Doing research in Brazil and Bahia empowered and affected Lorenzo, Franklin, Frances and Melville. The experience had a strong sensory and emotional side to it. In this they shared much in common. Having done fieldwork in Bahia on similar topics and in roughly the same period naturally would create a special bond between the four of them that would last for the rest of their lives. However, each of them added to their fieldwork experience their own individual agenda and personal touch. It is by comparing fieldwork styles, methodologies and social networks that one sees that Bahia had different impacts on the personality, ethnographic sensibility and future career of the four.
The daily experiences in Salvador of the two black scholars, Frazier and Turner, were remarkable and certainly quite different from everyday life in the United States. Upon their arrival in Salvador by boat they were picked up at the port by the American Consul (apparently a notorious racist who now had to welcome two American black scholars with all the due pomp). Their arrival was announced on the front pages of the leading Bahia newspapers and they checked into the centrally located Palace Hotel (possibly the best hotel in town) in the Rua Chile.1
Frazier and Turner were given a white driver dressed in a white suit and bow tie, and took individual Portuguese lessons from a woman who lived in the bourgeois Campo Grande square. They enjoyed Carnival and the popular Senhor do Bonfim street festival in the company of a group of light-skinned, middle-class girls. In other words, both of them could circulate at will in popular culture, traditional religious circles and among the elites of Bahia. It is likely that they experienced this freedom because of their American citizenship and hard currency (Sansone 2011).2
Their presence did not go unnoticed by the white intellectual elite; after all, they were most certainly the first American black scholars to carry out
The Palace Hotel on 20 Rua Chile, where Frazier and Turner stayed in Salvador, Bahia
The Edith Guesthouse at 277 Avenida Sete de Setembro, where Melville and Frances Herskovits stayed in Salvador, Bahia
A set of family photos of Herskovits with Frances and their daughter, and his correspondence with Mrs Ward of Northwestern, his secretary responsible for forwarding the mail during his Brazilian field trip, suggest that the family rented a small apartment in the Edith Schmalz Guesthouse on Avenida Sete de Setembro 277, on Campo Grande. The building is now known as Casa de Itália and is right in the centre of Salvador. It was comfortable but less flashy than the Palace Hotel.
In Bahia, apart from the assistance of the well-connected José Valladares, Herskovits relied on a different network from that of Frazier and Turner. He had much closer ties with the white Brazilian intellectual elite and maintained these contacts until the end of his life. His primary contact was Arthur Ramos, considered the dean of Afro-Bahian studies (Ramos 1934, 1937), but he also had the endorsement of the director of the Museu Nacional, the famous Dona Heloisa Torres (Sansone 2011).
Even though the four scholars were revolving around the same few cult-houses for their fieldwork, especially Gantois and Bogum, they did not interview exactly the same cohort of people. Let us now compare their style of fieldwork.
Frances’ contribution to the quality of Melville’s research must not be underestimated. In fact, Parés notes, Frances showed more concern for the social context of the cult-houses than her husband did (Parés 2016:141). Born in Minsk, then Russia, Frances migrated to the US at the age of eight. In her youth she wanted to be a writer, and in the 1920s, for her MA in Anthropology, she attended graduate classes and seminars at the New School of Social Research and Columbia University, where she met Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons and her future husband, Melville J. Herskovits. Her professional training as an anthropologist continued as she accompanied Mel on most of his trips, to Haiti, Trinidad, Dahomey, Suriname and other African countries. Also, thanks to her writing skills, she co-authored with Melville several articles and five volumes. These included the books Rebel Destiny (on the Suriname Maroons) and Dahomean Narrative. An indication of her early commitment to anthropology is that she applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1936 to do research for twelve months among the Mandinga of West Africa. She cited no less than Franz Boas and Edward Sapir as references. Apparently, she did not get the grant5 but, anyhow, by 1941 she had more fieldwork
1 Networks, Photographs and Fieldnotes
As we have seen, Turner teamed up with Frazier. Turner had a gasoline-propelled Edison phonograph, an expensive rarity in those days. It recorded on aluminium discs that played for fifteen minutes at the most. He had learned to operate this complicated machine, which was useful for his study of linguistics as well as for his general interest in music and its interaction with language. Herskovits teamed up with his wife Frances. She would eventually transcribe his fieldnotes and interviews and would maintain an interest in Brazil until the end of her life. The Herkovitses, too, had a sound recorder.
The international and Brazilian networks of our scholars were very different too. Frazier relied on the network established by Chicagoan Donald Pierson and later Ruth Landes in 1935–39. Upon arrival, Turner and Frazier had already identified several contacts in the political elites and among the key middle-class families in the black population. Both Pierson and Landes had relied on connections and guidance from the black and communist sympathizer, journalist and self-taught ethnographer, Édison Carneiro. As seen before, Landes made him the central key informant in her fieldwork. Though I have not found evidence in the archives, it is quite possible that Turner’s and Frazier’s contacts in the Candomblé world, especially those they interviewed in the famous Gantois house, were arranged by Ruth Landes and Édison Carneiro. Herskovits had better connections with the white intellectual elite already from the start and found in José Valladares a great local ally. Turner benefited from his friend and colleague Frazier’s contacts and fluency in Portuguese, and Frazier benefited from Turner’s recording methods, photographic skills and company.
2
After spending two months improving his Portuguese and reading secondary sources, Frazier interviewed forty-two families living near the Gantois cult-house and fifteen more from diverse neighbourhoods and social strata to obtain comparative data (Hellwig 1991, 1992; Saint Arnaud 2009).7 The choice of informants was not entirely random, as Frazier seemed to imply, and the questions he asked were related to his comparative research on the black family rather than Candomblé, which the Herskovitses would do a year later.
Almost all the interviewees in the leading group were women. Frazier explained this by arguing that men were hardly at home during the day.8 The women were mostly illiterate and worked as housemaids or in the homes of more affluent (whiter) people. Many of the interviewees revolved around the Candomblé house (some went there to check what was going on, “para apreciar”) for counselling, religious needs, social life and food. Roughly half were mestizo. Several had relationships or affairs with white, wealthier men – sometimes married. Most of them had short-lived marriages, often lived “maritalmente” (as if married), sometimes followed by a formal wedding at a later age. It was a pattern that, in the 1950s, anthropologists such as M.G. Smith defined as “typically Caribbean” (Smith 1962), but was also common in Latin America and other regions of the world, such as the Philippines (MacDonald and MacDonald 1978). Women experienced a very high rate of child mortality. When they separated from their husbands, they moved back to their mother’s house, with whom they created a household. The overwhelming majority of women had menial jobs. Those who were not housemaids did laundry, ironing, cooking or sewing. Some were street vendors or cooks, while others sold whatever they could from a little shop in their residence.
Frazier’s interviews show a variety of points of view in the black-mestizo population who lived in the neighbourhood: those who believed in education as the best and only way to upward mobility; a race- and labour-conscious stevedore who said that Candomblé was just to keep the Negroes dancing; and the “povo de santo” (the natural family and the most closely related people to the cult-house leadership). The vocabulary they used was that of ordinary people (seita, mãe de santo, Candomblé, maritalmente, etc). Frazier did not introduce expressions to talk about Candomblé but instead registered, often
Portraits of Franklin Frazier’s cases 30–34 and 36–38
On his notepad, Frazier meticulously recorded case number, name, date of interview, physical appearance (hair colour and texture, skin colour, size, mixed/very dark), age, family background, family organization, social relations, children, present status. In doing this, he differed from both Turner and Herskovits. He further noted whether people were satisfied or unhappy with their life, pessimistic or optimistic, whether women had a colour preference in terms of a future partner (most said they did not), and whether the interviewee was a virgin (!) – a question that was candidly answered. Some answers were recorded in Portuguese: trabalho muito, dinheiro pouco, despesas muitas (hard work, little money, lots of expenses). Frazier asked explicitly whether the informant knew something about Africa – none seemed to know anything. In Case 10, we read: “She knows nothing of her grandparents, nothing of Africa, and has been told nothing of either or has forgotten what she was told.” Frazier was not assuming that people had any memory regarding Africa in his way of asking questions. He recorded at least twice that the only African terms he found relating to the household were to do with food – acaraje, vatapa, caruru. One example is Case 1, Maria:
Knows nothing of her grandparents except the maternal grandmother, whom she knew only slightly. Never heard anything about Africa … Her family exercised strict supervision over her behavior … A man who sold milk began to flirt with her and tell her that “gostou” her. He invited her to come to his house. She began seeing him without her mother knowing. When she became pregnant, her mother scolded her severely. … She lived with the man as his wife for two years … During the two years, she had two children, both of whom died … At present, her younger sister and mother are living together as a family group.
Most households were indigent with unstable marital status. Many women were also working in “casa de familia” (as housemaids for a better-off family), sometimes met their husband there or became involved with a lighter-skinned man from that family, frequently maintaining a relationship with him and bearing his children. What was noticeable was the high rate of childbirth and the short duration of most marital arrangements – often as a result of the husband deserting his wife or dying prematurely, the young age of the first pregnancy, and the ephemeral nature of courting (it is possible that such details also had to do with the way Frazier recorded them). An excerpt from Case 8 reads:
She met him [the future partner] in the street. He liked her and she liked him. Her mother could tell from her eyes and scolded her. When the mother went to work, the man would slip in and have sex with her. She became pregnant. The mother scolded her and the man. The man took her and her mother to live in a house and provided well for them. She had three children with him. All three are dead – two as small … After four years, the man died.
For Case 6 Frazier wrote:
Met the father of her children at a festa. He said that he “gostou” her and she said “gostei” him … During the five years they have been living together “maritalmente” she has had three children two of whom are dead. At present she is pregnant. She is happy at the prospect; man is kind and supports her. Streetcar conductor.
Most women started to work at the age of twelve to thirteen and most people were illiterate. Children had, on average, two to three years of schooling. Only a minority attended school, such as Case 10, who described a structured nuclear family with parents and ten children who all went to school and regularly attended both the Catholic Church and Candomblé. There was no other church than the Catholic one for these informants. Only one informant used to go to a Baptist Church but was by then going to Candomblé and a centro espirita (spiritualist centre). Most people were local and lived in the house where they were born. About a third came from inland Bahia. There was a lot of mutual help in the neighbourhood particularly in the event of a crisis in a household, such as following the death or departure of a husband. Households were almost always matrifocal.
The colour terms used by the informants reveal a robust racist bias – moreno limpo, or clean brown-skinned man (Case 25). Their responses also indicate a strict moral code. So, Case 26 is solteira and honesta (unmarried but decent), states she wants to marry, is a filha de santo, observa obrigações (follows her obligations), likes Candomblé immensely, has learned some African words, but otherwise knows nothing of Africa.
Case 28, who wanted to become a filha de santo, is one of the few who learned African words not just in Candomblé but also from her mother and aunt. Otherwise, the only thing identified as African was food, especially as eaten on special holy days, such as São Cosme, São Damião (September 27) and São Antonio (June 13). For Case 31, who stated that her great-grandfather
Black woman, with maternal grandfather born in Africa, bore his tribal marks on face. Spoke African language, but informant never learned it or understood it. … Was a filha de santo and learned some African words. Knows nothing about Africa. Goes to Candomblé and the Catholic Church.
Africa was also a topic in the interview with Case 41:
Maria Francisca, mãe de Zezé, with African great-grandfather and grandfather of African origins, born in the sertao. Informant claims to be 55 years of age, but looks older. Tells the following story: When she came to Bahia there was a house in which she lived, where Africans lived under a pai de santo. All worked together for the upkeep of the house but engaged in individual enterprises like selling tobacco, peanuts, bananas and fish. The pai de santo managed the division of the produce of their labor. They spoke African and practiced African rites. She never learned anything of the language in rites because when 17 married a man who did not like the African practices. Her husband was the son of a gypsy and shared her mother’s dislike of African practices. She has had 12 children and only two are living. … She attends the Catholic Church and the Candomblé
Frazier’s fieldnotes include a second set of interviews, called “miscellaneous group”, mainly documenting people in the middle class.9 Many of these informants were second-generation Africans, born in Brazil, and had close connections to one or more Candomblé houses. An interesting exception was a weaver who had a reasonable living standard but could not be ranked as middle class. He was possibly the last weaver in Bahia to weave using West African techniques. He was aware that his trade was of African origin but did not go to Candomblé.
Those in the middle class often praised their mostly illiterate parents and their commitment to education for their children. They had little memory of past generations and never beyond the great-grandmother.10 The words they
3 Turner’s Approach
Turner’s fieldwork method was radically different in some ways and quite like that of Frazier and Herskovits in others. He left no fieldwork or methodological notes – in fact, there are no such notes regarding Brazil in his papers at Northwestern or the Anacostia Community Museum. Yet, from the recordings, interview transcriptions, letters, scripts for Afro-Brazilian folklore shows and later recollections of his experience in Bahia, we know that he showed his informants a list of words (and perhaps expressions) he had gathered from the Gullah, and played them his recordings of the African-influenced speech of the Gullah (Wade-Lewis, 2007:130).
Turner recognized in the Bahia speech several expressions he had heard from the Gullah and his informants also identified words in the written lists and recordings. Several African terms were similar in both contexts – and in this respect Turner’s research technique was well advanced and appropriate for the time. With the hindsight of history, one wonders today if in this process of recognition of African words and heritage it should not also be taken into account that the informants wanted to give a socially satisfactory answer to the friendly, well-educated and African-oriented black American linguist (Sansone 2011).
Turner’s informants can be divided into four main groups: povo de santo, capoeristas, musicians and language informants.11 There were no clear-cut
Besides the photos and the recording, Turner left us a set of transcriptions of tales and proverbs that he tidied up and reorganised several times in the 1950s and 1960s in the hope of getting them published as a collection of “Yoruba tales and proverbs in Bahia” and /or as part of a more general book on Yoruba tales in Nigeria and Brazil.13 As far as I know, this material has never been researched and catalogued by anybody besides Turner himself.14 A large part of
Despite their exceptional value, Turner’s recordings and photos remained invisible and unknown to most Brazilian scholars, until recently. In 2012, the digital repatriation16 of copies of his pictures and recordings of the Gantois and Axe Afonja Candomblé houses – in sessions organized by the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage of the Federal University of Bahia – allowed the older people in Bahia to recognize most of Turner’s informants.17 They were moved by the opportunity to hear the voices of such important people in the Candomblé community and viewed of great value the recordings of voices of long-ago religious leaders (Sansone 2011). This project is giving new relevance to Turner’s work in Bahia. More recently, Turner’s beautiful photos
3.1 Mel’s and Frances’ Fieldnotes
The Herskovitses’ fieldnotes are much more voluminous than the single notepad left by Frazier and, of course, Turner’s few scattered notes. The fieldnotes kept by the Schomburg Center come in two formats: handwritten and transcribed. The transcription is quite literal and is the text I studied.18 It consists of one large notebook with 260 pages and six notebooks with interviews and notes of participant observation. Each small notebook has 100 to 120 pages and comprises the same information as the larger book but is reorganized according to themes. Notebooks I to IV contain the description of a visit to the cult-houses and their feasts and rituals. The other six notebooks, marked A to F, contain the edited transcription of the interviews (Parés 2016). Mel and Frances kept no list of names of the informants, but these can be deduced from reading the fieldnotes19 or in the list of payments in their final report (Appendix 1). In notebook A, on pages 12–13, however, there is a list of “proper” (orthodox) Candomblé houses that have better “knowledge” (“conhecimento”) according to Manoel da Silva, one of the main informants. Men: Bernardino – Angola, Congo, Jeje, Ketu; Joãozinho “não é feito mas compreende muito”, Caboclo, Ketu (agora Ketu, “era caboclo alguns anos atrás”); Manoel Menezes – Jeje; Gonçalo – Angola; Vidal – Ketu; Procopio de Ogun – Ketu; Ciriaco – Ketu; Co…[unreadable] – depois do Engenho Velho – Ketu; Eduardo – Ijexá. Women: Engenho Velho – Tia Massi – Ketu; Gantois – Tia Menininha – Ketu “mas muito competente para todas as nações”; Oshumare – Cotinha, Jeje; Maria Nene – Congo; Candomblé de São Gonçalo “a ‘senhora’ que encontramos com Vidal cujo nome ninguém parece saber” – Ketu; Idalise – Estrada de Rodagem – Angola; Maria de Ogun – Jeje, Ijexá.20 This list highlights divergent opinions around the ethnic origin or “nation” membership of some cult-houses and pais and mães de santos – the most prominent and publicly known of whom was
The notes also include a detailed list of permissions issued by the police to cult-houses for the three years 1939 to 1941. From this list (see Appendix 2), one can see that most houses identified with the Angola or the Caboclo nation. However, in a trend that would grow in the successive decades, many houses of the Angola and Caboclo nations little by little became Nago-Ketu – that is, they joined the minority of cult-houses of the nation that was believed to be, together with the Jeje, the most orthodox and purely African (Gois Dantas 1988; Teles dos Santos 1996). Such a thing, wrote the Herskovitses, is what happened with famous priest Joãozinho da Gomeia, who was Caboclo and became Ketu21. This change from one nation to the other received much criticism, especially from the senior members of the most orthodox houses who were, in general, more reluctant to change. The informants complained of new houses being opened by people who were too young, sometimes even without proper initiation. Another phenomenon that was frowned upon was men dancing and being possessed by the santo, because possession indicated that they were “passivos” – and thus homosexuals. In the seniors’ orthodox houses, dancing was self-controlled and done for appropriate lengths of time, usually limited. Not everybody was supposed to dance all the time.
Here is an excerpt from the Herskovitses’ notes about the difference between Candomblé nations:
Caboclo: Joaozinho made the point, very definitely, that caboclo is different from Angola and Congo – in that it is Guarani. MJH’s impression was that his attitude was deprecatory when he talked about caboclo as against the other seitas. When FSH joined, he said that caboclo did everything more simply and less expensively … The matança [ritual killing of animals] was done in the open, in front of everyone, instead of reserving a special time and having a private ceremony. … Caboclo santos have no preceitos. While the African santos work with folhas, caboclo saints work with raizes. …The songs of the caboclo are not in African, they are in Portuguese, and they are very bonito … The songs are not fixed. Each santo makes up his own. We said they reminded us of the songs of the Evangelicos. He laughed, but he did not disagree.22
The Herskovitses gave an excellent and detailed description of the hierarchies (of respect), offerings arrangement of the house (and of peji, or shrines) and processes in Candomblé religion – for example, how to open a new cult-house, starting from a roca (an orchard). They clearly noted who did or did not do what in the house. It was a description from personal observation and from what they were told in the interviews. The couple asked each informant what their preceitos (religious obligations) were to the particular saint of his/her own house: type of feast, food, social obligation, clothing, space (the barracão and the surrounding yard) and key sacred shrines (peji), time, duration of initiation (the longer, the more traditional the house could be considered), etc. Each informant assumed that their preceitos were correct and that other houses might do it differently. It was a differentiating dynamic typical of Candomblé. One house existed simply because it was different from another one. For this reason, the general federation of Candomblé houses, founded by Édison Carneiro in 1938, had only a short, troubled life. Instead of official alliances, blood or spiritual genealogies have always worked better, liaising one house with others.24
In the Herskovitses’ interviews, unlike those of Frazier’s, or of Turners’ recordings and notes, there is little or no personal information on the interviewees. This information has to be gleaned through the detailed descriptions of rituals, animal sacrifices, ritual baths with specific leaves in water and causos (occurrences, usual mishaps due to error or not following what the saints expect from you) in your or other houses. MJH also used notas (lists of food types), amounts of money (dinheiro de chao) and objects that a saint required as offerings for a specific purpose.25
The Herskovitses’ description of the correct practices was always neutral. It was the transcription of what they heard, taken at face value. Sometimes there is a note between brackets with a remark, such as “we need to ask more about this”. Here is a typical example: “When a member of the family is to become a feita, relatives give presents. It is impossible to say just how much because they buy articles of clothing. Etc. Some give money, but those who know the Candomblé know what to give.”26 The transcriptions record literally what an informant said. What interested the couple was primarily the function of each saint, the composition of each ritual, the many taboos (as to food, clothing, behaviour, dance, etc.), the difference between houses and Candomblé nations (and between Ketu, Jeje, Angola and Caboclo), the funeral and death rites, the initiation, possession (who is possessed, how the community relates to it), and the opening of a new Candomblé house. In this, they always asked which words were used, especially African words. They tried to draw links with
The description of burials was very detailed, especially that of Mãe Senhora, a highly respected priestess: the coffin, preparation of the body, what went into the coffin, food and songs, how to walk the coffin to the cemetery, ritual steps, what to do after the burial, how to dispose of the possessions of the deceased, etc. It was also crucial in their research in Dahomey (1938). In the notes, they took care to transcribe as many African words as possible used in the interviews.
They also asked a lot about Exu, a Candomblé “entity” similar to Hermes or Mercury in Greek and Roman mythology, the messenger that also opened up and protected one’s path, even though outsiders often represented it as the devil. A similar entity, called bakru in Sranan Tongo, had attracted attention in their research for the book Suriname Folklore (1936). Melville and Frances would have some small metal statues of Exu made for them by the blacksmiths at the market.27 Alas, this is part of the collection that went down with the torpedoed ship. Their ethnographic sensibility was nurtured by their transatlantic research experience and the constant pursuit of ethnographic similarities, rather than singularities, between the different locations.
Other topics captured the couple’s curiosity, such as the process of numbering in the Jogo do Bicho (number game), of which they provide a very detailed description,28 and the phenomenon of amaziado, common-law unions, which they depicted as much more structured and based in African traditions than Frazier had portrayed a year earlier. The amaziado would be teased out in a specific paper (Herskovits 1945a).29 The Herskovitses also explained the important difference between ogan de ramo30 and ogan confirmado. The latter has rights and obligations. The first had none of this and was rather an honorary role. Each student of the Candomblé cult who was “initiated” (from the first ethnography of medical doctor Raimundo Rodrigues in the late 1890s onwards, many scholars became ogans and were publicly proud of it) was
In the papers and reports they would publish later, Frances and Melville tended to shun the topic of homosexuality and hardly registered the (conspicuous) presence of homosexuals in and around cult-houses or their ceremonies and feasts. Nonetheless, there are several references in the fieldnotes to a strange occurrence.32 In discussing the powers of the mãe de santo and the extent to which they could be “spoiled” by being used for evil purposes, they used the example of the mother of Mãe Menininha. She was a mãe pequena and was killed by a feitiço (fetish). She had been having relations with one of the filhas, something that, as Ruth Landes showed, was not uncommon in those days in the Candomblé houses dominated by women. But then she was attracted to a man, a butcher who lived just up the street from the pensão (the guesthouse where the Herskovitses were staying) and started living with him. Her woman lover became angry and also took a man but swore to the mother of Mãe Menininha that she would “give her an answer”. She went to Tio Ojo, one of the Africanos who dealt in sorcery and obtained a feitiço that killed Menininha’s mother. Pulqueria (a powerful priestess) was still living, but she could do nothing in this case.
Another example of the fact that they registered homosexuality was their description of a feast at Procopio’s cult-house on April 19, 1942. Procopio, one of the few informants who, according to the couple, was very fluent in Yoruba, entered the dance: “On the head, he had a blue-green hat of the kind Ogun wears, but more turban shaped, and the whole effect being of an African prince – not at all of an effeminate being. Nor was the dancing.”33 These are (private) admissions of the relevance of homosexuality in the houses, something Melville would later publicly condemn in his criticism of Landes’ study, which emphasized the centrality of women in Candomblé (1947). Besides several references to the relevance of homosexuality in Candomblé, there are many mentions of race and racial discrimination in the fieldnotes. They noticed homosexuality and racial discrimination as well as black consciousness but were not interested in developing these controversial issues in their publications – it was not part of their project.
The couple noticed several Dahomeyan influences at Mãe Senhora’s, even though these were not generally recognized and incorporated in Nago/Ketu rituals and objects. At the cult-house of pai Vidal, the couple constantly asked people to point out deities that resembled Dahomeyan gods. The people they interviewed often saw a resemblance. They also compared these similarities with their findings in Suriname and Haiti: “What has happened to the Dahomeyan gods here is like what happened in Haiti – they have become somewhat blurred in form and function, and sense of place has been lost.” In documenting their talk with Vidal, who wanted to know if the Jeje still existed in Africa, they noted: “Why have Nago survivals been so precise?” Frances had the answer: “I think the continuing contact with Lagos, as against none with Dahomey. But why have all the Brazilian students overlooked this material? Because they did not know what to look for?”36 The Herskovitses carried their two Dahomey books with them during the visit to the cult-houses and showed them whenever possible to create momentum and register how people reacted:
Showed Vidal Dahomean volumes. He was most impressed with coloured pictures of Aida Wedo, which he called Oshumare, and called a young woman to see it – possibly a filha de Oshumare. Also, the Hoho, which
he called Kohobi. Also commented on the chiefs’ big clothes and the umbrellas over them. He liked the bronzes and woodcarving. Did Africans themselves do it?37
The Herskovitses were very excited when they encountered Africanisms. Here is an example: “On the way, there was another nice Africanism – we passed the lame drummer and Raimundo stopped the car. Vidal leaned forward, his hands on his lips – ‘Don’t tell him where we are going. Let us see first what he is doing’ …”.38 Or: “Vivi opened with a song in a falsetto that impressed me … my associations were with Northern Nigeria, i.e. I thought of Kano when he called the gods, but Ogun in particular.”39 Of a ceremony, Mel wrote “all of it reminded me of the Dahomean Legba”.40 And they found the black Catholic brotherhoods quite impressive because “the heads, with their staves of office, looked like African potentates”. In other words, whatever looked African or reminded them of Africa was African. Throughout the notes, there are remarks on Africa – things or rituals that reminded them of Africa, such as, in commenting on a Lorogun feast at Procopio’s: “is this a survival of the annual ‘war’ of West Africa?”41 International comparison is everywhere: “There are more shrines I have seen except for Africa and the Suriname bush”;42 “Does her santo have an African name? Yes, it was Ainle. She pronounced it perfectly, and I exclaimed. I said I knew it from Africa, that it was a very important santo there … They were really impressed.”43 In describing a lower-class neighbourhood, Frances said “that is sheer Africa”.44
Status played a key role too:
Several stories followed the usual pattern we know from elsewhere – how many automobiles come bringing people to the festas they give, and how, on one occasion, a white girl got possessed, and the distress of her mother (the story told beautifully, what an actor the man is!), how he went to ask for a drum permit and was told “Two things I won’t allow here, jogo do bicho and macumba” and other tales of official interference; or various high officials, who (in the past, as always) were affiliated to the cult.45
I do not know whether it was intentional or by accident that the couple was in Salvador at the time of year when festas in the cult-houses were most concentrated – November to March, or Easter. In a single day, they visited five cult-houses! Most of the several lists in the notes (of objects and animals to be purchased for a specific ceremony, average payments for different types of labour, of ritual prescription for a specific ceremony, of hierarchical positions in a cult-house) would appear in the four articles on Brazil that would be published later.
The Herskovitses were generally polite and, before presenting a gift, they asked the important leaders about the kind of present (money) they could give to a house. They also negotiated to take a photograph, which was not always allowed. The fact that the couple had shown photos taken by themselves in Dahomey and printed them – in their books – made their plea for more photos to be taken more acceptable. Mentions of books, images, photographs and recordings are recurrent in the notes. The couple showed their Dahomey books and Vivi (an informant) showed a copy of Nina’s’ Os Africanos no Brasil, adding that everything he did and his divining came from his santo that he called on; nothing was written down. Mel added an important detail, which indicated that Vivi was illiterate: “Vivi held the book upside down and backside forward when he commented on it.”46 There is more evidence of how much photos and recordings by foreign scholars were perceived as quite important in the Candomblé houses:
March 4, Visit of Joazinho’s: Joazinho dropped on this afternoon with a ‘boy friend’ (everybody was aware of Joazinho being gay). He brought in a couple of records Turner had given to him – Turner left copies of his records with his informants … without fibre needles, we could not play his records, but we played some of our own. He knew most of the songs and (typically) responded by dancing to them.47
There was quite some intermixing between the various Candomblé nations. Most people would agree that there were more of the traditional (orthodox) cult-houses. Representatives of the less orthodox houses would try to get the support of a representative of one of the traditional houses to lend them
Most anthropologists and collectors of ethnographic records in those days did not focus on individuality or authorship. Their emphasis was on the phenomenon, not on people, and even less on individuals. So, the Herskovitses gave no names of the informants in the pictures taken, the published papers or the music recordings. However, some individuals are named in the fieldnotes
Offerings to the saints. Terreiro do Bogum, Salvador, Bahia
The Herskovitses did not import into Bahia the terms babalorisha or babalorixá and babalão, since these were already in use (as can be seen by the list of words noted in the interview with Leonardo).51 But the terms were of a second, internal and more sacred order – to be used by the people of the cult-house or those who had been initiated. The discovery of such terms of obvious African origin, by important outsiders such as the Herskovitses, meant that they started to be used in public, politically, to state or buttress cultural differences. The couple were facilitators of this process, in effect the political anaesthetization of Candomblé (Sansone 2003). Similarly, Frances and Melville often referred to their previous research in Africa and told their Bahia informants what a particular thing or saint was called in Dahomey – and sometimes in Haiti or Suriname. Throughout the notes, one can read the sentence: “We proceeded to show him the Dahomey books, and he was very interested …”. In general, the informants were very curious about Africa and wanted to see a picture of Dahomey.52 The couple’s prior knowledge of African cultures gave them a specific broader understanding, and certainly greater power, in their relationship with the informants. However, in looking for Africanisms in Bahia, sometimes the couple got confused. A case in point was the rotating credit system. At first, they asked if people knew esusu (I guess from Dahomey). People answered that this it was called caixa in Bahia and was used chiefly among seamstresses. Other professions created a system called sociedades. Later on, however, the Herskovitses referred to rotating cash systems (caixas) and sociedades (saving societies) as being specific to Bahia, and made no connection to their parallel across the Black Atlantic.53
Despite what we could call their Africanism bias, which emphasized what they saw as an existing and often repressed local memory of Africa, their detailed description of what they heard in the interviews and what they saw is of great use for those who are interested in the practice of Candomblé in the 1940s. As we can read further on, even though the fieldnotes were never fully exploited as they would have been had they been turned into a book, some of them were used in articles and chapters on the social organization of
This movement towards a new authenticity and Africanness was also generated from within the cult-houses. One more good reason for the acceptance of the Herskovitses in what were then defined as the most orthodox cult-houses was that they associated the existing local polarity of Caboclo–Ketu to the traditional polarity in anthropology between impure–pure and Dionysian–Apollonian.54 This polarity was assumed among certain senior figures of the Candomblé community as well as among the growing group of local and national “organic intellectuals”, but it was also central to the interpretation of cultures and personalities by the homonymous school of anthropology in the US in the 1930s and 1940s – of which Mead, Benedict, Linton and Herskovits were the most prominent characters. The polarity also fit the Brazilian interpretations by Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Arthur Ramos and Édison Carneiro, and would later inspire foreigners (Bastide and Verger) and the first generation of Brazilian anthropologists with US training (Galvão, Da Costa Eduardo, Ribeiro and Coelho).55 Emphasizing such a polarity was also useful to the internal power dynamics of the Candomblé community in Bahia and Northeast Brazil in general (Gois Dantas 1988).
4 Comparing Details
Not only did the four scholars have different emphases (structure for Frazier, language for Turner, and culture for the Herskovitses) but, as said before, they also had different networks. Turner and Frazier got in touch with many of the same key informants who would be helpful also to the Herskovitses a year later. Even though they mostly researched the same neighbourhood – around the Gantois house, with some incursions into other Candomblé houses and their immediate surroundings, in the neighbourhoods of Engenho Velho and São
Frazier’s style as an academic-political project can be discerned through his fieldwork notes. For defining characters, positions and manners of the Candomblé religion, he used native terms, such as casa (house), seita (sect) and zelador (caretaker) to refer to the temple, the religion and the priest and priestess. He seemed to bestow relatively little importance on Africanisms and sometimes downplayed African memories outright. In his interviews, he asked people what they knew of Africa, their African words, and whether their origin was African. His comments consistently suggested that daily actions, survival strategies and family arrangements were informed by present circumstances much more than by any African past. All of Frazier’s fieldnotes and interview transcriptions contain the name and primary data of the informant. He also took pictures of all the informants, even the simple people of the povo de santo, the followers of the Gantois Candomblé house. Every photo is numbered and has the name of the person portrayed written on the back and a number on the front to help identify the informant. This is the method he had used in his research on the black family and church in the United States (Sansone 2011).
Keeping details about the interviews, such as the name of the informant and the interview date, is evidence that Frazier meant this short but intensive pilot study to be continued and expanded. It is as though he had plans to get back to the same informants.
The Herskovitses’ style and project speak just as well through their fieldnotes and music recordings, which are catalogued according to themes. All the fieldnotes were also coded according to themes. The record of one interview was divided up into several themes. It must have been a tough job for Frances to retype the whole set, dividing it up into specific themes! The names of informants are scarcely mentioned, except when it concerns important characters of the Candomblé religion. Unlike Turner, who in his music recordings always indicated the name of the author or musician, the Herskovitses’ music recordings, which were later published in a compilation by the Folkways series of the Smithsonian, never mentioned the name of the musician but just to which orixá a particular drumbeat was dedicated, for example.
Like Turner, Herskovits submitted to his informants lists of words in African languages, especially relating to the religion he had researched while doing fieldwork in Dahomey (presently Benin) and writing the two homonymous volumes (Herskovits 1938a). In these lists,56 Herskovits gives several terms in
Turner and Frazier also interviewed some key people of the well-known black families who had relatives in Nigeria or Dahomey. Especially important was the Alakija family. Turner gained the trust of these families and one can imagine that it is because of this that he was able to obtain from his middle- and upper-class informants’ copies and originals of a passport for Bahia blacks returning to Africa and pictures of these families in Bahia and Lagos.57
A few years later, the black elite would become one of the key topics of research carried out by Bahia anthropologist Thales de Azevedo (1996 [1953]). The project was sponsored by the State of Bahia, Columbia University and UNESCO (see Chapter 3). My impression is that De Azevedo relied mainly on the black families who had been contacted by Pierson (and possibly Landes) and were later photographed and interviewed by Turner and Frazier. Whereas Turner and Frazier identified their contacts in their fieldnotes, interviews and photo captions, neither Pierson nor De Azevedo, who published books containing several pictures of black middle-class people, mentioned their names, but made do with captions like “Outstanding Bahian gentleman, a descendant of Africans” (Pierson 1971:243) or “Intelligent and sympathetic cult priestess, the old leader of one of the most prestigious Candomblé in Bahia” (Pierson 1971:317).
Herskovits focused his research on the priestesses (mães de santo), their immediate followers (daughters of the house and religious assistants), and the male character of the ogans (protectors of the house). In this he was very much in line with Ramos and Carneiro, who studied religion whereas Turner and Frazier concentrated on the community around the Candomblé house (Sansone 2011).
The Herskovitses kept an excellent weekly, sometimes daily, account of their expenses, from the moment they left Evanston to the moment they returned there.58 It was all very carefully noted in the large balance sheets of the Brazil Field-Trip 1941–42 Expenses Account (see Appendix 1).59 The expenses were listed in six columns: Travel Expenses (boat, train, plane, taxi and hired car); Equipment Replacement (books, films, mail); Informants; Translation, etc.; Living expenses in the field; and Miscellaneous. Most of the expenditure was
Living expenses was the largest category. It incorporated clothes (the couple purchased an entirely new wardrobe), medical expenses, hotels and rent, laundry, excursions and local transportation to all events (ceremonies, meetings, processions, or feasts such as Bonfim and Conceição da Praia). The Travel column records that, in Salvador, they spent quite a lot to hire a car for the whole period with a driver, Raimundo, who also seemed to be an informant. They also paid 500,000 milreis for his alvara (driver’s licence). The car hire would cost more than their accommodation at the Edith Schmalz Guesthouse.
In the Informants column, there is a substantial amount paid to Mrs Cabral in the US, for Portuguese lessons and translations. Then there are small amounts paid out in Rio, for a present to a mãe de santo (50 US cents), for buying traditional medicine from the Penha Church (USD 1.75) and USD 4.5 to a certain Helena Oliveira. In Recife and Porto Alegre, they spent very little on informants. Most of the money was paid in Salvador, where the Herskovitses paid Manoel and Zezé weekly for their information, hired Zezé as a babysitter, paid the singers and drummers of their recordings, regularly made gifts to several Candomblé priests and priestesses, and paid relatively high amounts twice for the “terramento” of their saints.60
Under Miscellaneous is listed a relatively high amount for school fees, for the American School in Rio, which Jean attended during the first two months of their stay. They also paid for having their future told and their orixá revealed, bought beads and shells (buzios), had orixá dresses made for them (later to be shipped to Northwestern University), paid for typing and assistance by the personnel at the Museu do Estado where they made their recordings, and even “lent” money to one or two people who were not to pay it back. They entered that spiralling mechanism of unequal and unbalanced exchange in joining Candomblé that is quite typical for outsiders, particularly those of a higher class, who tend to be regarded as a financial resource for the cult-house.61 The Herskovitses were captivated by Candomblé and the charisma of a few of its spiritual leaders. They showed respect (the attitude required to gain access to the proper care of a Candomblé priest or priestess, which included waiting, listening carefully and accepting menial tasks, such as cleaning toilets and
One wonders whether they received anything that could be called “objective” information in return. Or whether, instead, they were given the kind of information the informants thought they wanted, answering questions in a manner that they knew would have left the Herskovitses satisfied. Similarly, they may have been provided with the kind of inside information that the priest or priestess merely thought convenient to give. In many ways, what took place was something reminiscent of Marcel Griaule’s (1948) encounter just a few years earlier with the old sage Ogotemmeli, in his pioneering study of the Dogon religion in Mali: the sage tended to please the curiosity of the interviewer.
According to the final accounts, informants received very little, only 5.5% of the total budget. But the distribution of money, however tiny by Western standards, is revealing of the kind of relationship the Herskovitses established in the field, especially with the Candomblé community and some of its most prominent voices and authorities. Moreover, in a situation of relative or sometimes absolute poverty, such payments often meant much more to the receivers than one can imagine. Handing out money, in some cases through regular weekly payments such as to Manoel, or being able to hire Zezé, a mãe de santo, as a housemaid (actually a babysitter, a babá) for several months, indeed established a certain relationship of power as well as the commercialization of the information gathered. The book, The Root of Roots, by Richard and Sally Price, deals with the Herskovitses’ work in Suriname in the year just before their trip to Brazil. Paying for information and keeping a detailed list of all payments (in this case from the moment they left New York to the moment they came back) was not an uncommon practice in their fieldwork. Turner, too, set aside part of his budget to pay his informants – something not unusual among linguists – whereas, as far as I know, Frazier spent no money on his interviewees.
There were a few other differences regarding the relationship of these scholars with their informants and the research subjects. In Frazier’s and Turner’s papers, there is no trace of any correspondence related to Brazil after their fieldwork in that country.62 The Herskovitses stayed in contact with some of their key informants in Bahia. The MJH papers at the Schomburg contain some letters by Candomblé priestesses asking for financial donations to their houses of worship.
My impression is that Turner and Frazier were well accepted by their informants for different reasons than the Herskovitses were: apart from being competent scholars, and American, they were black and showed an interest in Brazilian blacks. Another difference was that Turner and Frazier, though quite interested and respectful of the hierarchy, discipline and mission of the Gantois, and Candomblé in general, never took the formal position
Last but not least, the scholars differed in how they photographed their subjects. In the composition of his photographs, Herskovits is never portrayed next to his informants. When there is a portrait of him in Bahia, he is next to his family, fellow anthropologists, or José Valladares – his main contact person. Herskovits, moreover, took many more photographs of objects, such as offerings to the gods, magic trees, sculptures of orixás, and musical instruments. He photographed very few people other than those within the Candomblé community, unless they were large groups at feasts and popular events.
Frazier was twice portrayed next to his informants, even holding a small child’s hand. Turner took photos of ordinary Afro-Brazilians, besides his informants. He attached a short description to each picture, often referring to whether the subject spoke Yoruba or another African language.
All of Turner’s recordings and many of the photos he took also have names and descriptions, which allow the informants to be recognized. In this, his fieldwork style resembled Frazier’s. Turner and Frazier were undoubtedly interested in social and cultural phenomena but were inclined to name and humanize their informants more than the Herskovitses. They saw the people who were part of and behind these phenomena. Moreover, it is evident that in those days the photos they took were possibly the first and only portraits that these often-destitute people had of themselves. It helps explain why all the informants appear dressed up in the photos taken by Frazier and Turner in Bahia.63
Musicians at the Nosso Senhor do Bonfim feast, January 15, 1942
January 1, 1942: The crowd gathering in the harbour in front of Mercado Modelo (Cidade Baixa) for the Bom Jesus dos Navegantes procession and street feast
Frazier with children from the Gantois neighbourhood
A Candomblé drum band, with a famous drum (atabaque). Frazier’s driver is the white man with a bow tie
Turner made recordings as linguists do – of songs, music, proverbs, modes of speech, pronunciation and interviews (see Appendix 4). He had modern recording equipment and the sound quality was excellent for the time. However, Turner did not have the social connections the Herskovitses had to publish his recordings, as they did with the Folkways at the LOC. He did not even try to make them public because he saw them as research documents. Turner’s recordings were forgotten after his death, until 2007, when his biography by the late Margaret Wade-Lewis was published. Then, in 2011, Alcione Amos organized a symposium dedicated to Turner for the Anacostia Museum. That symposium resulted in a special issue of the journal The Black Scholar, “The living legacy of Lorenzo Dow Turner: The first African-American linguist”, and in the travelling exhibition, “Gullah, Bahia, Africa”, organized by the Anacostia Museum in cooperation with the Pedro Calmon Foundation of the State of Bahia in 2016.
The Herskovitses recordings have a somewhat different history. They were made as part of the programme of the Archive of Folk Song, Music Division, Library of Congress (LOC):
The Folklore Foundation of the Library of Congress will make records of half a dozen of the best recordings. Following the custom, there will be
an added honorarium for the singers whose records are used, and I shall be writing to you soon to ask you to see that this money is distributed. I am sure it will not be unwelcome. I am, incidentally, carefully seeing to it that the names of the singers will not go on the records.64
Young group in the carnival of 1941, Bahia
Why was it that the names should be left out? Was it for royalty reasons, or because the oeuvre should be a collective one, focused on the music genre rather than the musicians?65 As indicated in the final report to the RF, the Herskovitses’ recordings were done in the Museu da Bahia, which was kindly made available for such purpose by its director, José Valladares. The Herskovitses would use these recordings in their future research. For instance, they took them on their trip to Africa in 1953:
We took along some of our Brazilian recordings to play in West Africa, in the Congo and Angola, and everywhere they created quite a sensation. It was fascinating in the Congo and Angola, where we played songs to deities, all of whom were recognized by Africans. There is certainly a magnificent field for work here. Why don’t you get yourself a grant and go to Angola?66
Woman dressed as Iyansã. Turner wrote: “Wife of Sangô, the Yoruba god of thunder - Bahia, Brazil.”
It must be noted that the recordings were done mostly in Ketu houses, which would have been quite different from the sounds familiar to people in the Congo and Angola houses. Franklin Frazier’s interesting pictures just sat in his archive after 1941. Until the moment of my research nobody had seemingly shown any interest in them.
5 Publications
None of our scholars produced the book on their research in Brazil that they were supposed to publish. However, each of them published several articles on Brazil that are worth scrutinizing: Frazier published six articles or chapters, Turner five and Herskovits ten. Herskovits published an article on the social structure of Candomblé, one on drumming in Candomblé, and one on the southernmost outpost of Africanism in Porto Alegre – the result of a “pesquisa relampago” (quick research). However, most articles or book chapters by the scholars celebrated the supposed relative tolerance of Brazilians, in most cases resulting from their engagement with the GNP as part of the war effort. In analyzing Frazier’s writing on Brazil, David Hellwig (1991) concluded that Frazier’s research was, in fact, a bit superficial. As shown below, I tend to disagree.
5.1 The Roots of the Black Family
Of all the articles and chapters on black culture and race relations in Brazil mentioned above, those with the greatest impact, in my opinion, were those of Frazier and Herskovits in the American Journal of Sociology and Turner’s text on Bahian-Nigerian family connections.
The contention about the structure and origin of the family arrangement, usually defined as “black family”, resulted from diverging interpretations of family life in the neighbourhood of Federação, and, more specifically, the surrounding community of the Gantois. Gantois is one of the five leading
Herskovits’ paper contained the essence of what would be teased out in articles published later. He praised Bahia in many ways, for being the ideal location for an institution of higher education, for its “natural cordial spirit” and for the wealth of ethnographic material it offered – especially in terms of cultural survivals from different regions in Africa. He and Frances were convinced that they had just studied only a small part of the themes and aspects that could be drawn from such a wealth of data. In many ways, Bahia was the ideal location for the study of acculturation, a topic Herskovits developed internationally together with Ralph Linton (see their statement on acculturation, 1938):
Here one finds one of the largest concentrations of descendants of Africans in the New World. Moreover, on account of the traditional tolerance with which in Brazil all forms of life were and still are considered, many African institutions and customs are preserved. The contact between Bahia and West Africa, on the other hand, has been more steady and has lasted longer than in any other part of the New World (…) Less known is the preservation of traditional African craftsmanship in woodcarving and iron mongering.
Herskovits 1938: 92
To discover the origin of African slaves in the US, we have to go through painstaking research. In Brazil, this is self-evident.68 Herskovits suggested a comparative ethnology method that draws connections across different locations in Africa and the New World based on the names of people, objects, animals, places and phenomena (1938:99). In Bahia, Africanisms, wrote Herskovits, could be found in several aspects of life. Still, arguably, the main four were as follows. 1) Cooperation in the marketplace and the world of work, such as the preparation of food to be sold, the collaboration among fishermen and the function of cantos (groups of African-born men, or their descendants, who met in a particular space and who were organized based on a specific skill – such as porters or plumbers – and/or provenance from a specific African
The descendants of Africans in Bahia were much more interested in talking about theology and liturgy than any other aspect of life. For this reason, Herskovits argued, it occupied them a great deal. The Candomblé cult made sense of life. It provided individuals with the feeling that they had deep roots, offered positions based on prestige, and satisfied the need for social and spiritual order. Obedience to norms was an African characteristic, said Herskovits. In the Candomblé house, newcomers knew their place: they did not speak or stand; they bowed their head and kissed the hand of those in a superior position. In closing, Herskovits argued against considering possession as psychopathology – even though he understood that this view had its roots in the medical background of the first researchers of Afro-Brazilian cults in Brazil (1943c: 102).
Frazier also published an article in 1942, in the American Sociological Review, which was much richer ethnographically than would have been expected from a sociologist. His argument was based on information from fifty-five informants, interviewed two to three times, always in Portuguese. Forty of them represented families, primarily women, who lived around the Candomblé house. Fifteen people from different backgrounds, mostly from the middle and upper classes, were interviewed in other neighbourhoods as a control group. He started the article with the statement: “The designation ‘Negro family’ has certain connotations for Americans, misleading regarding race relations in Brazil” (Frazier 1942:463). Subsequently, Frazier positioned himself on African survivals in a way that many of his later critics would not have expected, showing that he was neither blind to nor uninterested in what Herskovits defined as Africanisms. Frazier claimed that, “unlike in the US, Negro slaves were able to re-establish their traditional social organization and religious practices in Brazil. (…) many elements of African culture survived especially spiritual practices that are perpetuated in the Candomblé” (1942:466). He was convinced that the high degree of miscegenation in Brazil had its leading cause in the absence of race prejudice, which was why it was not common in the US (1942:467). Miscegenation, he argued, led to a weak racial consciousness: none of the people he interviewed regarded themselves as Negros, but simply as Brazilians … they used the term “black” to identify themselves concerning colour but not as race (1942:469). Information about their ancestry was limited – I would say that this is still something that any researcher doing fieldwork
Frazier described the community around the Gantois house as very close-knit, and the mãe de santo [Mãe Menininha] as the head of the community. African patterns of family life had disintegrated or become lost and family life now resembled a conventional Catholic one for the lower classes. Living “maritalmente” enjoyed a status similar to an actual marriage and these relationships could be pretty stable and long-lasting: “We find no consistent cultural pattern but rather accommodation to Brazilian conditions … the family arrangements appear to be similar to Negro folk in the southern part of the US” (1942: 475).
Frazier quoted Robert Redfield’s folk-urban continuum (1940) as a source of inspiration: the interviewed families exhibited the same characteristics as folk and peasant societies in other parts of the world (1942:476), where the family developed as a natural organization, with some families incorporating adopted orphans or abandoned children. Frazier saw his research as a pilot study that needed further testing if only because he was working in a virgin field, “since investigators interested themselves in African survivals in Brazil have been concerned with studying religious practices and beliefs, music, dances and folklore” (1942:470).69
Still, he ended with a firm, perhaps a sweeping, conclusion:
Among the poorer classes clustered about the Candomblés, the family, often based on common-law relationships, tends to assume the character of a natural organization. Whatever has been preserved of African culture in the Candomblé has become part of the folklore of the people, and, so far as family relationships are concerned, there are no rigid, consistent patterns of behaviour that can be traced to African culture. As Brazil becomes urbanized and industrialized and the mobility of the folk increases, the blacks will continue to merge with the general population.
Frazier 1942:478
Frazier’s ambition was to detect similar family patterns in the black population across different locations in the New World. Such populations belonged, by
Herskovits (1943d) was quick to react in the same American Sociological Review. His main arguments rested on what then was his more recent book, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). The African past mattered much more than was commonly held by scholars of the Negro. He accused Frazier of bringing the techniques of North American scholars to the study of his problem. “In doing so, however, he imported the methodological blind-spot that marks Negro research in this country. No reference to any work describing African cultures is made in his paper and only oblique references to the forms of African social structure are encountered” (1943d:395). Mel then sketched what he considered the West African family pattern to be and suggested that the Bahia case should be studied in that light. Herskovits resented what he felt was a picture of almost complete disorganization of the Afro-Bahian family. He argued that “what we seek are Africanisms, without reference to their degree of purity; that we are concerned with accommodation to a new setting; that our aim is neither prescription nor prediction, but the understanding of process under acculturation” (1943d:397). According to Herskovits, darker parents exerted even more surveillance on their daughters; however, “survivals of African family types in institutionalized form cannot be discerned” (1943d:399).
Africanisms in the Afro-Bahian family could be detected in the survival of essential points of West African social structure: tolerance and proximity of a father to the offspring of former unions and even with his ex-partner, patterns of polygyny, sexual independence of women, and the relations between mother and children. The amaziado relationship that Mel’s student, René Ribeiro, would later research for his MA in anthropology (Ribeiro 1949) could also be interpreted as an aspect of Africanism: “African patterns of polygyny have by no means disappeared. Plural marriage is not called as such … The amazia mating provides the mechanisms which permit the traditions to remain a living one” (1943d:399). Mel also held that the interview technique used by Frazier was inadequate for his research and went on to give a different reading of the data presented by Frazier in his article. Herskovits came to an entirely different interpretation: the informant was not disengaged from African traditions and gave a list of over 100 words and phrases in the Yoruba tongue. Plus, on hearing them he recognized dozens of African songs (1943d:401). In conclusion:
We are dealing with an acculturation situation, and the past of Afro-Bahian being what it is, greater variation in any phase of custom is to be looked for than in the indigenous cultures either in of Africa or Europe. But in studying this situation, it must never be forgotten that variation
Herskovits 1943d: 402does not mean demoralization, and that accommodation, institutional no less than psychological, is not prevented by the fact of cultural syncretization.
In his rejoinder, Frazier (1943) almost seemed offended by Herskovits. After all, in his article he had not expressed himself negatively about the notion of the family as a natural organization, nor had he ever used the expression “demoralization”:
This rejoinder to Professor Herskovits’ criticism of my article is written simply because the facts which I gathered in Brazil do not support his conclusions. It is not written because, as he stated in his The Myth of the Negro Past (p.31), I belong among those Negroes who “accept as a compliment the theory of a complete break with Africa”. It is a matter of indifference to me personally whether there are African survivals in the United States or Brazil. Therefore, if there was a methodological blind spot imported from the United States, it was due to my ignorance of African culture or my lack of skill in observing it. However, it should be pointed out that (…) Professor Herskovits was interested in discovering Africanisms and that I was only interested in African survivals so far as they affected the organization and adjustment of the Negro family to the Brazilian environment.
Frazier 1943:402
Obviously, Frazier resented the way Herskovits had used his knowledge of Africa to support his argument and somewhat disqualify Frazier’s, and added that he “found no evidence that their behaviour [of the families he interviewed] was due to African customs. White men and women of the lower class form the same type of unions. … The amount of surveillance is a matter of class” (Frazier 1943:403–404).
Moreover, Frazier argued that amaziado is a much more casual union than viver maritalmente – and, in correcting this, he entered into an argument, started by Herskovits, over the accurate use and knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese and its grammar. In analyzing the case of Martiniano do Bonfim, of whom Herskovits knew but had not interviewed, Frazier agreed that he had been raised according to African customs but that once Martiniano had settled in Brazil for the second time, he behaved according to Brazilian standards in terms of sexual unions and family life. Frazier added that his data had been checked with the findings of Dr Ruth Landes, “who spent over a year
The exchange between Frazier and Herskovits on the causes and origin of black family arrangements, based on the interpretation of field data gathered from the same cohort of people, became international and determined the discourse on the black family until at least the 1970s. I had become acquainted with this debate during the research for my PhD in the 1980s, which dealt with the black family in the Caribbean and in communities of Caribbean origin in Europe. In those years, every discussion on matrifocal family arrangements was based on a polarized opinion of its causes – whether poverty and durable inequalities or African survival – started by Frazier and Herskovits (MacDonald and MacDonald 1978). Yet, this debate and the academic papers that fuelled it had minimal impact in Brazil. Melville’s papers were published and republished, but by the 1990s were almost forgotten. Frazier’s were simply unknown in Brazil – at least until I took a photocopy of his article to my department and started using it in my classes. That was 1990.
5.2 The Herskovitses’ Publications
At the same time that the debate was raging, the Herskovitses together published an article in the prestigious Yale Review, the oldest literary journal in the US, written in a different, less academic and more journalistic style. It described in detail a feast in one of the more “orthodox” Candomblé houses (see Herskovits 1943, especially, pages 275–7). If I may say, I identified entirely with the description: it reflects what I have experienced often and shows that they had started a research tradition in Candomblé, which is called “researching from within the house”. They emphasized the brilliance of the colours used and that, in Bahia, Africa was no mythical land as referred to in Haiti or Guyana but a living reality (1943:266). Surprisingly, they argued that nothing distinguished Brazilian blacks in their speech – there was no form of “black Portuguese” spoken (1943:268). However, Africanisms can be found in the Portuguese that all Brazilians speak today, regardless of colour. The Herskovitses concluded by writing that Candomblé, “… of fascinating psychological implication … may be regarded as a supreme expression of that adjustment to
Their four-day research visit to Porto Alegre allowed Herskovits to gather enough material to produce an article in the prestigious journal, American Anthropologist (1943b). That this journal was open to publishing a report based on just four days’ research, a pilot study, testified to the high reputation Herskovits held in US anthropology. A lesser-known researcher would not have been given such an opportunity. It is worth stressing, anyhow, that the article left its mark in paving the way for the development of Afro-American studies in Southern Brazil and the Rio de la Plata region. Herskovits noted that in 1941 Porto Alegre had forty-one registered “Centers of African Religion”, none of them Caboclo. Certain songs he heard there were strikingly similar to the ones he had heard in Dahomey. Cult-houses named after Catholic saints (such as the Santa Barbara Society), were much smaller than in Bahia or Pernambuco, and their shrines were less elaborate. In addition to their public name, the houses also had an African name. The initiation process was shorter and the head of the initiated was not entirely shaven. The paper comes to a close with a familiar message in Herskovits’ writing: “The data from Porto Alegre teach how tenacious African custom can be under contact … Yet African culture, it must be repeated – perhaps all culture – does not give ground as readily as has been supposed” (1943b:215).
In 1944, Herskovits published an article on drumming, in the journal Music Quarterly. Titled “Drums and drummers in Afrobrazilian cult life”, it was the first detailed description of both the instruments and the players:
At the drums, his manners radiate confidence, in himself and the power of his instruments. Relaxed, the drum between his legs, he allows the complete rhythms to flow from his sure, agile fingers. It is he who brings on possession through his manipulation of these rhythmic intricacies, yet he never becomes possessed (…) though he often seems on the verge of possession. As the music becomes “hotter”, he bends to his instrument and the chorus’s swelling volume, and the dancers’ movements, respond to the deep notes of the large drum, whose voice commands the god themselves. Spectators may give their attention to the dancers and listen to the singing; yet the drummer knows that, without him, the gods would not come, and worship could not go on.
Herskovits 1944a:188–85
Herskovits detailed the position of the drummers in the Candomblé ceremony, how the dancers always faced the drummers, and how all the participants
Herskovits also wrote the brochure that accompanied the record, Afro-Bahian Cult Songs (1947), edited by the LOC. It starts with a staunch statement: “The music of the Negro cult groups of Bahia follows the fundamental pattern of West African and New World Negro music everywhere.” It adds that nowhere in the New World where African music has been retained does it have as rich a presence as in the Northeast of Brazil. Such music has a pattern and:
The melodic phrases are usually short. The music is to be thought of as polyrhythmic rather than polyphonic. Percussions take on such importance that the singing is to be thought of as an accompaniment to the drumming than the contrary, which is taken for granted by listeners trained to hear Euramerican music. Drums and iron gongs play the rhythm for the West African and Congo-Angola rites, while Caboclo groups employ the large calabash and the rattle.
Herskovits 1947:1
The brochure was written for laypeople and shows Herskovits’ real enthusiasm for the quality of the music and the beauty of the dance and ritual dresses of the orixás. He stressed the beauty and purity of the African music played in Bahia, such as the Jejé music for the orixá Gbesen, which is in the best Dahomeyan style. It was so superbly rendered that it would call forth admiration in Dahomey itself (1947:3). Congo-Angola music, in contrast, is “jazzy”, and one can see why it is the regional influence that most inspired Negro music in the New World (1947:4). Between the lines, the text suggests that in 1941–42 the Candomblé world was quite dynamic and creative, despite claims by most “orthodox” houses in favour of African purity and their general disdain for houses that were seen as less authentic (such as Angola and Caboclo). The text
“Rum, Rumpi and Le”: the Candomblé drum set. The drums were often dated and given special names
A later article by Herskovits, “The Panan, an Afrobahiana religious rite of transition” (1953), starts with the statement that the Jeje (then only a minority) were the most orthodox of all Candomblé houses. At the moment of writing this book, the Ketu houses represented the great majority of the orthodox houses. The Congo-Angola groups, said Herskovits, were linked to the less “orthodox” Caboclo cults,
… wherein Indian and Portuguese names of deities abound, initiatory periods are truncated to a few days or more weeks, and wherein the most
Herskovits 1953:219diverse African and non-African innovations are present. Finally, the continuum moves to the “Spiritualist” groups and to full-blown European beliefs and practices, which are syncretized into even the most “orthodox” aggregates.
It is this continuum, from pure to less pure (or outright impure) rites, which had already been established by Nina Rodrigues and his followers, that Herskovits would reestablish and incorporate into his writing and communicate to his international network.
Later, the paper moved on to a detailed description of the panan, “a series of major rituals, each of which symbolically reproduces some act which the emergent initiate will perform in daily life” (1953:219), such as cooking, getting married, having sexual intercourse and bearing a child. In a way, the panan was the ritualized performance of scenes and moments of daily life. It was a quiet, almost intimate rite, performed for a relatively small group of onlookers (usually no more than two dozen people) consisting of the relatives of the initiate and the inner circle of the house.
In 1954 MJH wrote his most complete paper on Candomblé for reading at the Congress of Americanists in São Paulo. It would be published in Phylon in 1956. The text was a synthesis of his and Frances’ research in 1941–42 with some additions from later research carried out by Herskovits’ PhD students, Da Costa Eduardo (1948), Ribeiro (1952) and Bastide (1948), and the UNESCO-Columbia project in Bahia (Wagley, De Azevedo and Costa Pinto 1952). The article stated that there was no part of the New World where research into Afroamerican culture had been carried out with greater intensity or more continuity than in Brazil. Religion was the focal aspect of these cultures, and it was thus scientifically valid to focus on this aspect (Herskovits 1954:148). However, the holistic approach to culture made it imperative to focus on the Afro-Brazilian subculture’s social structure and economic base. For this reason, what should be analyzed was the proportion of the membership that lived within one or two kilometres from the cult-house, or the extent to which that house was also the focus of the social community around it. These were topics that Édison Carneiro (1948), Nunes Pereira (1947), René Ribeiro (1952) and Da Costa Eduardo (1948) had started to research, but for which they now needed more detailed data.
The text then described the hierarchy of the house, with the babalorixá (priest) or ialorixá (priestess) at the head, below whom were the initiates, among whom women were the overwhelming majority. Herskovits argued that such female predominance reached back to African custom (Herskovits
The initiation could be sponsored by ajibona, a person from the cult-house or even another house, who would maintain a relationship with the initiated person for many years, as a saint godfather or godmother. The initiation could be done for a group of novices, called barco (boat), who established an in-group brotherhood\sisterhood. Cult-houses developed complex relationships with one another, ranging from respect and alliance to disdain and animosity. As Herskovits said, in Candomblé, there are lines within lines; one needs time and patience to learn how to behave according to the proper lines and rules. He summed up the core of his approach as follows: “To understand the nature of Candomblé as a cohesive social entity, we must look in two directions. We must consider now how it is set among the other elements of the society of which it is a part, and also indicate those mechanisms of interpersonal relations that are operative inside it” (1954:161). Candomblé can be so powerful that its influence reaches beyond the Afro-Brazilian circles. Participating in it is not only related to the power of the spiritual sanction but has important psychological consequences:
The aesthetic and emotional satisfaction afforded by cult rites also enter, in terms of the release from tensions they provide, and the excitement and dramatic suspense that attends them … the expansion of the ego-structure that results from identification with the achievements of the Candomblé must not be overlooked. (1954:165)
In closing, Herskovits reiterated his central tenet: “Adequate analysis of Afroamerican culture cannot be attained without due regard for the role of the traditional African component in setting its present configurations” (1954:166).
Must be thought of not only as a socially integrated unit, organized for the worship of the forces that rule the Universe but in economic terms as an institution which functions pragmatically to protect the best interest of its members and affiliates, with its activities comprising a significant sector of the total economy of the community.
Herskovits 1958:254
He then described the importance of magic protection for the women who sold food in the street, who in those days were almost all initiated in Candomblé. Selling in the street, where there were so many competitors and and so much jealousy, one needed the protection of gods. There was also a detailed description of the type of goods sold for every specific ritual and function, with prices (1958: 256–259).
Nothing is for free in Candomblé, goes a famous and popular proverb. Initiation went together with lists of goods that needed to be bought. The man who was confirmed as an ogan covered the high costs of initiation, a prelude to the stream of contributions he would be called on to make as time passed (1958:259). There was a whole section of the marketplace that catered for these offerings:70 two-legged and four-legged animals of different colours for ritual sacrifice, palm oil, cowrie/shells, necklaces, beads, cola nuts, pano da costa and several other products from West Africa, images of saints in clay and wood, and Exu made from iron.
In closing, Herskovits said that although such an economy also existed around religious rituals in West Africa, the pecuniary evaluations had become more pronounced in Brazil due to the “Euroamerican orientations towards the role of economic resources in ordering social position” (1958:264). The power of the house and the zelador, therefore, also dwelt in their economic power and in their ability to gather resources that were publicly displayed, sometimes in ostentatious fashion, during rituals: “The economic theory of the Candomblé
5.3 Frazier’s Publications
Franklin Frazier’s publications about Brazil are in a very different style. His article in the prestigious journal Phylon (1942b), which Du Bois had set up in 1940, shows two important things. Frazier was abreast of the most recent literature on race relations in Brazil and used his trip to Brazil to socialize with and interview black political leaders, especially in São Paulo, where he presumably fraternized with the Frente Negra Brasileira activists. In the first part of this article, Frazier emphasized the relevance of black people and their cultural heritage in the civilization of Brazil. He used citations from Freyre and Ramos abundantly, as well as those of Manuel Querino (1938). He also argued that “Unlike the slaves
After emancipation, Frazier continued, the pure-blooded Negroes became more mobile and lost much of their African culture. In the absence of race prejudice, such as existed in the United States, the increasing mobility of the Negroes accelerated the mixture of the races (1942b:291). Then he adds a fascinating statement: “It is exceedingly difficult to discuss and make intelligible to Americans race relations, involving white and Negroes, in Brazil” (1942b:290). There was, he argued, a certain amount of colour prejudice in Brazil since social distance based on colour was maintained by a subtle system of etiquette, but skin colour did not determine one’s place in the social organization (1942b:291). Bahia, in many ways, stated Frazier, was comparable to Charleston and New Orleans in the 1890s: there was a large mulatto community. In the labouring masses, race mixture took place on a large scale. However, there were signs of discrimination among the elites, with no black people attending the tennis club, the yacht club or the larger more international hotels. The fact that the Americans and British often did not like to see blacks in such places influenced the attitude of white Brazilians towards blacks.
In making such considerations, Frazier drew heavily on Donald Pierson’s thesis – which had been supported by Robert Park, possibly the most important of Frazier’s mentors. Towards the end of the article, Frazier reported on his meetings with some leaders among the blacks. These were (ex)members of the Frente Negra Brasileira, the most important political black movement that was active in the early 1930s, as well as associates of other black (cultural) associations in Rio and São Paulo:
The organizations in the south are sharply differentiated from those in the north. In the south (where they suffer from the economic competition of the European immigrants, especially the Italians), they are fighting discrimination and are seeking to integrate themselves into the social and economic organizations. On the other hand, in the north, they have cooperated with whites in studying the cultural contribution of the Negro and have fought for religious liberty for Negro cults, as well as the improvement of the social condition of blacks. It appears that the Negro organizations in Brazil lack the drive and motivation of similar organizations in the United States. This is doubtless since racial discrimination is not as strong even in southern Brazil as in the United States.
Frazier 1942b:294
In fact, the Negro has never been taken seriously or treated as a mature, intelligent human being … Since most Negro leaders have been forced to make their living behind the walls of segregation, the threat of starvation has been enough to bring submission (…) A character only develops when men are accustomed to responsibilities and Negroes have never been required or permitted to acquire serious responsibilities (…) The whole system of race relations in America has tended to rob the mass of Negros of a sense of personal worth and dignity and to rob their leaders of character (…) As if to compensate for the denial of freedom and justice, America has, through its philanthropies, spent millions of dollars in uplifting the Negro. But this has failed to solve the fundamental problem of integrating the Negro into American economic and social life (…) Whereas in Brazil, black, brown and white people know each other as individual human beings, in the United States they only know the Negro as a symbol or stereotype (…) All this points to one conclusion: caste and democracy cannot exist in the same society without perpetual conflict.
Frazier 1942a:125–128
Frazier went on to argue that it was only through struggle and by making use of moments of crisis, such as during WWII, that the Negro would be able to become emancipated.
Our attitude to the question of race is due to our provincial outlook. Our provincialism regarding race relations may be broken down as we are forced to treat the colored people of Asia and become more closely tied to Latin America. On the other hand, it is conceivable that we may attempt to impose our attitudes upon these people. If the latter happens, we shall not be able to assume moral leadership in the post-war world and will alienate the countries of Latin America. While we may provide Brazil with technical skills and capital, Brazil has something to teach us with regard to race relations.
Frazier 1942a:129
In 1944 Frazier published his last article entirely dedicated to Brazil and it is mainly along the same lines as the one in Phylon. He argued that in Brazil no violent civil war accompanied the abolition of slavery, as in the United States. There was no sharp boundary of territory between the free and enslaved person, nor was there a well-defined conflict between an agrarian and an industrial economy (Frazier 1944:87). Moreover, the dependence of the Portuguese upon the labour of the Negro was greater and many of the slaves were better skilled and more literate than the Portuguese (1944:91). In Brazil, the lower status of women compared to the US South, and the less puritanical habits, created fewer obstacles to concubinage, and children born out of wedlock were more often recognized as legal descendants. It led to a situation in which the entire structure of Brazilian society, both from a racial and an economic standpoint, was to preclude the possibility of a biracial framework. In turn, and as an indirect reference to Herskovits’ focus on Africanisms, Frazier stated that African culture had survived much more among the enslaved Brazilians where it was not necessary to engage in speculation concerning African survivals (1944:94). African influences were apparent in the language, diet and music of Brazilians.
These influences were regarded not as quaint or exotic outgrowths but as an integral part of the culture of Brazilian society (1944:96). Frazier quoted Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, Édison Carneiro and Arthur Ramos to support his statement. He then commented72 on the trajectories of the writer Machado de Assis and the chief engineer of the empire of Brazil, André Rebouças. Both were mulattos who, rather than being what Robert Park would have called “marginal men” or living in a segregated coloured community, were not considered a “Negro writer” or a “Negro engineer”. Instead, they were deemed to be Brazilian specialists in their fields (1944:98): “This is quite different from the situation in the United States, where there are Negro writers, journalists and even biologists and chemists and a different standard for evaluating their achievement” (Ibid.). In drawing such a conclusion, it was evident that Frazier was expressing his dissatisfaction with the pigeonholing of the black intellectual in the US – a topic of many of his essays and, more forcefully, in his last essay, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual” (1968). To him, Brazil’s system of race relations seemed to offer hope for a better future, as it did for the US,
I have detected only one article written by Frazier regarding his five-month stay and research in Haiti and Jamaica on the way back to the US from his fieldwork in Bahia. It is a short overview of race relations in the Caribbean, which mixes secondary sources and first-hand impressions. As much of his writing on Brazil was, it was part of a general plan to, so to speak, provincialize race relations in the US by showing the uniqueness of its polarization and violence. Rather than being the norm, as many US observers liked to think, such a sharp division between non-whites and whites was unique to the US, he wrote. The text “Race Relations in the Caribbean” is the third chapter in the critical compilation, The Economic Future of the Caribbean, that Frazier edited together with none less than Eric Williams (1911–1981), the Marxist scholar who in 1956 would become the first prime minister of independent Trinidad. These are the main conclusions:
I am not convinced that if these areas are brought within economic control of the US, it will mean an improvement in the economic standard of living. I am not convinced it will be an improvement or even preservation of the social or human values in the islands today. I am referring especially to the question of race relations and the effect of the influence of North Americans on race relations in these islands. Even in the British West Indies, where Anglo-Saxon ideas concerning the white and the coloured races exist, the blacks and the mixed-bloods have never been the object of lawlessness, violence, and contempt exhibited against people of Negro descent in the United States. A white minority in the British West Indies has maintained “white supremacy” and European culture without making a travesty of its law courts and resorting periodically to acts of violence. In the Spanish and, more especially, the French colonies, the respect which is shown to blacks and people of mixed ancestry is regarded by the average white citizen of the United States as a sign of weakness or even depravity … This only shows that the traditional North American attitude of caste is bound to negatively affect human value in the sphere of race relations in these areas.
Frazier 1944a:30
Frazier would write again on the Caribbean and, more generally, on plantation America and Brazil as part of this region (1957b), in his introduction to a prestigious compilation edited by Vera Rubin. Frazier was in the good company of, among others, George E. Simpson, Charles Wagley, M.G. Smith, Eric Williams, Frank Tannenbaum and Raymond Smith. He started, typically, with a provocation: Why was Plantation America not designated Negro America, since in this area the Negro had been the chief ethnic or racial group? (Frazier 1957b:v). Frazier then linked the Southern part of the US and plantation society as described by Freyre. The main difference between Brazil or the Caribbean and the US was that, in the US, a conspicuous class of poor whites was present. He proceeded to show that in terms of African survivals, he had finally come to a more challenging position:
The problem of African survivals among Negroes in the United States was once the subject of much controversy on the part of anthropologists and sociologists. It seems fair to say that as the result of this controversy, the sociologists gained a deeper knowledge of the persistence of certain phases of African cultural traits among Negroes and the anthropologists gained knowledge of the social history of Negroes which restrained their speculations concerning African survivals. … Probably, there is general agreement that there are more African survivals in South America and the West Indies than among American Negroes … But the real problem is more difficult … to what extent are African survivals influencing the character of these new societies which are coming into existence? Can their stagnation or development be explained in terms of African survival? … The real problem is not the discovery of African survivals but rather the study of the organization and role of the Negro family in changing society or in a new society that is coming into existence. … Moreover, these family traditions have been reinforced by the expectations and traditions of the class position of the family in the community.
Frazier 1957:viii
Two words appear in Frazier’s terminology that were not then in use in the literature concerning racial hierarchies in the US: “development” and “class”. His radical socialist past and his years in Paris at UNESCO, where the term “development” was ubiquitous, were very evident in his mature years.
One must take into account how the fact of their African origin has been communicated to Negroes. For the great masses of Negroes, the fact of their African origin has been regarded as a curse (…) This attitude was emphasized when Marcus Garvey attempted to organize what was the only really nationalistic movement to arise among American Negroes. The movement was supported largely by West Indian Negroes, and American Negro intellectuals denounced Garvey largely on the ground
Frazier 1958:273that he resurrected and emphasized the fact of their African origin75… Therefore, we shall begin by showing how the treatment of Negroes has impaired their usefulness as spiritual or moral leaders of Africans.
Frazier’s assessment of the organization of the black community and its two main pillars, the church and the school, was devastating: “The truth of the matter is that American Negroes have never been free, physically and psychologically” (1958:274). They had instead been reduced to childlike, clownish and sly human beings, he said. Frazier also insisted that some type of self-esteem and racial identity was essential in fighting this racial condition. Instead, most of them “insist on being only Americans, they become nobody” (1958:275).
In conclusion, he favoured two black radicals: “There are rare exceptions like W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson (the most outstanding black member of the US Communist party), but they are considered dangerous by white people. Therefore, middle-class Negroes regard them as dangerous.” Publicly defending Du Bois and Robeson would not only single out Frazier as one of the very few well-known black intellectuals to do so, but it would also be one of the reasons he was later accused of anti-American activities by McCarthy (Hellwig 1992). The last part of the article went even further in its excoriation of the status quo of US race relations. American blacks lacked the capital and technical and political skills to assist Africans, “who have a long experience of political struggle and are assuming a position of responsibility not open to Negroes in the US” (1958:278). The main problem, said Frazier, is that:
The general outlook of American Negros is dominated by provincial and spurious values of the new Negro middle classes. They live in a world of make-believe and reject identification with the cultural tradition of American Negroes as well as with their African origin (…) Their attitude towards the future is that of the gladiators and slaves in the Roman arena, who cried: “Hail Cesar, we who are about to die to salute you”. On the other hand, the African has a future in this world and has a place in shaping a new world as an African.
Frazier 1958:278
5.4 Turner’s Publications
As regards Turner, none of his published texts contains a detailed reference to his research as a linguist in Brazil. One article, possibly the most interesting, deals with the family connection between Salvador and Lagos, whereas the other two on Brazil seem to be written in the spirit of the GNP and celebrate Brazilian race relations as more lenient and much less segregated than the US. The slaves in Brazil enjoyed many advantages that were denied their fellows in the US or the West Indies (Turner 1957:232), such as finding it easier to achieve manumission. Africa and Brazil, moreover, were kept closer by the constant exchange of slaves, ex-slaves, returnees and migrants, especially between Lagos and Bahia. In Brazil, African religious practices were never seriously interfered with and as a result, in these religious communities, one could still see authentic African dance. Turner’s article in the popular Chicago Jewish Forum (1957) finishes with a statement that summed up his feelings: “Since the emancipation of the slaves, the Negro has participated fully in Brazil’s social and family life. There is no law prohibiting such participation or the exercise of any legitimate function of the citizen. Racial friction in Brazil is at a minimum. One is scarcely aware of one’s own color” (1957:235).
Soon after returning from Brazil, Turner presented the paper “Some contacts of Brazilian ex-slaves with Nigeria, West Africa” at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, in Columbus, Ohio, on November 1, 1941. The paper was published in the Journal of Negro History in 1942. Its central argument is that “students of African cultural survivals in the New World need not expect to make much progress in their investigations
Turner’s paper centred exclusively on the Yoruba and described the binational families that had evolved, especially those related to both Lagos and Salvador. Before the abolition of slavery, one way of keeping in touch with Africa was for a male slave to purchase his freedom and that of his wife and children and take his family back to Africa. “… many families who did this remained in Africa until after slavery was abolished in Brazil and then returned to Brazil” (1942:59). Sometimes, part of the family remained in Africa but kept in close contact with the Bahian section of the family. Turner then went into a detailed description of these links in the case of a couple of his key informants in Bahia – the well-known Martiniano do Bonfim (who Turner described as “one of the most colourful figures in Bahia today… many people seek his advice and follow it religiously”)78 and his wife Anna Cardoso Santos, both of whom had travelled twice to Lagos and back to Bahia. Turner received as a present the originals and paper copies of travel documents of ex-slaves from Bahia who had returned to Africa, as well as their wedding and death certificates. The text of the paper comes to a close praising the commitment among these families to preserving Yoruba culture and language (especially in folktales, bedtime stories and food and cooking), not only in Salvador but also in the smaller towns of Cachoeira, São Felix and Muritiba. They did not only speak Yoruba fluently, but “as leaders of the fetish cults, they use their influence to keep the form of worship as genuinely African as possible” (1942:66). What struck Turner was that most Brazilian ex-slaves of Bahia and their descendants were genuinely proud of their African heritage.
The quality of the information Turner gathered and the simple fact that he had been given the originals of personal papers and photos demonstrated the support and enthusiasm his fieldwork stirred among these Afro-Brazilian
In December 1950, Turner published a relatively lengthy review of The Negro in Northern Brazil: A Study in Acculturation by Octavio da Costa Eduardo (1948), in the Journal of American Folklore. Besides being quite thorough and severe, the review is an excellent book report. It emphasized that the culture of present-day Negroes in the State of Maranhão occurred against the background of sustained contact with African culture brought to Maranhão by the slaves. On the whole, the rural community had been less conducive to maintaining African religious practices than their urban counterparts. Despite defining the book as a very good model for future research in the New World, Turner made two criticisms, so to speak – one in line with Herskovits and the other in line with Frazier – and in this, he showed a degree of intellectual autonomy. He objected, as would possibly Herskovits, who had been Eduardo’s supervisor, to “how the contact of African and Brazilian cultures has affected other phases of the cultures of Negroes in Maranhão, such as music, folk literature, language, art, etc. is revealed only slightly in the author’s discussion of religion” (1950:490). The other criticism, reminiscent of Frazier’s ideas, concerned the amaziado arrangement and the organization of black families more generally: “Are these types of a relationship more prevalent among other groups of similar socio-economic status? If they are widespread among these, is this the result of borrowing from Africans, or have non-Africans and these other groups brought similar family forms from the Old World?” (1950:491). In other words, generalizations about the organization of the black family required a comparative analysis of all racial groups or groups of colour in the population of one specific community – not just the black population.
Turner, with his symbolic connection to the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, and Frazier, with his focus on the relationship between colour and class and on the psychological damage that segregation created for the black mind, represented two essential variants in the US black political thought of their time, possibly the most relevant and radical. Nowhere is their different emphasis on the past and future of black people more evident than in their contribution to the special issue of Présence Africaine dedicated to “Africa from the point of view of American Negro Scholars” (Davis 1958). For Turner, the preservation of cultural diversity was both a reason for emancipation from stereotypes and a tool to counteract racism:
Turner 1958:102–3
A study of the influence of African culture upon the Western Hemisphere reveals that the slaves on reaching the New World did not wholly abandon their native culture, but retained most of it with surprisingly little change. (…) Those aspects of African culture which have been most tenacious throughout the New World are survivals in languages, folk literature, religion, art, the dance and music; but some survivals from the economic and social life of the Africans can also be found in the New World.79
He then expands, based on his research and publications in Brazil and adds: “African linguistic survivals are most numerous in Brazil than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere … In Bahia, I found Yoruba spoken as much as Portuguese” (1958:107). (…) “In and around the Nago or Yoruba cult-houses in Bahia, for example, the atmosphere is so unmistakably African that one has difficulties realizing he is in the New World” (1958:112). Turner described music, dance, folktales and woodcarving in Bahia, all cultural forms that maintained their African origin. His political message can be summed up in the conclusion of his article for the journal:
Far too little attention is being given to objective studies of those aspects of the native culture of Negro Africa – especially the arts – which are and have been exerting, for more than four centuries, a significant influence upon Western civilization. More such studies would go a long way toward destroying in the minds of other people of the world many deeply rooted stereotypes regarding Africans – stereotypes due, in great part, but not wholly, to lack of knowledge of the native culture of Negro Africa.80
Turner 1958:116
Two compilations of the work of Frazier (1968) and Herskovits (1966) were published posthumously, edited by G. Franklin Edwards and Frances Herskovits, respectively. Only one of the twenty chapters that comprise Frazier’s compilation deals with Brazil, whereas in Herskovits’ compilation five
In terms of the influence of these four scholars on the Brazilian social sciences, while acknowledging his merit, Mel, and also Frances, who co-published articles with her husband and published an edited volume in 1966, were overquoted; Frazier and Turner were almost ignored. Another conclusion to be drawn from the above publications is that Brazil was for them a backdrop against which they could stage and corroborate their central arguments. For Frazier, these were that class division is a universal condition and that there is no analysis of race relations independent of class structure; and that race relations in Brazil were less dehumanizing and made the Negros less childlike than those in the US. For Turner, of key importance was that African survivals in speech revealed the complexity of black cultural expressions in the New World. For Herskovits, Africanisms were predominant not only in religious life and cultural expressions but also as an explanatory factor in the social organization and the family structure of the black population. More than any “real Brazil”, what mattered was how their representations of Brazil and its race relations could be useful in their political-academic struggle in the US.
6 Different Perspectives on Racial Inequalities
The four scholars had different political and personal agendas. From the early 1930s, Herkovits’ central point was reminiscent of the observation by Arthur Schomburg in the compilation edited by Alain Locke, The New Negro: “The Negro has been a man without history because he had been considered a man without a worthy culture” (Locke 1925:237). While using the notion of cultural focus, Herskovits argued that religion was focal for West Africans while economic relations were focal for the slave-owners. Therefore, the greatest proportion of African survivals was in practices that concerned the supernatural (Jackson 1986:112). According to Herskovits, Turner would argue similarly, except that, for West Africans, music was even more important than religion. Frazier, instead, was not convinced that religion and music, even if of undeniable African origin, were per se liberating forces from racism in the New World.
Thus, the anthropologist (Mel) and the linguist (Lorenzo) stressed cultural differences and considered the strength of culture and its capacity to be
Turner’s biography is evidence of how much the issue of African survivals concerned black intellectuals and artists, at least from the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the early 1920s (Wade-Lewis 2007). Frazier’s uncommon and rebellious trajectory reveals the dynamics among black intellectuals in the US (Platt 1990, 1991) and is reminiscent of specific contemporary black sociological thought in the US at the time, such as that of Julius Wilson. Herskovits’ commitment to African survivals and racial equality had a different origin and was in line with liberal ideas among US non-blacks of his time, especially Jewish intellectuals (Yelvington 2000; Gershenhorn 2004).
Brazil had an essential, if not central, place in the fieldwork experience of these scholars, and would bear on their writing, activities and networks for the rest of their career. Still, there is hardly any mention of it in their biographies – nor in the recent critical appraisal of Herskovits’ work, such as the documentary “Herskovits – At the Heart of Blackness” (2014) directed by Llewellyn Smith, and in Jean Allman’s lecture entitled “#Herskovits Must Fall” (2018 and 2020).
The four scholars also differed in terms of their antiracist agenda. Turner and Frazier were not only black scholars with an antiracist plan, they were also interested in meeting important black people, the black elite. The Herskovitses had an antiracist agenda but were much less interested in black agency and even less so in the black elite – in fact, Mel, as we know, was quite suspicious of black intellectuals. In line with mainstream anthropology of the time, one can imagine that he preferred “authenticity” in Africanisms rather than black people in the New World who, according to him, behaved in many ways as white intellectuals or the white upper class would.
Behind these different approaches in their research methods, there were somewhat diverging positions regarding the African heritage of their research subjects. Turner and Herskovits were convinced that the African past offered the kind of cultural grandeur that black people needed in their struggle for liberation in the United States. Frazier was not at all convinced that the past or cultural heritage were potential allies for black liberation. In this, his position
The four scholars had a relatively similar comparative international perspective and had plans to further develop this by researching in other countries of the New World and the African continent. However, they did not have the same opportunities for such projects. For a start, their universities were of quite different standing. Howard was a black university (the top one, but still a black university), so was Fisk, and Roosevelt was a relatively small, engaging, liberal and racially integrated university, but still just a small one – which paid relatively poor wages (Turner 1946; Chicago Defender, May 3, 1947:13). Northwestern was where, formally speaking, African studies were first established with substantial funding.
The four regarded Africa and Afro-America as a single area (Frances Herskovits 1966a:x), more so Turner and Mel, who considered it one cultural (and in many ways also social) whole: this was possibly their main merit. Frazier was also a universalist, but different: class analysis and the consequences of industrialization for black people and the people of postcolonial societies were part and parcel of his agenda.
In this context, Herskovits had the upper hand. He had spent more time doing fieldwork and his approach to African culture in Brazil fit very well with the renewed attempt of several Brazilian intellectuals to redefine national popular culture. Moreover, he had better and more powerful connections within the rising Brazilian anthropology community in Bahia and at the Escola Livre de Sociologia, the University of São Paulo and the Museu Nacional in Rio (in those days, the absolute national centre of Brazilian anthropology). Herskovits also had greater access to funding for research abroad and was better positioned to invite Brazilian scholars to visit the United States.82
“I always hold the possibility of returning to Brazil as a comforting thought, and will, of course, put the thought into action eventually”.84 Even though MJH
As we have seen, between 1941 and 1943 Frazier published six articles on race relations in Brazil and the black family in Bahia. Brazil became pivotal in supporting his argument about the black family and race being the real American conundrum. These were the years that led to the preparation of Gunnar Myrdal’s epochal book, An American Dilemma (Myrdal 1944). Frazier contributed to this book (Jackson 1994). However, Frazier’s work on Brazil did not go down in the history of the social sciences as powerfully as Herskovits’. Even in recent biographies of this great sociologist, who liked to define himself as a “race man”, there is little or no mention of his work on Brazil or the Caribbean. He is generally described as more national than Herskovits. I argue that Frazier was a cosmopolitan polyglot and internationally oriented scholar who, in many ways, wanted to do the same kind of grand international comparisons that Herskovits had. Frazier failed to leave an enduring influence on the Brazilian social sciences, though he spoke to the Frente Negra’s cultural politics (the Black Front). This group, in the thirties, was the leading strand in black Brazilian thought. It also stressed the universality of the human condition rather than cultural difference and claimed a valuable place for blacks within modernity. In 1940 Frazier met several leaders of the Frente Negra in São Paulo, although there is no detail of such an event in the papers.
Despite these significant differences, these scholars also had several key similarities. First, they all celebrated the relatively open and relaxed style of Brazilian race relations, especially in Bahia, which was determined more by class than caste. Such celebration became more visible during the war effort and the heydays of the GNP. The race relations were almost canonical: most Brazilian and US intellectuals of the time reiterated them. For instance, the long front-page interview with writer Vianna Moog in the Herald-Tribune (September 12, 1943) carries the following emphatic headline: “Race problems are lacking in the life of Brazil. Prejudice finds no echo there as nation rejects racial superiority idea”.86 Second, they used their experience and findings in Bahia and Brazil as stepping-stones to founding African studies in the United
Herskovits’ programme would grow and soon develop into the leading one in the United States (it is not by accident that the library specializing in African studies at Northwestern is named after him). However, one should not underplay the pioneering role of Fisk, Roosevelt and Howard in creating African studies and attracting African scholars to the United States (Sansone 2019). Turner and Frazier also helped to develop African studies through activism in associations that supported Africa and its independence, extracurricular activities in the community, professional associations (among others, the African Studies Association), international US-based institutions, such as the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Peace Corps, and UNESCO. Frazier’s and Turner’s efforts were significant in internationalizing traditionally black universities. Third, Turner, Frazier and Herskovits came to Bahia to test research produced elsewhere and corroborate their hypotheses on the African origin of black culture and survival strategies. The Gantois house was the standard test case and the primary cohort of informants, consisting of influential spokespersons in the Candomblé community and, for Frazier, the families who lived close to the cult-house. As it turned out, they all found in Gantois the causality of what they were looking for, respectively, slavery and adaptation to poverty (Frazier) and Africanisms (Turner for language and Herskovits for family structure.) These scholars also had in common that none of them made Brazil and Bahia the cornerstone of their studies, as they had proposed in funding applications for their research. They never wrote the book on Bahia they had planned.
In other words, Bahia was, for them, a testing ground for hypotheses generated within the American political, moral and racial context. As regards the issue of the black family, already in 1939, before he had any personal knowledge of Brazil, MJH insisted in a letter to Bastide that:
We are very badly in need of information concerning the less spectacular but equally important aspects of Brazilian Negro social and economic life. The organization of the family, particularly the relationship between a mother and her children as against that between a father and his children, the possible survival of any clan organization as cooperative work societies, and problems of this nature are practically untouched.87
Frazier disagrees entirely, I may say, with my own position concerning the retention of African elements in the Negro culture of the United States, and he does this so emphatically that I suspect there is something of an emotional tie-up. However, the book discusses very adequately the present condition of the Negro Family and its background in slavery times, and is the most comprehensive that has been written to date.
So, despite somehow disqualifying Frazier’s position as emotional, in a context where the proper scholar was deemed to control his or her emotions, Herskovits recognized the value of Frazier’s work on the black family and the solidity of his know-how more generally.
In those days, black speech and the black family structure were American concerns, not Brazilian. Then and now, scholars and laypersons agree that there is no “Black Portuguese”, but indeed, the use of a language usually defined as Yoruba in Candomblé ceremonies and of a plethora of terms of Bantu origin in the Portuguese that is spoken in Brazil. As for the “black family”, the phrase is still not in use in Brazil, where matrifocality is associated either with poverty or with social mores, not with Africanisms or African survivals (Woortmann 1987; Marcellin 1999). The research on black culture in those days concerned an American battle that was being fought on Brazilian soil; it never got back to Brazil as it should have.88
Although Wade-Lewis gives space to Turner’s year in Brazil in her biography of him (2007), surprisingly there is little to no mention of Frazier’s and Herskovits’ fieldwork in Brazil in the many otherwise detailed and excellent biographical reconstructions of their lives (Saint-Arnaud 2009, for Frazier, and Simpson 1973 and Gershenhorn 2004, for Herskovits),89 despite the importance of Brazil in their future career and writings. Nevertheless, Frazier’s fieldwork in Brazil does come up in several of his later publications, such as his review of Social Theory and Swing and Rhythm by Howard Odum (Frazier 1950:167)
In her book, Brazil’s Living Museum, Anadelia Romo (2010) produces ample evidence that scholars like Frazier, who advocated that little of an African tradition remained in black Brazilian culture, were edited out of the discussion and given little credence in Bahia. Even scholars such as Ruth Landes, who argued that the past needed to be understood alongside an equally dynamic process of contemporary change, were controversial. The Afro-Bahian culture was a meaningful building block in Bahia’s past, but it was an uncomfortable, unresolved issue for Bahia’s present and future (Romo 2010:11). I add that such a use of the past was in the interest of the “haves” and has penalized subaltern and strange voices today. Furthermore, Herskovits gained a receptive audience for his ideas in Bahia because of the undeniable grandeur of his research and because he focused on themes and topics dear to the Bahian intellectual elite and their trends. It is not by accident that Herskovits was embraced as the father figure of Brazilian anthropology, and thus Isaias Alves insisted that he inaugurate the Faculty of Philosophy. However, I disagree that Frazier and Landes were two failed researchers, as Romo says (2010:114). In many ways, both have withstood the passing of time better than MJH. Landes was recently rediscovered by feminist anthropologists and scholars who were critical of the canonical anthropological authority in ethnography (Cole 1994). Frazier might have left little influence in Brazil compared to Herskovits, but as soon as he came back from Brazil he secured a prominent position in Gunnar Myrdal’s project, in 1948, and was the first black person to become president of the American
7 Observing While Being Observed
The trajectory of the four scholars reveals a double tension: Bahia – that is, its exotic and tropical popular culture – had quite an impact on them; in turn, their presence, resources and network had an impact on Bahia. It is also important to detail how their experience and research in Brazil influenced their careers. Turner had travelled to London and other cities in the northern hemisphere before coming to Brazil and Frazier had travelled abroad before, especially to Denmark, but the trip to Brazil must have been deeply impressive for both. I do not believe that their laudatory texts on Brazil were just the result of a politically motivated choice. Brazil was attractive as a country where they could dream and envisage a post-racial context in the US. Richard Pattee, who had translated O Negro Brasileiro by Arthur Ramos into English, got to know the country in the late 1920s and became interested in the subject. Indeed, Turner and Frazier were not the only two prominent African Americans to be politically and emotionally invested in Brazil. Before them, in the 1930s, Ralph Bunch wanted to conduct his doctoral research comparative between US and Brazilian race relations, but was vetoed by the Rosenwald Fund which believed that black Americans might have “dangerous” ideas in Brazil. He was sent to Africa instead (see Hellwig 1992).
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what kind of emotions Brazil and its race relations stirred up in Frazier, Turner and the Herskovitses. These emotions were felt differently by them and had to do with both exoticism (or exotic celebration of the tropics) and a sense of freedom. The Brazilian tropics were exciting for all of them, perhaps, especially for Frazier and Turner, for whom Brazil was the first tropical country they researched. The Herskovitses came to Brazil after other tropical experiences, in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti and Trinidad. Frazier and Herskovits travelled with their wives. Turner, whose wife did not accompany him for a year, seems to have had more fun, but the sense of freedom, and perhaps of relative transgression, was a feeling that I reckon was more pronounced for Frazier and Turner, who sometimes felt relieved from the racial tensions of their daily life – they could taste, imagine or dream of what a less racist everyday life might be like.
Herskovits, as much as Turner and Frazier, came to Salvador to test the results of research he had carried out elsewhere. Predictably, he came to opposite conclusions to those of Frazier and concluded that Africanisms explained the matrifocal family arrangements of the Bahian black and poor. Matrifocal
In terms of theoretical approach, Turner’s work fell somewhere between that of Herskovits and Frazier, even though it tended towards Herskovits’ notion of Africanism. He believed that the strength of black culture and its language rested in its capacity to retain elements of its African past in the present. Compared to Frazier, Turner was less concerned with structure and more with culture. He was convinced that the dignity of blacks had to be based on their capacity to experience and be proud of their culture. To him, black cultural expressions in the New World were an essential asset for the populations of African descent; their social integration largely depended on their capacity to experience and exhibit their culture in public.
Frazier and Turner never went back to Brazil. They immersed themselves in other projects for the rest of their life. Mel, too, did not return to the field, except for a short visit in 1954. Partly this was the result of his broad interest in many other countries. Nonetheless, possibly because of its continental size, Brazil was quite different from the other tropical countries the Herskovitses had researched in, in that it had a local intellectual and academic scene, though much weaker than in the US, with which the couple maintained contacts at least until the late sixties. They all had plans to publish a book on Brazil. On September 6, 1951, MJH wrote to Verger saying: “I wish I knew when we were going to be able to get at our field material. However, from the look of it, it will be a while yet before we can get released from other more pressing duties”. There have been several speculations on why these books never came out. In many ways, the reason MJH never published the book on Brazil he had promised to himself and the foundations that had supported him is that, as his former student James Fernandez said concerning the book on cultural relativism he also ended up not writing: “This would have been something for his retirement years [MJH died of a stroke and presumably had plans to live longer]. In full career until the day he died at the age of sixty-eight, he was too much a man of the world to find time to do so” (Fernandez 1990:141).
One crucial question this book asks is how the presence of these foreign scholars in so few cult-houses affected the life, authority and self-image of
The reasons for the lasting success of the Herskovitses’ field trip in Brazil, even though their book on it did not materialise, are manifold. First, their fieldwork method was painstaking, detailed and focused, and they benefited from the experience, reputation, images and recordings they had built up and gathered elsewhere in the Americas and Africa. Moreover, MJH’s kind of findings and respect for local authorities made him much more acceptable. Second, the notion of African survivals or Africanisms was politically convenient and fit the priorities of the local modernist elites smoothly. The Herskovitses’ emphasis on authenticity, simplicity and elegance, as well as their predilection for things Yoruba or Dahomeyan, fit into the aesthetic project of Bahia-based cultural entrepreneurs such as Odorico Tavares and, in a different way, Jorge Amado, Valladares, Carybé and Verger (Ickes 2013:99–142). These artist-intellectual-cultural activists displayed some of the modernist sensibilities that Vivian von Schelling and William Rowe characterized as typical of that stage of Latin American modernization (Von Schelling and Rowe 1991). Such an aesthetic project did not stand on its own but was related to a sort of cultural-social contract that the elites tried to create with the “have-nots” (Jocelio dos Santos 2004). Third, their presence and interest were convenient to the Candomblé community – if Frances and Melville needed access to the cult-houses, the cult-houses used the Herskovitses as leverage for local political support. One could say that Frances and Melville, rather than Frazier and Turner, were the right people, with the right ideas, at the right time and place. My final point concerns the Herskovitses’ entanglement with social scientists and intellectuals in Brazil. One of the key motives for their conclusion on the survival of Africanisms in Bahia is that it also spoke to the priorities of the modernist component of the local intellectual and political elites and the
The comparison of the style, methodology and ethnographic sensibility of the four scholars illustrates important differences and nuances. In this second chapter, we have seen that their fieldwork in Bahia exacerbated the differences between the four scholars in terms of methodology and perspectives on racial hierarchies and fighting racism. Frances, although less in the limelight than Melville, co-authored (formally or informally) most of his publications, and her ethnographic sensibility and curiosity were conspicuous throughout the several volumes of the Brazilian fieldnotes, which she not only typed out but also edited and coded. They returned to the US convinced that they had managed to corroborate their initial hypotheses in Bahia. At the same time, having “made” Brazil and Bahia roughly in the same period and having shared so much of the same emotions, places, ethnographic situations and even informants, would create a unique and lasting bond between the four of them. Brazil and especially Bahia would remain in their minds.
From October 16, Turner rented a room at 11 Rua Alfredo de Britto in the Pelourinho neighborhood, for the price of 120.000 Reis per month.
This picture of sociocultural mobility in the middle class is not to say that, in those years, the Bahian elite was not segregated. In fact, even Gilberto Freyre, in his positive review of Pierson’s essay in the American Sociological Review (1940), published in Correio da Manhã on January 31, 1940, stated, “Pierson must have for sure encountered racial prejudice in Bahia. In Bahian society endures, hidden and sometimes watered down as bourgeoisie, one of the most endogenic and full of self-protection aristocracies that one has seen in America.”
Melville Herskovits Papers, Box 36, Folder 2, NU.
“Estou muito curioso de ver a conferência de Frazier impressa. Ele é sem dúvida o que se chama um ‘mulato frajola’ e essa gente é capaz de grandes surpresas.” (Valladares to MJH, December 1, 1944)
MJH Papers, Guggenheim Foundation 1929–1942.
Interview with Herskovits, Daily Northwestern, March 13, 1940, quoted in Gershenhorn 2004:255.
See Appendix 4 for the names of the people Frazier interviewed. living near and around the seita do Gantois.
This bias, one could argue, could lead to underestimating the presence and importance of men in the household.
Box 131–133, Folder 8. For a list of Frazier’s informants that he categorised as middle class, see Appendix 4.
Among the Brazilian poor, only a minority of whom had identity documents or any document whatsoever in those years, such difficulty in recalling the name of any relative beyond the grandparents was quite common.
See Appendix 4 for the categories and list of names Turner recorded.
I appreciate the help I received on this topic from the French independent scholar, Pol Briand (personal communication, August 25, 2005).
We found 415 documents, loosely organized, in 15 folders. Each folder is divided in 9 themes: author/source, location, songs, proverbs, story, riddles, scholar; translations and texts in Yoruba. There are also 4 summaries of the organization of the chapters, suggesting that Turner was planning a publication: theological stories, stories with a moral/Yoruba stories, satirical stories, and stories involving magic. None of them is complete or ready for publication. Forty sources are mentioned, 35 African and 5 Brazilian. The African material was collected in 7 Nigerian cities: Ibadan, Ijebu-Remo, Ilesha, Igebu-Ode, Ogbomosho, Oshogbo and Ado-Ekiti. The Brazilian interviewees were all from Salvador: Manoel da Silva, Martiniano do Bonfim, Anna M. Santos, Julieta Aurelina Nascimento and Manoelzinho. The transcription of these Brazilian recordings is dated July–August 1950 – it was done in the summer break because, as we know, Turner had no time for research during the teaching period. This part consists of a dictionary, “Africano e Português”, an exposition concerning the Yoruba in Bahia, history, songs, reports and the biography of Julieta Aurelina Nascimento. Furthermore, there are 17 documents concerning songs and biblical psalms in Yoruba, 20 proverbs, 173 stories, 4 riddles, 7 lectures/classes, 10 translated documents and 10 texts in Yoruba. Most of the documents are in English, with translation in English and Yoruba. Contextualizing these documents is a real challenge that will need to be done as a collective enterprise. It should also involve contemporary informants, Yoruba speakers, historians of the Yoruba language as well as, whenever possible, access to the sources used by Turner. I thank PhD candidate Diana Catarino for the preliminary scrutiny of these documents.
I am indebted to David Brookshaw, Librarian of the Melville Heskovits Library at Northwestern University, for having made me aware of such a precious register that had sat in the library unexplored since the entry was made of the donation of Turner’s papers, and for having been so kind as to send us a large box with a copy of them to Bahia. It is such rich material, which we hope to be able to analyse in the near future with the help of a scholar who is also a native Yoruba speaker.
Turner’s papers, Box 38, Folder 6.
This digital repatriation received the support of the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, where the collection of Turner’s recordings is housed; the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University and especially the Anacostia Community Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, which houses most of the photographs and artefacts Turner collected in his research (Sansone 2011).
This process of recognition and recollection was very much in line with what Olivia Gomes da Cunha did in 2003 with Ruth Landes’ photos (Da Cunha 2020). In our case, because of our arrangement with the NAA, we could leave copies of the photos on a DVD with the Gantois and Axe Opo Afonja houses, and made the pictures and small excerpts of Turner’s recordings available online. Our agreement with the ATM allowed for only small excerpts of 3–5 minutes. The Facebook page of the Afrodigital museum had over 15,000 followers in September 2020.
Olivia Gomes da Cunha’s recent and very comprehensive book (2020) suggests that analyzing the original handwritten notes might reveal differences between them and the transcribed notes – which are also more organized and, at times, have a more linear narrative.
See Appendix 4 for a list of these informants assembled from the fieldnotes.
MJH and FSH papers, fieldnotes, A 12–13, SC.
According to Jeferson Bacelar, in a personal conversation on September 29, 2020, Joãozinho never actually became Ketu.
MJH and FSH fieldnotes, Box 6, SC.
Box 21.
Box 6.
See, for example, Box 14–15. None of the three seemed to be worried about granting a degree of anonymity to the informants, even when it concerned sensitive issues. I wonder whether in those days that was the canon in the social sciences when doing research with “other” or foreign groups and populations.
Notebook C:19.
Today, such metal statues can still be purchased in the same São Joaquim Central Market. During his last visit to Bahia in 2010, my father Agostino also bought a number of these metal images of Exu and piled them up in the corner of my house. When visitors see these Exus they are always impressed. Some are scared, but all of them ask why the Exus are there.
Box 3A.
Largely based on René Ribeiro’s MA research on the same topic (Ribeiro 1945).
According to Jeferson Bacelar, in a personal communication on September 29, 2020, in recent times, this function is called ogan suspenso (provisional ogan).
Notebook B:29. Over the last three decades, with the growing interaction and interconnection between anthropology and Candomblé, things have changed, in the sense that a few initiated people have received formal training in anthropology and even degrees in the discipline, while a number of anthropologists have become initiated in Candomblé.
Notebook B:30.
Notebook V:62.
Notebook II:16.
Notebook V:41.
Notebook I: 22.
Notebook II:1.
Notebook IV:44.
Notebook V:41.
Notebook V:43.
Notebook V:18.
Notebook II:12.
Notebook II: 17.
Notebook II :2.
MJH and FSH Bahia fieldnotes, MJH & FSH papers, Box 18, Folder 110–113, SC.
Notebook V: 3.
Notebook V: 18.
However, nowadays, a sizeable part of the Candomblé community would argue that the Jeje nation is even more orthodox, hierarchical and demanding in terms of initiation than the Ketu nation.
Notebook V:64.
Notebook V:20.
Notebook B:25.
Notebook I:3.
Notebook B:34.
On this polarity, see Gois Dantas 1988, Capone 1999 and “From Africa to Afro” in Sansone 2003.
This is also reminiscent of Palmie’s description of Cuba in his essay “The Cooking of History” (2013).
Unfortunately, I have not found such lists in the archives.
This family was and still is successful in both Brazil and Nigeria, where some of its members became lawyers after training in the UK. Babatunde Alakija was the first black African pilot in the RFA during WWII – his extraordinary story was told by George Padmore in an article about the colour bar in the US military (Padmore 1941). I owe thanks to Julio Simões for such an interesting piece of information.
In the archives, I could not find any equivalent for Frazier or Turner.
MJH Papers, Box 24, Folder 168, SC.
The term is actually assentamento and means the grounding of your orixá in a particular house.
An experience that is quite common among foreign visitors to Candomblé houses and that, at the beginning of my stay in Bahia, I found difficult to avoid.
In the MS Archive, Gomes (2020) found a letter sent in 1942 from Martiniano to Frazier, which I was unable to trace.
To understand the importance of Turner’s photographs, one must remember that in those days and until the present, a popular expression in Brazil for taking a picture of a person was “tirar retrato” (making a portrait.) This is a reminder of a recent past in which most poor Brazilians had only one or two pictures of themselves taken throughout their whole life. One was taken at their wedding and the other, for men, was a snapshot on their work permit. The original photographs taken by Turner are held by the Anacostia Community Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Most of the photos taken by Turner, Frazier and Herskovits in Bahia can be viewed at the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage, www.museuafrodigital.ufba.br.
MJH to Valladares, February 4, 1943.
In a letter of June 12, 1949, Melville asks Valladares to give the money he will be wiring to the six to eight singers that will appear in the records edited by the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress.
MJH to René Ribeiro, October 19, 1953.
The paper, written in English and translated by José Valladares, was soon published in Portuguese (Herskovits 1943d), reprinted in the journal Afro-Ásia in 1967 and published again by the Museu da Bahia in 2008 (with the addition of the speech of the Dean of the Faculdade, Isaias Alves, and of the original text in English). Several of Herskovits’ papers would soon be translated into Portuguese. But today, no translation is available of Turner’s and Frazier’s articles on Brazil. In fact, until very recently, the only article by Frazier in Portuguese was the translation of “Negro Harlem: an Ecological Analysis” (1937), which came out in the large book edited by Pierson, Estudos de Ecologia Humana (462–479), under the title “O Harlem dos negros: estudo ecológico”. However, at the end of 2020, the new journal Ayé: Revista de Antropologia, edited by the University UNILAB, devoted a timely special issue to the translation of the Frazier-Herskovits debate on the black family in The American Journal of Sociology. The translation is preceded by a good commentary by Pires and De Castro (2020). The journal is freely available online at https://revistas.unilab.edu.br/index.php/Antropologia/issue/view/22.
Still in the 1930s, the US National Ethnographic Bureaus was recording the voices of former slaves and taking pictures of them. None of this happened in Brazil, despite the much higher number of descendants of Africans and their more recent arrival.
Here Frazier quotes Arthur Ramos (1934).
This is still the case at the moment of writing even though, obviously to a lesser extent, if only because street markets are no longer the only or main outlets for goods. Already in 1938, Pierson (1942:309–310) noted that African cultural forms in Bahia were disintegrating rapidly. However, Herskovits stated in footnote 5 that this was wrong, “as was evident in the flourishing condition of the Candomblé found during a visit to the city in 1954”.
Beside the articles and chapters mentioned here, in Brazil Herskovits published several essays in non-academic journals or newspapers, mostly translated into Portuguese (Herskovits 1941a, 1942a, 1942b, 1943c). The complete list of Herskovits’ publications dealing with Brazil is given in chronological order in the References.
Here Frazier quotes two very recent books: Lucia Miguel Pereira, Machado de Assis (1936), and Ignacio José Verissimo, André Rebouças através de sua auto-biografia (1939).
In those years, Frazier also reviewed books on Brazil (Frazier 1950a, 1952).
The acidity of his comment singles it out from the otherwise laudatory tone of all the other articles to the special issue, to the point that Alioune Diop, in his preface to the issue, somehow apologizes for Frazier’s toughness. It is worth mentioning that Frazier wrote this article after two important moments in his life, both associated with his two years spent at UNESCO in Paris. In 1952–3 he became acquainted as never before with African intellectuals and activists as well as with (mostly French) Africanists, such as Balandier; and he wrote and published in French (in Paris, with the publisher Plon) his most polemical book, Bourgeoisie Noire, in 1955. He would translate the book into English and publish it as Black Bourgeoisie in the US three years later (Teele 2002:3).
Frazier’s positive assessment of Garveyism in the 50s and 60s, when the movement was no more, contrasts with Du Bois’ incisive criticism of Garveyism in the 20s, when the movement was at its heights.
For critical scrutiny of the relationship between the spirit and tradition of the Harlem Renaissance and the journal Présence Africaine, see Mudimbe-Boyi 1992.
As contemporary historians know very well, this destruction, reported in Arthur Ramos’ (1939) first book translated into English, was less effective than people believed in the 1940s.
Martiniano, who died in 1943, played a central part in the narratives of a score of scholars, including Frazier’s and Turner’s, but for some reason not in the Herskovitses’. Perhaps Martiniano’s poor health in 1942 is the explanation.
It is worth mentioning that, to support his argument, Turner quoted Herskovits’ Myth of the Negro Past repeatedly, as well as Donald Pierson. However, in footnote 1 he stressed that “Dr. Pierson, not well acquainted with the native culture of the Africans, has greatly underestimated its influence on Brazilian culture.”
Turner and Frazier would hold their diverging positions on possible Africanisms in black American culture and yet would be interested in the future of post-independence Africa for the rest of their lives. They would both contribute to the special issue of the journal Présence Africaine, edited in book format and dedicated to the theme of American blacks and Africa (Frazier 1958; Turner 1958).
Lack of funding hampered Turner’s and Frazier’s plans to do research in Africa and to develop African studies in their institutions (Fisk University and later Roosevelt College for Turner, and Howard University for Frazier.) For example, while Herskovits was able to use the help of a number of PhD students, Turner had to rely on African informants in the United States and had fewer opportunities to do research in Africa. Turner finally went to Africa in 1951 with a Fulbright grant and later worked on the Krio language in Sierra Leone with grants from the Peace Corps (Wade-Lewis 2007:165–188). Frazier had to wait until his year at UNESCO in Paris in the 1950s to be able to work with Africanists and African scholars in the organization of the first conference on industrialization in Africa and other projects, mostly concerned with the issue of decolonization.
The text of his speech is in Frances Herskovits, ed. The New World Negro: Selected Papers in Afro-American Studies (1966) and translated into Portuguese by José Valladares. It was the text presented as a final research report to the Museu Nacional in Rio and first published in Brazil in 1944 by the Museu de Arte da Bahia, with a foreword by Isaias Alves, the first head of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Federal University of Bahia. The journal Afro-Ásia published it again in 1957 (www.afroasia.ufba.br) and the Museu de Arte published it a third time in 2008. In contrast, no translation into Portuguese is available for the articles written by Turner and Frazier. Of course, one can wonder about the effects of these politics of translation for the construction of the hegemony of Herskovits’ paradigm on Afro-Brazilian studies and Afro-Latin studies in general (see Yelvington 2006). This paradigm was buttressed by a number of prestigious scholars who followed its path, such as Pierre Verger and Roger Bastide.
MJH to Bastide, September 20, 1959.
His daughter Jean, who was with her parents in Bahia as a young girl and later became an Africanist, told me that when he went back to Bahia on that occasion he did not go to the Candomblé house (the Gantois) that was so important in his fieldwork and that also had become important in his personal life.
After the War Effort, and especially from the 1950s, Frazier became more critical and less supportive of the so-called mildness of race relations in Brazil.
MJH to Bastide, October 11, 1939.
In fact, when I took up my position at the Federal University of Bahia in 1992 very few or none of my colleagues in Bahia knew of the two articles by Frazier and Herskovits in the American Sociological Review until I left a photocopy of them with the library of my Institute.
Somewhat ironically, Allan Merriam’s long obituary of Herskovits gave more attention to Melville’s involvement with Brazil than the more recent biographies (Merriam 1964).
The lively debate took place on the eve of the “zoot suiter” riots in Los Angeles, in which organized groups of sailors attacked groups of very well-dressed and stylish Chicano and black young men and accused them of not supporting the war effort and trying to dodge conscription. The debate then raised the question of why black Americans felt effectively disenfranchised.