Facing the Flames: The Herskovitses, Trinidad, and the Anthropological Imagination

July 17, 2023 (last updated on November 17, 2023)
Ryan Jobson

Read Ryan Jobson in American Ethnologist. “Facing the Flames: The Herskovitses, Trinidad, and the Anthropological Imagination.”

In June 1939, Melville Herskovits arrived in Trinidad. Already committed to his eponymous thesis of African cultural survivals, he identified the rural municipality of Toco as a site to observe “African ways of life … in greatest purity.” The oil field strikes that gripped the island just two years earlier received only a passing mention in his monograph, Trinidad Village. This essay meditates on Herskovits's field notes to consider how a Boasian cultural paradigm compelled Herskovits to exclude the oil field labor from his study.

ARTICLE LINK: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.13189