Melville J. Herskovits on the African and Jewish diasporas: Race, culture and modern anthropology

Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits' (1895-1963) work helped to shape how African-Americans in the United States were viewed and viewed themselves. By 1930, he challenged the prevailing view that "Negro" life-ways were only an incomplete and pathological version of mainstream American culture. In contrast, he contributed a scholarly foundation to the claim that elements of African culture had survived in the Americas. His work supported the New Negro movement and the emergence of pan-African identity. Curiously, howev er, Herskovits argued that the Jews, another diasporic group, had no distin ctive culture nor were they a people. This paper reviews the development of Herskovits' views in relation to: (1) concepts of race and culture in mode rn anthropology; (2) public controversies concerning assimilation versus pa rticularism of blacks and Jews in the 1920s and 1930s; and (3) Herskovits' Jewish identity.