Herskovits's Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora

Diaspora 1:3 1991 Herskovits's Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora Andrew Apter University of Chicago It is customary, if not mandatory, in contemporary African diaspora studies to invoke the pioneering spirit of Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), whose lifework was dedicated to the repossession of Africa's heritage in the New World.1 Not that Herskovits was the first to engage in such research. Others before him included W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, as well as Jean Price-Mars ofHaiti, Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, and—more his contemporaries than predecessors —Zora Neale Hurston and the Brazilian ethnologists René Ribeiro, Arthur Ramos, and Gilberto Freyre.2 But Herskovits more than any other scholar posed the African-American connection as a theoretical problem that, in the service of a progressive if intellectually circumscribed political agenda, demanded systematic research into an unprecedented range ofWest African and New World cultures. It is not my aim to praise a great ancestor, whose flaws and limitations are as legendary as his virtues, but to assess the relevance ofhis theoretical program to contemporary African-American research. In particular, I will focus on his syncretic paradigm, which continues—even among those who disavow it as crudely essentialist or unwittingly racist—to inform the current renaissance in studies of the African diaspora. There is much that seems wrong, misconceived, and simply outdated in Herskovits's syncretic paradigm when it is evaluated against the current standards of a more critical anthropology. It is not difficult to see how Herskovits essentialized tribal origins in Africa, perpetuated myths ofcultural purity in the New World, overlooked class formation, and developed passive notions of acculturation and cultural resistance, all ofwhich distorted the ethnographic record under the guise ofan imputed scientific objectivity. But there is also something elusively tenacious about the concept of syncretism . Even when critically deconstructed, it somehow slips back into any meaningful discussion ofAfricanity in the New World. And even as we recognize that "Africa" has been ideologically constructed to create imagined communities in the black Americas—as Guinée in Haitian Vodoun, or the nations of Cuban Santería and Brazilian 235 Diaspora 1:3 1991 Candomblé—such invented identities cannot be totally severed from their cultural analogues (dare we say origins?) in West Africa. The goal of this essay is to rethink syncretism in a way that does justice to both sides of this methodological divide: to the inventedness (and inventiveness) of New World African identities as well as to their cultural and historical associations with West African peoples. This resolution requires greater clarity about just what it is we are comparing , contextualizing, and historicizing on both sides ofthe Atlantic , an exercise that gives a new twist to Herskovits's ethnohistorical method and owes its revisionary strategy to some critical lessons that I learned from the Yoruba in Nigeria.3 It is perhaps noteworthy that recent studies of "Africanisms" in the Americas, focusing on particular deities like Ogun, on religions like Santería and Vodoun, or even on transatlantic aesthetic and philosophical complexes, have effectively erased syncretism from their lexicons.4 These excellent studies indeed reveal that there is much more to such New World cultural forms than a blending oftwo distinct traditions into a hybrid form. Scholarly emphasis has shifted to disclose the nuanced complexities of the historical conditions in which African identities are remembered and forgotten, fractured and fused, invoked, possessed, repossessed, transposed, and reconfigured within rural peasantries, urban centers, immigrant communities, national arenas, even at transnational conferences on, for example, the Yoruba-based Orisà tradition.5 Consistent with this move is a shift away from cultural form toward cultural performance and practice, to traditions in the making rather than those already made, preserved, or retained. These developments are welcome as part of the positive trend in cultural studies, but it is equally clear that nothing as powerful as the syncretic paradigm has arisen from its ashes, resulting in a compelling crisis of representation . In brief, what is Africa's place in the New World? Indeed, what is "Africa"?6 Rather than address this rapidly growing literature, I will return to the essentials of Herskovits's syncretic paradigm in order to...