HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Bringing It All Back Home

Anthropologist brings Brazilian, Nigerian research to bear on U.S.

By Alvin Powell
Contributing Writer

J. Lorand Matory: "My scholarship has been about revisiting the sense that there are 'pure' cultures sitting around the world that are somehow distinct. Cultures have all shaped each other."

J. Lorand Matory was a cultural observer even as a child, watching the differences in speech, action, and other forms of interaction in his cosmopolitan Washington, D.C., home as well as among family members in nearby Norfolk, Virginia, where his grandfather was a Pentecostal minister.

He is still observing today.

Matory, professor of anthropology and of Afro-American studies, has extended his studies to outside the United States, with extensive fieldwork in Brazil and Nigeria. He is a close observer wherever he finds himself, however, and says he's interested even in the differences among students in Harvard's classrooms.

"Our students come from diverse places and backgrounds and I'm astonished how diverse their perceptions can be. In class, I like to hear them out and have them hear each other out," Matory said. "However we might choose to change the world - its political systems and traditions that might be abhorrent to us - we have to start out by understanding how other people see the world."

Matory is hoping to use his own understanding of the world as a lens through which to view the U.S. Matory has spent years studying African culture and the culture resulting from the slave trade and diaspora that established Africans in the Western Hemisphere.

Little by little, Matory said, his attention is coming closer and closer to the U.S. After studying religions in Nigeria, Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba, he is planning a book examining race and ethnic diversity in black North America.

"Gradually, I've been creeping back toward home, hoping I can say something more intelligent about my own native society than I could have if I hadn't gone away," Matory said.

Through numerous articles, papers, and speaking engagements, Matory has already had a lot to say about cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. His 1994 book, Sex and the Empire that is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, examined the roles of women and transvestites in Nigeria's Yoruba kingdom and was named one of the outstanding scholarly books of 1994 by Choice magazine.

He is currently working on a book about gender and nationalism in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, called The Trans-Atlantic Nation: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé.

"My scholarship has been about revising the sense that there are 'pure' cultures sitting around the world that are somehow distinct. Cultures have all shaped each other," Matory said.

Matory's varied expertise gives him rare insight when comparing different cultures, according to William Fash, the Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, and chairman of the Anthropology Department.

"He is very well versed in African studies as well as in the Caribbean," Fash said. "There aren't many people who can say they're expert in two hemispheres and in interactions in two different parts of the globe."

Fash said Matory is adept at his teaching duties as well as his research. In addition to teaching and research, Matory is the undergraduate advisor for the Anthropology Department's social anthropology wing. He counsels students about the department's expectations and guides them through senior honors theses.

"Sometimes life seems like one constant office hour, but I like the students," Matory said.

Two Cultures, One Family

Matory grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Washington, D.C. He said he first became interested in African cultures at age 5, when he was given a picture book about Africa.

"I remember being fascinated by the animals," Matory said. "But the same book, as was the habit in those racist times, had people mixed in with the animals, as if they were just another part of the scenery.

"As interesting as I found the animals, I found the people more interesting," Matory said.

As he grew older, Matory marked the differences between his family's urban lifestyle in Washington and that of his mother's family in Norfolk. When they visited family in Virginia, he said, he noticed that people not only dressed differently and talked differently, but had different values as well.

As an African-American in a white-dominated society, Matory also couldn't help but notice the differences between his community and the larger society, where images of blacks were often stereotypes of one kind or another.

"I came to be aware of those images even as I was living with real people," Matory said.

In high school, Matory realized he had a gift for languages. He now speaks fluent French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yoruba, the language of Nigeria's Yoruba people.

Matory received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard in 1982. He headed to the University of Chicago for graduate work, gaining a master's degree in 1986 and a Ph.D. in 1991, both in anthropology.

He returned to Harvard in 1991 to take a post as assistant professor of anthropology and Afro-American studies. He was promoted to associate professor of anthropology and Afro-American studies in 1995 and again to professor of anthropology and Afro-American studies last July.

Matory has received several fellowships that supported his research abroad, including a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for pre-dissertation research in Nigeria, from 1988 to 1989; a Social Science Research Council Grant for Field Research in Bahia and Sao Paulo, Brazil, from February to September 1992; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, for overseas archival research and writing on Afro-Brazilian religion and politics, from 1995 to 1996.

He is a member of the American Anthropological Association and the African Studies Association, and a former associate editor of the journal American Ethnologist.

"I get the greatest joy out of understanding people who have been brought up differently from me," Matory said. "I want to share what I've learned and my joy at what I've learned with people who haven't spent as much time in different places."