From Afro-American anthropology to the ethnography of literacy: Conversations with John F. Szwed

This article presents an interview conducted with John F. Szwed—an anthropologist, musician, and writer, who has worked at universities including Columbia, Yale, Temple, New York, and the University of Pennsylvania where he was director of the Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE) from 1969–1974. CUE was arguably the first major research center focusing on ethnographic fieldwork in the city since the ‘Chicago School’ of Urban Ecology began fifty years before, although Szwed’s perspective was more theoretically informed by the Afro-American anthropology or African diaspora studies tradition of Melville J. Herskovits. The interview traces a trajectory through Szwed’s work, leading from updated research in Afro-American anthropology, into the founding of CUE, and onwards through anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to literature and music which informed an influential conference paper of Szwed’s, concerning the ‘Ethnography of Literacy.’ (Afro-American anthropology, urban ethnography, sociolinguistics, writing, reading, literacies)