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African Contributions to America's Musical Heritage
| Article
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17392 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
4,776 Words |
| Author
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David Evans
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In recent times, African history and culture have become increasingly important, especially to Americans. This is visible in efforts by some black leaders to foster the adoption of "African-American" as a term of self-designation, with the purpose and effect of engendering pride in one's place of origin and heritage. However, in earlier days, when terms such as colored and Negro were preferred, the prevalent view in America was that the slaves arrived here stripped not only of their freedom but of their African culture as well. The basis of black American culture was viewed as their response to slavery and subsequent experiences. This view held that Africa was a distant memory rather than a vital force in creating and sustaining a distinct culture in their new homeland.
A pioneer in black studies was the late anthropologist Melville Herskovits (1895-1963). Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, he conducted comparative studies of African and various New World black cultures, developing several important new and more positive concepts about the processes of acculturation that took place when Africans encountered European cultures in America. These concepts mark a historical progression in the development of a distinct African-American culture over some three and a half centuries.
The first of these concepts is simply the retention of African elements and their associated meanings. For example, words for certain foods, such as yam, goober, okra, and gumbo, have been retained from African languages with essentially their original meanings. Some cultural retentions undergo a further process known as syncretism, whereby similar African European cultural elements are merged or equated to form a single entity whose bicultural derivation is still clearly understood. This concept plays an important role in certain African-American religions, such as Haitian vodun, where deities of traditional African religious systems are equated with various Catholic saints. This process enables the African cultural element and its meaning not only to be retained but also to thrive within a larger non-African cultural setting.
A step further from syncretism is the process of reinterpretation, through which new meanings are given to old cultural elements, or conversely, old meanings are given to newly encountered elements. In cases of reinterpretation the connection of the cultural element to Africa is often not clear to those who employ it. For example, the trickster hero Anansi in a cycle of West African folktales is sometimes transformed to a character named Aunt Nancy, or even Boy Nasty in some African-American storytelling traditions.
Herskovits' final concept, cultural focus, is the most abstract of all. It refers to a situation wherein people finding themselves in a new cultural environment continue to focus on and elaborate upon the same cultural institutions that were emphasized in the old cultural setting.
When Africans came to the New World they brought with them music, and its integral role in black life has continued up to the present day. Music and the associated arts of dance and verbal expression also still frequently contain African stylistic characteristics, meanings, and social contexts. Virtually all of the essential traits of black music in the United States can be traced to African origins. Among these are the music's tendency to invite participation from all who are present through dancing, clapping, foot tapping,
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