Abstract
AbstractIn June 1939, Melville Herskovits arrived in Trinidad. Already committed to his eponymous thesis of African cultural survivals, he identified the rural municipality of Toco as a site to observe “African ways of life … in greatest purity.” The oil field strikes that gripped the island just two years earlier received only a passing mention in his monograph, Trinidad Village. This essay meditates on Herskovits's field notes to consider how a Boasian cultural paradigm compelled Herskovits to exclude the oil field labor from his study. Still, he is aggravated throughout by oil troubles of his own. Vexed by a faulty gasoline generator, Herskovits used his field diary to document his frustrated efforts to record audio of Shango songs in Toco. Engaging in a counterfactual thought experiment in which Herskovits pursued the aftermath of the oil field strikes as his object of study, this essay considers how Herskovits could have charted a distinct ontological ground for discipline of anthropology.
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