Kevin A. Yelvington, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida
Living History; Or, The Prices Turned to History before the Historical Turn was Cool
Today, I am going to be dealing with the concept of history in its many dimensions—history as what happened, and what was said to have happened, as Rich’s student Rolph Trouillot used to say—and in the many ways that histories, now pluralized, become constituted, and how their trajectories cross in particular, you guessed it, historical conjunctures. I have in mind aspects of Rich and Sally’s histories and how they have intersected with, and comingled with, and determined, my own. If I talk about myself in what follows, it’s only to give one personal example of their tremendous influence, initially from afar.
In 1985, I went to the University of Sussex to study Development Studies and Social Anthropology for my D.Phil. degree. It was the end of the UN Decade for Women (1976-85), and I was interested in the theme of “women in development,” especially given the proliferation of women workers in worldwide maquiladoras. In preparing to do my fieldwork on women world-market factory workers in the Caribbean, it was easy to find women in Caribbean ethnographies, especially those in the wake of British sociologist T.S. Simey’s Welfare and Planning in the West Indies (1946) and Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques’s Family and Colour in Jamaica (1953).. What ensued was an endless string of ethnographies on the supposedly pathological and disorganized, not to mention dystopian and “dangerously large,” Afro-Caribbean family, and the powerful and independent Black matriarch who could choose to be legally married and raise “legitimate” children if she wanted to – a discourse that recapitulated the ex-slaveholders’ and colonial officials’ racist and classist jeremiad.
At Sussex, I turned to Sally’s Co-Wives and Calabashes. (1984) and read how, with the backdrop of the image of the Suriname Maroons in the romantic imagination of outsiders—(other Surinamers, and anthropologists alike),— “The place of women in these societies has been one area of particular interest,” because, indeed, “Maroon women are strikingly independent in many respects.” But the real gender politics get misunderstood, she argued: Maroon women’s “Independence has been misread as a Western-style women’s liberation.” Sally shows how certain depictions hardly differed between eighteenth-century missionaries, colonial officials, and twentieth-century anthropologists, writing that the “ideologically motivated glorification of Maroon society” led to “ironic distortions.”. These distortions were evident in views on women’s artistic works. “Many studies of Maroon art have been quite detailed, but attitudes toward women – on the part of both ethnographers (who have almost always been men) and their informants (also almost always men)—have tended to distort our overall understanding of Maroon arts and of their role in social life.” And this included admirers such as Melville Herskovits, for whom “the Saramaka” became central to his emerging theoretical apparatus.
Now, at this point I already had an interest in history. I had done my M.A. thesis at Florida International University with Rich and Sally’s former colleague at Yale, Anthony Maingot, using historical materials to criticize Melville Herskovits’s theory of acculturation. But what Sally suggested to me was:
- The importance of understanding the history of how things came to be before the anthropological gaze of a particular observer, located in time and space.
- To pay attention to women’s many “works,” (in Sally’s case, that meant focusing on their artworks in the context of their other works.)
- And the importance of understanding the history of anthropological theory, how it came to beand how it came to be received wisdom and an academic paradigm.
For the first, it meant locating ethnography within larger, living histories but also, practically, doing life histories of individuals. I conducted life history interviews of immiserated women factory workers, often while they were working one of their many shifts.
For the second point, that of women’s works, I paid attention to women’s juggling of their many works—in this case world-market factory wage labor work but, also, work in the informal sector as petty commodity producers or informal wage laborers, work within the household, and “working” their oh-so-important social support networks with family and friends.
We will get to Sally’s third lesson in a minute.
As I continued to work on becoming a Latin Americanist/Caribbeanist anthropologist, I turned more and more toward history, and this is when I encountered Rich’s First-Time. Now, a historical perspective didn’t always appear in Rich’s work. Yes, there was the tutelage of Sidney Mintz whom Rich and Sally met while at Harvard when Sid was doing a year at MIT. And under Sid’s influence there was Rich’s 1966 American Anthropologist article “Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen: A Historical Sketch.” But as he wrote in his autobiography, hewing to reigning anthropological paradigms was deeply unsatisfying:
My work with Sid was really what got me through that first year of graduate study. He’d been trained in Columbia’s still-Boasian department, with Ruth Benedict as one of his favorite teachers. His historically minded, Marxist-inflected brand of anthropology struck quite a contrast to the predominantly British orientation of social anthropology at Harvard. Otherwise, I spent much of that year dealing with people in anthropological subfields that had no interest for me….
And in Saramaka Social Structure (1974), which was based on his dissertation, Rich offers apologies, stating that he wanted to “offer a straightforward social-anthropological account” that was “aimed at laying bare the basic patterns of Saramaka social structure.” But while “there is considerable attention devoted to examining social process and change during the past hundred years or so, this study does not engage in the analysis of long-term historical developments.” In a self-reflexive mode, he wrote of his book that “In its theoretical concerns, it is quite obviously a product of the late 1960s” and promised to go on to write “a general ethnography of Saramaka which, unlike the present work, is heavily historical.”
We finally find Rich in full historical voice in First-Time. The emphasis is on Saamaka First-Time discourse as an ideology, as a kind of politics, as a lens through which to see events in the present, but also as a kind of collective armor. Later, Rich told us, at the beginning of Alabi’s World, what he thought he had been, and was, doing: “The fourth and controlling voice in Alabi’s World is my own, that of a self-styled ethnographic historian. (Though ‘ethnohistorian’ might seem a simpler label, I worry that ethnohistory has all too often been understood as little more than ‘the history of the bare-assed’…).” The “practice of ethnographic history,” he wrote, “must be animated by a constant attentiveness to meaning” while, at the same time, “to the process of producing histories” and the politics involved in this process, to “relationships between the author and his historical subjects.” This entreated readers into a dialogue with Rich’s “controlling voice,” inviting them to adjudicate as well. The Saamakas’ selections from histories were shown, but Rich’s were shown too.
The whole move didn’t obviate utilizing archival materials—including eighteenth-century Moravian missionaries’ chicken scratching—and conventional historical methods. But this wasn’t post-positivism. It was positivism transcendent. It wasn’t that any old interpretation would do or that one’s “positionality” dictated the horizon of knowledge, but, instead, underscored the need to get it right.
We see intellectual honesty at the center of this effort. In the coda to The Convict and the Colonel (1998), Rich returns to his 1985 Caribbean Review article that uses a wooden sculpture by Martiniquan artist and anticolonial disrupter Médard Aribot to discuss Caribbean historical consciousness. He first presented the work as “Le Roi des Indes”—“King of the Indies”—but later found out that he had misheard the name from the sculpture’s owner. He re-checked, re-heard, and re-learned that Médard (the “convict” of the book’s title) had intended his carved figure to be called “Le Roi Béhanzin,” referring to the ruler of Dahomey who had resisted the French but was ultimately defeated by them and exiled to Martinique in 1894. Rich wrote: “The honest anthropologist must wrestle with…demons.” And, clearly, chief among the demons to be slain was the urge to write convenient histories that freeze, rather than frees, historical actors.
Since this time, I have always included archival and oral history in my ethnographic projects, be they on urban “redevelopment” in Overtown, Miami, or, much later, wine tourism in the Temecula Valley, California, and Alicante, Spain. Rich wrote that “historical consciousness—collective memory—is never monolithic. Whether in Martinique or the rain forest of Suriname, it is always embedded in ongoing social process.” All of this was happening before the so-called “turns” in the human sciences and historiography – the historic turn, the linguistic turn, the cultural turn.
Now, yes, I accept some of the caveats of the periodization of historiography. But there was a historic turn. And this turn? Well, Rich and Sally were turning to history, and turning history, way before the historic turn was cool!
By now, Bárbara and I have been able to get to know and care deeply for Rich and Sally as people. When our daughters Cristina and Amanda were born, Sally carved calabashes with their names on them. And I was able to host Rich and Sally for a discussion that became their article “Executing Culture: Musée, Museo, Museum,” published in the American Anthropologist in 1995. Could this go somewhere else?
The questions of how history is used in the present and the politics of museum representation had already been innovatively pursued in Sally’s Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989). There, Sally ends by emphasizing what the politics of representation mean “in the actual lives of real people.” Focusing on the Suriname Maroons and again, criticizing how “the arts are understood by many outsiders as static traditions,” she invokes the concept of “art history,” showing that for the Maroons themselves there exists “the presence of stylistic and technical change, recognized individual creativity, and communal attention to chronological development.”
My less erudite work on museums, necessarily flipped the script and looked at the “outside” of the museum as it were, asking how the “civilized” worked to museumify “history.” In my case, it was a study of the thankfully ill-fated attempt in the early 1990s to establish a museum based on artifacts from the eighteenth-century pirate ship Whydah in Florida’s already-pirate-themed Tampa Bay, home to the Buccaneers American football team and the Gasparilla Festival, itself founded on the legend of José Gaspar, a supposed Spanish pirate.
Since the early 2000s, there have been a few books discovering, advocating for, and methodologizing, a rapprochement between anthropology and history. And yet, the Prices’ work anticipated all of this. I must have done a good job of following in their footsteps because,even though I was an anthropologist, I was asked to contribute a chapter to the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean.
And now, what about a rapprochement between anthropology and the history of anthropology – or, really, the histories (plural) of anthropologies (in the plural)? Here, I return to the third early lesson I got from Sally as well as reflexive traces left by Rich: That of understanding the history of the discipline. My Sussex doctoral thesis supervisor was David Harrison, who had been a Ph.D. student of the Jamaican anthropologist M.G. Smith at University College London. David had initially intended basing his early 1970s Ph.D. fieldwork on a “restudy” of Toco, Trinidad, where Melville and Frances Herskovits had done fieldwork in 1939 for what became their 1947 book Trinidad Village. Instead, he ended up doing fieldwork in the village of Grande Riviere, about 10 miles from Toco. But David had me read Herskovits—as Sid had had Rich and Sally read him—and me, in a post-1960s/1970s US cultural politics world, Herskovits was an intriguing figure. I eventually started puttering around his vast papers at Northwestern University and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
I discovered Herskovits’s many transnational intellectual exchanges with Latin American and Caribbean ethnologists and have been working through the material from that angle for 30 years now. I was encouraged that I was on the right path by Rich and Sally’s short (but not so sweet, at least according to Jean Melville and Frances’s daughter Jean) book on the Herskovitses’ first fieldwork with the Saamaka in 1928, The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology got Its Start (2003).
In 2018, Rich and Sally moved to Florida, about an hour away from where Bárbara and I live, buying a beautiful waterfront house right on the bay. You can imagine how excited we were. And as a sixth-generation Floridian, I could now, I hoped dearly, play host and provide something of Florida that might be of value and interest to them.
This was my chance to try to start repaying debts that really could never be repaid. Intellectual debts, as you have just heard, but also, speaking as a Marxist historical materialist, thinking of more tangible ones: a letter of recommendation for my tenure, a letter of recommendation for my promotion to full professor, a letter of support for my Guggenheim Fellowship, and Rich and Sally sitting outside the book exhibition hall at the American Anthropological Association meetings with officers from the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe (“anthropology’s think tank”), advocating for them to accept my application to convene an advanced seminar. (It was held in 1999 and resulted in my 2006 edited book Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, in which Rich and Sally have chapters.
There was the important act of care when Bárbara, la cubana who epitomizes the Cuban-American ethic of resolver, prevailed on our beloved and decorated family doctor, the amazing Dr. Eduardo González at the University of South Florida medical clinic, to accept Rich and Sally as new patients even though he was already full up.
Of course, one downside of Florida living is hurricanes. But we found a silver lining…When a hurricane hits, Rich and Sally evacuate their bay-side house and decamp to our more landlocked house until they are allowed to return to their house in Coquina Key. These are times to be grateful for being safe and being together but also to catch up on work while other obligations are necessarily on pause. Rich and Sally set up shop on the Mexican table in our dining room on our Mexican dining table, responding to e-mails,and carrying on an amazing work ethic that, I’m sorry to say, is from a bygone era.
This is a time when Bárbara and Sally cook together, when the four of us enjoy being with our daughters Cristina and Amanda, when Rich and I watch soccer matches, and when the four of us catch movies on Netflix. We chat about our families, and get worked up discussing politics, the state of the state of Florida, the state of the union, and the state of the world. I am just grateful, very grateful, that our histories, in the many senses of the term, have crossed. And Bárbara joins me in the most fervent of hopes that they may continue to do so for many years to come.