Hall 1990, p. 235). The lack of
politics in the notion of hybridity is never discussed. "Africa," Hall maintains, is
never unmediated, unchanged, nor completely recoverable for Caribbean people

and by extension blacks in the diaspora. It becomes a sort of base for this hybridity,
giving it a singular, recognizable form: "Africa, the signified which could not be
represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken, unspeakable

'presence' in Caribbean culture. It is 'hiding' behind every verbal inflection, every
narrative twist of Caribbean cultural life. It is the secret code with which every
Western text was 're-read.' It is the ground-bass of every rhythm and bodily move-
ment. This was-is-the 'Africa' that 'is alive and well in the diaspora"' (1990,
p. 230). Gilroy, too, opposes essentialism but tends to assume the formation of a
black diaspora. The "Black Atlantic" is a singular, albeit "hybrid," cultural form
now "continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people" (1993, p. 16),
TABLE 3 Estimates of regional distribution of slave exports to America from Africa, 1662-1867
Sierra Gold Bight of Bight of West Cen

Decade Senegambia Leone Coast Benin Biafra Africa A
1662-1670 3,232
12,174 23,021 34,471
9,695
1671-1680 5,842
20,597 22,753 24,021 15,794
1681-1690 10,834
15,333 71,733 21,625 32,760
1691-1700 13,376
17,407 103,313 12,115 30,072
1700-1709 22,230
34,560 31,650 138,590 23,130 109,780
1710-1719 36,260
6,380 37,540 138,690 51,410 132,590
1720-1729 52,530
9,120 65,110 150,280 59,990 179,620
1730-1739 57,210
29,470 74,460 135,220 62,260 240,890
1740-1749 35,000
43,350 83,620 97,830 76,790 214,470
1750-1759 30,100
83,860 52,780 86,620 106,100 222,430
1760-1769 27,590
178,360 69,650 98,390 142,640 266,570
1770-1779 24,400
132,220 54,370 111,550 160,400 234,880
1780-1789 15,240
74,190 57,650 121,080 225,360 300,340
1790-1799 18,320
70,510 73,960 74,600 181,740 340,110
1800-1809 18,000
63,970 44,150 75,750 123,000 280,900
1811-1815 19,300
4,200 34,600 33,100 111,800
1816-1820 48,400
9,000 59,200 60,600 151,100
1821-1825 22,700
4,000 44,200 60,600 128,400
1826-1830 26,700
4,900 70,500 66,700 164,400
1831-1835 27,400
1,100 37,700 71,900 102,800
1836-1840 35,300
5,700 50,400 40,800 193,500
1841-1845 19,100
200 45,300 4,400 112,900
1846-1850 14,700
700 53,400 7,700 197,000
1851-1855 10,300
300 8,900 2,900 22,600
1856-1860 3,100
300 14,000 4,400 88,200
1861-1865 2,700
1866-1867 0
Total
599,864
0
0
2,600
400
41,200
3,000
756,390 710,451 1,870,620 1,658,152 3,927,801
Source: Klein 1999:208-9.
240 YELVINGTON
typified by their common "desire to transcend both the structu
state and the constraints of ethnicity and national paticularity"

his examples are drawn from Anglophone societies and with th
made to stand as "the" Black Atlantic. Whereas Hall, in the end,
pora using familiar metaphors of contagion (Browning 1998), Gi
anthropologists by his inattention to the "politics of politics" (W
Drawing from the historians, cultural theorists, and others, and

velopments within their own discipline, some anthropologists n
beyond culturalist approaches to diaspora and beyond a mechani
ized notion of culture in which culture becomes a reified, thing
may be "possessed," "maintained," or "lost," "decays," or is "resis
of "culture contact." These anthropologists seek to combine prior
preoccupations with a concern with the constitutive practices of di
resentations of blackness and diaspora. In addition, creolization

(Palmie, 1995b), and local constructions of African cultural "puri
ticity" come in for analysis. If Africanisms are found, anthropolog
mechanism(s) are they transmitted? For the French ethnographer o
Roger Bastide (1898-1974), the mechanism was "memory" (Bast

what are Africanisms in the first place? The idea seemed decept
ing and a hypostatization of culture to many. Sometimes glossed
Friedemann 1993; Martinez Montiel 1993, 1995), "vestiges" (Pol
or the idea of an "African element," "African background," or "Af
New World culture, it is not (and perhaps cannot be) precisely defi
& Torres impatiently write, "anthropological understanding of b
traditions in the New World has often bogged down in debates a
Africanisms against Europeanisms" (1992, p. 22). These same auth

concepts of "blackness" and "black culture" that are placed with
power relations (Whitten & Torres 1998, p. 4). Blackness, unders
ethnicity ("race" and culture) arising from cultural "identity pol
is for Rahier part of processes of creolization: "These processes
fragments from various origins, as well as original creations, to m
ways, to be reshaped within various time-space contexts, and to

cultural traditions associated with blackness" (1999b, p. 290). But
more existential definition of blackness (Bastide 1974, p. 122).
If anthropological models of creolization derive from linguistic
also provides a new metaphor for the anthropology of diasporaDialogism in anthropology has come to signify concern with lan
representation and authority/authorship in ethnographic texts, bu
herent reason it should be limited to these issues. The concept o
be applied to the anthropology of diaspora does not imply an eq
participants in the process. It entails, rather, multiparty interac
ideational, and discursive phenomena, among others, in complex
characterized more often than not by an unequal distribution of
not between fixed objects, but a process of mutual influence and co
241
itself already part of an ongoing dialogic process where "rhetorics of se
(pace Battaglia 1995) play a crucial role. Recent developments include th

Matory (1999a,b), whose dialogic approach to the emergence of Yorib
derived religion and identity in Brazil is based on the premise that Africa
cally "coeval" with the cultures of the Americas, rather than representati
past or base line. This implies a central role for African agency: "Bot
agency and African culture have been important in the making of African
culture, but, more surprisingly, the African diaspora has at times playe
role in the making of its own alleged African 'base line' as well" (1999a
the case at hand, he demonstrates the reciprocal influences between nor
Brazil and late-nineteenth century colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He effective

that a mobile, educated class, transnational and culturally hybrid, mo
and forth across the Atlantic, created and propagated "Yoriba" culture
that gets represented as "pure African" culturally and, at times, racially.
that, in turn, this process is related to and derivative of the cultural-
"Lagosian renaissance" of the 1890s, itself the result not only of loca
ethnic and class relations but of the influence of Afro-Brazilian "returnees
Whether a dialogic approach is a "third way" or a kind of epistemic bre

yet clear (Yelvington Forthcoming a), but it is compatible with creoliz
els of culture and language as well as with Skinner's (1982) "dialectic"
diasporas and homelands. The dialogic concept is consistent with an a
to African cultural "continuities" as the process, "whereby sociocultur
while undergoing change and even 'transformation,"' where continuity
as "a synthetic phenomenon with the property of appearing flexible an
under some conditions and persistent and self-replicating under others,"
ing "both tradition and change at all times" (Smith 1982, p. 127). It is
amenable overlay to the empirical, historical work on back-and-forth m
between African and New World societies that complement Gilroy's not
Black Atlantic (Sarracino 1988, Turner 1942, Verger 1968), and even an
such activity at a more symbolic level involving the negotiations over "
and "race" between Afro-Americans and Africans (Yelvington 1999). T
now a number of theorists of diaspora whose approaches could be broa
dialogic. Gordon's important recent work (1998, Gordon & Anderson

an example. Through personal political engagement through/with ethno
explores the contradictory cultural constructions of "race," color, and nat
Nicaraguan-Caribbean coast, showing how Creoles see themselves as par
parate diasporas," unexpectedly negotiating and naturalizing cultural pr
ideas that constitute what he calls "Creole common sense," neither auto
nor incontrovertibly accepting racialized notions of blackness. Gordon &
(1999) distinguish between diaspora as a conceptual tool referring to

group of people and diaspora as a term to denote a kind of identity f
they call for increased ethnographic attention to processes of diasporic
tion (to the extent they exist). The idea of investigating the "borders"
(Clifford 1994) is relevant here. Within the broad confines of this appr
242 YELVINGTON
is a commitment to a social/cultural constructionism centered aro
local manifestations of blackness in light of their articulations
globalizing processes, with process, negotiation, and conflict in

which is often characterized by conflict, all grounded in world-sy
and historical particularities.
IDENTITY PLAYS: "RACE," ETHNICITY, CLASS, GENDER,

AND NATION/TRANSNATION
The anthropological imagination is formed not only by disciplinary doctr

institutional logics but by national(izing) processes of "race," ethnicity,
gender, and nation/transnation. In his 1974 review of the status of Afro-Am
research in Latin America, Bastide complained that while "entire aspects of A
civilization have been preserved in Latin America so clearly that no conc

'reinterpretation' is needed to discover them," it was nevertheless more di
to do research in South America than in North America because "miscegen
continues to occur" and because miscegenation's cultural twin, syncretism
worked to the point where "cultural identity shifts from blacks and mulatto
nation as a whole," so that "one will find African cultural traits in whites
as European cultural traits in the descendants of Africans." He asked: "H
one establish a science if its very object cannot be clearly defined?" (1974,
What Bastide was lamenting was for Europeans and North Americans a d
and uncertain notion of blackness, not only with regard to what was supp
happening "on the ground" but also within nationalist discourse and its inte
with ethnography. Anthropologists who focus on identity within diaspor

turned to these problems, at some times representing their subjects' conc
of diaspora, at others promulgating their own criteria for diasporal definit

inclusion. A brief survey follows.
Blackness versus Mestizaje
Defining the subject of anthropological inquiry has hinged on accepted e

logical definitions. The picture in this region appears complicated. Colonia
American and Caribbean concepts of "race" and hence blackness are defined
the rubric of mestizaje (metissage in French), meaning miscegenation or "
mixing as well as a cultural blending. Colonial knowledge deployed el
systems and nomenclatures for the "racial" results of such mixing, which, fa
warding to say the twenty-first century, stand mostly in contrast to North A
ideas. Black and white "races," however, are thought of as polar opposite
both systems. Mestizaje is a foundational theme in the culture of the Am
coupled with the ideology of blanqueamiento ("whitening"), and has been
used to project different kinds of putative "nonracial" nationalisms that i
eral paradoxically make claims for an all-inclusive "mixed-race" national id
243
hail the virtues of the miscegenation process, while at the same time en
hegemonic valorization of whiteness.
This discourse is a way to talk about society "improving" through

diluting, as it were, black and Indian elements (e.g., Graham 1990, Har
Stutzman 1981, Torres 1998, Wade 1993, 1997, Yelvington 1997). Black
stigmatized, and a plethora of "racial" terms leads identification away f
ness towards whiteness, rendering blacks invisible and blackness a shift

hard to pin down from emic or etic perspectives (Godreau 2000). But a
time "black culture," rendered as folkloric, becomes a topic of invest

local ethnographers, with the effect of charting the disappearance of
black cultural traits and narrating and domesticating black (popular cul
tributions to the nation. A complementary discourse is one of contri
the nation. With the colonial order turned upon its head in the late co
postcolonial setting, there is the construction of ethnic and cultural dif
prove and justify contribution, authenticity, and citizenship, often throu
performance (Guss 2000, Segal 1993, Williams 1991); here "Africa" oft
in a symbolic system of the requisite distinction.
Perhaps the best known discourse of nationalism is the Brazilian variant

as "racial democracy," promoted by Brazilian sociologist/social historia
Freyre (1900-1987), a student of Boas at Columbia University (see e.g.,

1994, Needell 1995). This discourse has had an effect on anthropology
work in Brazil came at a time when African Americans were debating
"racial paradise." Frazier, too, proclaimed that "Brazil has no race probl
In the postwar context, UNESCO believed the myth enough to spon

teams under the direction of Swiss anthropologist Alfred Metraux (1
to try to verify racial democracy's existence (Bastide 1974, pp. 113-14,
1980, pp. 123-24, Maio 2001). Subsequently, anthropologists have docu
the operation of "fluid" racial systems (e.g., Harris 1970, Sanjek 1973
(1970) in Brazil used a set of 72 drawings on cards to solicit "racial" iden
across class, gender, and region; he obtained 492 different categorizati

of which are not translatable, and showed that there was large disagre
the categories themselves (Figure 1). Anthropologists working in this r
set out (as have scholars from other disciplines) directly to debunk the
simultaneously account for its existence within the context of racial f
(Goldstein 1999, Sheriff 2000, Twine 1998; cf. Ferreira da Silva 1998,
Segato 1998). On the other hand, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) want to
debunking as a kind of U.S. cultural imperialism, claiming that U.S. sch
simply importing their own concepts of "race," which are ill-fitting in th
context (cf. Fry 2000, Healey 2000, and the numerous reactions in Theor
& Society 17(1) 2000). Blackness is a prominent theme in Latin Ameri
movements (Alvarez et al 1998), and scholars now investigate the grow
black consciousness/social movements in the region and their articulat
globalizing blackness (Gomes da Cunha 1998, Grueso et al 1998, Sanson
cf. Mintz 1984).
244 YELVINGTON
Anthropologists continue to find blackness (see Table 4)
like Bahia, Brazil, where scores of Ph.D. students have gone to
survivals; Bahia parallels various locales such as the Pacific co

Cuba, and Haiti, and Ponce, Puerto Rico, which serve functio
those of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia for Nort
Americanists. Godreau (1999) deals with this in a sensitive way
research in Ponce. But anthropologists may ask, Where does th
rary "mixed" groups and identities such as "Spanish" in Trinid
Garifuna people of Central America (Gonzalez 1988), or Afro
2000)? Some anthropologists draw on the perspective of "eth
process of a people coming into being and into thinking of the
O ~~~~~~~~~~~i.
6I
=1 -b
a
(d
Figure 1 Drawings used to elicit responses on "race" in Brazil. Source: Harris 1970,
pp. 3-4. Used with permission of the Journal of Anthropological Research.
That is, they focus on concepts of people(hood) in contrast to traits or e
culture (Whitten 1996). Bilby (1996) for example uses the concept to
maroons in Jamaica and the Guianas, the cultures seen as "more Afri
others, are the result of a rapid creation of new societies out of multip
ethnic and New World situational) pasts. R. Price's powerful work on
maroon historical consciousness and self-definition (1983, 1990; cf. Sco
the best-known example across disciplines. Price (1998) now extends t

to a Martinique that is at once thoroughly creolized, subject to Frenc
lationist policies, and, in a nostalgist mood, engaged in "pastifying" t
relations of the present. The past proves to be a dynamic resource for
seen in the considerable effort thrown into the commemorating of slaver
national contexts (Thomas 1999); elsewhere the past is "silenced"(Trouil
Jo
.-
Figur
246 YELVINGTON
TABLE 4 Populations of African descent in the Americas

Population (thousands) Percent of Total
Country Minimum Maximum Minimum Maximum
Brazil
9,477
53,097
5.9
33.0
United States 29,986 29,986 12.1 12.1

Colombia
4,886
Haiti
6,500
Cuba
3,559
7,329
6,900
14.0
94.0
6,510
21.0
100.0
33.9
62.0
Dominican Republic 847 6,468 11.0 84.0

Jamaica
Peru
1,976
2,376
1,356
Venezuela
Panama
1,935
35
Ecuador
9.7
9.0
10.0
14.0
1,147
387
91.4
6.0
2,150
1,837
573
Nicaragua
76.0
2,192
559
73.5
5.0
10.0
9.0
13.0
Trinidad and Tobago 480 516 40.0 43.0

Mexico
Guyana
474
222
474
321
0.5
29.4
0.5
42.6
Guadeloupe 292 292 87.0 87.0

Honduras
Canada
112
260
Barbados
205
Bahamas
194
Bolivia
158
Paraguay
Suriname
St.
Lucia
Belize
280
260
245
80.0
95.8
72.0
85.0
158
156
121
5.0
1.0
223
146
92
2.0
1.0
2.0
156
151
121
112
2.0
3.5
39.8
90.3
46.9
3.5
41.0
90.3
57.0
St. Vincent and the Grenadines 94 105 84.5 95.0
Antigua and Barbuda 85 85 97.9 97.9

Grenada
Costa
French
72
Rica
Guiana
Bermuda
81
66
37
38
Uruguay
75.0
66
58
39
38
Chile
El
66.0
Total
64,859
=presence
Source:
of
1.2
****
**
124,332
Monge
61.3
1.2
Salvador****
Argentina
2.0
42.4
61.0
38
Guatemala
84.0
2.0
9.0
blacks
17.2
acknowledged
Oviedo
1992:19.
bu
247
The Positionality of Blackness
Two decades ago, Fontaine (1980) issued a clarion call for political-ec
and class perspectives on Afro-Latin America. It is probably fair to say th

call-beckoning the explicit formulation of relationships between diaspor
class-has been largely unheeded by anthropologists. The full potential o
proach within anthropology that considers differential insertion of commun
blacks into the global political economy in relation to transnational cultura
including constructions of diaspora, remains a chimera. The role of clas

identification with and commitment to blackness is not to be underestimated. In
one study conducted in Cartagena, Colombia (Solauin et al 1987), 120 adults from
four social classes were asked to identify the "race" of individuals depicted in 22
photographs. This exercise elicited the usual plethora of "racial" identifiers. When
the respondents went on to describe themselves, only among the upper class was
there a majority of self-reported blancos (whites). No blancos were found in the
lower class, nor were negros (blacks) found in the upper class; among this class
darker individuals referred to themselves as morenos (browns), which has dark
and light implications. Hardly any respondents positively identified with blackness used negro when referring to themselves, nor used terms denoting African
ancestry. Indeed, negro is not generally a polite term when used to describe others
in Latin America; as a self-appellation it, as well as designations with "Afro-" as
a prefix, have grown in popularity in black intellectual circles, however. Such is
the situation under blanqueamiento: Fewer and fewer people remain on the side
of the continuum that receives the most discrimination, thus affirming whiteness
as the ideal. Macro work has sought to describe the "position" of blacks within
national structures of racism, documenting the black presence but also "invisibility," discrimination, and human rights violations, as well as the advent of new
black social movements, which sometimes exist in cooperation with Amerindian
groups (Minority Rights Group 1995). Sometimes anthropologists are called on

to justify claims to cultural distinction and heritage. The work of Jaime Arocha
and the late Nina S. de Friedemann was important for the passing in Colombia
of a 1993 law based on the 1991 constitution that gave recognition to the ethnic
status of Afro-Colombians and identified their territorial and cultural rights (see
e.g. Arocha 1998, de Friedemann & Arocha 1995).
Gendered Logics
Anthropology has shown the central place of gendered logics and distinctions in all
aspects of an Afro-American society; S. Price's (1993) richly textured ethnography

of the Saramaka is an important example. Historical anthropology has sought to
document the social and legal conditions for "miscegenation" in relations of power
between white men and black women (Martfnez-Alier 1989). The articulation of
gender ideologies and gendered practices with the central institution of kinship
(and kinship-building) has preoccupied ethnographers seeking to chart diasporal
connections and similarities. Herskovits had, as might be imagined, postulated
248 YELVINGTON
that what were regarded as significant (and notorious, depending
tioning) features of Afro-American family and kinship system

households, extended families, and high rates of "illegitimacy"tations of African patterns. By contrast, M.G. Smith (1962), lik
the origins of the system in the slavery period, while R.T. Smit
been concerned with the determining role of class differences. T
diaspora vis-a-vis gender and kinship was mapped in slavery and

tus. Rather than in slavery per se, Stolcke locates the present fa
forms in "the interplay of the colour-class hierarchy, family id
ideology" (1992, p. 140).
On the other hand, the prevalence of Afro-Caribbean women as

economic autonomy (a phenomenon documented during slavery)
by Mintz & Price (1992, pp. 77-80) to be the result of certain A
of the separateness of male and female roles reinforced in the p
Women's visibility and influence in Afro-American religious cul
(Brown 1991, Burdick 1998, Silverstein 1979, Wedenoja 1989; cf
and the intersections of gender and blackness are prominent theme
(e.g., Bolles 1996, McClaurin 1996). There is an emerging intere

sexuality, beauty, and aesthetics within mestizaje/nationalism (R
the definition of blackness from the "outside" as a commodity
sex tourism (Fernmndez 1999). Black masculinity is now being t
Americanists and Caribbeanists, as are the links between black h
transnationalism to the extent that not only a "global gay" but a "g
identity is articulated (Murray 2000; cf. Sweet 1996).
Transcendental Blackness, Diaspora, and Nation/Transna
Blackness is often seen to transcend nation-states (and history) f

New World in the form of African-derived and Afro-Christian
santeria in Cuba, vodou in Haiti, and candomble and umbanda in
adherents in North America-all of which have received an enormous amount of
attention from anthropologists. Substantial agreement exists between the Afrogenetic and creation/creolization theorists in that area of culture demarcated as
"religion" on the existence of "Africanisms," however conceived, as a subject of
inquiry. Herskovits maintained that "it is in that general field of culture we may
denominate as supernatural sanctions that peoples of African descent manifest the
widest range of Africanisms, and the purest" (1948, p. 3). Recall that even Frazier
was willing to admit "Africanisms" in religion (see 1957, p. 279).
General descriptions of Afro-American religious cults (e.g. Murphy 1994,
Simpson 1978, cf. Glazier 2001) as well as case studies emphasize continuities (but cf. Besson & Chevannes 1996, Thoden van Velzen & van Wetering
1988). Some prominent themes include spirit possession (Wafer 1991; cf. Zane
1999), trance and altered states of consciousness (Bourguignon 1973), healing and
medicinal knowledge and practices (Laguerre 1980, Littlewood 1993, Voeks 1997,
249
Wedenoja 1989), syncretism (de Heusch 1989, Houk 1995), but antisyncr
(Palmie 1995b). Anthropologists have charted the movement of a sing
tion or deity from Africa to the New World (Barnes 1997, Brandon 19
as black interaction with established (and new, evangelical) religions (
1993, 1999) and, in contrast, the "African" influence on the forms of
worship (Austin-Broos 1997, Kopytoff 1987). The role of colonial and

nial politics in the histories of African-derived religions is an emerg
(Chevannes 1994, 1995, Harding 2000, Pulis 1999a, van Dijk 1993), and
as-resistance, certainly a Herskovitsian theme, is explored as well (Be
Chevannes 1994). Even when the global spread and popularization of C
religion such as Rastafarianism is discussed, it is (still) sometimes con
terms of "formal and direct continuities" from African cultures (Savishin
The theme of flight is prominent in Afro-American consciousness an

ality (McDaniel 1990); at the same time anthropologists have mapped
American religious dispersal (Greenfield 1994, Segato 1996). The efflo
of identity in migration situations (Purcell 1993) is often tied to constr
religious diaspora (Brown 1991; Pulis 1999b). Along these migration rou
public performances (Bettelheim 1979, Green 1999; cf. Scher 1999) an
(Duany 1994; Wade 2000) where the "Africa" (and thus diaspora consc
theme is prominent, for example in Bahian carnival groups (Agier 20
"black music" performers in Colombia (Wade 2000). Here, ethnomusic
have made especially creative contributions (Austerlitz 1997, Averill 19
2000, Guilbault 1993, Moore 1997, Pacini Hernmndez 1995). The religi
ings and moorings inherent in these forms of popular public culture are a
(Bettelheim 1979; cf. Bilby 1999).

The notion of transcendence is also entailed in questions of how nati
tities are imagined in light of the diaspora experience. Hall (1999, p.
Caribbean national imaginations: "Where do their boundaries begin and
regionally each is culturally and historically so closely related to its ne
and so many live thousands of miles from 'home'? How do we imagine t
tion to 'home', the nature of their 'belongingness'?" Anthropologists h
these imaginations to be mediated by migration routes, social network
ideologies, national identities, and transnational creations of blackness
aspora (Olwig 1993) and affected by articulation with U.S. blackness an
American identities (Duany 1998, Foner 1998, Greenbaum 2001, Ho 199
1998).
CONCLUSION
That the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and
has been elided from the core of the discipline is somewhat ironic i
of the staple theoretical concepts in cultural anthropology in the
acculturation, assimilation, and syncretism, in part derived from its
250 YELVINGTON
such as Herskovits and his followers. The result is that "new" per
temporary anthropological theory such as the globalization of cul

transnationalism, colonialism, and political economy, which hav
concerns of Afro-Americanists, can only be presented as "new

this elision. Yet this exile was a two-way street. Afro-American
anthropology's concern for the pristine and exotic even while w
graphic and historical contexts where such a stance was an unl

at the same time not historicizing this concern. In other words,
the African diaspora in the New World neither did nor do, by and
thropological ways of knowing about the African diaspora to the
production and reception of that knowledge. To the extent that t
has consciously or unconsciously aligned itself with either side o

Frazier debate, it has suffered from a kind of "paradigm paralys
respect to the positionings (political as well as anthropological)

view of culture as an undifferentiated whole with firm discern
proaches, such as the creolization model, laying claim to obviatin
been used to provide the foundation for newer perspectives and

current interests in the discipline as a whole (and from other d
of the most interesting newer directions are charted not by a h
hyper-reflexive postmodernism that eschews a commitment to tru
ones that attempt to steer paths through materialistic determinism
duction and through ethnography and revisionist historiography. I
have perhaps replaced for good prior explananda such as Afric

"retentions," and the like with new ones such as the concept o
understood less as a kind of ontology and more as a kind of cu
politics.
This raises a new set of issues, political as well as epistemological. To the extent
that an older anthropology has been drawn on by disempowered communities of
blacks in the New World to justify their place within nationalizing processes, and to
the extent to which what have come to be classified as "essentialist" self-concepts
lend themselves to effective "strategic essentialism," then this new anthropology

has some hard choices to make. The controversies surrounding processural views
of culture, the "invention of tradition" perspective, and those aligned perspectives
that emphasize cultural hybridity, vis-a-vis the political effects of this kind of
anthropological discourse on disempowered, subject peoples, is one of the most
contentious and compelling issues at present in the discipline. Portraying "black
culture" not as entailing some stable heritage inherited from the past but as made
and remade under specific historical conditions, or choosing to emphasize choice
and agency, means that there is always the possibility that black claims to cultural
authenticity and distinctiveness might be subverted and with them a whole series of
rights in highly politically divisive and contentious situations. Ironically, however,

even to search for Africanisms means to show how much African culture has been
lost. These issues are rarely explicitly discussed within the anthropology of the
African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, despite some of the major
251
arguments coming from Latin Americanist anthropologists (Briggs 1996
1989; cf. Hale 1997). Perhaps when the innovative nature and unique opp
presented by Afro-American anthropology are fully realized the deb
moved forward. The picture is extremely complicated, and there is no
believe it will not remain so for some time to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Faye V. Harrison for her encouragement and su

suggesting the focus on the diasporic dimensions of the anthropology
Latin America and the Caribbean, and for her comments on an earli
what I've written here. I thank J. Lorand Matory for his advice and
suggestions on sources and perspective. I also thank Kenneth M. Bilb
French, Isar P. Godreau, and Richard Price, for their comments on an e
of the article, Claire Insel for her editorial prowess and her patienc
Eugen Camp for his technical assistance. And I would like to thank B
Cruz for all of her ayuda y apoyo.
Visit the Annual Reviews home page at www.AnnualReviews.org
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The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions

Author(s): Kevin A. Yelvington

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2001. 30:227-60

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF AFRO-LATIN AMERICA

AND THE CARIBBEAN: Diasporic Dimensions

Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620-8100;

e-mail: yelvingt@chumal .cas.usf.edu

Key Words African diaspora, blackness, history of anthropology, "race,"

discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African

INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENCE OF

The current anthropological concern with processes of globalization,

Americas, such as that of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), St. Clair D

(1874-1938), to name only a few. The Haitian anthropologist A

recent works from a number of disciplines aimed at defining dias

ing and justifying its use as a theoretical concept do so from a par

Although this is not the forum to write or right such a history, w

or redemptionist, nor a place to cite chapters and ignored verse

be shaped by its paradigmatic formation as an anthropological specialization dating

pictions of New World blacks by maintaining the Boasian conceptual separation

and collaborator Frances S. Herskovits (1897-1972) in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti,

AFRO-LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

rubric of "acculturation." For Herskovits, even improvisation was an

(1903-1949) in Brazil and Ferando Ortiz Femrandez (1881-1969) in C

followers of the Brazilian Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906)], Pr

in Haiti, and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran (1908-1996) in Mexico. This

tual social formation" engaged in setting the field's parameters; Hers

Americans. In order to reverse this, he provided evidence for what h

TABLE 1 Herskovits's "Scale of Intensity of New World Africanisms"l

2The derivations of the listings given in Table 1 are as follows:

over, however imperfectly, the folkways of the American environ

243-46): Citing Herskovits, he was willing to admit that African

in "stripping from the aboriginal African culture" their "larger in

the more intimate elements in the organization of living" (Hersko

1947, p. 7). Nevertheless, today scholars tend to be identified (ev

explicitly self-identify) with one of two competing camps: the n

creativity, cultural blending and borrowing, cultural adaptation

stances, and ethnogenetic processes.

In terms of a politics of reception, Frazier's views have fallen

diaspora in the Americas are liable to locate themselves within t

institution, such as family land in the Caribbean (e.g. Carnegie

results in the production of a "natural order" that tends to uphold

"ways of seeing." Furthermore, the relationship between the ant

anthropologists' personal questions of identity is crucial (Frank

AFRO-LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

historians of anthropology. Fewer still are anthropologists who attempt o

and explicitly to place themselves and their theoretical approach within s

1992), a Caribbeanist who sets her approach in relation to Du Bois's anth

of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean inasmuch as this scholarship e

the concept of diaspora or shows how Afro-Americans are conscious of be

thropological in orientation or speaks directly to questions that have been

by social and cultural anthropologists-namely, the work of ethnomusico

GEOGRAPHIES OF BLACKNESS: DELINEATING DIASPORA

have to be defined in less concrete terms, by focusing more on value

cal' principles, which may underlie and shape behavioral response"

quite diverse in formal terms," suggesting that "the comparative

attitudes and expectations about sociocultural change... might re

derlying principles will prove difficult to uncover," they point t

attempts "to define the perceived similarities in African (and A

unconscious) that are amenable to identification, description, an

the more formal elements stressed by Herskovits exerted less

AFRO-LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

force on Saramaka (Suriname maroon) aesthetics (1999). Citing the mo

tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated

survival. This is how those generalized projections of a series of events that