Melville J. Herskovits

A survey of the whole field of anthropology.

Almost fifty years ago Melville Herskovits set out to debunk the myth that black Americans have no cultural past. Originally published in 1941, his unprecedented study of black history and culture recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life, the language and arts of the Americas.

When this book was first published in 1958, Melville Herskovits, with his wife and collaborator, Frances, had spent over twenty years studying the social networks, religion, music, and oral traditions of the peoples of West Africa and their descendants in the New World. Dahomey, the major site of their Africa work, is in the country now known as the Republic of Benin. This volume, published now as a companion piece to Northwestern University Press's best-selling West African Folktales, has two goals: to provide basic texts of material collected in the field; and to show how they were collected, analyzed, and theorized in the anthropological and folklore disciplinary traditions of Herskovits's day. The result is a wide-ranging collection, culled from an entire narrative tradition, that remains unique among anthropological publications.

Study of native life in the valley of Mirebalais.

A controversial review of the history of black Americans and an assessment of the challenges that faced them at the beginning of the twentieth century and suggests that African Americans will only achieve a desirable standard of living--in both the economic and moral sense--through association with and emulation of Anglo-Saxon society. He looks to the church (along with white America) as a source of moral and intellectual instruction for African Americans. He hopes to see the African church subsumed by the larger white Protestant churches, and black clergy trained by reputable ministers and suggests that white women (whom he judges as morally strong) undertake the moral instruction of the freedmen and women. Despite these proposals, Thomas is not optimistic about the future for African Americans and their contribution to American society without the moralizing power of true Christianity.