~HRSK-TUR.NER~

'early ethnographic approaches--Herskovits and Turner'

From the 1930s until the 1960s, a student of Boas,

Melville Herskovits, provided a wealth of cultural and linguistic

evidence supporting the African contributions to American

cultures. His work was countered by the theories of E. Franklin

Frazier, a Howard University sociologist who, taking a position

congruent with that of the structuralists, pointed to

institutional and structural forces as having the most telling

influence on the culture of Black Americans (he was not so much

concerned with language), with little telling African input. The

repercussions of this sector of the debate have washed through

politics and everyday life, largely in the wake of the "Moynihan

Report," which used Frazier's position as its starting point for

kenning the state of the African-American family in the US.

Moynihan, of course, was a major formulator of today's welfare

system. The Herskovits-Frazier debate is still an issue to be

reckoned with, and many of the arguments--for, against, or

synthetic--rely on models of creolization. {<[LINK]> --refer to

Holloway, M&P, Brathwaite, Joyner--branch to Herskovits-Frazier

debate} A student of Herskovits, Lorenzo Dow Turner, provided

one of the seminal works establishing substrate influence in

North America, the 1949 _Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect_.

Ironically, Turner's work was largely ignored during his own

lifetime, when Frazier's views were ascendent. He died unable to

find a repository for his research. {<[LINK]> Labov-- AnnArbor

article} 175, 195)

<[LINK] to continue with the history of creole studies>

~hrsk-tur.ner~