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From New International, Vol. XIV No. 3, March 1948, p. 94.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Trinidad Village
by Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits
Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, $4.75
Trinidad Village is the latest in a series of field studies on Negro cultures in the New World, made by Dr. Herskovits, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, and Frances S. Herskovits.
Some of the dates served as illustrative material in the earlier study by Dr. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, published in 1941 as the first monograph under the Myrdal study. That book documented the author’s thesis that there are significant and enriching survivals of the ancestral culture of Africa in the culture of the Negro in the U.S., and proposed (in line with Dr. Herskovits’s method since 1930) that the proper field for research on this thesis is Negro life throughout the New World.
The authors point out that a comparative study of rural Trinidad and the South of the United States is important because in both of these areas aboriginal tradition could not revive as a functioning reality. Both Trinidad and the U.S. are also predominantly Protestant in religion. The village studied is Toco, in the northeastern part of the island. The population is almost entirely Negro and the region is untouched by industrialization. The main problem is subsistence. The structure of society in all major essentials is largely European.
To retrace the detailed findings would be interesting – it made good reading – but suffice it to say, the Africanisms found are recognized as minor retentions or reinterpretations of African forms. This was true in relation to the economy, division of labor between men and women, food habits, as well as in the relation between the sexes, the role of the ancestors, etc. Africanisms have persisted to a greater extent in religious life, folklore and music.
Much attention is given to the Shouters, a Baptist sect, which represents a transition between African and European forms. The Shango cult is not present in Toco, although it exists elsewhere in Trinidad. The appendix to the volume gives Notes on Shango Worship to illustrate this transition in another form. While Calypso music is not treated extensively, it is pointed out that the Calypso songs follow a pattern fundamental in Trinidad music, a pattern illustrated with local songs.
Perhaps most significant is the placing of Trinidad next to the U.S. at the end of the scale showing the least retention of the African background. It is easier to accept that these two areas are “parallel” than it is to accept that Toco is “without any more Africanisms than would be found in almost any rural Negro community in southern United States.” This latter statement is a part of Dr. Herskovits’s unproved thesis.
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