Herskovits’s Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora

Abstract

It is customary, if not mandatory, in contemporary African diaspora studies to invoke the pioneering spirit of Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), whose lifework was dedicated to the repossession of Africa’s heritage in the New World. Not that Herskovits was the first to engage in such research. Others before him included W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, as well as Jean Price-Mars of Haiti, Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, and—more his contemporaries than predecessors—Zora Neale Hurston and the Brazilian ethnologists Rene Ribeiro, Arthur Ramos, and Gilberto Freyre. But Herskovits more than any other scholar posed the African-American connection as a theoretical problem that, in the service of a progressive if intellectually circumscribed political agenda, demanded systematic research into an unprecedented range of West African and New World cultures. It is not my aim to praise a great ancestor, whose flaws and limitations are as legendary as his virtues, but to assess the relevance of his theoretical program to contemporary African-American research. In particular, I will focus on his syncretic paradigm, which continues—even among those who disavow it as crudely es-sentialist or unwittingly racist—to inform the current renaissance in studies of the African diaspora.