This book has dealt with the trajectory of four remarkable scholars in Brazil, especially in Salvador da Bahia. We have seen how carefully they prepared their field trips in Brazil, which would correspond to the most extended period of fieldwork in their career abroad for all of them. We have also seen how their curiosity for Brazil was nurtured by the hope to find there, if not a race-free heaven, then at least a society that had a less acute and violent variant of racism than in the US in those days. However, their ethnographic sensibility was also informed by the canon in their discipline: sociology, and linguistic and cultural anthropology. Despite a sometimes-similar focus and the fact that they shared, at least in part, the same cohort of informants, their methods, type of fieldwork, questions they raised and networks were quite divergent. In the first three chapters of this book, the chronological and comparative description of the intertwined journeys of our four scholars have emphasized parallels, shared moments and spaces, tensions and joint views among them. Their experiences in Brazil and Bahia were similar but also showed that academic status, skin colour and personal political agendas profoundly affected how they perceived social facts and how the social environment perceived them. However, if all this impacted on the position of the individual scholars and the place from which they spoke, their discipline – with its style, jargon and canon –strongly influenced the way they fashioned their fieldwork and came to their conclusions. Here the point is that Lorenzo, Franklin, Frances and Melville were not just interpreters, subject to their discipline, but also an active part of the whole.

Their research in Bahia was undoubtedly part of a specific historical moment, which related to the successful encounter between a local or regional modernist agenda and the international yearning for safe havens in a world tormented by racial segregation, first, and the horrors of WWII, later. The four scholars benefited from the Good Neighbor Policy, which provided the resources for such research for the first time. Still, they were pathbreakers and each carried out their research in their own innovative way. Their experience in Bahia would have a lasting impact on the future of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-American and African studies in the US. It would also contribute to paving the way for the transformation of Bahia into an ideal field station for ethnographic training in the tropics.

The construction of Bahia as a perfect research site has been an almost century-long process, which started in the mid-1930s and continues today. It has been a process that has been affected by local or regional political and intellectual agendas and transnational perspectives and projects. It has been the nexus of plans and projects developed in Brazil, the US and France, on some occasions (Merkel 2022). It has been not only a “macro” phenomenon, however, since, as we have seen throughout this book, it has also had myriad “micro” dimensions and episodes. This is where individual trajectories, emotions and sensibilities have come to the fore in making the multilayered entanglement I have tried to detail.

At this point, I owe an apology. I have focused on only some episodes of the narrative, hopefully exemplary ones, in this book. The complete reconstruction of the flows and networks involved in the exchanges described would be a much broader and altogether different project, which would require an alternative methodology based on collective curatorship, interdisciplinary collaboration and crowd-sharing. As it is, the experiences of our four scholars in Brazil do not lend themselves to stern conclusions on centres and peripheries, as I was inclined to draw before this research. Nonetheless, they shed new light on the often-subtle dynamics through which relationships of power and authority work in the social sciences and through which coloniality is constructed from within and without in Brazil.

The condition of coloniality has led to severe limitations for developing cutting-edge and internationally recognized research in the social sciences in Bahia. In fact, the work of the four individuals in question highlights a double tension. On the one hand, Bahia – its exotic landscape and tropical popular culture – impacted on social scientists from the outside, who were primarily, though not exclusively, foreigners. Furthermore, several themes and categories that were elaborated based on their fieldwork or impressions gathered in Bahia would later influence Afro-Brazilian, Afro-American and even African studies in the US. On the other hand, the presence, resources and networks of these scholars “from the outside” impacted on Bahia, especially its intellectual climate, the Candomblé community and the conditions for producing scientific knowledge.

Until recently, Melville Herskovits was undoubtedly the author with the strongest and most lasting impact on the Brazilian social sciences – at least until the eighties. Turner and Frazier may never have supervised a Brazilian student, but MJH was an excellent professor and supervisor, often fatherly, to a few critical Brazilian scholars. His influence faded somewhat in Brazil during the 1970s, but in the US it was revamped in the same decade due to three factors. First, the advent of a feminist perspective on family organization fed into Herskovits’ perception of the matrifocal black family as a positive asset and an element of African survival. Let us consider the conclusion of the famous and seminal review of the literature on the black family in the Americas by MacDonald and MacDonald (1978):

The cultural materialist approach [that is, that of MJH] is the most illuminating of the theories brought forward by recent works because it takes into account the past as well as the present and the political and economic as well as the cultural. The prevalence of adaptive kindred among poor blacks in the New World combined in a unique syndrome with frequently impermanent unions, frequent matrifocality, wide-spread child fostering, emphasis on consanguine rather than affinal bonds and great reliance on fictive kinship, demonstrate the survival – and the survival value – of refashioned West African ethnic traditions. (MacDonald and MacDonald 1978: 33)¹

Second, Herskovits’ perspective, best teased out in The Myth of the Negro Past, that “the millions of African who were dragged to the New World were not blank slates upon which European civilization would write at will” (Mintz 1990:xviii), suited the theoretical and empirical premises of the social history of slavery and its culture that started to be developed in the US and in Brazil in the 1970s. These new perspectives in the study of slavery also scrutinized conflict and negotiation in the slave condition, emphasized agency on the part of the enslaved against all odds, and did not make room for moral annihilation or slavery as “social death”, as Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson put it in his classic, Slavery and Social Death (1982).

Third, in the years after the heydays of the Civil Rights Movement, the African survival approach fit relatively smoothly into the move to create Black studies and change the academic curriculum towards a more tolerant view of ethnic heritage. The paradigm that was centred on the pursuit and celebration of African survivals rhymed with multiculturalism in US education better than any race and class analysis – pace Frazier – would ever have been able to do. As Walter Jackson pointed out, as particularism and universalism were both tendencies in Boasian anthropology, with Ruth Benedict opposing Herskovits, so were they also in black consciousness:

With the reemergence of black nationalism [in the US] in the late 1960s, there was a reawakening of interest in African traditions among Afro-Americans and a reexamination of the whole issue of African traditions. Anthropologists turned to Herskovits’ writing as a starting point for investigations of Afro-American cultures (Whitten and Szwed eds. 1969). Historians found in his emphasis on slave resistance and reinterpretation of African traditions a way of discovering the world of early Afro-Americans. By the end of the 1970s, it was rare to find an anthropologist or historian who would argue that slavery had “stripped” blacks of African culture. Through a complex political and intellectual change process, Herskovits’ work received its greatest recognition in the years after his death.

(Jackson 1986:123–4)

However, lasting impact is subject to alternating fortunes. Over the past decade, Turner has been rediscovered by the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institute and others; the intellectually and politically tormented Frazier, the character I feel most empathy with, has been observed in a different light, as a race- and class-conscious cosmopolitan and engaged intellectual. Turner was remembered, until recently, primarily for his work among the Gullah. His research on Brazil was ignored. A different and ironic destiny had been reserved for Frazier: after his death, he was mostly quoted in association with the so-called crisis of the black family. After the political use of such moral notions in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), and later in the jargon of the civil servants involved in the War on Poverty, Franklin Frazier, often in the company of Oscar Lewis, the inventor of the term “culture of poverty” (whose career had been severely constrained by McCarthyism, which declared him left wing), was declared persona non grata in the scholarship on race relations in the US and labelled a conservative.²

What makes Frazier’s position more relevant in Brazil is that the contention between him and Herskovits, on the origin or essence of the black family, anticipated a tension within the field of Afro-Brazilian studies that would become more overt just a few years later. In the mid-1950s, the area of Afro-Brazilian studies would split into “Estudos afro-brasileiros” and “Estudos do negro” (which later became the “study of race relations”). The latter group decried the folklorization of the Negro and the absence of focus on the “real Negro” by the so-called culturalist generation, although it recognized the authority of this generation in terms of the study of black cultural expressions. In the study of race relations, the leading critics of the culturalist view were Luis Costa Pinto, Florestan Fernandes, Guerreiro Ramos and Édison Carneiro. Later this group would be joined by Roger Bastide, Otavio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and others. From the 1970s, the debate ended up being also an opposition between quantitative research and ethnographic research on race relations carried out in Rio, São Paulo and the South, as well as between ethnographic research on black cultural expressions, mostly Afro-Brazilian religions and sometimes music genres, mostly conducted in Bahia and, to a lesser extent, in Recife and São Luis. From the late 1980s, with the celebration of 100 years of abolition, redemocratization and the growth of new forms of black activism, things would change again. However, this shift is beyond the scope of this book.

At this point, even though my sympathy and preference for Frazier are undeniable, I need to be fair to Herskovits. As said, he was a gatekeeper, but one with a mission, from whom black activism and new perspectives on African heritage benefited at times. Since Gershenhorn’s book on MJH (2004) and Patterson’s (2001) and Stocking’s (2002) on US anthropology, in association with the trend for a scrutiny of anthropological authority more generally, there has been a profound review of the intellectual and political power and authority of anthropologists such as MJH.³ This reappraisal led to the documentary, Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, directed by Vincent Brown⁴ and produced by the US Public Broadcast System in 2010, and to Jean Allman’s scouring presidential lecture, “#Herskovits must fall?”, at the 2018 ASA conference (Allman 2020). Allman scrutinized the role of Herskovits as the founding father of African studies and his influential role in the African Studies Association – of which he was the first president. Indeed, Herskovits represented the epitome of the pre-WWII US anthropologist before access to the discipline became less elitist, thanks to the GI Bill of Rights. This Bill, which among others created educational opportunities for returning veterans, meant that the number of anthropologists in the US increased and that fieldwork opportunities for a greater cohort of PhD candidates had to be created. Again, Brazil became the key region in Latin America, possibly only after Mexico, which was perceived as more backward and culturally traditional (especially the State of Yucatán in Mexico, a bit like the State of Bahia in Brazil), and has historically and emotionally been much more closely connected to the US, also in terms of a fieldwork destination for US anthropologists.

It is, however, not only a question of number but also of style. In my writings on the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s cabinet of curiosities and the making of ethnography in Latin America in the years 1890–1910, I speak of home (or family) science (Sansone 2020, 2022). Even though the US in the 1930s and 1940s showed a much higher degree of institutionalization of the social sciences than Brazil in the same decades, and Italy around 1900, in many ways one could use the term family science to classify Melville and Frances Herskovits’ practice of anthropology: a specific and entirely personalized way of managing the paradigm centred on the notion of Africanisms or African survivals and their intellectual configuration (Yelvington 2011). They were a couple surrounded by a loyal group of acolytes composed of PhD students and former PhD students then at the beginning of their academic career.⁵ Their connections across the New World were developed in a context of generally sparse intellectual environments (with a very restricted group of intellectuals and social scientists to relate to), in small countries with (much) less developed centres and opportunities for the practice of anthropology (Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti, Trinidad and Bahia). In Haiti, they had the support of the network of Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) and in Suriname, they were assisted by Rudolf Van Lier (1914–1987), a colonial administrator and clever self-taught historian. Frazier and Turner had even less anthropological practice. Brazil was their first important fieldwork experience abroad. The lack of, or thin, experience of the four scholars was an important factor in the style of their fieldwork in Bahia. In Brazil, even though the teaching of social sciences in universities was still in its dawn, the four encountered there a denser intellectual environment and, if only for the sheer size of the country, had to face a more complex and segmented society with much more internal diversity. Brazil, moreover, was in those days for Herskovits and his academic-political plans a sort of cultural and racial alter ego of the US. His visit to the country was also motivated by the GNP.

In any case, in these flows, when considered more generally, the global South was almost always at the receiving end while the global North was the giving end. After World War II the situation changed, as we have seen. The key question is to what extent and in which concrete aspects did these changes make a real difference in Bahia. Was the new stage that started in 1950 conducive to better conditions for the production of knowledge and the empowerment of the then young Brazilian anthropology? Or was it that, in Brazil, this discipline was born in a context where coloniality and dependency were still very strong, and such unequal conditions of scholarship would persist?⁶

It makes no sense, and is unfair, to dissect MJH’s trajectory without at least casting an eye also on what occurred afterwards, in the successive stages of scholarly exchange between the US and Brazil, especially Bahia. One crucial point of distinction concerning Herskovits, compared to later generations of US anthropologists, was that he had a life plan and a project for the development of Afro-American studies and, later, African studies. He would go a long way towards achieving his aim. He stayed on at Northwestern from the beginning of his career until his death, a timespan of almost thirty years. In recognition, the outstanding Africana library of that university is named the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.

Generations of US anthropologists, for reasons related to the functioning of US academia and professional careers therein, have since been much more mobile. For example, Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris decided to move from Columbia to the University of Florida at Gainesville, which was becoming an important centre in Latin American studies. On the one hand, this movement of academics has been a hurdle in developing stable interinstitutional exchanges between Brazil and the US.⁷ On the other hand, more and more opportunities have arisen for individual North–South projects, for instance, due to the popularization of Fulbright grants for US and Brazilian scholars. Such a situation often creates opportunities for win-win relations between scholars in Brazil and in the US on an individual basis, but much less so for institution-building and the much-needed internationalization of graduate studies and research more generally in Bahia.

Whether Herskovits was a conservative or a liberal is often misconstrued. From what we read in this book, we could easily gather that he passed as a liberal in his days. However, this liberal stance can become more conservative when it concerns the “Other” at home. Herskovits often mistrusted African-American scholars on the grounds of their supposed lack of scientific objectivity (Anderson 2008; Gershenhorn 2004). He also doubted the “Others” abroad in the tropical alter ego of the US, Brazil, whom he considered, for different reasons, self-seeking and not entirely trustworthy.⁸ My position on the liberal vs conservative stand of Herskovits is ambivalent and shifting. On the one hand, in line with James Fernandez (1990), one of his last students, I do not consider Herskovits a conservative: “He considered himself to be – and I think he was – a humanist and a humanitarian” (Fernandez 1990:141). Cultural relativism did not, for him, suspend the requirement of shared humanity (1990:142).

The source of his cultural relativism was scientific observation. Throughout his career, Herskovits was extremely active in carrying anthropology into the public arena, speaking at churches, social groups and schools of all kinds about the fruits of anthropological wisdom (1990:147). Yet, distancing was a requisite of world citizenship, as it was perhaps the only sure guarantee of world order (1990:149).⁹ With Redfield, MJH believed that cultural relativism was not a doctrine of ethical indifference. But at the same time he was very cautious about action anthropology. So, while Herskovits emphasized the practical aspect of relativism, he was hesitant to engage in active advocacy on social issues because of the ethnocentric values that were often implicit or explicit in any action or advocacy programme (Fernandez 1990:151). It was a long-standing dilemma for Herskovits, who was a public man, frequently speaking on anthropological issues that were relevant to racism, American policy in the world and particularly in Africa (1990:150). In his earlier years, he had confronted Malinowski’s suggestions that anthropology could assist colonial administrators and help them work better in understanding the locals. Herskovits’ strong, persistent, decades-long attack on racism must still be relevant today, but perhaps even more relevant and revelatory was his tendency to see racism in the context of a set of relationships in the world – what we would now call the world system – which was egregiously intolerant and essentially imperialist in nature (1990:158).

On the other hand, unfortunately, as a neat result of Herskovits’ staunch aversion to action research and his firm belief that emotional distance from the object of research was key – even though we have seen throughout this book that he could be quite emotional about the object of his fieldwork in Brazil – he tended to mistrust the small, but growing number of black scholars active in the field of African-American studies and, later, African studies. There is enough evidence of it regarding Zora Hurston, Du Bois and even Turner and Frazier (see Gershenhorn 2004), to indicate that he was a de facto conservative force in the US academy. At the same time, Herskovits, who certainly was a gatekeeper and often unfair to black scholars in the US, was considered a facilitator in Bahia – in terms of resources, access to literature, political protection for Candomblé houses through his prestige and sheer presence, and introductions to international connections – and even one of the patrons of Brazilian anthropology. It is true that all the Brazilian students who managed to obtain a MA or PhD grant through his intervention were white, but they all had fond memories of Mel, as a dedicated, caring and even friendly supervisor.

Let me add that, predictably, over the last twenty years while researching for this book I have come to realize that the field of Afro-Brazilian studies has always been more complex than I imagined at first. It does not lend itself to straightforward generalization and sweeping statements, especially when you add an international Brazil-US comparative perspective – which still requires a lot of methodological refinement. Nonetheless, whatever conclusion is drawn on the transnational dimension of Afro-Brazilian studies, from the moment of its inception in the academic establishment in the mid-1930s, requires a critical assessment of power and the positioning of knowledge in the US-Brazil academic exchange. This assessment can lead to embarrassing discoveries – for instance, regarding the complex and unequal relationship between Bahia’s local contacts (or gatekeepers), such as Édison Carneiro and José Valladares, and American professors who visited Brazil and Bahia. The former had the local knowledge and could assist the foreigners in their fieldwork, while the latter, especially when they were white, had grants to offer or connections to American universities, which, among others, Arthur Ramos and Valladares made use of.

I wonder how the gathering of information and the picture of Brazil provided by these key informants was affected by the unequal basis of this intellectual exchange. I think that most of these major Brazilian intellectuals, then and perhaps even now, tended to tell American visitors exactly what they wanted to know and “discover”. In those days, those visitors were looking for a racial democracy in Brazil to counteract the racial segregation in the United States, and they were given “evidence” of it. In the 1990s, American researchers portrayed Brazil as a house of horrors (modernity had gone wrong), and they were given “evidence” that Brazil was a racial hell. With the advent of the Lula era, things changed again, and Brazil started anew to be represented as a positive example of the struggle against racial inequalities (Sansone 2011). With the Bolsonaro government, the country became a new hell. An equal relationship between US and Brazilian scholars in this field is still wanting.

The transnationalism of Afro-Brazilian studies was born complex, with tensions relating to colour/race, local/international, North-South, North and South Brazil, and has been increasingly so. The field, especially regarding anthropology, has been entangled with cultural, racial and political agendas that have frequently originated elsewhere. In many ways, we can even speak of an entangled history (Siegel 2009:x–xiv), whereby biographies, emotions, individual and collective projects of emancipation from racism and colonialism, and academic and political agendas are constructed in a transnational fashion and the local can be part of the global. In this process, as a representation of the flaws of the systems of race relations and racial hierarchies, Brazil and the US are the mirror image of each other. African Americans read race relations in Brazil to their political advantage and, similarly, Afro Brazilians read race relations in the US (which they get to know indirectly because few can travel to the US) in ways that make sense of their struggle against racism in Brazil. Misunderstandings, outright mistaken interpretation and even absurdities and funny translation flaws can be part of such mirror reading, which tends to be inherently comparative and thus exaggerated, as Seigel (2009:208–239) shows. In this respect, it seems necessary to embed, much more than I have been able to do here, such entanglement in the context of the reception of “the ideas out of place” and that come “from the outside” in Brazil – a phenomenon that has generated quite a scholarship of its own (see Schwarz 1992).

In terms of the international flows from North to South, we have seen that there has been a trend moving from scholars arriving for individual research projects to summer school scholars joining a particular programme,¹⁰ with quite a few intermediate stages. Generally speaking, the numbers of foreign visitors (also from other parts of Brazil and, more recently, the rest of Afro-Latin America) have become increasingly bigger, and the community of scholars is becoming less elitist and more culturally and ethnically diverse. Nonetheless, although Bahia remains a magic place for research and field experience, a wellspring for an ethnographer, it is still no home for institution-building or the empowerment of local anthropologists.¹¹ Power imbalance was and still is part and parcel of such entanglement. Within this transnational exchange, there are hierarchies, giving and receiving ends, centres and peripheries, haves and have-nots, global South and global North, racial tensions, imperial projects and attitudes, and the coloniality of much of the Brazilian intellectual elite. Bahia’s subaltern position in the social sciences is created not only from without but also from within. To a lesser extent, such entanglement with the US has also concerned African studies carried out in Brazil.¹²

In more recent times, in intellectual and popular discourses about race relations in Brazil, United States-based scholars and representations of American race relations and black politics have played a significant role, whether negative or, more recently, positive, as an example to be followed in terms of affirmative action and even identity politics. One can argue that the field of ethnic and racial studies historically has been transnational as well as troublesome. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant contended that this is primarily the result of a more recent internationalization – or even Americanization – of the academic canons from the 1990s (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999). The reaction of several Brazilian scholars to the accusation of being “Americanized”, not exactly viewed as a compliment across Latin America, was very lively with a heated discussion on the “import” of US ideas of race to Brazil and what to do to reverse racial discrimination and the kind of racism and antiracism that would characterize Brazil. What was at stake in the discussion was the condition for the production of knowledge on race relations in Brazil and whether that could take place without bias when most of the funding came from US foundations, especially Ford, Mellon, MacArthur and Rockefeller. The debate on the acritical import to Brazil of racial theory developed in the US context, sparked by Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article, besides reflecting a century-old discussion on the reception of foreign ideas by the Brazilian intellectual elites, needs to be historicized. It has much deeper historical roots than is often assumed, right down to the making of the Brazilian nation.¹³

Brazil’s relationship with the US continues to be important but painful (especially when financial resources are scarce) and is subject to the whimsies of national politics (depending on who is the president of the US or Brazil). Whether black or non-black, local scholars in Bahia have been tied up in complex agendas around resources, emotions and identity politics. For several scholars based in the US, black and non-black, Field Station Bahia has been a rewarding and convenient location. US-based scholars here had the advantages of exoticism plus the authority that derived from the value of their hard currency. Here they could afford a lifestyle they could not in the US, and relative comfort that is hard to get in Africa. As a Senegalese colleague once put it to me: “La Bahia c’est l’Afrique possible.”