The Birth of African-American Culture

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 29, 1992

This long essay, written in 1972 by two anthropologists in an attempt to prevent ideology from diverting the course of African American studies, posits that the Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World cannot ``be said to have shared a culture ,'' having been ``drawn from different parts of the . . . continent, from numerous ethnic and linguistic groups, and from different societies in any region.'' On the contrary, the authors conclude that the roots of African American culture lie in the cooperative efforts of the enslaved to create a new society here. Drawing heavily on examples from the Caribbean experience, Mintz and Price believe that so-called African retentions in the cultural realm must be examined in light of social structures and relationships established in the Americas. They examine, for instance, the development of unilineal vs. aggregate family groups in different contexts and the apparent reversion to African gender roles in the economic autonomy of women in Jamaica. This provocative book is bound, even now, to raise the ire of supporters of narrow Afrocentrism, while the general reader may find its arguments too technical.