Turner, Franklin and Herskovits in the Gantois House of Candomble: The Transnational Origin of Afro-Brazilian Studies.

THIS ARTICLE starts with a double statement. In the US, African Studies, as a proper field of academic study, originated within the field of African-American Studies. Brazil and especially the state of Bahia, which has the highest percentage of people of African descent in that country, took a key place in this process. The style, jargon, priorities, fashions, and methodology of African Studies and African-American Studies were therefore interrelated, especially in the period between 1930 and 1960. That is when African decolonization started on a large scale and new research agendas were set. The second statement is that there is no history of anthropology and related disciplines outside the geopolitics of knowledge. This posits that in intellectual exchange there is a global North and a global South, with giving and receiving ends, and that the position of the scholar in this exchange reveals his or her approach and agenda. The following text hopes to corroborate both statements. (1) Between 1941 and 1943 the city of Salvador, Bahia became the site of the battle between two different perceptions of black integration in the US and of the place of Africa in this process. E. Franklin Frazier, the most famous black sociologist of the time, who had already published The Negro Family in the United States, (2) was locked into an argument with the equally famous, white and Jewish anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the "origins" of the structure of the so-called black family. To make things even more complex, both centered their contention on fieldwork done among the same informants: the povo de santo (the members, literally, "people of saint") of the same Candombli house of worship in Salvador--the prestigious and "traditional" Gantois terreiro, of the Ketu/Yoruba nation. Between Herskovits and Frazier was the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, who would later publish his seminal book on African influences in Gullah, the language spoken by the people of the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the US. (3) Turner was a friend of Frazier's, but his scholarly theories were closer to Herskovits'.