Between 1941 and 1943, the city of Salvador, Bahia, became the site of a battle between two different understandings on racial integration in the United States and the place of Africa in such process. Franklin Frazier, the most famous Black American sociologist at the time, was involved in an argument with the equally famous White and Jewish anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the "origins" of the so-called "Black family".To make things even more complex, both centered their contention on fieldwork done with the same informants: the members (the povo de santo) of the same Candomblé house of worship in Salvador - the prestigious and "traditional" Gantois terreiro, of the Ketu/Yoruba nation. In between the two of them was the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, who was a friend of Frazier, but whose scholarly theories were closer to Herskovits'. The debate highlighted interesting aspects regarding the way Anthropology defines itself as a discipline as compared to Sociology, as well as related to the construction of African studies and Afro-Brazilian studies as academic fields.
Frazier; Herskovits; Dow Turner; Africa; Candomblé
