Herskovits on Religious Syncretism

    From the 1930s to the 1960s, the dominant view in American social science presumes African Americans discarded their remnants of African culture. However, this view is greatly challenged by Herskovits. In his classic — The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), he argues that blacks in the United States retain African cultural elements in their music and art, social structure and family life, religion and speech patterns and they are not completely assimilated in American population.                      

          Herskovits credits Arthur Ramos as one of the first to employ the concept of syncretism to account for the identification of African deities with Catholic saints in Brazilian Candomblé. However, it is him who greatly promotes the study of African religious syncretism in scholarship in the 1930s and 1940s. When The Myth of the Negro Past was published for the first time in 1941, as Sidney W. Mintz points out, “it was a work almost without precedent” and “that the field in which he was a pioneer, the Afro-American tradition, was nearly a perfect vacuum at the time reflects the way society conditions the insights of the social sciences.”  Like Mintz, Andrew Apter also believes that Herkovits has made great contribution to the study of African religious syncretism. According to him, “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 of West African and New World cultures.”  Herskovits of course is not the first scholar who firstly pays attention to the Afro-American religious syncretism, but his studies on it encourage more scholars to explore it, which greatly promotes the rise of religious syncretism study in American scholarship.