The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective PDF
Preview The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective
The Birth of African-American Culture : An title: Anthropological Perspective author: Mintz, Sidney Wilfred.; Price, Richard publisher: Beacon Press isbn10 | asin: 0807009172 print isbn13: 9780807009178 ebook isbn13: 9780807009161 language: English Blacks--Caribbean Area--History, Slavery-- Caribbean Area--History, Acculturation-- subject Caribbean Area--History, Caribbean Area-- Race relations. publication date: 1992 lcc: F2191.B55M56 1992eb ddc: 305.8960729 Blacks--Caribbean Area--History, Slavery-- Caribbean Area--History, Acculturation-- subject: Caribbean Area--History, Caribbean Area-- Race relations. Page iii The Birth of African-American Culture An Anthropological Perspective Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price Page iv Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 Beacon Press Books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 1976 by the Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Inc. Preface © 1992 by Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 04 03 02 01 00 7 8 9 10 11 Text design by Karen Savary Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, 1922 [Anthropological approach to the Afro-American past] The birth of African-American culture: an anthropological perspective / Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price. p. cm. Originally published: An anthropological approach to the Afro- American past. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, © 1976. (ISHI occasional papers in social change: no. 2). With new pref. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8070-0916-4 (cloth).ISBN 0-8070-0917-2 (paper) 1. BlacksCaribbean AreaHistory. 2. SlaveryCaribbean Area History. 3. AcculturationCaribbean AreaHistory. 4. Caribbean AreaRace relations. I. Price, Richard, 1941 . II. Title F2191.B55M56 1992 305.8960729dc20 91-41020 CIP Page v Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 7 The Encounter Model 2 23 Sociocultural Contact and Flow in Slave Societies 3 38 The Slave Sector 4 42 The Beginnings of African-American Societies and Cultures 5 52 Retentions and Survivals 6 61 Kinship and Sex Roles 7 81 Conclusion Notes 85 Bibliography 105 Index 117 Page vii Preface What follows was written in 19721973, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights struggle and the swift establishment of Afro- American and Black Studies programs in U.S. universities, part of the veritable explosion of general interest (and publication) in the sphere of Black History. 1 It was intended both as credo and as primer. We were troubled by certain polarizations emerging in Afro-American Studies. It seemed that ideological preoccupations might deflect the scholarly quest charted by such pioneers as W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson in the United States, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, Nina Rodrigues and Arthur Ramos in Brazil, and Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, and carried forward by the generation of Melville J. Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier, Zora Neale Hurston, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Roger Bastide, Romulo Lachatañeré, and others. We therefore focused on strategies or approaches for studying the African-American past, rather than presenting the results of such studies to date, with the hope of encouraging historians and others entering the field Page viii to employ conceptual models that did full justice to the complexity of their subject. The argument aimed to build on the insights of Herskovits and his peers. But it was greeted in some quarters by afor ussurprising hostility, accompanied by the charge that it denied the existence of an African heritage in the Americas. It seemed that many such reactions originated in a desire to polarize Afro-Americanist scholarship into a flatly "for" or "against" position in regard to African cultural retentions. For instance, Mervyn Alleyne dubbed us "creation theorists,'' charging us with exaggerated attention to the cultural creativity of enslaved Africans in the New World; yet his own book reaches conclusions close to our own. 2 Daniel Crowley castigated Sally and Richard Price's Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest, which develops the conceptual approach in a particular historical context, as "badly overstat[ing] a good case."3 Joey Dillard found the authors "not completely on the side of the angels," their arguments "controversial if not positively heretical."4 Though such theological discourse is less common today, the contention continues. Joseph Holloway, after asserting that the effectiveness of the book "is attributable to its theoretical framework, applied methodology, and analysis of New World Africanisms," concludes that "Its limitation is its failure to look at African acculturation and retentions outside the Caribbean."5 A recent exchange between folklorist Charles Joyner and historian C. Vann Woodward suggests that the battle line is still drawn in about the same place. In an entry in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Joyner argued in a vein similar to our own: The process of linguistic change provides a model for explaining other aspects of the transformation from
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