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| Author(s): |
Alexandre Almeida Marcussi
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2010-06-30 |
| Examining board members: |
Marina de Mello e Souza;
Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes;
Maria Cristina Cortez Wissenbach
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| Advisor: | Marina de Mello e Souza |
| Abstract | |
This work analyses the historiography which has studied the formation of African-American cultures and the cultural exchange between Africans and Euro-Americans, sustaining that it has been characterized by a contradictory coexistence of universalistic and particularistic presuppositions about the nature of culture. These contradictions can already be observed in Franz Boass Anthropological culturalism, which moves between two definitions of culture on the one hand, as an organic and stable spirit and, on the other hand, as a historical and dynamic aggregate of customs and ideas , indicating permanence and transformation as simultaneous aspects of cultural contact. Melville Herskovits was grounded on Boass ideas and inherited these contradictions when he studied African-American cultures, representing them simultaneously as an acculturation, focusing a discontinuous relation with the past, and as a preservation of africanisms, stressing a continuous relation with African cultures. These difficulties have unfolded themselves up to the contemporary debate about the concept of creolization and Mintz and Prices work, which describes African-American cultures focusing cultural creativity and the survival of African structures at the same time. Authors of the so-called afrocentric perspective have tried to solve this impasse by minimizing transformations and stressing continuity with the past. By doing so, they have intensified the dualism implicit on the particularistic arguments of previous analyses. Another tradition of studies about cultural exchange in colonial societies including authors such as Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Ortiz and others associated to post-colonial thought has developed a different conceptual model, which focuses on the ambivalences and inversions that can be observed on the affective dimensions of cultural contacts. These authors have interpreted cultural exchange through a dialectical logic, deconstructing dualistic thoughts, embracing the self-contradictory nature of the fenomena, and thus indicating a theorical alternative to the models inherited from anthropological culturalism. (AU) | |