206 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the PresentGhana, and Brazil to conduct ethnographic studies of Af-
rican diasporic civilization and evaluate African traits re-
maining in these cultures. Th e 1928 and 1929 fi eldtrips to
Suriname resulted into two publications coauthored with
Frances Herskovits: Rebel Destiny (1934) and Suriname
Folk Lore (1936). His fi eldtrip to West Africa resulted in the
publication of An Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief and
Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom.
In the mid 1920s, Herskovits initially followed Boaz’s
theory that there was an absence in the continuity of Afri-
ca’s past to contemporary African Americans’ lives. Aft er
his ethnographic study of African cultures, Herskovits
argued that African cultural elements remained in New
World African descendents throughout the Diaspora.
Furthermore, his research focused on the acculturation
and the process associated with cultural changes. By ex-
amining “Africanisms,” he created cultural categories for
Africans and Europeans to explore metaphors that could
substantiate their cultural formation. Herskovits’s clas-
sic thesis in Myth of the Negro Past (1941) postulates that
Europeans tried to destroy African historical contribu-
tions to the formation of culture globally, and African
cultural traits were retained in the African American cul-
ture; moreover, these traits were acculturated into Anglo-
Americans as well. Herskovits linked African American
linguistics, music, dance, folklore, folk medicine, and
funeral practices to African cultures as evidence in his
thesis. In addition, Herskovits argued that African traits
were more common in Brazil and the Caribbean because
of their relative isolation from Europeans; similarly, the
inhabitants of the coastal islands of Georgia and South
Carolina retain the highest African traits in the United
States. Consequently, Herskovits was noted for his argu-
ment on ethical relativism in politics; he maintained that
there was no objective order of justice and that what is
moral in one culture may not be moral in another; there-
fore, Herskovits questions legitimating one culture and
invalidating another culture.
During his long academic career, he held numerous
offi ces and memberships, including the following profes-
sional affi liations and positions: editor of Th e American An-
thropologist (1949–1952) and Th e International Directory of
Anthropologist (1950), vice president of the American Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science (1934), president of
the American Folklore Society (1945), and membership onacculturation and cultural development in examining the
absence or presence of African culture in contemporary
African American life. Herskovits, one of two children, was
born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, to Herman and Henrietta Hart
Herskovits on September 10, 1895. His father, a merchant,
emigrated from Austria-Hungary in 1872, and his mother
emigrated from Germany in 1882. Aft er his mother’s death
in 1941, he and his family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania,
where he graduated from high school in 1912.
Herskovits studied concurrently at University of Cin-
cinnati and Hebrew Union College in 1915, but his studies
were interrupted by 15 months of service in World War I. In
1919, he was discharged from the U.S. Army Medical Corps;
prior to returning to the United States, he studied at the
University of Poitiers in France. His education continued
in the United States at the University of Chicago, where he
received a PhD in history in 1920. Subsequently, at Colum-
bia University, Herskovits transitioned from history to an-
thropology. Franz Boaz served as his academic advisor, and
in 1921, he received an MA, completing a PhD in 1923 in
anthropology; his dissertation was titled “Th e Cattle Com-
plex in East Africa.” While in New York, Herskovits’s social
theories were infl uenced by A. A. Goldenweiser and Th or-
stein Veblen at the New School for Social Research, in addi-
tion to Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and his future wife,
Frances Shapiro, whom he later married in 1924.
In 1923, Herskovits received a three-year research fel-
lowship from the National Research Council Board of Bio-
logical Sciences to conduct research on the “New World
Negro.” While researching the physical anthropology of
African Americans for the fellowship, he simultaneously
taught at Columbia, from 1923 to 1927; however, in 1925,
he worked at Howard University as assistant professor in
anthropology, at which time he became acquainted with
Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, and Ster-
ling Brown. In 1927, he moved to Northwestern University
as an assistant professor in sociology. Initially, he was the
only anthropologist at Northwestern; he later established
an anthropology department, of which he became chair in
- He contributed to the study of African Americans by
establishing the fi rst African American program in 1948
and was appointed chair in 1961. Later he formed the Afri-
can Studies Association and became its fi rst president.
Herskovits’s scholarship was advanced through sev-
eral fi eld trips to Suriname, Nigeria, Haiti, Trinidad, Benin,