Melville J. Herskovits

Early life, family and education

Herskovits was born to Jewish immigrants in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on September 10, 1895, and attended local public schools. He served in the United States Army Medical Corps in France during World War I. Afterward, he studied at the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1920. He moved to New York City for graduate work, earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University under the guidance of Franz Boas. His dissertation, The Cattle Complex in East Africa, investigated theories of power and authority in Africa as expressed in the ownership and raising of cattle.

Among his fellow students were future anthropologists Katherine Dunham, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Frances Shapiro. He and Shapiro married in Paris, France, in 1924. They later had a daughter, Jean Herskovits, who became a historian.

Career

In 1927, Herskovits became a full-time anthropologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 1928 and 1929 he and his wife Frances Herskovits conducted field work in Suriname, among the Saramaka (then called Bush Negroes), and jointly wrote a book about the people. In 1934, Herskovits and his wife Frances spent more than three months in the Haitian village of Mirebalais, the findings of which research he published in his 1937 book Life in a Haitian Valley.

In its time, this work was considered one of the most accurate depictions of the Haitian practice of Vodou. They conducted field work in Benin, Brazil, Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria and Trinidad. In 1938, Herskovits established the new Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. In the early 1940s, Herskovits and his wife Frances met Barbara Hadley Stein, who introduced them to Stanley J. Stein; with advice from Herskovits, Stein and Stein started recording Jongo songs.

Herskovits also influenced Alan Lomax, who collected African-American songs. In 1948, Herskovits founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies at Northwestern University, with the aid of a three-year $30,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, followed by a five-year $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1951.

The Program of African Studies was the first of its kind at a United States academic institution. The Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University, established in 1954, is the largest separate Africana collection in the world, containing more than 260,000 bound volumes. In 1957, Herskovits founded the African Studies Association and was the organization's first president.