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Article

Barnet, Miguel  

Stephen M. Fay

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 28 January 1940 in Havana, Cuba, to a middle-class family of Catalan descent. Barnet’s parents owned a successful autoparts business and sent their son to an exclusive American school in the city center. Although educated in an Anglophone and US-centric environment, Barnet was entranced by the popular Cuban culture he witnessed in the solar (tenement building) opposite his family home, where the noisy comings and goings of the residents of African, Chinese, Central European, Middle Eastern, and North African descent gave the young Barnet his first taste of the island’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity. His initial ambition was to work in television and radio, for which he took classes in the city’s Institute of Advertising in the late 1950s, but the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement and the flight of the dictator Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959 inspired a change of professional direction.

Barnet enrolled ...

Article

Barnet, Miguel  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Miguel Barnet is the author of Biografía de un cimarrón (Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), which recounts Esteban Motejo's life as a runaway slave in Cuba and as a soldier in the Spanish-American War (1895–1898). Other works by Barnet include Canción de Raquel Rachel ...

Article

Blanchet, Lina Mathon  

Rebecca Dirksen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

also commonly remembered as Lina Mathon-Fussman or, equally, as Lina Fussman-Mathon, was born in Port-au-Prince on 3 January 1903, one of five children of Charles Mathon, a medical doctor, and Cléante N. Marie Anne Carré Mathon. By all accounts captivated by the piano as a toddler, she was formally introduced to the instrument at the age of 4 by Haitian composer Justin Elie. She subsequently studied the classical music repertoire with the best teachers of the era, including completing advanced studies at the Ecole Notre-Dame de Sion in Paris between 1917 and 1921. Blanchet would eventually cofound the Lycée Musical de Port-au-Prince (a music school) and was later named the first director of the Conservatoire National by Haitian president Paul Eugène Magloire.

A tireless promoter of Haitian folkloric music throughout her life, Blanchet is cited as the first artist to mount stylized Vodou-influenced spektak performances on a ...

Article

Carneiro, Édison  

Stefania Capone

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born on 12 August 1912 in Salvador da Bahia to Antonio Joaquim de Souza Carneiro, a civil engineer and a professor at the Polytechnic School of Bahia, and Laura Coelho de Souza Carneiro. Édison’s mother died young, around 1922, after giving birth to seven children. In 1925, Antonio Carneiro married Georgina Rocha, who had difficult relationships with her stepsons. Édison grew in a family of African descent that was considered “socially white”—uma familia de “negros broncos,” as stated by Ruth Landes (1994) generally respected and particularly skilled at developing ties with the Bahian elites They were not rich but despite recurrent economic difficulties all the children received a good education two sons followed the path of their father becoming engineers the other three graduated in law including Édison and his elder brother Nelson Carneiro who became a congressman the two daughters became school ...

Article

Fernandes, Florestan  

Michelle Gueraldi

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Florestan Fernandes strongly influenced the study of race relations in Brazil by documenting the importance of race in Brazilian society and the existence of racial discrimination. He was one of a group of social scientists who challenged the Brazilian myth of racial democracy, which held that racism was not a significant factor in Brazilian society. Fernandes criticized what he termed the Brazilian “prejudice of having no prejudice.” Together with other Brazilian and foreign social scientists, partly inspired and funded by the UNESCO Race Relations Project of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, Fernandes revolutionized the study of race. According to fellow social scientist Carlos Hasenbalg, Fernandes “substantiated the significance of racism and racial discrimination in industrial and capitalist Brazil, but saw them as an archaic survival from the seigniorial, pre-capitalist and pre-industrial past.”

Fernandes was born in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1920 His ...

Article

Guignard, Mercédes Foucard “Déïta”  

Rebecca Dirksen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born in Port-de-Paix, Haiti, on 21 September 1935 to Luc Foucard, a medical doctor, and Isabelle Markez, a Haitian of Dominican birth. She had eight siblings. Known by the sobriquet “Déïta,” this pioneering woman devoted her life to demystifying the mystical ways of Haiti—“mon pays unconnu” (my unknown country), as she would come to call it. Undeterred by social norms restricting the activities of women of her class and background, she spent much of her life conducting fieldwork and interviews among the rural peyizan (peasantry), attending Vodou ceremonies (sacred events of the predominant Afro-Haitian spiritual practice and way of life), profiling the lwa (spiritual entities of Vodou, including ancestral spirits) and elucidating their attendant mythologies, decoding the practices of secret societies, collecting proverbs and stories passed down generation to generation, and learning about the medicinal properties of the island’s native plant species.

Déïta s earliest interactions with Vodou were ...

Article

Hazoumé, Paul  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Beninese ethnographer and novelist, was born on 16 April 1890 in the southern Beninese city of Porto Novo to a very wealthy family. His father Alamavo Hazoumé was one of the chief advisors of King Toffa of Porto Novo, a self-proclaimed modern ruler who had collaborated closely with the French government against his rival Dahomey. Alamavo was a fervent believer in Western education, especially after he visited Paris on a diplomatic mission for King Toffa in 1895. His son kept a photograph of his father taken on this trip for the rest of his own life as a precious heirloom.

Alamavo Hazoumé sent his son Paul to mission schools run by French White Fathers missionaries in Porto Novo. There, Hazoumé so impressed his teachers, especially the ethnographer Reverend Francis Aupiais, that after graduating from the mission school, he worked for it as a teaching assistant, from 1905 to 1907 ...

Article

Ribas, Óscar Bento  

Orquídea Ribeiro

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Angolan writer, poet, essayist, journalist, and folklorist, was born in Luanda, Angola, on 17 August 1909. He was the son of a Portuguese father, Arnaldo Gonçalves Ribas, and an Angolan mother, Maria da Conceição Bento Faria, a prototype of African ladies of the time, who kept the original sources of her culture alive. He attended primary and secondary school in Luanda, the Lyceum-Seminar of Luanda, and the Luanda Salvador Correia High School. After a short stay in Portugal to study commercial arithmetic, Ribas returned to Angola to work in the Directorate of Finance and Accounting. He resided in various cities of Angola, namely Novo Redondo (Sumbe), and Benguela, Bie, and Ndalatando.

Ribas gradually went blind during his early twenties but remained an indefatigable researcher and writer publishing books and articles on the culture of Angola from oral tradition to religious rites and culinary arts At the age of thirty ...

Article

Rouch, Jean  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

French filmmaker and ethnographer active in Niger, was born on 31 May 1917 in Paris. His father was an adventurous naval officer who had traveled as far as Antarctica. His mother had a deep love of poetry and painting. Their son would combine his parents’ interests in his later life.

The Rouch family moved often in Jean’s early life, and he spent time in Algeria, Morocco, and Germany. In 1937, he entered the École des Ponts et Chausées to study engineering. Rouch did so at the behest of his father rather than out of a real interest in the subject matter. However, Rouch found plenty of opportunities to take other courses outside of engineering and science.

In his last year of studies Rouch met anthropologist Maurice Griaule whose work on Dogon communities in West Africa would later be one of the most well known and controversial examples of French ...

Article

Rouche, Jean  

Elizabeth Heath

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

As a pioneer of ethnographic filmmaking, which documents the lives, customs, and cultures of ethnic groups, Jean Rouche developed styles and techniques that influenced a generation of African moviemakers. Rouche's mother was a painter and his father was a naval explorer. Born in Paris, Rouche trained to be an engineer. He graduated from a prestigious Parisian engineering college in 1941 and immediately left Nazi-occupied France for the freer West African colony of Niger.

Rouche was hired to oversee the construction of a road, but lack of equipment halted the project. The engineer, however, had taken an interest in aspects of Songhai culture, including spirit possession ceremonies conducted by African workers he had befriended. Fascinated by the rites and curious to learn more, Rouche returned to France, where he enrolled in a doctoral program in anthropology and studied with the famous ethnographer Marcel Griaule Taking a break from his ...

Article

Schapera, Isaac  

Gregor Dobler

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

South African social anthropologist, was born on 23 June 1905 in the village of Garies in the Northern Cape, where his parents, Hermann and Rosie, recent Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, kept a small trading store. The family moved to Cape Town in 1911. After his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage, Isaac left home at fifteen and entered the University of Cape Town in 1921. He studied law but took social anthropology as a minor in his second year, following the lectures of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Cape Town’s first professor in social anthropology and one of the founding figures of British social anthropology. After his MA with Radcliffe-Brown, he went to the London School of Economics to write a PhD under Charles Seligman and attend Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminars. He returned to South Africa in 1929 lecturing at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the University ...

Article

Verger, Pierre Fatumbi  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The holder of a Ph.D. degree in African Studies from the University of Paris, Pierre Verger traveled through various countries between 1932 and 1945 as a as a professional photographer and researcher for the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro (Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro; today the Musée de l'Homme). He eventually settled in the city of Salvador in the Brazilian province of Bahia in 1946, where he explored in depth the black culture of Africa and Brazil, writing several books on the subject. Verger's pioneering work traced strong links between the religion and culture of Dahomey (now Benin) and Brazil. In 1952, while in Dahomey, he was initiated into the Yoruba Religion, given the name Fatumbi, and made a babalawo, or priest, of the Ifa divination system.

Some of Verger's publications include Fiestas y danzas en el Cuzco y en los Andes Celebrations and ...