Founding Anthropology at Northwestern
The legacy of Melville Herskovits
By Robert Launay
The Department of Anthropology at Northwestern has long been marked by the personality of its founder, Melville Herskovits. Herskovits came to Northwestern in 1927 as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department. It was more than ten years later, after his promotion to full professor, that he founded the Anthropology Department in 1938. Like many other pioneering anthropologists of his generation, Herskovits was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University. Unlike many of his peers who followed their mentor by specializing in the study of indigenous American cultures, as Boas had, Herskovits focused his attention on the study of Africa and the African diaspora in the New World. He conducted field work in Suriname and Haiti on New World cultures that maintained important African influences before writing a two-volume monograph on Dahomey, a prominent West African kingdom in modern Benin. In 1941, he published the pathbreaking book The Myth of the Negro Past, an impassioned refutation of the fallacious idea that Black Americans effectively had no history by demonstrating the extent to which American Black culture was infused with African elements.
Herskovits’s first doctoral student was William Bascom, who received his Ph.D. in 1939, in the first year the department was founded. Bascom, whose work centered on a detailed account of the intricate Ifa system of divination among Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, continued as a faculty member of the department. For the next two decades, the department produced the majority of Africanist Anthropologists in the United States. In 1948, at a time when area studies were becoming increasingly prominent, Herskovits founded the Program of African Studies at Northwestern, one of the first in the nation. The Program, which involved extensive participation from other departments, especially Political Science, History, and Linguistics, helped underscore the interdisciplinary contributions of Anthropology to the University at large. Indeed, in 1957-58, Herskovits was instrumental in founding the African Studies Association and served as its first president.
Because of Herskovits’ influence, the University as a whole and especially the Department of Anthropology rose to national and indeed international prominence in African Studies. Herskovits helped oversee the creation of the Africana collection in the University Library, which remains one of the most (some would even say the most) important collections of published and unpublished material about Africa in the world.
Alongside its preeminence in African Studies, the department recruited several prominent faculty members from minority communities outside Africa. Most notably, Chinese anthropologist Francis Hsu, trained in Great Britain under Bronislaw Malinowski, was hired as an assistant professor in 1947; Hsu would continue at Northwestern until his retirement, serving as department chair from 1957 to 1976. In 1953, Tewa Pueblo anthropologist Edward Dozier was initially hired as an instructor. Promoted first to Assistant and then to Associate Professor, he was the first Native American to be tenured as an anthropologist in the United States. However, he left the department for the University of Arizona in order to be closer to his home community.
Herskovits died in 1963, having lived to see most African nations accede to independence. The department continued to maintain a very strong presence in Africanist anthropology, with the addition of such important scholars as Paul Bohannon, Ronald Cohen, Mary Douglas (Avalon Professor of the Humanities) and Jane Guyer, who was also the Director of the Program of African Studies from 1994 to 2001. While a few of the graduate students trained by Herskovits were linguistic anthropologists, most notably Joseph Greenberg, it was only after Herskovits’s death that anthropology at Northwestern became a fully fledged four-field department. With the arrival of Stuart Struever (founder of the Center for American Archaeology at Kampsville, Illinois) and the subsequent recruitment of James Brown and Jane Buikstra, the foundations of the department’s archaeology and biological anthropology programs were firmly established. Today, we continue to build on the rich legacy of Herskovits, as we approach the centennial of his arrival to Northwestern.