Summary
From Africa to the Americas: New Directions in Afro-American Anthropology
"The study of the African diaspora begins with an enigma," said
Kevin Yelvington, chair of this year's advanced seminar on From Africa
to the Americas: New Directions in Afro-American Anthropology. "The
transatlantic slave trade was an unprecedented and unparalleled migration
of people, linked to a confluence of political, economic, and historical
events different from other fields of anthropology." To forge
new directions in this field, contemporary investigations into the
nature of African-derived cultures in the New World must be located
within that context, and take into consideration the traditional
concerns of scholarship on the African diaspora.
Eleven advanced seminar participants reviewed the debate
begun in the late 1930s between the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and
the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, which has continued to define the field's
terms of reference. "Herskovits traced what he saw as African cultural 'survivals'
in religion, language, the family, and other cultural forms to the New World," Yelvington
explained, "while Frazier argued that Africans were stripped of their cultures
in the enslavement process inventing new aspects of culture on the spot, on the
ashes of their previous cultures." Although there have been efforts to transcend
this debate (the major theoretical attempt by Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price,
a seminar participant, was written more than twenty years ago), contemporary
scholars tend to be placed into two competing camps: "Afrogenetic" versus "creationist" or "creolization" positions.
Rather than developing another "master narrative" on
the nature and provenance of African-derived cultures in the Americas, the seminar
participants discussed the importance of context for the subsequent development
of black culture. "This means that attention must be paid to historical
specifics such as the nature of colonial systems and slave regimes and their
effects on local African-derived lifeways, pointing to the implausibility of
once-and-for-all, generalized theoretical statements," said Yelvington. "Historical
evidence on the diversity of contexts in which Africans found, and find, themselves
in the Americas indicates the utility of a more plural perspective for the 21st
century." Related to this, the group considered historical evidence of on-going
relationships between African and new World societies during and after the slavery
period encapsulated with the metaphor of "dialogue." The back and forth
movement of people and ideas has heretofore hardly been integrated in Afro-Americanists'
theoretical conceptions.
A series of key points guided the sometimes contentious
and heated discussions during the seminar week, including a critique of mechanical
and essentialized notions of culture, a perspective in which culture is conceived
of as a process, and a consideration of the differential insertion of communities
of blacks into the global political economy and transnational cultural flows.
Participants also reflected upon the distinction between African "survivals" and
discourses about such "survivals"; the idea that cultural values and
practices are often appropriated from their originators; a re-evaluation of the
West African "sending societies;" and a consideration of ideologies
of race, ethnicity, and nationalism in the construction of blackness. "We
asked, who gets to define what is African, who determines what becomes part of
the canon, and what voices have been and are being silenced by this determination," said
Yelvington.
The central issue of the seminar emerged as a question: "How
is the culture reproduced and by what means?" The idea of an underlying "grammar" for
Afro-American cultures was subjected to close scrutiny by seminar participants.
While a complete consensus was not reached, several theoretical points were refined
during the course of discussion. Yelvington said, "We began to ask whether
culture itself was an appropriate concept, and if we should go beyond culture
in our investigation."
This advanced seminar was made up of an interdisciplinary
group of scholars, including an archaeologist, a linguist, social and cultural
anthropologists, both established and younger scholars, a balance of men and
women, and scholars from diverse ethnicities. Yelvington anticipates that a volume
in SAR's advanced seminar publication series, tentatively titled Afro-Atlantic
Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, will result from this gathering.
