By Jerry Gershenhorn
ISBN-10: 0803203950
ISBN-13: 9780803203952
ISBN-10: 0803221878
ISBN-13: 9780803221871
ISBN-10: 0803222475
ISBN-13: 9780803222472
Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of information is the 1st full-scale biography of the trailblazing anthropologist of African and African American cultures. Born right into a global of racial hierarchy, Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963) hired actual anthropology and ethnography to undermine racist and hierarchical methods of puzzling over humanity and to underscore the worth of cultural variety. His study in West Africa, the West Indies, and South the US documented the far-reaching impact of African cultures within the Americas. He based the 1st significant interdisciplinary American application in African stories in 1948 at Northwestern collage, and his arguable vintage the parable of the Negro prior delineated African cultural affects on American blacks and showcased the vibrancy of African American tradition. He additionally helped forge the concept that of cultural relativism, relatively in his e-book guy and His Works. whereas Herskovits promoted African and African American experiences, he criticized a few activist black students, so much particularly Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he thought of propagandists as a result of their social reform orientation. After global warfare II, Herskovits turned an outspoken public determine, advocating African independence and attacking American policymakers who handled Africa as an item of chilly warfare approach. Drawing greatly on Herskovits’s deepest papers and released works, Jerry Gershenhorn’s biography acknowledges Herskovits’s many contributions and discusses the advanced outcomes of his conclusions, methodologies, and family with African American students.
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Sample text
This group included future anthropologists Ruth Benedict, whom Herskovits met at the New School, Margaret Mead, and A. Irving Hallowell; future sociologist Malcolm Willey; and Herskovits’s future wife, Frances Shapiro (1897–1972). Frances, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born in Minsk, Russia. An aspiring writer, she studied at the New School and briefly lived in Paris. A. degree, Herskovits pursued the study of anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas, who would have a profound e√ect on the young man’s career.
Like Boas, Herskovits believed that environment, not race, was the key to behavior. He would compare ‘‘the relation between the ratio of White and Negro blood and mental ability’’ by employing psychological tests. ∞∂ By undertaking a study of race mixing, Herskovits tackled a subject that had been clouded by racist assumptions for generations. ’’∞∏ During the 1920s race mixing became an issue of public debate in the context of the campaign to limit immigration to the United States. In 1921 Vice President–elect Calvin Coolidge, influenced by the racist beliefs of Madison Grant, asserted, ‘‘Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.
In his famous head-form studies of immigrants and their children, Boas provided evidence that head form changed from generation to generation. Boas’s results showing di√erent head shapes for Italian-born immigrants and their American-born children placed the racial determinists on the defensive. According to the traditional definition of race as a group with similar physical traits, Boas’s findings, published in 1911, meant that Italians and Italian Americans could be members of two di√erent races.
Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology) by Jerry Gershenhorn
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