Herskovits and Hurston in Haiti

Abstract (English)

The long US military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and attendant political and economic transformations in the Caribbean country resulted in a spate of cultural production suffused with ideological positionings. These ranged from notorious “Zombie” films shown to US audiences to lurid travelogues purporting to expose the atavistic savagery behind the Vodou religion that used racist tropes that had the effect of justifying US intervention and control. In Haiti, there was a literary flowering with the Indigéniste movement – drawing inspiration from, and with connections to, writers of the Harlem Renaissance – emphasizing noiriste themes, imagining an African past. Ethnologists, with their own agendas – scientific, nationalist, and otherwise – were prominent in this historical process. Into this context anthropologists from the United States entered. One was Boasian anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), who was in the process of formulating, in the midst of a transnational intellectual network, his own research paradigm to understand the African diaspora in the Americas. His Life in a Haitian Valley (1937) refined his focus on what he called acculturation and religious syncretism. Another was the African American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a former student of Franz Boas and research assistant to Herskovits, whose 11-month fieldwork (albeit interrupted) resulted in Tell My Horse (1938), an ethnography of Vodou that straddles the line between anthropology and literature. This paper compares the conditions of the production of Herskovits’s and Hurston’s works by analyzing their theoretical assumptions, differing research methods and engagement with Haitian society, and their somewhat contrasting ethnographic descriptions, to understand how anthropological knowledge is constituted.