Let us start our journey by following the steps of our scholars from the moment they left the United States to their return. Their visit was preceded by planning, reading and corresponding with Brazilian scholars and specialists on Brazil. It was nurtured by expectations built on the social and racial context of the US and a genuine curiosity for Brazil – then a country described or perceived by many as the socioracial alter ego of the US. Their research would focus on the city of Salvador da Bahia. This place would have a lasting effect on their lives because of its reputedly cordial black popular culture, the vivacity of its street feasts and festivals, its Afro-Catholic religiosity, the vibrancy and “Africanity” of its popular music, the colourfulness of its street life and marketplaces and its seemingly relatively tolerant race relations and hierarchies.
The year 1940 was a year of change in Salvador. There was a slow but steady recognition of the importance of black popular culture in the press, especially in the newspapers associated with the powerful conglomerate, Diarios Associados, which belonged to the magnate Assis Chateaubriand. WWII was on all the front pages but neutrality was still very present. A Tarde leaned towards the Allies, while the Diario de Noticias and Estado da Bahia leaned towards the Axis. The latter even published an ad on October 18 praising Mussolini and carried a regular column, “Hoja Hispana”, which staunchly supported Franco. Both the Allies and the Axis paid to have texts of their preference published. In October 1940, Salvador received many important visits: President Getúlio Vargas visited the first oil well in today’s Lobato neighbourhood, then Stefan Zweig, G. Freyre, Lorenzo Turner and E. Franklin Frazier went there. On October 9, 1940, the Estado da Bahia published a long text on the visit of the last two in three sections. Since this paper was among those put out by Diarios Associados, it must have been published in other newspapers, possibly with the support of the Good Neighbor Policy (GNP).
In January 1941, the highly popular Bonfim Feast was attended by more locals and outsiders than usual. Zweig visited the Bonfim Feast and described it in his book (1941). That day, he went to it twice: early in the morning to participate in the sacred part of the festivity, and in the late afternoon to join people’s celebration among the many open-air stalls that were selling food and drinks and where music was being played (see also A Tarde, January 12,
It is possible to imagine that these foreign intellectuals were affected by this spirit and that, experiencing it firsthand, it created an emotional bond with Bahia (especially its “magic” and people), which would last and, one way or another, influence their bond with Brazil and its memory when they left. In Bahia and especially in its popular culture, people of different origins, colour and social position could come together like nowhere else.2 Then and now, Bahian street feasts and festivals gather different sections of the population, as well as outsiders and foreigners. These events could be interpreted as a metaphor for the society and both a political tool and a stage for the Candomblé community. Lately, they have also become platforms for local and state politicians and part and parcel of the routes and curious destinations listed by the State and Salvador Tourist Board.3 If, as I argue in this book, Bahia was constructed as a good location to dream with (to dream of a better and more just society), its popular street festivals are good moments for that daydreaming.4
By October 1941, when the Herskovitses arrived in Bahia, the political situation had changed. Reading A Tarde, it is evident that the US was close to entering the war. There was much less space for neutrality in the newspaper. The GNP was becoming more established, the US military bases in Natal were being prepared, and the jangadeiros were arriving in Salvador where they would be filmed by Orson Welles.
Let us now turn to how Franklin, Lorenzo, Melville (Mel, to his friends) and Frances contributed, somewhat unconsciously, to creating the conditions for celebrating the supposed absence of racism in Brazilian society. This does not mean that social and racial structures were not changing already in Salvador in the 1930s. Society was becoming slightly less hierarchical, and for the first time a sizeable component of the intellectual elite had started to develop
A careful look at the proceedings of both congresses reveals the participation of a singular combination of so-called regional intellectuals, nationally renowned intellectuals, doctors, physical anthropologists, ethnographers, psychiatric doctors and a few international scholars. Melville, unable to attend, sent a paper to be read on his behalf to both congresses.6 In the 1937 event, his paper, presented as a keynote speech, would eventually be the first in the collection of selected papers published in book format (Carneiro and De Couto Ferraz 1940; Romo 2010:47–85). After this Congress, which had received the support of the state governor, Juracy Magalhães, who also opened the event, Édison Carneiro constituted the first Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects with the help of Martiniano and the Candomblé house led by Mãe Aninha. As often occurs in processes of patrimonialization, the association had to establish the criteria for membership and sought to distinguish between pure and less pure Candomblé and between religion and sorcery. One can imagine that proximity to scholars of Candomblé could be conducive to a cult-house being seen as more “traditional”, pure and authentic than others.
The 1930s was a new and vital decade in the relationship between the state, the establishment, academia and racial hierarchies in Brazil. This was true especially for the State of Bahia (Ickes 2013) and for the relationship between the police and the Candomblé communities – who had to operate under
At the same time, the late 1930s were the period of violent repression of cangaço (social banditry), which ended in 1937 (the same year as the Second Afro-Brazilian Congress) with the killing of the whole Lampiao group and the ensuing highly symbolic and macabre travelling exhibition across the capital cities of the Northeast of the heads of ten of those beheaded bandits (Grunspan-Jasmin 2006). Without disregarding the relevance of cultural integration, which certainly had a positive spin-off effect on the self-esteem of particular sections of Afro-Brazilians (Candomblé leaders and their acolytes, musicians and composers, capoeira masters and black intellectuals), socioeconomic integration was dramatically lagging. Moreover, poverty and even despondency were the reality of the great majority of the non-white population.
Thanks to Pierson’s network of informants and fieldwork experience, Ruth Landes, an American anthropologist, also chose Salvador for her postdoctoral research, originally intending to focus on matriarchy in Candomblé.9 Landes, whose thesis supervisor had been no less than Ruth Benedict, accepted Pierson’s help in making connections and receiving guidance for her research. She did not rely as much as others on the famous Brazilian anthropologist, Arthur Ramos, the key contact person indicated by the Director of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Heloisa Alberto Torres. Dona Heloisa, as she was known, was a key facilitator and the quintessential gatekeeper of Brazilian anthropology (Correa and Mello 2009).10 This was one reason that brought
Another reason for her ostracization was that Landes became, without being entirely aware of it, the victim of the separation of sociology and anthropology in US academia. Even though an anthropologist, Landes preferred to rely on a network laid by Chicago sociologists. In reent years, somewhat ironically, critical anthropologists have rediscovered Landes’ ethnography, appreciating its pioneering, very subjective approach (Cole 1994; Fry 2002, 2010), and even her love letters with Carneiro have been scrutinized (Andreson 2019).12
In short, Salvador and its Afro-Bahian community were, in those days, an essential crossroads for international sociology and anthropology as well as an important source of inspiration for antiracist thinking. From the late 1930s, resources for research and fieldwork in Brazil by US scholars started to be made available as part of the several cultural-diplomatic activities sponsored by the GNP, such as funding the publication of translations of Brazilian literature into English and US literature into Portuguese (Morinaka 2021). With the GNP, the American government, through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), which from August 1940 was coordinated by Nelson Rockefeller, was trying to improve the relationship with Latin America and to counteract the neutrality of the Brazilian government in the Second World War.13 Consider Brazilian public opinion at the time and that the United States was the land of institutional racism. The argument of many Brazilians was: Why fight German Nazism and defend American segregation? As we shall read later on, our four scholars committed themselves powerfully to the war effort, and it was precisely against the argument of Latin American neutralists that Frazier engaged with his polemic and the political article, “Brazil has no Race Problems” (1942:122). He argued that Brazil had a completely different racial setup from the US and went as far as to quote Theodore Roosevelt’s commentary on the topic after his one-year-long famous trip to Brazil in 1913: “The one point where there is a complete difference between the Brazilians and us was the attitude towards the black man. In Brazil, there is no stigma attached to Negro blood. One drop of Negro blood does not make a person a Negro and condemn him to become a member of the lower caste” (Frazier 1992 [1942a]:123; Roosevelt 1914).
It is worth remembering that, in those troubled years, Brazil was thought to be a possible safe harbour not only by American blacks but also by European Jews – even though many were refused entry. Frazier and Turner came to Brazil in the same year as the well-known Austrian and Jewish writer Stefan Zweig and his wife.17 It seems that their first impression was similar and positive. From their correspondence and writings, one gathers that they were all delighted to see a relatively high degree of racial interaction in the public schools and in the children’s homes. There is evidence that these positive representations of race integration in Brazil by foreign black and Jewish intellectuals, in some
1 Franklin E. Frazier
In November 1939, Frazier applied for a grant to do research in Brazil, from the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation, which had financed Turner’s research on the Gullahs in 1936. The concise statement of the project that was originally meant to last twelve months is as follows:
A comparative study of the Negro family in the West Indies and Brazil with the view of determining the role of traditions, familial sentiments, and affection in the organization of family life among pre-literate people subjected to a century or more of contacts with Western civilization.
Frazier acknowledged an elastic notion of the family as a household and showed a concern for international comparison, very much in line with Melville Herskovits, who had done research on family organization in Trinidad, Suriname and Haiti before coming to Brazil. In the Statement of Plans for work submitted, Frazier said that the project was a continuation of the research he had been engaged in during the past twelve years, namely the study of the Negro family in the United States:
The study of the Negro family has a two-fold significance: first, it provides a comparative study of the family in which the more intimate aspects of family life may be studied as well as its formal institutional character; secondly, it offers an approach to the study of the processes of assimilation or acculturation of the Negroes who have been brought into contact with Western civilization. … The career of the Negro in Brazil has been different from that in Jamaica and Haiti. Although Negroes have been incorporated more or less into the political organization in which Portuguese cultural is dominant, large masses of the Negro population are still influenced by their African cultural heritage … I have been assured of the cooperation of George E. Simpson (from Oberlin College), who has made a study of elite and masses in Haiti, and D. Pierson, who has made preliminary studies in Brazil. I also plan to consult Dr. Herskovits, who has done work in Haiti.18
Professor Frazier is a sincere and hard-working student of Negro family life, whose publications I hold in considerable respect. It so happens that we disagree on certain matters of theory, but I find that the data in his books are of great value (…) I believe that the opportunity he is requesting to go to the West Indies and Brazil should be vouchsafed him. I think it will broaden his background and give his work a perspective that it needs.19
Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson, who indicated that Frazier was renowned also among black academics for his militant stands against segregation, wrote:
There is no question about the fact that Frazier has made some of the most significant contributions to the study of the family of the recent sociologists (…) A portion of Frazier’s public reputation has resulted from a certain vocal impatience over annoying racial pressures, but as far as I have been able to determine, these incidents have had no bearing upon his scholarly work (…) They did serve at one time relatively obscure the full force and significance of his more substantial work, and to blunt the enthusiasm of several individuals who might have been asked to appraise his public service.20
Burgess’s recommendation was powerful. To him, Dr Frazier was one of the few scholars who could study the Negro dispassionately and objectively. Pettit
Frazier’s and Turner’s trip was prepared quite carefully and in advance. Frazier had copies of The Negro Family in the United States sent by the University of Chicago Press on November 12, 1940 to Cyro Berlinck, Dona Heloisa Torres and Francisco de Conceição Menezes at the IHGB. Pierson was instrumental and provided hotel, haircut and shoeshine prices, travel suggestions and information about the climate.
Interestingly, Pierson, Turner and Frazier exchanged information about toiletry items, such as toothbrushes and shaving cream, which in those days seemed quite scarce or very expensive when imported. We gather from this that Brazil was a relatively closed economy. Pierson also wrote several letters of recommendation: “You will probably find, as I did, this procedure particularly useful in Brazil where ties of kinship and friendship rather than a community of interest are still to a considerable extent the basis of social organization.”23 Pierson (August 30, 1940) informed Frazier that he had written letters of recommendation to Arthur Ramos (“who unfortunately might be away to Louisiana State”), Freyre, Lins do Rego and Jorge Amado (“another important member of the younger and increasingly prominent literary group seriously concerned with the life of the lower classes”). About De Oliveira Vianna, Pierson wrote, “he has, however, the conception that the Negro is racially inferior, a point of view so much at variance with that of the other men to whom I am sending letters.” Pierson added: “Letters to Delgado de Carvalho and A. Carneiro Leao are included without great expectations that these men, although considering themselves sociologists, will be of much assistance to you. Dr. H. C. Tucker, the
Frazier was very concerned about the lynching of African Americans and was well known to be a tit-for-tat fighter against everyday racism. In the Franklin Frazier Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, there are several folders in which Frazier kept newspaper clippings of lynching episodes in the United States, gathered in the period just before he left for Brazil. For instance, he sued several segregated establishments for refusing him entrance. Frazier also did not accept invitations from academic institutions if it meant he would be subjected to segregated facilities or travel. No wonder that, as soon as he arrived in Rio, he gathered the brochures of such institutions as orphanages – the Instituto Central do Povo and the Orfanato Ana Gonzaga –which portrayed racially mixed groups of kids living together.25 Horror had given way to amazement in Brazil.
Frazier had already gained acceptance in certain academic circles and even within the Roosevelt government. He came to Brazil to lecture on his book and the situation of the black population in the United States, but also to collect material that would back his theory that it had been slavery and adaptation to poverty that had influenced the family structure of the black population. For that purpose, Frazier travelled straight into one of the regions of the New World that, according to Herskovits, was the strongest repository of “Africanisms” – the city of Salvador and especially the surrounding community of the most traditional Candomblé house of worship, the Gantois. In his Bahian expedition, he profited from the network laid out by his fellow Chicagoan and sociologist, Donald Pierson. But Pierson warned him not to rely too much on American anthropologist Ruth Landes (who, as I said earlier, had infringed the American racial code and the Brazilian social code by having a relationship with black communist sympathizer, Édison Carneiro, and having “gone native” in her fieldwork).
Frazier and his wife left New York on August 23, 1940, on the Moore-McCormack Lines’ SS Brasil and arrived in Rio on September 4. He asked Turner, who was already in Rio, to book a room with a bath for him and Marie in the Florida Hotel, where Turner was staying. Correio da Noite, on September 5, announced the arrival of Frazier and his wife on the ship SS Brasil. The
The newspaper Globo of September 26, 1940 reported that Frazier and Turner had come to study the African contribution to the formation of Brazil, and that they planned to stay for two months in Bahia and continue northwards towards Maranhão. The Estado da Bahia on October 7 covered a press conference the two gave in Rio in which Frazier explained the position of blacks in the US: caste difference had almost disappeared, especially in the North; many able black professionals needed only to be given an opportunity. Frazier planned to go to Martinique and Haiti on his way back and return to Brazil for a more extended period. He saw his current visit as aiming to do exploratory research. In the Folha da Manha of September 17, he was even more specific: the plan was to come back to Brazil in June 1942 for more detailed research based on data gathered in this first period of fieldwork. Frazier argued for a modern concept of family, based on the views of the sociologist Burgess of the University of Chicago, which he defined as a unit of people interacting with one another. In São Paulo, at the Escola Livre de Sociologia, the conference “A familia preta nos EU” was held in English on September 18 at 21:00. In the interview with Frazier the day before, for the Diario São Paulo, the reporter asked him about Gobineau’s idea of superior and inferior races. Frazier, after much laughter, stated that Gobineau wrote sociological poetry with no scientific basis and that were no different races but just different cultures. As mentioned in most newspaper articles, both Frazier and Turner also saw their stay in Brazil as a way to bring Americans and Brazilians closer and improve academic exchange between the two nations.
On December 8, 1940, Franklin Frazier and his wife arrived in Salvador with Lorenzo Turner, on board the vessel Mormac York, as announced by the newspaper Diario de Noticias. As was the case in those days for important visitors, their arrival was reported on the front page of the leading Bahian newspapers.26
On August 8, 1941, the usually unsophisticated Estado da Bahia carried a lengthy article about Frazier’s ideas on black social mobility in the “land of Roosevelt”: with emancipation came competition with the whites, who, through class organisation, kept out blacks from the best jobs. It was the reason why the great Booker Washington had organised the training of blacks. Migration to the big cities of the North had created new opportunities, especially for those with lighter skin. Stadluft macht frei (city air makes one free). The journalist added that Professor Frazier always tried to give an economic explanation. These were Frazier’s words:
Because of segregation, many blacks must look for jobs in the “black world”, which exists in our bi-racial society. However, the big city cannot be a space for prejudice because it is ruled by competition.28 I have been here for just one month and have no clear picture of the difference from Brazil. I can say that darker and light-skinned blacks have developed certain solidarity in the US, which has turned the black race quite “race-conscious.” If a color line exists in Brazil, it must be subtle and work through a set of sympathy-antipathy rather than by institutional discrimination. My second remark concerns blacks with a lighter skin: in both countries, they tend to be overrepresented in the middle classes.29
Frazier was impressed by Afro-Brazilian studies and quoted Pierson. The relationship between the two countries was important because Brazil had a lot to teach the US about race relations. While suggesting that the situation was improving, he added that President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor had been champions of racial equality in the US. The journalist stated that Frazier, after just one month in Brazil, already showed fluency in Portuguese. The article, titled “The US Negro is not any longer a pariah”, reported that Frazier and Turner were there to collaborate on Yankee-Brazilian cultural proximity. This, moreover, was the spirit of most of the press coverage. Frazier was happy with the attention he and Turner (although to a lesser extent) received
As can be seen in Frazier’s letter to Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation on January 20, 1941,30 Frazier spent the first two months in Brazil acquiring sufficient facility in Portuguese to interview families and read considerable background literature. He announced that for this reason, because he found Salvador a rich source of information and also on account of the rising costs of travel, on his way back he would focus on Haiti and make only a brief visit to Jamaica.31 In this letter, Frazier added a few photos with fascinating captions. From one of these captions we gather that a woman “of mixed Indian and negro descent” helped him to make contact with the families he interviewed in the area.
In Salvador, Frazier stayed at the Palace Hotel, in the centrally located and elegant Rua Chile, and together with Pierson, Landes, Turner and later Herskovits would use the Bahia US consulate as a contact address.32 On August 5, 1941, Frazier wrote a memorandum to Miss Winslow, Advisor for Civic Projects, the Council of National Defense, with several recommendations as regards the Good Neighbor Policy (GNP):
During the time that I was in Brazil, I had a good opportunity to learn the attitudes of people in various walks of life towards the United States. It was my distinct impression that many persons were suspicious of the GNP because of the traditional attitude of North Americans toward colored people. I may cite two examples: One is the case of one of the best-known authors in social science [Gilberto Freyre?], who stated that he did not want to visit the US because of the attitude toward colored people. The other is the case of the leading literary figures in Brazil, who expressed the same opinion [Jorge Amado?] … The fact that a large proportion of Brazilians are of mixed blood seemed to increase the suspicion regarding the real attitude of North Americans towards Brazilians. … For other reasons also, the Haitian and Trinidadian elite had the same feeling. … One of the most effective ways of allying these suspicions would be to have colored Americans participate in projects encouraging cultural relations with Latin America.33
Frazier suggested sending American professors and students to Brazil and receiving Latin American students at Howard, as well as the translation of literary and scholarly works by Negro authors into Spanish and Portuguese. In this context, he added that Pierson had suggested the translation of Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1948) into Portuguese – which, alas, was never done.
Pierson wrote to Frazier:
We were indeed glad to hear through you of Martiniano, Edison Carneiro, and the Amorim, Bahe, and Carteado families, and we appreciate your tendering for us, eles tem muitas saudades, and hope you will repeat
the sentiment when occasion affords. You speak of several visits to Candomblé. Have you seen ceremonies at Engenho Velho, Gantois and S. Goncalo? You probably know that there are at least three seitas, the Nago-Gege, the Congo Angola and the caboclo and that you may want to keep your relationships with each separate and apart in so far as possible. Martiniano, for instance, ruffles easily on mention of such bobagem (nonsense, as he calls it) as a caboclo seita … This reminds me that Martiniano once sang for Mrs. Pierson and me a work song in African dialect, which he said Africans were accustomed to singing when lugging heavy loads up the steep Bahian streets. The tempo and melody were reminiscent of Dvorak’s Song of the Volga Boatmen. It would be a shame to let this song die with old Negroes like Martiniano. Could not Turner record it?34
He then commented on the Landes case, indicating that Frazier was well aware of the tensions:
The RL case appears clearer since recent dinner engagement with two American residents at Bahia who seem to have been closely involved. Violations not only of the mores regarding the proper role of women (serious from the Brazilian point of view) and racial taboos (serious from the American residents’ point of view) but also of sexual taboos appear to be involved, including a reported attempt to seduce a European male resident who, I understand, bitterly resents the experience and spreads its details widely. There also appears to be involved, perhaps as rationalizations for more powerful but partially suppressed motives, resentment over certain personality deficiencies, including lack of tact, inability (or unwillingness) to take the role of others, and ingratitude. I suspect that, so far, at least as American residents are concerned, the matter takes on a symbolic character in that the American colony, being a minority in an alien city whose values differ in some respects markedly from the American and which is also conscious of deprecatory attitudes towards its member on the part of certain European nationals, particularly the English, feel themselves occupying an uncertain status and because of this insecurity tend to resent any occurrence which may lower the prestige of all Americans.35
On July 24, 1941, Frazier wrote a short letter to Dona Heloisa, apologizing for taking so long to send his final report, enclosing his two articles on Brazil and announcing a more comprehensive final report. He would never send it. Frazier returned home from his trip to Brazil, convinced that the US had something to learn from Brazil in those war years regarding race relations. He made this position clear in some interviews he gave to newspapers and in several radio programmes. A good example was the radio programme, University of Chicago Round Table on Race Tensions, broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company on July 3, 1943, in which he participated with Robert Redfield. Here is an excerpt:
[Redfield:] The policy of race discrimination, then, not only does not work but is wrong. It is inconsistent with what our democratic principles are. We cannot maintain our moral integrity while we declare the one and practice the other. [Frazier:] May I remind you in that connection that one of our allies, Brazil, with a proportionally larger Negro population than the United States, has no Negro problem or any other racial problem. There are no racial tensions between whites and blacks or browns.36
In his report on Brazil to the Guggenheim Foundation and in the first four articles he published on Brazil, Frazier was quite optimistic about the quality of Brazilian race relations. Soon, however, he became more critical, even though he continued to be convinced that race relations in Brazil were much less limiting for black people than they were in the US. In his review of Pierson’s classic, he commented,
The reader will find in the fifth part, which deals with African survivals, a situation which offers a marked contrast to race relations in the United States. In Brazil, one needs not to speculate upon African survivals, for they are apparent in the religious practices, the dances, the foods, and the songs of the descendants of the slaves and even in the culture of the Brazilian people. … There is a class rather than race prejudice in Brazil. I would agree, on the whole, with this conclusion. However, I am convinced
Frazier 1943a: 189that is an oversimplification of the racial situation in that country. Although race prejudice does not exist in Brazil in a sense it exists in the United States; there is prejudice, especially in the upper classes, against people of black complexion. Moreover, in southern Brazil and among upper-class Brazilians, there is some prejudice not only against persons of black complexion but towards persons of Negro ancestry. Nevertheless, it is true, as Dr. Pierson states, that racial descent has little influence on the social organization, and such prejudices are personal matters.
From this reasonably nuanced opinion, one can deduce that Frazier experienced personal racial prejudice from the upper class in Brazil. Valladares’ comments in a letter to Herskovits, in which he labels Frazier a “mulato frajola” (a showy mulatto), which we discuss later, could be evidence of it (see footnote 4, Chapter 2). Frazier, in many ways, used and abused the Bahia case to justify his opposition to racial hierarchies and its racialized cultures in the US. There is one main thing he did that proved seminal for future work on comparing transnational race relations systems: he pointed out that in the US blacks were acculturated but economically not integrated, whereas in Brazil blacks were less acculturated and partially integrated into a class, rather than a caste system. This anticipated the main argument in my book Blackness Without Ethnicity (Sansone 2003), that cultural and socioeconomic integration need not go hand in glove and that ethnicity and African survivals – or their reinterpretation in Brazil – are not equivalent but can follow diverging logics. Moreover, I strongly agree with Platt37 that “The significance of Frazier’s view on Brazil is not to be found … in what they say about Brazil, but in what they reveal of a Black scholar living in an environment which severely restricted all dark-skinned people.” As Platt maintains (2002), the type of race relations in Brazil that Frazier envisaged broadly corresponded to a myth that made perfect sense in those years that, in the US, were characterized by segregation on the one hand and the need to unite the country for the war effort on the other.
Frazier returned from Haiti to the United States to strengthen “his opinion that humanity was possible for black people in the New World in the context of modernization and industrialization” (Sansone 2011). He engaged in many activities to improve inter-American solidarity. On July 24, 1941, Frazier wrote to
Rebellious in his youth and still so in his prime (Platt 1991 and 1996; Teele 2002),40 “Though never a party-joiner, never a ‘proper’ Negro, never a typical representative of any movement”, E. Franklin Frazier was a product of the social ferment of the 1920s (Davis 1962:435). He contributed a chapter to the famous anthology of black thought, The New Negro, but grew disillusioned with the Harlem Renaissance and became closer to Du Bois and black communist activist Paul Robeson when they were persecuted during McCarthyism. In his biographical notes sent with the application to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1939, he wrote:
I regard segregated schools as the worst form of injustice that has ever been perpetrated against Negroes in the United States. Separate schools have handicapped them intellectually; they have built a false notion of the world; they have given the Negro a wrong conception of himself, and finally, they have made the Negro unfit to compete in the larger community.41
I do not think that the students utilize as much as they should the excellent facilities provided at Howard University. This is because Howard University continues to be essentially a separate Negro institution. Howard University does occupy a strategic position in Negro education because it could easily lose its racial identification and become simply a great university”.
He also explained why he changed his name:
I was once known as Edward. F. Frazier, but when I began to write in Atlanta about the racial situation, I decided to take the pen name, E. Franklin Frazier, since the F stood for Franklin. This provided me with a certain amount of security since the Georgia white folks did not know that Edward F. Frazier was E. Franklin Frazier who lived among them. However, they discovered it on my last day in Atlanta after I had written an article on “The Pathology of Race Prejudice” in the magazine Forum.42
In this militant spirit and full of anger at the effects of segregation on black political thought, he travelled to Brazil soon afterwards. Frazier did not believe that emancipation and critical thinking could originate from despondency or social or cultural isolation.
His mission was the emancipation of the Negro and the Negro intellectual from their segregation; in this, he insisted on becoming the specimen of the cosmopolitan (Negro) intellectual. His research in Brazil and soon afterwards in Haiti (Frazier 1944a) was the beginning of such an international trajectory. Let us explore several episodes in Frazier’s rebellious career after his trip to Brazil: his collaboration with Myrdal’s project supported by the Carnegie Corporation, his stay at UNESCO, his commitment to modern Africa and African studies, and the writing of the book Black Bourgeoisie – first published in French in Paris with Plon.
Frazier’s closeness to Myrdal is evident from the letter Myrdal sent him on May 11, 1942: “I am writing to you to ask you if you would find it possible to do me great service as a friend and a colleague: namely … to read through
To speak frankly, when you began the study, I had misgivings as to whether it would set the Negro’s problem in a new perspective. … After reading the chapters … I feel that you have subjected many of the assumptions underlying practically all studies of the Negro to the type of rigid criticism that they have needed…. I think you have done an excellent job in showing how superficial and sterile such thinking about the race problem is.
Frazier was also critical of using the word “caste” because it did not explain how race relations work and suggested a constant lack of change. Myrdal reacted by agreeing that it was an inadequate expression but that he used it because he did not want to use “race”, which has even more misleading connotations. In a letter to Arnold Rose (no date), Frazier added a painful comment: “On page 10, you might even say that dumbness is cultivated even by educated Negroes. For example, I know one who has a PhD and holds a very responsible position that always plays the dumb role in order, not only to propitiate whites but to secure certain personal advantages.” Frazier was also critical of excessive praising of Negro achievement – he saw it as condescending.
Footnote 32 in Chapter 35 of The Myth of the Negro Past (Herskovits 1941) sums up Frazier’s objection to Herskovits’ propaganda, by asserting that if whites came to believe that the Negro’s social behaviour was rooted in African culture, they would lose whatever sense of guilt they had for keeping the Negro down. Negro crime, for example, could be explained away as “Africanism” rather than as due to inadequate police and court protection and inadequate education. In reviewing Chapter 4, Frazier anticipated the main argument of his future book Black Bourgeoisie:
I feel that you have sensed or perceived something within the Negro group which is not altogether a class phenomenon. … An abnormal or unusual amount of striving for the symbols of status and power, which is, of course, tied up to some extent with social stratification. It is more closely related to prestige. For example, a member of the upper class may desire some title or degree simply for its prestige value, whereas it does not really change his class position. This I recognize as related to the caste position of the Negro.43
With reference to the belief that the Negro male has larger genitalia than the white male, you may be interested in the following. A. One of America’s greatest psychologists once told me in the privacy of his study that during the First World War, he went to a camp and measured the Negroes’ genitalia to discover if it were true that they were larger than those of the white men. He told me that his investigations showed that there was no difference in size. B. White men frequently peep at Negro men in lavatories, and even sometimes state that their reason is ascertaining if the current belief is true.44
Overall, in his review of Myrdal’s manuscript, Frazier was also very cautious about sweeping statements on the term “miscegenation” (“I have the feeling that as used in the United States, it is not merely a descriptive or emotionally neutral term”). He was wary about the use of the expression “blood” or anything like “race”, or the idea that the reformist government tended to treat the Negro more fairly. Frazier was tough, too, on the provincialism of traditional Negro leaders: “Booker T. Washington’s attitude towards labor union was due also to his provincial outlook. When Robert Park was in Europe with Washington, he was startled by his provincialism.”45
Besides confronting the provincialism and nationalism of conventional US black leadership and militating in favour of a new black cosmopolitanism that was not US-centred, another important episode of Frazier’s unconventional rebelliousness/anger was the tone of his contribution on the US black student to the special issue, “Les Etudiants Noirs Parlent”, of the journal Présence Africaine (1953), edited by Balandier:
One can see that the American Negro student has succumbed to “the temptation of the West”… Probably one can say that it has been inescapable for a racial minority like the Negro, which has nor background nor tradition. The situation is, however, essentially different from the Negro student from Africa. The experience of the Negro in the United States and the Negroes themselves have nothing to teach the African student, except
Frazier 1953:281in a negative sort of way. The African student is a member of an elite with a rich cultural heritage. Although the masses from which he springs are experencing changes similar to those occurring among the Negro masses in the US, they are a sizeable compact society and not a relatively small minority dispersed in a European community. Moreover, the transformation of the African populations is an essential part of the revolution of the modern world. In the US, the Negro will likely be integrated increasingly into American life, and he will have little influence on the course of world development. On the other hand, the course of economic and social development in Africa will influence world history. Therefore, the “temptation of the West” becomes of considerable importance to the African student.46
Unlike the mainstream thought of black leadership in those years, for Frazier there was no natural or emotional link intrinsic to Pan-Africanism: the connection to Africa had to be developed according to African needs and priorities – US blacks and their leaders had no forerunner or teacher role to play; instead, they should learn from Africa. It was very much in this line that Frazier wrote back to the Angolan intellectual Mário de Andrade, secretary of the Congress of Black Artists and Writers:
It is with a deep feeling of regret that I am compelled to forego the opportunity to attend this important Conference … which is of special importance at a time when a world revolution is in progress which will mark a new epoch in the history of mankind. … As the result of two world wars, there has been a shift in the future of mankind. In Asia and in Africa, where the impact of European civilization uprooted the people from their established ways of life, new societies are coming into existence. The attention of the world is focused today upon the emergence of new societies and nations in Africa …47
Frazier’s connection with UNESCO lasted many years; it started in 1949, with an invitation from Arthur Ramos, head of the Department of Social Sciences, to join the race committee, and ended with a sad letter in March 1962 by Métraux, then head of the Department of Social Sciences, just two months before cancer
Mainly because of his reputation with Alva Myrdal and his contribution to the committee on the statement on race, on December 19, 1950 Frazier was asked whether he was interested in collaborating with the UNESCO Programme for Technical Assistance to economically underdeveloped countries. At first, seemingly, he showed no interest. However, Alva Myrdal wrote him a very impassioned letter on August 28, 1951:
I cannot rest content with the indication given that you are unavailable (…). I want to point out that the job is envisaged as one having its main responsibility for the broad fields of industrialization, migration and tensions. You would find two other sections well covered by colleagues: a political scientist is directly responsible for work in “New States”, while Dr. Métraux has responsibility for the particular resolution on race. You might, to my mind, welcome this opportunity of working not directly in the race field but on the more general social science problems. The fact that most of our activities nowadays relate to underdeveloped countries will, I am sure, be a further challenge to your interest … I would get no stone unturned to get you released from Howard….48
On September 6, 1951, Frazier replied and accepted the invitation. In doing so, he revealed how concerned he was with his academic status. He said he would not take a lower level than the previous directors: “I am especially interested in the problems with which (the position) is concerned and in the phase of the work dealing with tensions arising from the introduction of modern
It was an excellent opportunity to be recognized as an internationally oriented sociologist, a specialist on the race problem worldwide rather than a typical Negro intellectual of his time – most of whom Frazier considered mediocre (Frazier 1968). Alva pulled strings and had Mr Arnaldo, director of the New York office of UNESCO, contact Ralph Bunche. Arnaldo wrote to the president of Howard on September 21, pressing him to release Frazier and added “I had an informal conversation with Ralph Bunche of the UN, and he expressed the opinion that Professor Frazier would be an excellent choice for the position in question.” He was hired.
Soon, however, Frazier would come across some problems. Alva Myrdal wrote to him on November 2, 1951, saying that his report on the Negro in the US would have to be censored. Frazier’s report, “The Influence of the Negro on the Foreign Policy of the United States (Memorandum to the Social Science Division of UNESCO, June 1950)” was an excellent overview of the Negro question and the sociopsychological consequences of segregation. His main arguments came from his book, The Negro Family in the United States:
Garveyism is the only truly nationalistic movement that made its appearance among Negroes principally in Northern cities … After the dissolution of the Garvey movement … it was principally the work of the Communists among the urbanized masses that was responsible for the idea that the Negroes were a racial minority seeking national emancipation (p. 2)
… Negro in the US have no cultural roots outside the US. … They think of themselves as Americans … (p. 3).
… In order to understand the provincial social attitude of the Negro toward the world outside the Negro community, it is necessary to analyze the effects of segregation upon the psychology of the American Negro (p. 7).
… their attitudes, aspirations, and values are determined by the segregated social world around which their lives revolve (p. 7a).
When it came to the black elites, he said in the report (which would later be teased out in Black Bourgeoisie, 1955):
Let us consider the attempt of the upper class within the Negro community to play the role of a wealthy leisure class. Such behavior indicates that the Negro tends to live in a world of “make-believe”, and this fact has had a profound influence upon the personality of the Negro … It should be pointed out the tradition of dependency upon the white man – has prevented the Negro from acting as a mature, responsible member of the community.49 Generally speaking, the Negro has never been taken seriously and until recently he has been left to “play” within the Negro world (p. 7k).
His recommendations were telling. His last one was that UNESCO provide all the US participating organizations with a statement on race drawn up by the Committee of Experts on Race, which was appointed by UNESCO (p. 31).
In this report, however, he had to leave out a part because, in the words of Myrdal, “you might not wish to draw any unfavorable attention from the US delegation just now when you are joining the UNESCO staff”.50 Frazier would stay for almost two years at UNESCO, from November 1951 to September 1953.51 In this position, he organized a research group on the industrialization of the Belgian Congo “to determine what kind of African community was coming into existence and what kind of a person was that African native becoming”. He also planned to organize the African Conference on the Social Impact of Technological Change to be held in 1954 in Abidjan – and tried to make it a meeting of social scientists rather than just administrators. For that reason, he gained the support of the International Sociological Association (Costa Pinto sat on the Executive Committee). As part of these plans, he organized a tour of some African countries, including the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In a letter to Professor Busia on January 16, 1953, he communicated that he would like
During his stay in Paris, Frazier established contact with international scholars, several of whom were French, socialized with the community around the journal Présence Africaine, travelled extensively across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and wrote two books, Black Bourgeoisie (published first in 1955 in French and 1957 in English) and Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World (1957) (Saint-Arnaud 2009). If the first book is the result of forty years of (acid) reflection on the US black middle class, the second book results from his international orientation and the urge to read race relations in the US through a global comparative perspective – in which his knowledge of Brazil played no minor role (Teele 2002:157). The second book was possibly the best expression of his internationalism and his project for a comparative perspective on race relations in different contexts. Frazier was convinced that “although the problem of the Negro-white relations in the United States has many unique features, it is, nevertheless, a phase of the world process” (Saint-Arnaud 2009:206):
Except in the US and Canada, the establishment of white domination was associated with the creation of a large mixed population. In the West Indies, Central America, and in large part of South America, economic and political developments indicate that the Native Indian and Negro populations, as well as the mixed-bloods, will increasingly acquire economic and political power and thereby destroy the pattern of white domination.
Frazier 1957:327–8
Frazier’s two-year residence in Paris with UNESCO resulted in the solidification of his passionate internationalism. He returned to the US with his radicalism transformed by the experience because now he compared the black American
On May 31, 1960, Métraux asked Frazier to contribute to a book on industrialization and race relations. On October 19 that year, Frazier sent a memorandum to the Department of Social Sciences of UNESCO on “The causes of conflicts between whites and Negroes in the United States”. It summed up his point of view on segregation and civil rights and ended with the following words: “There is one important factor that favors the Negro, namely, that his struggle has become part of the struggle of people of the world for freedom and democracy”. Soon, Frazier would get a second invitation to join UNESCO for two years. According to Métraux, in a letter of January 27, 1961, Frazier should spend two years organizing the collective book on industrialization and race relations in the modern world, focusing on the US and South Africa.
On March 9, Frazier sent Métraux a synopsis of the proposed study. It was, in fact, the outline of a book on how industrialization is related to race relations because:
it determines the type of social organization in which people of different racial backgrounds will find an accommodation (1) … In an urban industrial society where there is greater anonymity and social mobility, race prejudice does not play the same role in race relation as in an agriculturally based society (2) … In a freely competitive society where the labor status of a racial group is not determined by birth and the division of labor is an impersonal process, the racial division of labor is due to cultural backgrounds, and particular skills and psychological constitution of races (4).53
The book would be based on contributions from some of the most important and renowned social scientists: Herbert Blumer on theoretical aspects of race relations, Ellen Hellman on South Africa, J. Clyde Mitchell on Central Africa, Georges Balandier on the Belgian Congo, Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes on Brazil, Everett Hughes on the US, André Michel on France, Kenneth Little on the UK, Georges Friedman on the Soviet Union. It is worth stressing that Brazil would take centre place in this international perspective and that Frazier had kept in touch with research in Brazil, where, even though in the past race relations had scarcely existed as the result of industrialization and
The difference between the two countries had been attributed most often to the difference in the racial attitudes between Latin and Anglo-Saxon people. But, according to Frazier, the difference between the two countries was likely due to underlying economic and social forces – such as the absence of a poor white working class to compete with the enfranchised Negroes or the lack of political struggle along racial lines (Frazier 1944). This seemed to be confirmed by the fact that racial problems had emerged with recent changes in Brazilian society’s economic and social organization. Since Brazil had become industrialized and urbanized and new classes had come into existence, the emergence of problems involving race relations was becoming evident (Frazier 1944:10). Here two things are apparent. Frazier, also on account of his own experience, was putting Brazil on the world map as few scholars of his time would have done. But despite this, he had changed his perception of Brazil as a fairly race-free nation to that of a country where race relations existed, albeit somewhat differently from the US. On May 3, 1961, Métraux wrote that “A book written according to your plans would be an outstanding contribution to the question of race relations.”
Frazier’s assignment, however, did not get clearance from the State Department. On May 4, Métraux wrote that “the clearance which was necessary to make a contract with you is being held up because you have not yet answered the State Department questionnaire”. Frazier replied on May 6: “It is difficult to understand why it is necessary to fingerprint an American scholar each time that he undertakes some scholarly task for an international organization.” No solution was found and on March 13, 1962, Métraux stated, “I am terribly sorry, but I repeat that I do not feel responsible for a solution which I had not foreseen. It would have given me particular pleasure to end my UNESCO career collaborating with you as I started it some ten years ago.” The fascinating collective book that Frazier had carefully prepared would never be.
Frazier’s commitment to Africa and African studies has too often been overlooked, possibly because he rejected the aesthetic romanticism about Africa associated with the Harlem Renaissance (Winston 2002:138).54 Frazier
Moreover, Frazier kept in contact with several African intellectuals as well as with the community around the Paris-based journal Présence Africaine, and was one of the founding members of the African Studies Association (he was part of the small group that founded the association in a meeting held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in March 1957, and took part of its first board of directors). This dedication would be crowned with his nomination in 1962 to the Presidency of the African Studies Association for the year 1963. Unfortunately, cancer would kill him just before he took office.
As can be seen from his notes at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, from the 1940s to the end of his life Frazier resented deeply all the obstacles he faced that prevented him from becoming the universal scholar he had certainly hoped to be (Sansone 2011).55 Yet, he achieved a lot. He was not only attuned to mainstream sociology throughout his life but also well connected. His prominence in Myrdal’s project, An American Dilemma, contributed to making him the first black president of the American Sociological Association in 1948 (Saint-Arnaud 2009:206). Nevertheless, he remained unsatisfied with the place of black American intellectuals in mainstream academia and with the mediocrity and self-complacency of the scholars who operated exclusively within the black community.
2 Lorenzo Dow Turner
In doing fieldwork in Bahia, Franklin Frazier teamed up with linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner. The two had been friends for many years. Turner (BA at Howard, MA from Harvard and a University of Chicago PhD in 1926), one of the first
For this research, Turner had received two prestigious grants – from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 1933 and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1936. The concise statement of his grant application was as follows: “My purpose is to determine the nature and extent of African survivals in the speech of Negroes on the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia and the British West Indies.”56 His interests had an international perspective right from the start, but given that the grant was coming from the US it had to be associated with a focus on African Americans. In his early years as a researcher, Turner had to support his study through several short teaching posts and as a journalist. Only for his PhD did he manage to arrange a one-year grant.
Turner received a grant for his research on Brazil from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which specialized in funding historically black colleges, black scholars and Jewish organizations. It ceased its activities in 1948. Here is the concise statement of the work plan: To study the sounds, syntax, inflections, intonation and vocabulary of Negro speech in Bahia and Pernambuco, Brazil, to determine the nature, extent, and significance of West African survivals in their speech. From the ACLS, he received an additional USD 1,000 grant-in-aid for purchasing a “speech recording outfit”, then a very expensive machine. Waldo Leland, director of the ACLS, was the first name Turner mentioned in his list of references for this application. Turner gave more details in the Statement of Work:
For the last three or four years, I have worked intensively in London, Paris and the US on the sounds, syntax, inflections, tones, and vocabulary of about fifteen West African languages spoken in sections of West Africa from which the Negroes of the US were brought as slaves … From my study of the importation of slaves from Africa to Brazil, and from the knowledge I have at present of Negro speech in Brazil, I find that, with few exceptions, the West African languages which have influenced the sea-island speech of South Carolina and Georgia appear likewise to have influenced the speech of Negroes in certain parts of Brazil, particularly Bahia and Pernambuco. My plan, therefore, is to spend one year in these two states making a study of West African survivals in the
speech of Negroes. After selecting the appropriate informants, I shall collect my material somewhat as follows: first, through personal interviews with informants, during which I shall use work-sheets prepared especially to facilitate the study of this particular speech, and second, using a speech-recording machine, with which I shall make phonograph records of folktales, proverbs, life histories, narratives of religious experience, invocations and prayers of the wide-spread fetish cult, secular and religious songs, etc. All of this material will serve as the basis for an intensive study of the sounds, syntax, inflections, tones, and vocabulary of the principal languages spoken in those sections of West Africa from which the Negroes of Bahia and Pernambuco were brought as slaves … I intend to secure textual material from priests of the fetish cults that will be primarily religious and mythological … My subsequent work will be the study of West African survivals in the speech of Negroes in other parts of the New World, such as the British and Dutch Guyana, the West Indies and elsewhere.57
Turner prepared his trip to Brazil by corresponding with Herskovits, with whom he had been in contact since 1936 and from whom he sought advice in his plan to “further study African survivals in the speech of the New World Negro”.58 Turner had read the two Dahomey volumes published by Herskovits (1938 and 1938a) and was quite excited by them. In a letter to Leland of March 12, 1940, Herskovits actively supported Turner’s application and added that he could help Turner by introducing him to Freyre and Ramos. Although Leland was quite supportive of Turner, as we can see from his correspondence with Herskovits on March 6, 1940, he raised a question, which his Advisory Board had also mentioned, namely that of Turner’s facility with Portuguese:
In your opinion how important is it for him to have a good knowledge of Portuguese? I know that he worked in Paris with French Negroes without much more than a rudimentary knowledge of French. It seems a paradox that a man can work in linguistics without knowing languages, but in primitive linguistics, scholars do that all the time.59
Turner left New York on June 16 and arrived in Rio on June 26, 1940 on the vessel Uruguay, of the American Republic Line/Moore-McCormack Lines. He
Frazier replied on July 16: “I thought that the language would be difficult to speak and understand, but I suppose I will learn that as I have others by being among the people who speak it every day.” It is obvious that Frazier had a gift for languages, while Turner did not. Turner wrote back on July 26: “Language here is hell. These people speak so fast that it is still difficult for me to understand most of what they say … My Linguaphone set has not been as useful to me as I had hoped.”
Turner intended to remain for six months in Bahia – three in Pernambuco and three in Maranhão. Time permitting, he also would have liked to spend three weeks each in Sergipe and Alagoas: “In the four states, the customs of the negroes appear to be more primitive than anywhere else. I was told that in certain parts of Minas, many African customs have survived. I shall probably go there too.” In Salvador, Turner had originally planned to rent a furnished home where he could make recordings without disturbing anyone. It would turn out differently, and he and Frazier would both stay in the same centrally located hotel.
As soon as Turner arrived in Rio, he contacted Oneida Alvarenga, director of the Discoteca Publica Municipal of São Paulo, asking for copies of the recordings done by Mário de Andrade in 1938, of which he already knew. The Library could lend these recordings only if a librarian accompanied them. Turner would have to pay for the librarian to travel to Rio by train for him to make the recordings with his equipment.62 Turner’s initiatives were criticized by Mário de Andrade himself, who wrote angrily to Oneida for having lent breakable discs without written authorization so that Turner could take them to Rio to make copies. He added: “Turner’s case is very serious. Even though I imagine that he is a probe person, 99.5% of humanity does not care properly for other people’s property.”63.
I have been in Brazil since June 26 and in Bahia since October 8. The field here is rich in African material, and I am having no difficulty in finding it. The African songs and stories I have recorded are so numerous that I have stopped counting them. I have recorded at least 600 African songs and a great deal of other valuable African material. There are already many thousands of African words in my list besides numerous survivals in other phases of language. In the Candomblé, in Bahia, the influence of Nigeria, Dahomey, and Angola is strongest, but other words from other sections of the West Coast have found a permanent place in the vocabulary of Brazilian Portuguese …64 By this time, you have seen Mr. Ramos. I had several profitable talks with him in Rio, and the letters he gave me to his friends in Bahia have been very helpful. Frazier has been in Brazil since September. He sails for Haiti on February 20. After spending four months in Bahia, he is no longer in doubt of African survivals in New World culture. From now on, he will observe the American Negro through different but wiser eyes. This trip to Brazil has indeed been a revelation to him.65
On February 17, Herskovits replied to the last comment: “I am glad to learn that Frazier’s work has been going well. I shall be interested in seeing how his experience in Brazil and the West Indies affects his future approach toward his American Negro materials.” Soon, Frazier would enter this argument by sending Herskovits a postcard portraying Mãe Menininha and her ekedis. Frazier’s words on the postcard are revealing.
Turner had unique recording equipment. Using a Lincoln Thompson with a petrol generator (400 watts, 110 volts and 60 cycles), which was relatively portable for those times although it weighed 75 pounds (34 kilograms), he recorded many hours of interviews with Candomblé priests and priestesses as well as music, folktales and short stories. Besides recording more than 600 twelve-inch discs,66 Turner also took over 200 pictures, including several of Frazier’s informants (Sansone 2011).
Turner stayed in Brazil two months longer than Frazier, travelling and recording in two states with a large black population north of Bahia – Sergipe and Pernambuco. Shortly after coming back to Fisk in June 1941, he organized a Latin American festival, with a special section on Afro-Bahian dance, as part of the initiatives supported by the Good Neighbor Policy. The festival programme
On November 18, 1941, Turner reported his research to Mr Haygood of the Rosenwald Fund. He announced that he was almost ready to publish the first volume of the results of his trip to Brazil and added the transcription of several interviews. Turner planned to publish, over the next few months, a monograph with several studies of the influence of Yoruba on the vocabulary, syntax, morphology and intonation of the language of Brazil and to edit in two or three volumes an annotated edition of 100 folktales in the Yoruba language.67
Turner soon started working on new grant applications to fund the publication of these volumes. In a note on March 18, 1943,68 he wrote what seems to be the statement of work for yet another application. He planned to interview a set of West African students in US universities, such as Fisk and Lincoln, to corroborate his data and recordings from Brazil:
If I am able to work thus with these Africans during the coming summer, I shall be able to publish during the late fall one volume of African folk tales and one volume of African folk songs as they have been preserved in Brazil. Each volume will contain a critical introduction and an English translation of the African words. Both volumes will be annotated and properly illustrated by photographs and drawings of Brazilian ex-slaves –many of them were born in Africa or are sons and daughters of native Africans – various objects of African origin, such as musical instruments, images of African deities, etc. There will also be photostat copies of documents revealing direct contacts that Brazilian ex-slaves and their descendants have had with West Africa. A well-trained musician makes the musical transcription of the volume of songs. None of the material in the two volumes has ever before been published. … This material will be published at a time when unprecedented interest is being manifested both in the African’s contribution to civilization of the New World and in the whole problem of the relations between the white and the darker races of the world.69
On January 2, 1945, Turner applied again to the Rosenwald Fund. He requested USD 2,500 to complete and publish three volumes on Afro-Brazilian folk material: 1. an annotated collection of Yoruba secular and religious songs; 2. an annotated volume of Yoruba texts (Yoruba words in phonetic notation with tones marked) with English translation; 3. a collection of Yoruba stories for children, edited in Portuguese with English translation. The research should take twelve months, starting from June 1945. In the application, Turner indicated that he was involved in time-consuming extracurricular activities – as curator of Afro-Brazilian and African art exhibits at Fisk University and director of Afro-Brazilian folk dance. This time his main reference was Melville Herskovits. Turner’s statement of work is revealing of the precariousness of his academic position and his chronic lack of funds for research:
Since the summer of 1941 … I have devoted every holiday, every summer and as much time during the school term as my teaching schedule
permitted to study and to translate into English this African material. … The Nigeria material, which is by far the most extensive of the three groups, will be published first. … I have completed my translation of all the Yoruba material for these volumes and have checked them carefully with a native Yoruba informant – Mr. J. Tenimola Ayorinde, of Abeokuta, Nigeria, who is at present in the US … I find very little time for research during the school year … Consequently, I am to have a sabbatical leave of absence from the University next school year (1945–46). … I shall be able to devote all of my time, beginning in June 1945, to the Brazilian material and expect to complete the three volumes in June 1946. The director of the University of Chicago Press has manifested considerable interest in the Brazilian Material above inscribed, and has invited me to confer with him concerning the publication of one or more of these volumes. I plan to continue indefinitely my study of African cultural (especially linguistic) survivals in the New World.70
He did get that grant and an additional one from the American Philosophical Society (The Chicago Defender, May 18, 1946:5).71
In the following years, Turner, as evinced from his papers at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University and interviews with his son and wife,72 used recordings, interviews, impressions and even a set of artifacts purchased in Bahia (photographs, music instruments, orixá statues and four Afro-Brazilian women’s garments)73 in his teaching and
It required quite an effort to mount the usual Turner presentation since he did not travel light. Among his equipment and illustrative items were a large African map, a tape recorder, recordings, one or more projectors, reel-to-reel tapes, slides and, in many cases, African artefacts, among them jewellery, drums and masks. He utilized public transportation since his final vehicle was the one he sold before leaving Africa. In the later years, Lois Turner travelled with him to local engagements and assisted with the projection of slides and the playing of music.
Wade-Lewis 2007: 187
Often such lectures were followed by an Afro-Brazilian dance and music show, directed mainly by his wife Lois, a professional dancer. Seven women dancers, led by Lois, would perform the Yoruba cult dances from Bahia, in honour of Yansa, Ogun, Oxumare and Oxala; drums were played and songs in African languages and Portuguese were sung; Turner would comment on each piece, stressing whether the speech was of Angolan or Yoruba origin.74
On other occasions, the show was performed on the radio, such as in the programme “Races and Cultures of Man”, produced by the Roosevelt University of Chicago for Radio WKBK on January 16, 1953, 2.30–3.00 pm. Turner was introduced by the well-known black anthropologist and senior professor, St. Clair Drake, as having just returned from West Africa, where he had collected over 3,000 “native songs”. Turner began by saying that in eastern Brazil five or six African languages were still spoken, and many other aspects of African culture were unmistakeable. He drew connections between music and singing across the Black Atlantic, constantly suggesting similarities and used a red thread to unite these black music forms.
In 1944 Turner was given the USD 2,500 grant from the Rosenwald Fund and an additional USD 750 from the American Philosophical Society “for a twelve-month period to enable … to complete and publish three volumes of Afro-Brazilian folk material” (Wade-Lewis 2007:144). In his application for the latter fund, there is an outline of the three volumes. The first is an annotated book of secular and religious songs in Yoruba with English translations; the second an annotated collection of Yoruba texts consisting of folktales and other narratives, orations and prayers with English translation book of secular and religious songs in Yoruba. True to his Brazilian grant proposal, the third volume is conceived of as a collection of bedtime stories told in Portuguese to the children of the religious cult-houses of Bahia, Brazil, with the scenes and characters of African culture.78
In the following years, together with African assistants, Turner would transcribe hundreds of pages of folktales in African languages, mostly Yoruba,
The transcriptions carry only the name of the speaker. There is no date or place indicated – and in this Turner was in line with a tendency among linguists to consider languages timeless and spaceless, as cultural entities in themselves. The transcriptions are divided into sections: supernatural, human-animal relations and marital relations. Transcriptions in Yoruba, written mainly in pencil, were subsequently submitted to Nigerian students who were then visiting Roosevelt University, some of whom became a sort of assistant to Turner, like Olatunde Adekoya, or Ade. As described by Wade-Lewis (2007:149), Ade lived rent-free for two years with Turner in Chicago. Most pages in the transcriptions were checked by Turner and signed by Ade. They approved of Martiniano’s Yoruba – noting “yes” on the side of each page – but disapproved of the Yoruba of Manoel da Silva, whose transcriptions are dotted with “no”. Manoel had compiled his dictionary of “Africano” words with Portuguese translation for Turner. Next to several words, Ade added “not Yoruba” and occasionally “Haussa”. Here and there, one can see next to Ade’s signature “yes/no” and a date. This work of correcting the transcriptions by native Yoruba speakers from Nigeria was done in July and August 1950.
This “Africano” language consisted of a lexicon possibly borrowed from several West African languages and from the Congo-Angola region, plus several words created in Bahia but seen as African words anyhow. It was a lexicon used
A list of “Africano” words with Portuguese translation, given by Manoel da Silva and his wife Zezé
When he analysed his transcriptions with the help of Nigerian native Yoruba-speakers, Turner had doubts about the Yoruba and Africano speech used in Bahia. These doubts matured in the period 1941–48, and were one of his main motivations when he applied for a Fulbright grant in 1949 for research in Nigeria. As Wade-Lewis put it: “he wished to gain the background to interpret his Brazilian Yoruba folklore more adequately by immersing himself in the source, Nigerian Yoruba culture, through which he would develop a more nuanced sense of African philosophy underlying the culture” (2007:165).81
Turner received the grant, and sailed to Nigeria in 1951. There he was based at the University of Ibadan. During his interviews with Yoruba speakers, he often played his Bahia recordings and presented the documents he had received in Salvador from Bahian-Nigerian families (copies of passports, photos, etc.), which were always much appreciated (Wade-Lewis 2007:172). During his stay in Nigeria, Turner also lectured on “Brazil’s Indebtedness to Africa”, stirring up quite a lot of interest. He drove to Sierra Leone from Nigeria, passing through Togo and Ghana. In Sierra Leone, he spent about two months interviewing speakers of Krio, the Creole language spoken by most people in that country. Nearly a decade later, with funds from the Peace Corps, he was involved in training aid workers, travelled to Sierra Leone and managed to publish two
In a way, Turner did what Pierre Verger was also doing in the same years – becoming a messenger across the Atlantic. The differences, of course, lie in the fact that Turner was black and their networks were different. Verger was facilitated by his French colonial connections and prioritized Benin; Turner made use of the Fulbright grant and later the Peace Corps funds, and focused on the Yoruba of Nigeria and thereafter the Krio of Sierra Leone. In her biography of Turner, Margaret Wade-Lewis mentions that he had plans to publish three books on his fieldwork in Brazil82 (Sansone 2011). Eventually, he would publish none of his planned volumes, and only parts of his material and findings would come out as articles. His amazing photos would not be made available to the public until the Anacostia Museum gave access to them in 2011.
It was not for lack of training or good contacts83 or recommendations:84 Turner’s failure to succeed was primarily due to the precariousness of his finances, which also had to do with the racial bias of those days, which had prevented him from obtaining a more solid academic position. A second reason could be the kind of Yoruba Turner found in Bahia – a creolized form that did not rhyme with the Yoruba nationalism of the late fifties and early sixties in Nigeria, which stressed purity rather than the adaptability of the language and possibly was not interested in creolized versions of the Yoruba language spoken abroad. Contemporary understandings of the Atlantic-Yoruba circular
3 Frances and Melville Herskovits
My reconstruction of Frazier’s and Turner’s fieldwork in Brazil hinges on a relatively small archive and often I had to draw from newspaper clippings and other people’s recollections to put together a particular episode. But the archives concerning the Herskovitses are much more generous. Their documents and correspondence are scattered across at least five places and three institutions (Schomburg Center, Northwestern University and Smithsonian Institute – especially the Anacostia Museum, National Anthropological Archives and National Museum of African Art). Some documents – mainly concerning the 1960s and McCarthyism – still seemed to be under embargo at the time of writing. Yet, there is such a plethora of documents, diaries, fieldnotes, photographs, sound recordings and newspaper clippings that one cannot complain. The reasons for this abundance are manifold: the sheer length of their stay in Brazil (for twelve months), their habit of painstakingly keeping and storing receipts, clippings and various types of documents, the fact that they worked closely together, and that they corresponded for decades with numerous Brazilian intellectuals, politicians and, to a lesser extent, Candomblé people. Moreover, Melville had way more financial and political backing for his international and institutional projects compared with Frazier and Turner, and he became one of the leading foreign patrons – and maybe gatekeepers – of Brazilian anthropology (Sansone 2021 and 2023).
Herskovits’ interest in Brazil developed quite early in his career, possibly as early as 1930. This is evident in his correspondence with Rüdiger Bilden and, later, Donald Pierson, then a PhD student at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Park and Anthony Burgess. Pierson wrote to him and suggested the “apparent lack of racial prejudice in Brazil” as a field of study. Herskovits wrote back enthusiastically and arranged to meet Pierson. Soon, Pierson, who was studying Portuguese and reading anything on the topic that he could find in the US, sent Herskovits a translation of the table of contents of Os Africanos no Brasil by Nina Rodrigues (1932).85 In the same year, MJH wrote to Freyre and the secretary of the first Afro-Brazilian Congress in 1934 in Recife,
The Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) does not appear to hold documents relating to Lorenzo Dow Turner, and for E. Franklin Frazier I have found only a couple of cross-references. However, the archive does contain plenty of crucial documents on Melville Herskovits, and on his successful application to the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) for a grant for one year of fieldwork in Brazil.86 In the RAC, there is also material on the years immediately afterwards (1942–45), which shows how his research in Brazil consolidated his career in the US and was, in fact, a stepping-stone towards establishing African studies proper at Northwestern University. The collection also documents the consolidation of his role as a transnational gatekeeper in the fields of African-American and, later, African studies (Jackson 1986; Gershenhorn 2004, 2009).
Herskovits started contacting the RF about a possible trip to Brazil in the latter half of 1940. By April 1941, his application for a grant of USD 10,000 was ready. He sensed that the RF was interested in promoting Latin American studies and, especially in Latin America, of social sciences developed in the US.87 Herskovits had extensive research experience in the Caribbean and Africa (except for Cuba). Brazil was the only significant country of what today we would call the Black Atlantic in which he had not yet been able to carry out research. The grant he was now applying for would help fill this gap. Herskovits’ poor command of Portuguese was an issue, and Joseph Willits, the director of the RF’s Division of the Social Sciences, politely suggested that he familiarize himself with speaking that language before making his trip. The Herskovitses did not take his advice.88 On June 11, the grant was approved anyway.
3.1
In the eight months before their departure, Melville and Frances carefully prepared for their trip. They started studying Portuguese (Melville already had a reading knowledge), investigated the best way to travel (by cruise ship, since flying with PanAm would be almost twice as expensive), arranged travel insurance and purchased fieldwork and recording equipment. They also inquired about local weather and health conditions, made hotel reservations in Rio (Gloria Hotel) and Salvador (Edith Schmalz Guesthouse) and wrote letters to Brazilian colleagues and authorities.
Melville already knew personally several of the Brazilian contacts he wrote to in announcing his trip and making arrangements to meet, such as Gilberto Freyre and Arthur Ramos, because they had visited the US over the previous years or because they had already corresponded and had common interests and networks. On June 9 and 18 letters were sent to Ramos, Freyre, Bastide, Pierson, Charles Wagley, Heloisa Torres, Roquette Pinto, Cecilia Meirelles and Mário de Andrade.90 Moreover, the Rockefeller Foundation had an office in Rio, which paved the Herskovitses’ way in Brazil with letters to the Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty). On January 5, 1942, Melville wrote to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Temistocles Graça Aranha, thanking him for the contacts he had arranged for the couple in Brazil, mainly in Bahia. Herskovits received some inside information on the Brazilian (then relatively small) social sciences community ahead of his trip. Dr Austin Kerr of the Rockefeller office in Rio was one of his “inside” informants:
A few days ago, I called on Dona Heloisa and had a most interesting conversation with her. She knows Dr. Arthur Ramos very well, but their fields of activity are rather separate. She says Ramos has an extensive collection, but that is personal. The University has nothing. Dr. Ramos founded an Anthropological Society here in Rio. Dona Heloisa could not attend the meeting (she really could not), but it was reliably reported that Ramos and one of his students made some rather puerile remarks in their
speeches. Roquette Pinto attended, and perhaps Gilberto Freyre. You will have learned much from Ramos about what he has done in Bahia, but Dona Heloisa told me that she has some information about people in Bahia that she believed Ramos did not have. (An African weaver and woodcarver, I believe). I believe that you will find it profitable to use the laboratory facilities at the Museu Nacional. They are probably rather primitive but the best available. I would suggest that you not hook up too exclusively with Ramos. Also, I would suggest that instead of collecting for Northwestern, the chief aim is to collect for institutions here, donating all artefacts to institutions here and taking with you only duplicates. This is real good-neighborliness.91
Melville answered on July 30:
Many thanks for your letter with its realistic appraisal of a situation that is not much different from what I have encountered in two other parts of the world. … I am hoping to get to know all my Brazilian colleagues. I take it for granted that there are tensions wherever personalities are involved, and the one thing I do not propose to do is to get mixed up in the resulting situation. Many thanks also for the suggestions as to hygiene and clothing. … I am also bringing a little more quinine than you indicated since once we get to work, we will probably be living as close to the group we are working with as possible, even though it may mean conditions that are somewhat primitive. No sun helmets! I got cured of them in Trinidad.92
Herskovits also prepared the audiovisual part of his future fieldwork quite carefully. He purchased a camera, an Eyemo 35mm film camera, 80 rolls of Eastman Kodak film and 8,000 feet (almost 2,500 metres) of film. He would also travel with a heavy case with 200 blank discs for audio recording, which had been made available free by the Music Division of the Library of Congress on condition that a copy of the future recordings would be deposited in the Library.93 Melville asked the Music Division and the Rockefeller office in Rio
I recently had a word from Turner … that the Brazilian law required one copy of each recording made in the country to be deposited with the Central Archives before the original record may be exported. I am sure that the fact that I will be recording for your Archives will not make it difficult to have this law waived, provided that … copies of my records are to be made for the return to Brazil.94
A few days before departure, Harold Spivacke, chief of the Division of Music, proposed a less formal approach:
It is possible of course that any attempt to export the records may bring down such regulations on your head, but if you simply take them out with you or send them by diplomatic pouch I think we can avoid them. At any rate, you shall have your letter [of credentials from the librarian] and I am sure we can overcome the obstacles as they arise.95
For recording music, Herskovits tried to secure the assistance of his friend, ethnomusicologist Allan Lomax of the Music Division, starting from January 1942. Lomax was quite interested in researching in Brazil.96
In their fieldwork in Brazil, the Herskovitses planned to use the recordings they had made in other places across the Black Atlantic: “I am taking a number of my Trinidad recordings to Brazil, and also some commercial records of West Africa, since all of this will be useful to stimulate singers and also to document discussions of the general problem of the comparative study of Negro music” wrote Melville.97 In the same letters, he asked for some copies of Haitian music records from the Lomax collection, adding that “The songs should be African in type, preferably with drum rhythms.” It seems obvious that the plan was to facilitate the recognition of Africanisms in Brazil through music from other locations in the Black Atlantic.
Herskovits also wanted to use the film camera. “Besides my regular ethnological work and recording, I am hoping to be able to get motion pictures
I am very dubious about our being able to find the money for films of the Brazilian Negro cult groups. In general, we have had to steer clear of giving too much publicity to the more backward peoples in the Latin American Republics, much as we would like to make records of value anthropologically speaking.99
This harsh response owed a lot to the turmoil caused by Orson Welles’ filming of the Rio Carnival, which the Council had supported. Herskovits answered swiftly, defending his plans very politely but firmly:
The statement of policy you make is an interesting one, but I wonder if it might not be worthwhile to probe further its validity. I doubt very much whether pictures of Negro dancing during carnival time, or even recordings of some magnificent songs and dances that are found in the macumbas of Rio and the Candomblés of the north, would if presented sympathetically, and like the art, they are, be in any way unacceptable to the Brazilians. However, I suppose these matters of high policy are determined for you, and I don’t imagine that such a point as this needs to be argued with you. Nonetheless, as an expression of opinion, it might be worthwhile to you in the event the matter is raised sometime later.100
Despite the negative response, Melville went ahead with his plans to film motion pictures and asked US ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, for support in facilitating their entry by informing the proper authorities in Brazil about these films, arguing that they would be used solely for scientific purposes.101
After perusing the various options, Melville booked a cabin for his family on a Moore-McCormack ship from New York to Rio de Janeiro.102 The Herskovitses
Africanist and folklore scholar William Bascom would take over Melville’s position at Northwestern during the latter’s leave. The correspondence between Melville and him is revealing of the Herskovitses’ first months of stay of in Brazil.104
We’ve had a mad ten days of it since we landed; meeting people, finding our way about, learning Portuguese, and planning work. I made my debut with a paper in Portuguese last Friday night; it was rather tiring reading it, but people apparently understood me – at least they laughed in the right places and not in the wrong ones. Rio is as lovely as it is supposed to be … Everyone is extremely cooperative, from the moment we got here and found that our luggage was to go through customs without inspection to my recent interviews with one of the ministers when it was arranged to have letters introducing me officially to the Interventores (appointed governors) of the various States we’ll work. We have not had the chance to do any anthropology yet, but there’ll be plenty of chances for that … Chuck Wagley is here … Ramos and his wife are fine and want to be remembered; Freyre has turned out to be a very nice person also.105
A week later, Melville asked Bascom to send copies of his books to Cecilia Meirelles, and the syllabi of some of his recent courses to Donald Pierson and Cyro Berlinck of the Escola Livre de Sociologia in São Paulo. Brazil seemed to be a good place for research:
Things are beginning to open up in interesting fashion … not far from where we are going (in Maranhão), there are a number of quilombos, villages of descendants of escaped slaves not unlike Bush Negro
communities [in Suriname], all waiting to be studied. I have also been shown a magnificent document of the 18th century constitution of an association of Negroes who were Mahis from the North of Dahomey; and their officers had to be born members of that tribe, born in Africa. The material here is so rich one scarcely knows where to start.106
Soon, Melville would start sending books printed in Brazil to colleagues in the US:
In a few days, I shall have sent to you two copies of Nina Rodrigues’ ‘Os Africanos no Brazil’ [with z]. I would be interested in Disu [presumably a Nigerian student] checking the proverbs on pp. 200–220, and in seeing what he knows of the validity of the presentation of Yoruba mythology, as given on pages 322 ff. I will also send Goncalves Fernandes ‘Xangos de Recife’ in which you will find Yoruba songs. … If these are in archaic ‘Nago’ it would also be interesting to know.107
On December 15, Melville asked Bascom to send a set of his books and reprints of his articles to José Valladares and Father Fidelis Ott in Salvador:
The first one is a young chap, the director of the Museum here, who is working with us as an interpreter on loan, so to speak, from the state government in return for the training he will get; the second is out of the Middle Ages – a Franciscan Friar who has studied anthropology, is interested in the life of the Negroes here (especially their religion!) and is going to teach in the new College they are setting up … Bahia is a charming city, with an excellent climate – and a housing shortage. We are still in the pensao (boarding-houses) we land in on our arrival and may have to stay here, especially since our being here will not interfere with our working. We have not found materials as close to the surface since we have worked in Guiana – but there is plenty down farther that will need probing.108
It seems almost impossible that we have been in Bahia four months … work has gone very well indeed – the amount of material we have got is appalling, and we shall spend most of the time in São Paulo typing our notes in duplicate, so that one copy can be sent by mail and one retained by the Embassy, with the original flying with us.111 The recording has gone excellently … I am hoping that the Library of Congress will get authorization to send the records back by air express … Our plans are as follows: Recife, May 14,112 Return to Bahia June 14, after a few days to Rio until July 1, then to São Paulo until August 10.113
Melville prepared his one-month sojourn in Recife with the usual care. He asked the US Consulate in Salvador to communicate with the Consulate in
After completing his fieldwork in Bahia, Herskovits was nominated honorary professor of the recently opened Faculty of Philosophy of Bahia. The Institute dedicated its opening and first public event to the conference given by Herskovits, “Pesquisas etnologicas na Bahia”, held at 8 pm on May 6, 1942, in the main hall of the Instituto Normal.115
On June 20, the forty-two professors of the Congregação (Senate) of the Faculdade unanimously nominated Herskovits as the first honorary professor of the Institute.116 Since Herskovits had already left for Rio de Janeiro on his way to the US, the title was delivered to Reginald Castleman, Consul of the US in Salvador da Bahia, who later forwarded it to Herskovits.117 The title was delivered in a public ceremony on August 21 at the Instituto Historico e Geografico da Bahia (IHGB), by Thales de Azevedo to Castleman.118
His report on fieldwork in Brazil was very much appreciated by Willits, who stated, “It is excellent and will be very useful to us. It clearly states the possibilities and limitations of social sciences grants in Brazil.”121 Herskovits advised, “… treat it as a confidential document in somewhat of a response. Some comments mightn’t be so good for the Good Neighbor Policy!”122
On December 12, 1942, Herskovits wrote to Willits applying for funding for two “brilliant” Brazilian scholars – Octavio da Costa Eduardo and René Ribeiro – and suggested a substantial donation for the new Faculdade de Filosofia da Bahia, which had greatly impressed him. Alas, on December 16, Willits
From 1943, Herskovits tried to raise financial support for the Institute of Philosophy of Bahia, which would later merge with the Federal University of Bahia, founded in 1957. For some reason, this application was not successful. He kept supporting this institute by donating books to its library – his publications and other general-interest books that Northwestern University could ship. Herskovits and Frances, the co-author of much of his work, would never get to publish the book on Brazil that they had proudly announced in their interview with the Rio daily newspaper, A Manhã, on July 5, 1942.123
Such renewed interest in Brazil raised hopes of support for the social sciences in Brazil: “The interest that, in America, exists nowadays in Brazilian matters is corresponded on our side. Believe me. For this reason, I remind you again of the possibility the Library of our Institute receive some of the numberless publications produced over there …”.126 Mel answered that the need to help the Faculdade when the opportunity should arise had not been forgotten.127
However, the success of their field trip to Brazil depended not only on the support of Brazilian colleagues, intellectuals and even politicians. One good reason for the success of their fieldwork, argued Mel, was that the informants were happy with the anthropologists’ interest in them: “Afro-Brazilians feel happy with receiving people who know Africa, and that can utter opinions, with proper grounding, on their way of life, their worldviews, and who were familiar with their Gods and found their cult understandable and familiar.”128 Also, the key informants played a big role in such success: “It would be difficult to find anywhere a group of people more congenial than those I have met in
I wish to acknowledge the wonderful courtesy we received … during our stay in Bahia … Salvador became to us not merely a city where we were able to carry out interesting research … in the future, we will look back with great pleasure to these months we spent in Bahia.130
and:
While the people of our city are thrilled with excitement because of the victories achieved by the weapons of the democracies in Africa, I had the pleasure to receive your letter of October 30 … I was pleased to read that you still plan to bring me to the USA. I wait, enchanted, for this opportunity that, if put in practice, would put me in touch directly with the Masters of this great nation and would make it possible for me to learn that which thus far I have had to learn by myself, with the ensuing shortcomings.131
Or:
Your information that you are trying to arrange it for me to study for a period in your country woke up old hopes to be able to complete my studies in the US … You have seen our deficiencies: professors, libraries, organized services, means, academic spirit and so forth. That is why every Brazilian wants to go to study in America.”132
Valladares’ acknowledgement of the grant he got from the RF with the support of MJH is especially interesting on account of the place of orixás in it: “I have just received a message by the Rockefeller, informing that I was given a grant. My thoughts of gratitude are in the first place for dear professor Herskovits. The second place is shared by Berrien and the orixás, especially Omolu, my father to whom I offered a few bags of popcorn.”133
Herskovits invited several Brazilian scholars and helped many more in their process of applying for grants, with positive reviews of their applications, recommendation letters or just by pulling strings. Thanks to Mel, Octavio Da Costa Eduardo, René Ribeiro and Ruy Coelho could complete their MA or PhD in anthropology in the US.134 Valladares managed to conclude his degree in museum studies in the US and Mexico thanks to Mel’s support of his application for a grant from the RF; he spent one year in the US in 1944. Herskovits, with the help of Ralph Linton, suggested a topic for Gizella Roth (Valladares’ wife) for her dissertation in museum studies. She wrote the thesis while in New York with her husband, studying at the Brooklyn Museum and doing fieldwork later in Bahia on Negro folklore by collecting folktales. This had been done in the US but was thus far unexplored in Brazil.135 Herskovits, who was her mentor, had recommended Gizella to his friend and colleague Ralph Linton. Gizella would eventually obtain an MA in anthropology at the University of Columbia in 1948, with a dissertation on Afro-Bahian folktales,136 which Ruth Benedict favourably reviewed. She then became the anthropologist at the Museu da Bahia and a lecturer in anthropology at the Faculdade de Filosofia, where she substituted Professor Ott for a while.
After Mel and Frances moved back to the US, their connections with Bahia were largely through José and Gizella Valladares. José was the director of the Museu da Bahia, as he liked to be referred to. He kept the Herskovitses informed about three topics over a long period: the Candomblé community, the Faculdade de Filosofia and the upcoming Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and general politics with particular reference to education. For decades, the Herskovits and Valladares families would stay in touch on amicable terms.
While Valladares was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the creation of the Faculdade, he was critical about the creation of the UFBA:
I have no doubt that something with the name University of Bahia will be inaugurated, but I do not know whether it will be a serious matter, matching the name, or one of those arrangements that bring with them a lot of honor, many responsibilities, but no means or faculty to perform a good job.138
On March 29, Herskovits replied that he hoped it would be “Uma coisa seria” and that he would make the work of the Faculdade practical. Valladares, however, continued to doubt:
A few days ago the University of Bahia was created. At long last. In my opinion … it leans towards bureaucracy … Everything is done under the supervision of the Institute of Medicine and we have no reason to expect much from these professionals who pose as scientists, these native “faux monnayeurs”.139
Valladares was vital in sending news about the Candomblé houses and the people who had taken part in the 1941 research, such as Bernardino, Joãozinho da Gomeia140 and Dona Zezé who would open a huge new cult-house in the neighbourhood of Engenho Velho in 1947.141 Although Valladares was
MJH’s attitude to these Brazilian scholars, who were almost all white, would differ considerably from his views of black scholars in the US, whether junior or senior. Even though, in recent times, critical voices have been raised against Herskovits’ attitude regarding US black intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, African scholars (Gershenhorn 2004; Allman 2020), in his correspondence he seems generally supportive of black intellectuals, such as Du Bois and his project for an Encyclopedia Africana. He was, however, very selective and demanding and, as he wrote to his mentor, George Seligman, was ambivalent about black scholars in the US. Gershenhorn (2004) writes that Herskovits dealt with most of the funding agencies available for Negro studies: Phelps Stokes, Rosenwald, Board of Education, ACLS, Guggenheim and RF. On the one hand, he understood that these funds helped with the Negro question, which he agreed was urgent. On the other hand, he was after something else, something less evident and more hidden than civil rights or space for black intellectuals in the US academia – African survivals. To make things even more complex, Mel often resented that black activists and scholars did not claim this issue for themselves.144 In fact, by the mid-thirties, Herskovits began to see himself as the interpreter of Africa to Afro-Americans (Jackson 1986:109). Today, one could say that he felt he was a (white) hero of the Black Atlantic. Others would join him in this sentiment, such as Pierre Verger.
3.2
The tradition of visiting the north of Brazil, I am happy to say, seems to be growing, and I suspect you will be seeing more and more Americans as time goes on. My ‘propaganda’ for Bahia seems to be having some effect.146
Mel was good at local and international networking and did this very well in Brazil. He developed contacts and preserved and nurtured them over time.147 In Salvador, Recife, São Paulo and Rio, he knew who was who and was a friend of the powerful in the cultural and intellectual elites. Moreover, besides keeping friends in the Candomblé community in Bahia, Melville and Frances were also on friendly terms with Isaias and Landulpho Alves, Aristidis Novis (Secretary of Education) and Odorico Tavares. Tavares was a key radio, newspaper and cultural promoter and producer from 1940 to 1970 in Bahia. He was closely related to Paulista media magnate, Assis Chateaubriand (Ickes 2013). Tavares was a regional modernist and admirer of the “authenticity” of popular culture, which he contrasted with the elitism of the traditional Bahian oligarchy (Ickes 2013:440; Da Costa Lima 2013). He managed two newspapers, Estado da Bahia
MJH also stayed in touch with Dona Heloisa:
Out of our Committee on Negro studies of the American Council of Learned Societies is going to come I think an Inter-American society of Negro studies, and a journal which I hope will circulate in all the Americas, and will have articles in any of the four languages. We are planning to have it published in Havana under the editorship of Ortiz. Some of us are also working toward an international conference on Africa, which should be interesting. Brazil, of course, will be represented.148
It is clear that Brazilian participation in this society was important to Herskovits. “Brazil will, we all hope, have a considerable membership in the society since the Brazilian students in the field will naturally play an important role.”149 Melville would return to Brazil just once more, for the XXXI International Americanist Congress held in São Paulo on August 23–28, 1954.
In his letters to Frances, he commented on this visit in detail. At the congress, he met many of his Brazilian connections: René Ribeiro, Ruy Coelho, Dante de Laytano and Aguirre Beltrán. As a supervisor, he also was on Ruy Coelho’s PhD committee at the Institute of Philosophy and Humanities of the University of São Paulo. At one of the dinners, while trying to recall his Portuguese, he heard of the scandal involving Gizella and Valladares. Accusing him of seducing his wife, Valladares had shot Ben Zimmerman (not fatally) – a student on Wagley’s team, which included Gizella. Valladares went to jail for a while, and Gizella went to the United States to cool off for a few months. Then she came back, and they were living together again! It must have been hard for Gizella, says Mel. He also says he is happy to have heard it before going to Bahia, where he had been invited to give a lecture at the Faculdade,
Melville Herskovits at the XXXI International Americanists’ Congress, São Paulo, 1954. From left to right (of those it was possible to recognize): Octávio da Costa Eduardo, René Ribeiro, Felte Bezerra, 4th scholar, 5th scholar, Ruy Coelho, Thales de Azevedo, 8th scholar, Melville Herskovits, Fernando Ortiz, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. Rodrigo Ramassote and Julio Simões helped to recognize some of those present. If the reader has any idea who figures 4, 5 and 8 might be, please contact sansone@ufba.br
At the Congress, six beautifully clad Bahian women dressed in traditional Bahian costume distributed African food. Melville talked to one of them, who turned out to be a filha de santo151 of a house in Engenho Velho. She recognized
3.3 Herskovits’ Candomblé
During their fieldwork in Brazil and in the first period after they returned to the US in 1942, the Herskovitses were intrigued, even affected emotionally, by Candomblé. This involvement was confirmed by their daughter, Jean Herskovits (see Appendix 3), who told me that Mel believed in the power of orixás and combined this with his traditional Jewish superstitions. He possessed several amulets and frequently carried one with him. He thought that there was a supernatural dimension to many of the phenomena he analyzed, as can be perceived in many places in his correspondence. A letter to William Bascom reveals: “Here is one point you can clear up – a point of considerable importance … It concerns possession by the gods.”153 In another letter, Valladares reported the sudden death of a famous Candomblé priest, which according to him resulted from not following the limits established by one’s protecting saint:
On May 6 Silvino Manoel da Silva passed away. Since Silvino was the assistant of Dr. Novis I used Yesterday’s gathering to inquire from the Secretary of Education about the cause of death of our renowned alabe. He passed away in the Spanish Hospital, where he was an intern, having been treated as a patient with means. He had married Mrs. Zeze in
extremis. Dr. Novis’ purse paid for the whole treatment. Upon the burial, both Dr. Novis and the head of the Medical School gave a speech.154
Mel answered on May 25:
Your news about Manuel came as a great shock to both of us. … My mind wandered back to Bahia and the drama implied by your news. We shall both be waiting with the liveliest interest for the information about the gossip that is going on and the explanation that the cult-folk is giving for this sudden death. And we have all the faith in the efficacy of your perguntazinhas (small and tricky questions); we are all sure there will be a fascinating tale to be told. If you do see Zezé, do extend to her our sympathy. And tell her that Frances is writing to her. Manuel, whatever his faults – and he had many – was a person of many qualities and a real power. It seems incredible that he has disappeared from the Bahian scene … we had not forgotten Exu.155
One more: “By reading your article replying to Frazier, I see that our late Manuel was right: Ogun is the saint protecting the professor.”156 As said, Valladares was Herskovits’ guide and messenger to the Candomblé community:
Vou vivendo na santa paz de Olorum. Every now and again, I meet Raimundo, always progressing. Among the other friends, I have seen only Possidonio. He invited me to visit the Xango Feast in the Oxumare house. One of those girls who did the recording was with the enchanted Iemanja, but that day I did not see Cotinha do the mirror dance.157
Procopio, Mrs. Popó, Caboclo, Raimundo, they all inquired about the professor, madam and your daughter, and I always say that I just received a letter in which each of them is greeted individually … Bahia is still a good land … the Eguns cult in Amoreira would be a good reason for a new field trip of yours.158
In another letter, Valladares went into detail about the supposed death of Joãozinho da Gomeia:
Yesterday … I started a chat with that son of Omolu from the (cult-house) of Engenho Velho. Joazinho is alive and kicking. As regards his death, I was told by a mate of the Omolu guy; it was news spread when Pedra Preta had traveled the inland. … That way, the news of his death went around a lot and many people went to the Quintas (cemetery) waiting for the coffin.159
In many ways, Candomblé became part and parcel of the Herskovitses’ life, at least for several years after their trip to the US. Jean told me that her parents were convinced that their lives had been saved by Candomblé. Mel firmly believed that the machado de Xangô (Xangô’s axe) he received from the Candomblé people in Bahia had saved his life and that of his wife and daughter. When it was time to go back to the United States, they were persuaded not to get on their boat (they would eventually fly back to the US) by a group of Candomblé priestesses who gave them a wooden Xangô axe to protect them. The boat in which they would have travelled, the vessel SS Bill, was indeed sunk by a German submarine, and in it was lost a copy of the recordings and fieldnotes and most of the Afro-Brazilian artefacts the Herskovitses had purchased in Brazil for the Museum at Northwestern University.160 Luckily, Mel had kept a copy of his recording and fieldnotes with the American Consulate in Salvador and had sent a second copy by mail to the United States. The wooden axe became a cherished object in Jean Herskovits’ New York home, a bittersweet reminder of Bahia, Candomblé and her parents.161
Matters raised by Herskovits’ fieldwork in Bahia would keep cropping up for several years in his correspondence with Brazilians and US colleagues, and would, in many ways, become part of the research agenda of Afro-Brazilian studies in the next two decades. In Porto Alegre, Mel was impressed by the number of black people, the availability of herbs and cult objects, and the well-organized pejis (altar rooms):
They have almost as much knowledge of Africa, and as full survivals of African religious life, as they have in Bahia … There are some interesting differences – they make filhos de santo, and don’t have ogans; they cut the skin of the skull rather than shave the head in initiation, the period of
which is briefer; the songs are quite different, and the nacoes represented are almost exclusively Gege, Oyo and Ijexá.162
Jean, the Herskovitses’ daughter, holding a Xango axe given to her parents by a Candomblé priestess before their trip back to the USA
Here in Brazil, most of the cult-initiates are women. They are called yawos from initiation to the end of their 7-year period, and vodunsi after that, when they have the right to become priests or priestesses if their santo call them to be. In Bahia, they say that they don’t like to “make” male initiates – a puritanical reluctance to have men and women share the intimacies of the initiatory period. In the south, they “make” men because the period is shorter and the initiation can be done individually, as it is in the case of men in Bahia when they are “made”. However, in Bahia (but not in the south) they have an institution called the ogan. This is a person that goes through a rite of “confirmation”, relatively short, that gives him the right to perform sacrifices; these men help in the financing of the house they belong to, are called by a given god, give sacrifices to their head (bori), and are really important members of the cult-group. Now, in West Africa, my experience has been that there are many more women than men initiates, but it never occurred to me to find out what the role of men affiliated with the religious group might be. Can you both [Valladares and William Bascom] look into this? I suspect it might lead to something of interest, even though what comes out might be very different from the institution I’ve sketched.163
For Herskovits, the issue of sexuality and religious life was a tense question in the research on African survivals in the New World that needed to be explored better.
Melville’s connection to Candomblé was so strong that Valladares, in his correspondence, called him repeatedly “o reputado babalorixá Herskovits” (the renowned Candomblé priest, Herskovits).164 In several letters, Melville gave evidence that he believed in the power of orixás and of African deities more generally. Here is evidence of it: “I hope the new administration in Bahia will mean nothing but good things for the Museum … I am outing two particularly good African charms to work on this.”165
In a way, this near-sentimental relationship to Candomblé was part of a specific ethnographic sensibility. In his interviews to Brazilian newspapers, Herskovits emphasized that he was not there to study the “primitives” but the beauty and variety of black culture in Brazil. He also proposed acculturation theory as an ideal, even though, as Romo correctly stated (Romo 2010:127), his research still searched for untouched African practices, and his focus on Bahian popular culture was timeless and static rather than directed at social change.167 In the following excerpt, one gets a sense of what the Herskovitses liked most in Bahian popular culture:
I am very glad we decided to come, for there are innumerable problems to be tackled, and the materials are right at hand. The day before yesterday, for example, we assisted a ceremony of the fishermen in which a gift was given to the “mother of the waters” to ensure good catches during the year. It was in connection with a Catholic celebration of considerable importance, but there was nothing Catholic about the rite! And the two-hour sail in the fishing boat, accompanied by other vessels filled with singing, drumming people, was quite an experience.168
3.4
In the MJH papers, there are two reports, one for the RF dated October 16, 1942, and a shorter one for the Conselho de Fiscalizaçaõ,169 dated April 16, 1943. Both contain roughly the same summary of ethnographic findings, but the first includes a quite detailed description – a social map – of intellectual life and the social sciences in Brazil. This feature makes it particularly important because it teases out the Herskovitses’ agenda in Brazil, which was not only ethnographic.
The first report for the Rockefeller Foundation is marked confidential. The reason for this is the double agenda of the Herskovitses’ research in Brazil, as Mel candidly states right at the beginning of the text:
The first aim was to continue the progress of studies of the transmutation of African cultures in their New World environments, and the light this throws on the dynamics of culture in contact. The second was to gain insight into the intellectual life in Brazil and to assess the possibilities for social science research, both for students from the United States and trained Brazilian students.170 This second objective … was visualized as best approached from the angle of the contacts and relationships that a working scholar would normally have during his stay in the country.171
The report is further divided into sections: itinerary,172 research findings, the place of the social sciences in the intellectual life in Brazil, centres of social
In studying the economic aspects of life, the type of employment available to the “Negroes”, the wages paid for various kinds of work, and the standards of living … were analyzed. The economic position of women, an important point in any research into the survival of African custom, was examined carefully. One of the most characteristic, most picturesque, and most immediately noticeable elements in the Bahia scene is the Baiana, the woman who, at various points throughout the city, sells cooked food, principally dishes of African provenience, or sweets or meat.173…. Cost and return to them were investigated, as were other less picturesque aspects of women’s place in the economic sphere, such as are implied by the existence of a large servant class composed mainly of Negro women.174 The economics of the African religious cult groups proved to be a fertile field. We have in our notes, for example, the original
of a list of actual expenditure made by a novitiate at the time of her initiation into the cult.175
Herskovits added that the cost of goods for a ritual could be high and that for this reason it would be possible to pay stipulated weekly or monthly payments to the cult head of a house, which would serve as credit for “scholarship” initiation or when a candidate with an important god had no resources. Cooperative societies had been found to be an important economic mechanism in all the Negro societies they had hitherto studied. However, this was less evident in Bahia than elsewhere, except among fishermen.176
Acarajé being sold in the traditional African fashion just with pepper, and other produce, mostly fruit. Acarajé is a fried bean fritter. From the 1950s, it would become “Afro food” and made more sophisticated with several extra ingredients
The Herskovitses chose to concentrate on the study of how the cults were integrated into other aspects of the culture:
An outstanding characteristic of African life, which has been everywhere retained in the New World, is its patterned discipline, so as in the inner organization of the Afro-Brazilian religious groups … The etiquette of the cult as an expression of discipline exacted and given, the careful assignment of duties of the various members and the meticulous care given to carrying out these duties, the order was prevailing at ceremonies, whether among participants and spectators, all showed cult-life and cult-procedure to be social phenomena exhibiting a degree of orderliness far removed from the common concept of African ritual as spontaneous and naïve.178
It is exactly such internal discipline that conferred a special status and distinction to the cults: they were beautiful because of their internal logic and orderliness. The report also commented on the recordings:
Song-cycles heard during the sacrifices of larger and smaller animals, and songs in the death rituals; songs employed during initiatory rites and the song-cycles for the “offering of the head” of a devotee. Most of these songs were checked in the only correct way to control them – by hearing them sung during actual ceremonies, sometimes by the very singers who recorded them for us.179
As in other Catholic New World countries, each African deity is identified with a saint of the Church. In Brazil, however, no cycle of African cult-worship is complete, nor any initiation valid, without pilgrimage being made to certain churches named for saints that are equated with important African deities.”180
The last comment concerns black magic. It was said to be on the rise together with the greater role played by those who exploited beliefs that were not permitted free play, especially in those parts of Brazil where the suppression of African survivals was heavier, where prestige-lacking institutions had to go underground:
The disparity between the actual survival of Africanisms in these regions and the hypotheses concerning the extent of survival possible under repression, held not only by those not in sympathy with a policy of tolerance but also by some students who profess the read atrophy into signs of outer disappearance, is of methodological significance in orienting approaches in the wider field of the study of cultural survival.181
The more society suppressed African survivals, the more it created opportunities for black magic and people to exploit other people’s beliefs. It was a point of view that would soon resound in Roger Bastide’s perspective on corrupted Afro-Brazilian religious experience and his not-so-subtle preference for “Yoruba” rather than “Bantu” expressions in Brazil (1974:101–106). The preference for Yoruba would have a lasting effect and was already present in Brazil as early as in Nina Rodrigues’ studies and, later, in Édison Carneiro’s gaze on African heritage in Brazil and Charles Seligman’s book.182 Stefania Capone, in her overview of Afro-Brazilian studies in the years 1930 to 1970, masterfully
From pages 14 to 37, most of the report is devoted to its second aim. This part contains a few sweeping yet exciting statements:
A large proportion of Brazilian men of letters and figures in the academic world have derived from the plantation area of Brazil. Furthermore, the heritage of the slave economy is seen in the present-day socio-economic orientation of Brazil – the fact that there is no middle class and that Brazil, not being as yet industrialized lacks the wealth to support full-time, professional scholars.183 Most professors have part of their training abroad, mostly in France and Coimbra and Germany. However, such period abroad mostly only concerns part of their education, which they prefer to define as autodidact.184
Brazilian people, argued Herskovits, often commented that American education was too specialized and did not concern itself with spiritual values. Nonetheless, interest in US education was rapidly growing, especially in the social sciences, since “Brazilians grant social sciences today our specialty”.185 Some Brazilians, he argued, had misgivings about the effect of “our way of life” on those [students] who would come to Brazil but preferred to have their methodology taught to the Brazilians in Brazil. On a positive note, Herskovits registered that “the capacities of the Brazilian intellectuals, men and women, impressed me as being of the first order. … The potentialities for significant work are not exceeded by those of any comparable American or European group known to me”.186 However, “One needs not to belong in the country to realize the handicaps under which research must be done”.187 Herskovits related very little exchange between the production centres in Brazil, even in the case of São Paulo and Rio. Rio, he added, was characterized by endogamy, with very few students coming from the suburban part of the city and, even less so, from another state. The difficulty in making a living practising the social sciences, which forced many scholars to work as doctors, historians or
Herskovits believed in the cross-fertilization between teachers and students and in the creative adaptation of ideas and theories coming from abroad to the Brazilian context. This, however, is not what happened:
The academic scene in Rio and São Paulo is, indeed, so international that the fact that one is in a Brazilian setting is sometimes lost sight of. This might be highly advantageous if it led to a development in these centers of the true internationalism of scholarship. One receives the impression, however, that it results rather in the formation of a mosaic of nationalism” (p. 25).
Four types of social scientists could be identified in Brazil, stated Herskovits. The first and most important stemmed from the academic setting, such as the Faculties of Philosophy and Law. In the second group were those who worked under the auspices of the national and local institutes of history and geography. These institutes often had important archives, but:
Insofar as intellectual leadership is concerned … these institutes offer little promise. Each appears to be controlled by a small group, whose membership regards the institute as their private concern and would scarcely welcome the intrusion of a young scholar with live intellectual interests, who might bring up discussions that would disturb their afternoon hour of relaxation with coffee and pleasant conversation.188
For those familiar with contemporary Brazil, the situation in these local institutes has largely remained unchanged! The third category comprised those in government-controlled organizations, besides museums and faculties, who were charged with research and investigation in the social sciences. The fourth group included people with no academic or institutional affiliation, who were often carrying out research – they accounted for a considerable proportion of the publications in the social sciences.
Engineer and sociologist Euclides da Cunha, author of the classic “Os Sertoes” (1902), and Nina Rodrigues, were considered part of the fourth such group. In the following section, Herskovits listed and ranked the five main
This school exhibits a tendency to copy, somewhat uncritically at times, American orientations and methods. … It labors under a serious financial handicap, inasmuch as it does not have government support. The Faculty of Philosophy and that of Law also offer work in the social sciences. Historical work and sociology, in the French tradition, is given by three excellent French professors at the Faculty of Philosophy. Here is one of the strongest centers of the tradition of importing foreign teachers, and I understand that requests have been made to the Nelson Rockefeller Committee for aid in bringing to the institution men from the US in the humanities and statistics to replace Italian professors whom the war compelled to resign their posts.191
The third and fourth centres were located in Salvador and Recife. In Salvador:
The newly formed Faculty of Philosophy is interesting from several points of view. Its director, the Secretary of Education and Health of the State of Bahia, Dr. Isaias Alves, is a professional educator, having been himself a teacher, having studied at Teachers’ College, New York, and having served in the national Ministry of Education. It is … the only institution of higher learning in Brazil that relies on a private endowment to finance its work. … Whether the men who make this Faculdade will be able to free themselves of the deep-seated intellectual tradition of the region, which stresses a broad, generalized type of investigation and fine writing
for its own sake as against modern social science approaches, will, in large measure, depend upon the publications available to them, and on what other stimuli as to method and aims they receive. At the moment, however, there is a degree of enthusiasm, drive and earnestness in the undertaking that I found impressive as I watched the project develop over a period of months.192
The situation was altogether different in Recife, where the Faculty of Law, “the only possible institutional centre for social science investigation, lives on its past reputation”. However, the presence in the city of two personalities such as Gilberto Freyre and Ulysses Pernambucano meant that Recife had to be included among the important centres of present activity and future potentiality in social science. The fifth locality mentioned in the report is Porto Alegre, which, even though it produced almost no work in the social sciences, had one of the oldest university traditions in Brazil. The Faculties of Law and Philosophy of the State University were thought to be promising in this respect.193
The last part of the report is devoted to the budget194 and acknowledgements. From the report, one gathers that the degree of institutional support the Herskovitses received while in Brazil made it much easier for them than for Frazier and Turner to maintain and develop intellectual and institutional contact with Brazil over time. Melville acknowledged Dr Lewis Hanke of the Library of Congress at the luncheon to introduce the couple to several key intellectuals in the (selective) Jockey Club in Rio upon their arrival. He also thanked the American Embassy staff, the Brazilian headquarters of the Rockefeller Foundation (especially Dr Kerr) and the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Brazilian Foreign Office (especially its chief, Temistocles da Graça Aranha). Herskovits acknowledged, too, the unique articles about his work, which had appeared in the press under the signature of Afranio Peixoto, Cecilia Meirelles, Gilberto Freyre and others. In Bahia, he thanked the Interventor and the Secretary of Education and added that it was “Under the sponsorship of the latter that we had with us, first as an interpreter and later as an observer of method and field procedure, the young Director of the State Museum, Dr. José Valladares.”195
The second report, of April 6, 1943, addressed to the Conselho de Fiscalizaçaõ, is considerably shorter (ten pages rather than thirty-seven). After a page and a half of thanking the Brazilian authorities, this second report adds
The report had quite an impact on the Council. The Diario Oficial records the reading of the report:
The Council listened attentively to the reading of the report submitted by professor Melville Herskovitz and his wife … and considered the scientific interest of the work of the scientist and the contribution which they brought to Brazilian ethnology, especially in the field of negro acculturation, and expressed to Professor Herskovits and to his distinguished co-worker, Mrs. Herskovitz, its great appreciation and esteem, congratulating them heartily on the success of their research which will make possible studies of the greatest importance to the field of modern africanology.196
There is no mention in the Diario Oficial of the research and final reports sent to the Council by Frazier and Turner.
For the four scholars, the research in Bahia would be their main and longest field trip abroad. They were all impressed with Brazil and seduced by the black popular culture in Salvador. The city seemed to them a relatively happy and peaceful island in a world torn apart by racial segregation and the horrors of WWII: the ideal place for doing fieldwork, with local and even kind informants available, key informants eager to show them around and local intellectuals and politicians who felt honoured by their visit and who would do their utmost to make their stay as pleasant as possible. As we shall read in the next chapter, their fieldwork highlighted a number of important differences in style and academic influence, locally and internationally. Yet, Bahia would be an awe-inspiring moment in life for the four of them.
Who knows? They all may have met and had a drink and food together in one of the several shacks (barracas) beside the large and impressive Senhor do Bonfim church.
Both Zauberung (enchantment) and Entzauberung (disenchantment), usually in this order, are states of mind that can be perceived in the biographies of most foreigners who decided, often as part of their soul-searching stage in life, to settle in Bahia, usually performing an activity quite different from that back home. Riserio (1995:122–123) speaks of the “dialectics of the encounter”: “A realidade cultural baiana foi afetada, funda e profundamente, pela chuva de signos da modernidade estética e intelectual que a atingiu … Em contrapartida, deve-se dizer que a Bahia afetou de modo igualmente intenso que se atreveu a toca-la assim tão de perto.” That is, our four scholars influenced Bahia and in turn were influenced by it. Of course, such dialectics occur in many contexts, but in Bahia perhaps more extensively.
On the use of black popular culture and folklore in selling tourism and, more recently, on the making of “roots tourism” in Bahia, see Pinho (2018).
Riserio (1995) spells out one of the keys to understanding the complexity of racial hierarchies in Bahia: in its representation, black cultural expressions become hegemonic even though they were not dominant in terms of power. This occurred within the development of an embryo of a peculiar social pact based on the celebration and high visibility of black culture and the relative absence of claims to economic and political power – a domain, in fact, left to the non-blacks to occupy and control. Such complex duality is the basis for the title of my book, Blackness Without Ethnicity (2003). That is, cultural vitality and visibility are not naturally matched with claims of political and economic power and, in fact, go together with a relatively low-profile use of ethnicity in the traditional arena of party politics.
For a short biography of Martiniano, see Capone 2012.
MJH sent, to be read in public, two papers to the 1935 Congress – “On the Provenance of the New World Negro” and “The Art of Dahomey: Brass-Casting and Applique Cloths” (Herskovits 1935 and 1935a), and the paper “African Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Belief” to the 1937 Congress (Herskovits 1940).
Melo Franco directed the Serviço de Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (SPHAN) that was created in November 1937 on the basis of a project developed by Mário de Andrade. Carlos Drummond, chief of cabinet of Capanema, assisted the minister in establishing good contacts with Brazilian intellectuals.
For a detailed sociohistorical description of the different heritage registers in Brazil, see http://portal.iphan.gov.br/pagina/detalhes/218. Accessed 15.07.2020.
The results of Landes’ research in Bahia were published in The City of Women (1964). It is worth mentioning that both Pierson and Landes had been “trained” in doing fieldwork among black people during a short residence at Fisk University, a black university in Nashville, Tennessee. Apparently, in those years, the idea of a white scholar going straight from the north of the United States to black and tropical Brazil was seen as unfit without first doing a stint in the south of the United States. It must be added that, at that time, Fisk was at the forefront of antiracism and an interesting place to be anyhow. For example, after retiring from the University of Chicago, where he had been the mentor of Franklin Frazier, Robert Park took a position at Fisk.
In those years, characterized by the authoritarian Estado Novo government of Getúlio Vargas (1936–45), foreign researchers in Brazil needed authorization from the then very repressive Ministry of Justice. This was done often in collaboration with the director of the Museu Nacional. There is evidence at the Museu archives that Lorenzo, Franklin and Mel obtained such permission. Foreign scholars signed a document in which they guaranteed that a copy of the book or report resulting from their research in Brazil would be sent to the Museu Nacional. This often did not take place. Of the four scholars studied in this paper, only Melville sent a proper report, in spite of the reminding letters of the Director of Museu Nacional. Frazier and Turner sent only a preliminary report, plus a copy of the articles both had published on Bahia. None of the three, however, ended up publishing the book on Brazil they were supposed to according to their grant application. Most unfortunately, the archive of the Museu Nacional was destroyed in a fire in 2018.
On the life of Édison Carneiro and his involvement with the making of Afro-Brazilian studies, see the painstaking and well-documented doctoral thesis by Luis Gustavo Freitas Rossi (2015) and the article by Maggie (2015).
The relationship between Landes and Herskovits was not bitter at the start. On September 12, 1939, Landes wrote in friendly terms to Mel, “the master of Negro studies”, asking for his opinion about her text on the Negro ethos and making comments on matriarchy and homosexuality in Candomblé. Apparently, she trusted MJH (Landes to MJH, Box 12, Folder 13, NAA, SI). Herskovits replied on October 17, saying that he was very surprised by how much her findings diverged from anything he had read so far, and asking whether she had checked her findings of homosexuality with Ramos. He concluded by saying that he was interested in her work and glad to read her manuscript as soon as he received it. An exchange of letters followed, until January 1940. It started amicably but ended somewhat sourly, when Landes seemingly started resenting Herskovits’ negative commentary, especially on the issues of homosexuality and ethos. In her letters, Landes commented that the blacks in Rio really hated whites and that, in Rio, there were many malandros, or hustlers (which she translated as “bums”). Landes was enthusiastic about her fieldwork and Brazil and said she was being advised closely by Édison but was also in contact with Ramos, who, she said, knew only one single Candomblé house well.
The GNP was anticipated in the 1920s by cooperation in the field of scientific research and public health, such as in the international campaign against hookworm.
See the interview with Orson Welles and clips of the documentary, http://canhotagem.blogspot.com/2009/12/que-verdade-e-esta.html. Accessed 24.02.2011.
For a careful and detailed description of the making and unmaking of this film, see Benamou (2007). More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_%28film%29\. Accessed 24.02.2011.
See the film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSBxYcxnhf8. Accessed 24.02.2011.
Zweig and his wife, Lotte, committed suicide together in 1943, in the Brazilian town of Petropolis, after publishing the book Brazil: Land of the Future, which amazingly celebrates the qualities and tolerance of Brazil. He also left a letter of apology to the Brazilian people. The book ended up being a welcome gift to the international impression management of the authoritarian Vargas regime. For a wonderful transnational and comparative reading of Zweig’s tragic biography, see Spitzer (1989).
Guggenheim Foundation Grant Application, 1940, Frazier Files, 1939–1941, GF.
GF Application 1939. I believe that Herskovits really hoped that fieldwork in Bahia would transform Frazier and make him more receptive of the African survival paradigm.
GF Application 1939.
He received a fellowship for twelve months, from September 1, 1940 to September 1, 1941. As Moe, director of the foundation, said in his letter introducing Frazier: “The terms of his appointment require him to devote himself during this period to a comparative study of the Negro family in the West Indies and Brazil.” In the end, Frazier would stay abroad for about nine months only (Moe to Frazier, August 20, 1940, MS).
White to Frazier, April 8, 1940, MS.
Pierson to Frazier, May 9, 1940, MS.
Box 131–14, Folder 15, MS. Soon afterwards, Frazier and his wife arrived in São Paulo before going to Bahia, “where he managed to collect fifty family histories”. Pierson gave Frazier 30 letters of recommendation addressed to people in Salvador of different classes and colours (Pierson, in Correa, 2013: 262).
E. Franklin Frazier papers (hereafter cited as Frazier Papers), Box 131, Folders 133–137, MS.
These pages may be consulted at the Moorland Spingarn Center and the Museu Digital da Memória Africana e Brasileira (www.museuafrodigital.ufba.br).
All remarks within the quotations are hereafter in [square brackets].
Frazier’s perspective on black social mobility and the city and industrialization as a solution to racism would later reverberate in the work of sociologist Florestan Fernandes.
Estado da Bahia, August 8, 1941.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Archives and Box 131–133, Folder 14, MS.
All of this section is based on the E. Franklin Frazier file at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
On his way back to Haiti and the US, he spent three weeks in Trinidad in order to get on a flight to Haiti. Those weeks, he argued, were not lost, since they gave him a sense of the British colony. Altogether he spent five months in Brazil, three weeks in Trinidad and two and a half months in Haiti.
Frazier to Winslow, August 5, 1941, GF.
Pierson to Frazier, November 27, 1940.
Ibid.
Frazier Papers, accession 160516, Class M323.2, Book C43, MS.
Platt 2002:92.
In doing this, in my opinion, Frazier wanted to show that he had good connections too.
Frazier to Enoch Carteado, October 19, 1941, letter in Portuguese in which Frazier informs him that his wife Marie is studying Portuguese, implying that they had plans to go back to Brazil.
In a letter by his nameless cousin, written on November 8, 1940, Frazier was informed that certain colleagues at Howard called him a Stalinist – an adjective used in those days, I suspect, to define communist sympathizers.
We can easily see how such a stand echoed Florestan Fernandes’ position towards the Negro’s unfitness to compete with non-blacks in Brazil in the late 1950s (1965).
GF Application 1939.
Frazier to Myrdal, June 27, 1942, MS.
Ibid.
Frazier to Myrdal, August 17, 1942, MS.
He had anticipated this topic in an earlier article in Présence Africaine 6 (1949), “Human, all too human”, 47–60.
Frazier to De Andrade, September 4, 1956.
Alva Myrdal to Frazier, August 28, 1951.
Memorandum to the Social Science Division of UNESCO, June 1950, p. 7h.
Myrdal to Frazier, 2 November 1951. It is worth stressing that throughout the correspondence with UNESCO, when it came to salary, working conditions and formal treatment Frazier was painstaking if not demanding, since he always expected to be treated with the consideration his standing required – and Frazier was a person who was easily offended, as his colleague and rival in black sociology, Charles Johnson, often commented.
Frazier’s concern with the “Negro intellectual achieving maturity and emancipation”, the provincial outlook of the Negro group in the US and the challenges that intermarriage posed to conventional racial hierarchies would appear in several published and unpublished essays written in the period 1950–1963 (unpublished manuscript “Intermarriage, A study in black and white”, and “Britain’s Colour Problem” in The Listener 1960).
During the 50s, Frazier became more critical of race relations in Brazil and distanced himself from the celebration of its supposed racial democracy. In doing this, he became more critical of Wagley, Thales de Azevedo and Pierson – he grew quite negative about the theoretical lack of sophistication of the last. In the meantime, he grew closer to Florestan, Bastide and possibly Octavio Ianni – with whom he had got in touch during his stay in Paris and in dealing with Présence Africaine.
Frazier to Métraux, March 9, 1960.
Despite being well-known as irascible, ill-tempered and debating the matter of African survivals vigorously (Frazier 1957a), Winston (2002:139) argues that Franklin Frazier was a friend of Melville Herskovits until the end of his life. Davis, in his epitaph of Frazier, says: “He and Melville Herskovits, the anthropologist, had a feud over African survivals which lasted thirty years, but the two remained friends” (1962:435).
Frazier Papers, Boxes 131–33, MS.
LDT papers, Box 41, Folder 8, Grant Proposals, NU.
LDT papers, Box 41, Folder 8, Grant Proposals, NU.
Turner to MJH, October 25, 1939, Turner Papers, Box 25, Folder 2.
Leland to MJH, March 6, 1940.
Turner to MJH, February 17, 1940, NU.
Turner to Frazier, Box 131–16, Folder 8, MS.
Alvarenga to Turner, August 23, 1940. Olivia Gomes da Cunha (2020) maintains that this assistant travelled with Turner all the way to Bahia. I could not see evidence of this in the documents I was able to investigate.
August 5, 1940, De Andrade’s Papers, IEB/USP. In his long interview with Marisa Correa (1987), Pierson stated that he first received Turner in São Paulo and that through his connection with the city’s Department of Culture, he helped Turner to get copies of a few dozen records of Brazilian folk music. These were copies of recordings done by Mário de Andrade a few years earlier in Northeast Brazil.
Turner was aware of Renato Mendonça’s book on African influences on the Portuguese of Brazil (1938) and often quoted it.
Turner to MJH, November 11, 1940, MJH Papers, Box 25, Folder 2, NU.
One hundred of the USD 1,000 Turner received from the ACLS was meant to pay informants. In a letter of December 11, 1939, Herskovits suggested that Turner put at least USD 300 aside for payments to singers and other informants. Eventually, Turner would receive USD 3,500 from the Rosenwald Fund and the Fund would purchase and lend him the sound recorder and generator, valued at USD 867 – this cost would be deducted from the USD 3,500. The aluminium discs for recording cost an extra USD 157. Turner applied for an additional grant from Fisk to purchase a Kodak and a motion-picture camera. Would he eventually record motion pictures?
It is possible that the title Turner had in mind for one of these volumes was the title of his unpublished manuscript, The Yoruba of Bahia, Brazil. In Story and Song (Turner’s Papers, Box 40, Folder 5, NU).
Turner’s Papers, Grants Applications.
Ibid.
Rosenwald Fund Application 1945, Turner’s Papers, Grants Applications, NU.
Like other newspapers for the black community, the well-read black newspaper The Chicago Defender closely followed Turner and Frazier’s trip to Brazil as well as the lectures on race relations in Brazil that both scholars gave in the US soon after their return, especially those in the Chicago area. The paper also followed more generally the academic career of the two scholars and celebrated their success. From consulting the newspapers, one finds entries on race relations in Brazil from as early as 1916 to the 1970s. As is expected and indicated by research on US black views on Brazil, comments on Brazil’s race relations were very positive until turning more critical, starting from the 1970s.
Lois Turner told me: “My husband told me I was so beautiful I could be Brazilian” (she was a light-skinned mulatta, by Brazilian standards, with “tracos finos”). Lorenzo junior, who was a Vietnam veteran and was still affected by a severe war trauma, told me he was planning to finally publish his father’s book on Brazil. That project, alas, was not completed (Interview with Turner’s son and wife, September 12, 2012).
From the personal correspondence between Turner and his wife, Lois, Wade-Lewis gathers that he purchased three African drums and four rattles from one of the cult houses in Bahia, for his personal collection (2007:130), and that “Having observed African percussion style, dances, music, religious practices and folklore, upon his return to Nashville he taught Lois a traditional Afro-Brazilian dance, which she, in turn, taught four women students at Fisk. They performed it in the authentic garments that Turner had purchased” (2007:133). These were activities Lorenzo was good at. Wade-Lewis defined Turner, besides being a good scholar, as a good speaker, an African-American griot par excellence (2007:151). She adds, “The most devastating constraint of his generation … was the assumption that persons of African ancestry were not imbued with the ‘objectivity’ to analyse their own experience and therefore should not be funded to do so.” (2007: 269).
Turner’s Papers, Box 50, Folder 9, NU.
No actual fieldnotes have been found in the two collections of Turner’s papers at the Melville Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University and the Anacostia Community Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. This is obviously a great obstacle to reconstructing Turner’s Brazilian experience, which has to be done by interpreting the news coverage about his trip plus his annotations as a linguist, as well as his pictures, recordings and correspondence.
This is even though, by the 60s, Brazil did not feature any longer in Turner’s correspondence, which by then revolved much more around (black) US concerns or Africa – an exciting continent in the years of independence. It was still one of the eight topics of a series of lectures that LDT offered – always in exchange for an honorarium. (Box 7, Folder 3).
Olivia Gomes da Cunha was possibly the first Brazilian scholar to point out the importance of Turner’s work in Brazil (Gomes Da Cunha 2005:7–32; 2020). Pol Briand, a French independent scholar, also paid attention to Turner’s work in Brazil, highlighting his originality, but alas never published his research. More recently, Xavier Vatin published a brochure in English and Portuguese, with a CD, presenting Turner’s recordings in Bahia (Vatin 2017); see also Nobre 2019.
APS Application 1944: 146. Turner’s Papers, Grants Applications.
We are planning to post most of these documents in a special collection dedicated to Turner, in the Afrodigital Museum of the Federal University of Bahia. Our aim is to encourage the collective curatorship of these documents through the web and apps such as Wiki, for instance, by having speakers of African languages, located in various places, identify terms and the way they were used both in the Yoruba of 1940s Bahia and in the “Africano” speech that is so prominent in Turner’s notes and the Herskovitses’ fieldnotes.
Manoel, ogan in the Gantois house, was also a key informant to the Herskovitses, who called him Manoel da Silva. He was married to Zezé, vodunsi in the Gantois, who was another key informant to the Herskovitses. In fact Zezé passed a very similar word list to the Herskovitses, who copied it in their fieldnotes (MJH & FSH papers, Box 31, Field Notes Bahia, Book E 74–75, NU). Zezé – who had been initiated in Gantois but said that her real saint was a Caboclo – and her husband Manoel were trying to open a cult house in 1940–42 where Zezé could worship her actual saint, which she eventually did a few years later in Rio. My impression is that in the early 40s, also thanks to the growing interest of national and foreign scholars, the end of formal legal prohibition for the celebration of Candomblé in 1939, and the slow but steady opening of spaces in the fields of politics and culture production, there was a development of what could be called ethnocultural entrepreneurship in Salvador. A number of relatively young individuals in the Candomblé community tried to promote themselves, bypassing the traditional hierarchy based on age and time elapsed since initiation. Joãozinho da Gomeia was such a well-known character (see, for example, Chevitarese and Pereira 2016). I argue that in a less obvious way Manoel and Zezé were active in the same fashion.
Fulbright Plan of Work, July 1949, Turner Collection, Box 2, Folder 2, NU.
In Turner’s papers at NU (Box 40, Folders 3 to 5) are several transcriptions of the Yoruba folktales. In Folder 5 there is a manuscript with the typed transcription of many tales, among others by Martiniano do Bonfim, checked and approved by Ade in 1950. It seems to be a compilation put together in Brazil (1940–41), Nigeria (1951) and, in the following years, from Nigerian students who visited Roosevelt College. Many tales were transcribed on Roosevelt’s notepaper in 1958. They seem to have been dictated by Nigerian visitors or students, such as Ogunnuga and Ade Dawodu (Box 40, Folder 3). Box 40, Folder 4 contains typed pages of Yoruba myths, which seem to have been the preparation for another book manuscript.
In the late 1940s, Turner was elected to the Committee on Negro Studies of the ACLS and became a reviewer of proposals for the Rosenwald Fund.
Turner received letters of recommendation from Rüdiger Bilden, Heloisa Torres and Arthur Ramos. He became acquainted with all of them plus many other intellectuals while in Brazil, including Gilberto Freyre. At some point, he suggested a long list of people for Allison Davis (Department of Education, University of Chicago) to meet in Rio, São Paulo and Bahia, which included Dona Heloisa, Roquette Pinto and Arthur Ramos – with whom he was on friendly terms (Turner to Davis, March 24, 1945, Box 4, Folder 2, NU).
Pierson to MJH, May 10 and August 28, 1934; MJH to Pierson, May 15, 1934.
For this research, I worked through the following documents at the Rockefeller Archive: Rockefeller Foundation Records (RFR), Projects SG 1.1, Series 100 International; Series 257 Virgin Islands FA386; Series 216 Illinois Social Sciences, Subsection 216-S, Box 20: Document 214.9; Melville Herskovits J., 1941, Travel, Anthropology, Northwestern University.
See Moseley to MJH, April 10, 1941, RFR.
See Willits’ notice to the RF, May 23, 1941, RFR.
A first version of this section was published in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie (Sansone 2021). Available at <https://www.berose.fr/article2357.html>
Cecilia Meirelles introduced Herskovits to Mário de Andrade (De Andrade’s Papers, September 29, 1941, IEB/USP) and so did Gilberto Freyre, who asked De Andrade to send more books to Herskovits and informed him that Herskovits had already read his books on the black sculptor Alejadinho and the congada magic drum session (De Andrade’s papers, January 10, 1935, IEB/USP). On August 19, 1935, Herskovits replied, thanking De Andrade for the books and promising that he would send his Suriname recordings to him.
Kerr to MJH, July 28, 1941, MJH Papers, Box 11, Folder 12, NU.
MJH to Kerr, July 30, 1941, MJH Papers, Box 11, Folder 12, NU.
In a letter to Spivacke of the Division of Music of the National Library, on June 18, 1941, Herskovits agreed to leave a copy of the discs but stressed that he would like to “retain the privilege of checking on any arrangements made for my recordings for broadcasting, or any proposed used of them for musicological analysis. I have learned from sad experience …”.
MJH to Waters, August 5, 1941, NU.
Spivacke to MJH, August 20, 1941, NU.
Ibid.
MJH to Spivacke, August 22, 1941, NU.
MJH to Lomax, July 15, 1941, NU.
MacGowan to MJH, June 21, 1941, NU.
MJH to MacGowan, August 13, 1941, NU.
MJH to Caffery, August 12, 1941, NU.
As part of the Good Neighbor Policy initiated by President Roosevelt at the beginning of his mandate in 1933, the United States Maritime Commission contracted Moore-McCormack Lines to operate a Good Neighbor fleet of 10 cargo ships and 3 recently laid-up ocean liners, between the United States and South America. The passenger liners were the recently defunct Panama Pacific Line’s SS California, SS Virginia and SS Pennsylvania. Moore-McCormack had them refurbished and renamed them SS Uruguay, SS Brazil and SS Argentina for their new route between New York and Buenos Aires via Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Montevideo. https://www.cruiselinehistory.com/history-moore-mccormack-lines/. Accessed 28.01.2020.
MJH to Willits, June 23, 1941, RFR.
MJH, Box 16, Folder 5, NU.
MJH to Bascom, September 22, 1941, NU.
MJH to Bascom, October 6, 1941, NU.
MJH to Bascom, October 30, 1941, NU.
MJH to Bascom, December 15, 1941. Valladares had been indicated as Herskovits’ interpreter – later he also became a commentator – by Isaias Alves, brother of Governor Landulpho Alves, who combined the position of secretary of education with the directorship of the new Faculdade de Filosofia. On José Valladares’ perspective on museums, see Ceravolo and Santos (2007); on his pioneering view of tourism as a positive factor for heritage preservation, see Valladares 1951.
Herskovits received other requests for funding from Brazilian institutions, which he forwarded to the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Fulbright, usually to no avail. This was the case with the request for USD 10,000 funding from Dr Torrecilla of the Faculdade Livre de Educação, Ciências e Letras in Porto Alegre, which Melville forwarded to Moe of the Guggenheim on November 23, 1942, adding that he was not that impressed with the Faculdade and that funding should be provided instead for the university, which was supported by the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Moe promptly answered that “the request is entirely outside the scope of any funds I have to do with” (MJH, Box Guggenheim Foundation, NU). Mel was much more successful with grants for individuals, such Arthur Ramos and Vianna Moog, and especially the PhD students in anthropology, Octavio da Costa Eduardo and Mario Wagner, in 1943 (both students at the Escola Livre de Sociologia in São Paulo), Ruy Coelho in 1945 and René Ribeiro in 1944 (see, among others, the successful application to Willits of the Rockefeller for Eduardo (MJH RF 1943–44, Box 50, Folder 17, NU)). See also the application to the RF for Valladares, with the support of William Barrien (Barrien to MJH, April 3, 1943, Box 50, Folder 17). Eduardo was the path-breaker and Mel fondly called him the guinea pig – the first successful Brazilian applicant to which fresh applicants could refer (MJH to Eduardo, September 20, 1945, Box 32, Folder 35). The correspondence between Eduardo and Herskovits has been painstakingly analysed by Ferretti (2017) and Ramassote (2017), but that between Herskovits and Ribeiro, Coelho and Valladares still deserves closer scrutiny. At first glance, it shows a similar pattern, dictated by friendliness and genuine interest from the side of Herskovits to develop research in Brazil, and dependency from the side of Brazilians in terms of facilities and opportunities. The relationships were very much one-way. The only things these young Brazilian scholars had to offer were their motivation, certain inside knowledge and being Brazilian, which could be an asset during the GNP. In the meantime, Mel was also (co)sponsoring or supportive of the research of other important intellectuals and researchers of the Afro-Latin world, like Aguirre Beltran in Mexico, Price-Mars in Haiti and Romulo Latchanaere in Cuba. In some cases he also sponsored PhDs in the US. It is worth mentioning that, approximately in the same period, the Carnegie Corporation of New York in cooperation with the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, was developing a project for the promotion of African studies across Latin America. This included grants for Brazilian writers and intellectuals to spend a few months at a US university (Morinaka 2019).
Initially, the couple had planned a trip to Maranhão before going to Bahia. Health problems (apparently Mel had his first stroke in Rio) prevented them from going and they spent more time in Rio than they had originally planned. Herskovits would soon manage to satisfy his curiosity for black culture in Maranhão indirectly by sending Octavio da Costa Eduardo there for fieldwork for his PhD. Eduardo was the first Brazilian to get a PhD in anthropology under Herskovits’ supervision (Ferretti 2017; Ramassote 2017).
Among the documents that Mel sent to Northwestern, there was a copy of the Bahian police list of permits granted for “African religious ceremonies” for the years 1939 to 1940 and 1941 (MJH to Northwestern, July 29, 1942), which are in Annex 1.
On May 18, five suitcases were dispatched from the guest house to the docks and the vessel Itatinga to be forwarded to the Herskovitses’ address in the US: “1 trunk with personal belongings used in the course of fieldwork, 250 kilos; 1 box with a typewriter, motion picture camera, blank records, 50 kilos; 1 box containing personal belongings and certain specimen of Afro-Bahian metalwork for the University Museum, 50 kilos; 1 package containing field equipment, 50 kilos. … War-risk insurance is to be placed on this shipment by you for me…” (MJH to Bauder, May 7, 1942). Unfortunately, Herskovits’ secretary at Northwestern received the following communication sent on August 10 from the Northern Pan-America Line: “We regret to have to advise you that the vessel SS Bill has been lost as a result of enemy action. We presume the goods were covered by Marine and War Risk Insurance…”.
MJH to Ward, March 23, 1942. The couple would go to Porto Alegre towards the end of their stay in Brazil.
The Herskovitses received much assistance from the Rockefeller office in Rio, the US Embassy and the US consulates in Salvador and Recife, with post, finding a place to stay, representing the couple at Brazilian institutions, and sending off their fieldnotes and field/recording equipment.
A Manhã, April 30, 1942. Herskovits reported this public lecture to the magazine Science Press, suggesting that they write about it (MJH to Cattel, May 7, 1942).
“A Congregação da Faculdade de Filosofia da Bahia, tendo em vista os serviços pelo professor doutor Melville Herskovits, Chefe do Departamento de Antropologia da Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA, não somente através da valiosa cooperação cientifica da conferência com que inaugurou as atividades culturais deste Instituto, mas também pelo constante incentivo e pela decidida solidariedade com que continuo a dar-lhe sua colaboração, e considerando seu interesse pelo estudo dos problemas da cultura bahiana, no programa de pesquisas ligadas ao seu elevado renome nos meios universitários e científicos, resolve conferir-lhe o titulo de Professor Honorário de Antropologia” (Alves to MJH, July 16, 1942). It was an honorary position, but in those days quite an important one. Evidence of this is that the second honorary professorship was offered to Gilberto Freyre in 1943 (De Azevedo 1984:78).
MJH to Alves, July 26, 1942.
Alves to MJH, August 5, 1941. This is Isaias Alves’ speech that day: “A Faculdade de Filosofia da Bahia, a que os bahianos tem dado incentivo e apoio material, patrioticamente secundados por bem feitores de todos os quadrantes da Pátria, sente-se desvanecida de reunir cidadãos do Brasil e dos Estados Unidos, nesta hora de confraternização, deante do fantasma negro da guerra, homenageando um cientista que será um dos liames espirituais entre as duas Pátrias” (Alves in Herskovits 1943d: 37). Despite such celebration of Herkovits, an international name in Black studies, in those years the situation of Afro-Brazilian studies in Bahia was dismal. Arthur Ramos and, in 1939, Couto Ferraz and Édison Carneiro moved to Rio de Janeiro, then the federal capital. Apart from the Columbia-State of Bahia-UNESCO project, in 1950–52, which focused on race relations rather than what was then understood as Afro-Brazilian studies, it was only in 1959, with the foundation of the Centre of Afro Oriental Studies (CEAO), through an initiative of the Portuguese refugee Agostinho da Silva, that the UFBA started to invest in the development of Afro-Brazilian and African studies in Bahia (Oliveira, Waldir and Vivaldo da Costa Lima 1972: 32–35). In 1965, CEAO would launch its journal Afro-Ásia, which is still possibly the main journal in the field in Brazil (www.afroasia.ufba.br).
MJH to J. Willits, May 26, 1942, RFR.
Willits to MJH, May 14, 1942, RFR.
Willits to MJH, October 20, 1942, RFR.
MJH to Willits, November 4, 1942, RFR.
Brazilian newspapers devoted much space to the couple. For example, between 1941 and 1950, the newspaper Correio da Manhã published 17 reports on the couple’s voyage to Brazil. Altogether, the Herskovitses had much better press coverage than Frazier and Turner. Frazier and Turner drew attention because of their singularity, since they were possibly the first two US black scholars to come to Brazil with prestigious grants and as part of the GNP. Frazier’s Guggenheim grant, given in the same year that Alfred Métraux got his, was covered in the newspaper Correio da Manhã (May 19, 1940 and September 5, 1940). The Herskovitses attracted attention because they came as part of the GNP and during the war. Three prestigious newspapers wrote about them: Correio da Manhã (September 17 and 21, 1941), Diario de Noticias (September 19, 1941), which expressed surprise that MJH was able to read his lecture in Portuguese, and Jornal do Comercio (September 18 and 20, 1941), which related MJH’s visit to the ABL with its president Afranio Peixoto and famous educator and radio journalist Roquette Pinto, who showed the couple around, introducing Melville as the “US Nina Rodrigues”. At the ABL, Roquette Pinto suggested that with the help and knowledge of Herskovits, “who has already been in Africa”, Arthur Ramos and other Brazilian scholars should organize an expedition to the part of Africa where the slaves came from – “a lot of our anthropological questions would be solved by such an expedition” (Correio da Manhã, October 9, 1941:4). It is remarkable that some of Brazil’s top intellectuals always wrote quite positively about the couple’s visit to Brazil. These included Afranio Peixoto, Camara Cascudo, Roquette Pinto, Manuel Diegues Junior and Gilberto Freyre. None of them ever commented on Frazier and Turner. Herskovits’ recordings got special attention in A Tarde (January 27, 1942, p. 2 – quoted in Lunhing 1995): “Serão ouvidos em Washington as melopéas dos candomblés negros da Bahia. O objetivo da visita do professor Melville J. Herskovits. A população negra da Bahia oferece vasto campo para novos estudos originais. Encontra-se nesta capital, tendo chegado anteontem, pelo ‘Almirante Jaceguai’, o professor Melville J. Herskovits, chefe do departamento de Antropologia da Northwestern University de Evanston, Illinois, USA. Antropologista de renome e autor de vários trabalhos divulgados em todo o mundo, o professor norte americano está realizando uma viagem de estudos, acompanhado de sua esposa e uma filhinha. … Discos para a biblioteca do Congresso. O professor Herskovits, traz na bagagem completa aparelhagem para a gravação de discos de nossa música folclórica e das lendas e contos brasileiros. Estes discos serão remetidos, não só para a University de Illinois, como igualmente, para a biblioteca do Congresso, em Washington. Aproximando-se a hora do ‘lunch’ não mais queriamos interromper o descanso do professor ‘Yankee’. Assim agradecendo a atenção que nos dispensou dispedimo-nos do Mr. Herskovits”.
MJH to Torres, September 30, 1942.
MJH to Graça Aranha, September 30, 1942, RFR.
Alves to MJH, October 13, 1942.
MJH to Isaias Alves, February 4, 1943.
MJH in A Manha, July 4, 1942.
MJH to Thales, September 30, 1942.
MJH to Interventor Alves, published in Diario da Bahia, November 10, 1942.
Gonçalves Fernandes to MJH, November 9, 1942.
Ribeiro to MJH, November 14, 1941.
Valladares to MJH, August 3, 1943.
Moreover, MJH managed to mobilize his connections for his protégés. So, Aguirre Beltran helped Valladares when he spent one month in Mexico City as part of his training in museum studies (Valladares to MJH, August 8, 1944).
MJH to Valladares, April 11, 1944. Melville suggested that Gizella work on a compilation of Negro folklore comparable to what the Herskovitses had done in Suriname and Elsie Clews Parsons had done in the US: “One of the reasons why this is such a nice problem is that students of Negro folklore, Boas and Parsons among them, have been greatly impressed at the role of Spanish and Portuguese in spreading European folklore among non-European peoples all over the world. It should be interesting and significant to see just to what extent Portuguese elements are present in the tales to be found among the Negroes in Bahia since this would in a sense comprise a test case” (MJH to Valladares, July 17, 1944). She would research acculturation, one of Melville’s key interests. On July 29, Gizella wrote back enthusiastically about the MA project suggested by Herskovits.
This dissertation is worth exploring. On February 29, 1948, she sent a copy of the list of contents, a brief description of each of the nine key informants, a summary of the introduction, the glossary and the list of 59 collected tales.
Herman Roth to MJH, April 28, 1944.
Valladares to MJH, March 16, 1946.
Valladares to MJH, April 22, 1946.
Despite being well-known as a flamboyant homosexual, he married Maria Luiza, an older woman (a filha de santo) from his terreiro in Rio de Janeiro, in an important ceremony reported in the press (A Tarde, June 18, 1945). Valladares sent Herskovits a newspaper clipping, with a subtle comment about Joãozinho having finally settled with a spouse.
“Your news about our candomblé friends was quite exciting indeed, particularly about Zeze, who we assume is on the way to becoming a pretty important mae de santo. I hope you have the opportunity to attend some of the ceremonies when her new roca is established. It will be interesting for us if we ever get back to Bahia, to find our old friend in such a strategic position. I take it that the fact that the new center is being sponsored by Tia Massi means that it is an orthodox house, and that the issues between Zeze and the caboclo god have been satisfactorily resolved. Or is it going to be part caboclo, part Ketu?” (MJH to Valladares, March 29, 1947).
René Ribeiro, in a letter to MJH, wrote of Bahia as “a sua terra”, your homeland. Mel was sentimentally attached to Bahia in a way (RR to MJH, June 2, 1955).
Castleman to MJH, August 21, 1942.
MJH to Seligman, February 9, 1939, Herskovits Papers, Box 21, Folder 22, NU.
MJH to Rex Crawford, cultural attaché to the US Embassy, who had just taken his new post in Rio de Janeiro. In the letter, MJH continues, “I quite envy you being there, and I hope that the work comes along as well as you would hope in your most sanguine moments” (MJH to Crawford, October 19, 1943, NU).
MJH to Valladares, February 3, 1943. See what comes in 1944: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSo7ylXTwb0.
It is worth noting that neither Herskovits nor Frazier and Turner seem to have contacted the two most outstanding black social scientists of the time, Édison Carneiro and Guerreiro Ramos. Even though Frazier was aware of Carneiro’s work and quoted him in his reply to Herskovits in the American Journal of Sociology (1943), there is no mention of each other in Frazier’s nor in Carneiro’s correspondence. Pierson, Landes and Ramos did not introduce Carneiro to Frazier. It would have been the obvious thing to do. Frazier and Carneiro were both left-leaning, Édison was then a communist and Frazier a radical, even labelled a “Stalinist” by several of his Howard fellows (Platt 2002). Carneiro had moved to Rio in 1939 and Frazier spent about two months in Rio before going to Bahia. Why did they not meet? Was it because of the tension created by the relationship between Landes and Carneiro? This is one of the mysteries my research has revealed. Another question is why Jorge Amado, always a curious observer of city life, seemed not to have paid much attention to Frazier and Turner’s stay in Salvador, even though he had received a letter of recommendation for the two from Pierson and, in an interview in Estado da Bahia, he thanked them for their generous offer to make their recordings available for the soundtrack of the movie Mar Morto – the first movie shot in Bahia, inspired by the homonymous book by Jorge Amado, which was never completed (Estado da Bahia, October 30, 1940; Diario de Noticias, November 6, 1940). One possible reason is that Amado had already moved to Rio by then.
MJH to Torres, May 12, 1943.
MJH to Lois Williams, May 14, 1943.
It is quite possible that the aftermath of the scandal in the then very provincial Salvador was the reason that Gizella, a promising young researcher, left her junior position at the Faculdade – and anthropology altogether. It is worth recalling that Ben Zimmerman not only left Brazil right away but abandoned his PhD project.
A woman who is initiated in the cult of the orixás and takes a special position as such in the Candomblé house.
From Brazil, Melville wrote a series of letters to Frances, commenting on the re-encounter with the country and the people in 1954 (MJH to FSH, 1954). Interestingly, Meville’s daughter Jean told me a slightly different story: Melville, a heart patient and very superstitious, became very emotional when he went back to Bahia, to the extent that he did not want to go back to the Candomblé houses he knew. Jean had told a similar story to Melville’s biographer, Gershenhorn (2004).
MJH to Bascom, August 13, 1942.
Valladares to MJH, May 12, 1943.
MJH to Valladares, May 25, 1943.
Valladares to MJH, October 28, 1943.
Valladares to MJH, August 5, 1942.
Valladares to MJH, October 1, 1942.
Valladares to MJH, November 18, 1946
MJH Papers, Box 4, Folder 12, NU.
Jean Herskovits (Interview, 2003) told me that her father was quite superstitious – apparently one of the few things of his training as a rabbi in his youth that remained in his adult years – and was always impressed by the magic and predictive power of Candomblé.
MJH to Valladares, August 14, 1942. In spite of the fact that the Herskovitses spent only five days in Porto Alegre, they managed to gather enough material to produce what Mel called a “substantial article” (Herskovits 1943b).
MJH to Bascom, February 5, 1943.
Valladares to MJH, May 12, 1943.
MJH to Valladares, March 29, 1947.
MJH to Verger, April 27, 1948.
Herskovits 1941a. For this reason I would disagree with Roger Sansi, in his otherwise outstanding account of the process of patrimonialization and objectification of Candomblé in Bahia, when he states that the Herskovitses had a predilection for syncretism (Sansi 2007: 53). The couple did register quite a degree of syncretism and, more generally, mixture, but they were not happy about it.
MJH to Willits, December 12, 1941.
In those days, foreign scholars needed a formal endorsement by the Council in order to carry out research in Brazil.
There is no mention throughout the report of institution-building or establishing an exchange between US and Brazilian institutions. Brazil was seen, by and large, as a place to come to for research and from which interesting students could be extracted to go and do their advanced studies in the US. This perspective would last for a long time, and in the early 50s would inspire the construction of Brazil as a so-called field station, a location which US social science students could visit for their senior undergraduate training for their PhD fieldwork.
Rockefeller Foundation Report, October 16, 1942, page 5, RFR.
The Herskovitses arrived in Rio on August 10, 1941. While in Rio, they visited the National Faculty of Philosophy, the National Museum, the headquarters of the Service for the Preservation of Historic and Artistic Patrimony (SPHAN), the ABL and the anthropological section of the Institute for Educational Research of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro. On October 12, they travelled to São Paulo, where they visited the Escola Livre de Sociologia and the Faculties of Law and Medicine of the University of São Paulo. The original plan was to do fieldwork in Rio, but Melville fell severely ill and that work could not go ahead. The illness also meant the couple could not visit Maranhão, as originally planned. A great deal of Melville’s keenness for Eduardo obtaining a grant to do research in Maranhão had to do with his interest in a part of Brazil that he could not get to know personally. They arrived in Salvador on November 24 and remained there until May 15, 1942. On May 15, they proceeded to Recife until June 15, when they travelled back to Rio, after a four-day stop-over in Salvador, to organize the shipment of field equipment to the US. In Recife, they visited the institutes, museums and libraries, and the Faculty of Law. In that month, they counted on the collaboration of the group of researchers and students led by the psychiatrist Ulysses Pernambucano, one of whom was Gonçalves. Back in Rio, “through the cooperation of Bahian friends of the African religious groups”, they were able to gather comparative data to supplement their findings in the north. On July 10, they travelled again to São Paulo, remaining there for one month, where they basically spent most of the time typing up their Bahia fieldnotes and copying them in duplicate [which soon proved a very good thing to do, when the ship they sent their field equipment was sunk]. During this month, a four-day visit to Porto Alegre took place. The Herskovitses spent the last two weeks of their stay in Rio mostly “in paying those all-important good-bye calls which loom so prominently in the Brazilian social code”. They left Brazil, by air, on August 21, arriving in Miami three days later, and in Evanston on the 26th. In Brazil, Melville delivered the following addresses: September 15, Brazilian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology, Rio de Janeiro; October 16, União Cultural Brasil-Estados Unidos, São Paulo; May 6, Faculdade de Filosofia da Bahia; June 6, seminar organized by Ulysses Pernambucano, Recife; July 21 and 27, Escola Livre de Sociologia, São Paulo; August 17, Brazilian Society for Anthropology and Ethnology, Rio de Janeiro.
One can see from the pictures of Baianas that he took in those days that they were still African street-sellers rather than Afro icons, as they came to be represented and reconstructed from the 1960s.
It is not clear in which of the Herskovitses’ published writing this seems to have been described.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 5.
He is referring to the “puxada de rede”, the collective casting of a large fishing net into the sea from a large canoe, which is manoeuvred around the school of fish and pulled ashore from the beach by two large groups of men, each pulling one of the two ropes. Each participant is entitled to a percentage of the catch.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 6.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 9.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 8.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 11.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 11
In his book, The Races of Africa (1930), then a must-read in physical, social and cultural anthropology, and which in French translation was adopted as a manual by the first Brazilian folklore mission, Charles Seligman devoted a whole section to the Yoruba, called “The True Negro: the quintessence of one of the four main African ‘races’”.
Melville was particularly shocked by the context of the Faculty of Philosophy in Bahia, since the building was made available by the State, but no salary was paid to the faculty, whose professionals had to earn their living through other activities and professions.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 16.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 17.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 18.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 19.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 26.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 28.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 29.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 30. This substitution of Italian professors with US professors in Brazil seems to have been a larger project, which had begun in those war years within the area of criminology (see Sansone 2022).
RF Report 1942, RAC: 32.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 30–32.
Herskovits stated in his final budget overview that he paid only 5.5% of the total donation to informants.
RF Report 1942, RAC: 36.
Diario Oficial, September 21, 1943, section 1, translated by the US Embassy in Rio.