African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 152
Crowley’s studies in the West Indies earned him a brief teaching appointment at the
University College of the West Indies in Port of Spain, Trinidad. During his tenure, he
experienced a transformative encounter with the famous Trinidadian celebration of
carnival. This annual celebration, an exciting fusion of music, song, dance, theater,
costume, and parades, so fascinated Crowley that for the rest of his life he investigated
the event not only on various islands in the West Indies but also in Brazil, Bolivia,
Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Goa. The “carnival volume” of the Caribbean Quarterly,
which was edited by Crowley in 1956, is still acknowledged as the foundational work for
all students of this traditional festival.
Crowley turned his attention to Africa in 1960, when he traveled to what is now
Democratic Republic of the Congo to analyze the art of the Chokwe people in the
Katanga (now shaba) province. Although a civil war would cut short his planned
research, he was still able to conduct many in-depth interviews with a wide range of
artisans including potters, carvers, and weavers, and to collect more than eight hundred
examples of their work. His field investigations on artists’ lives would later be
complimented by a long series of studies on contemporary marketing practices for
indigenous art in various African countries. Appearing regularly in the magazine African
Arts from 1970 through 1985, his reports would eventually expand beyond Africa to
include the native arts of the Pacific, Southeast Asia, South America, and the circumpolar
regions.
Because he was eager to embrace all the world’s cultures as his topic of study,
Crowley was an energetic traveler whose collective journeys would encircle the globe at
least nine times. But within the broad scope of his scholarship, the peoples of Africa and
the African diaspora were his foremost concern. He never forgot Herskovits’s assertion
that racist thinking in the United States and Europe had denied Africans and their
descendants recognition for their impressive history of cultural achievements. Crowley
set as his chief goal the investigation of African and African American art, in both its
visual and verbal modes, to help ensure that their history would not become merely a past
denied.
References
Crowley, Daniel J. 1956 Caribbean Quarterly (carnival issue), 4, nos. 3 and 4.
——. 1961. Folklore Research in the Congo, Journal of American Folklore, 60, no. 294:457–60.
——. 1962. Negro Folklore: An Africanist’s View. Texas Quarterly, 5:65–71.
——. 1966. I Could Talk Old Story Good: Creativity in Bahamian Folklore. Folklore Series, No.
17. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——. 1970. The Contemporary-Traditional Art Market in Africa. African Arts, 4:43–9, 80.
——. 1973. Aesthetic Value and Professionalism in African Art: Three Cases from the Katanga
Chokwe. In The Traditional Artist in African Societies, ed. Warren L. d’Azevedo. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
——. 1999. The Sacred and the Profane in African and African-Derived Carnivals. Western
Folklore 58:223–28.
——, ed. 1977. African Folklore in the New World. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Tokofsy, Peter, ed. 1999. Studies of Carnival in Memory of Daniel J.Crowley. Western Folklore,
58, nos. 3 and 4.
JOHN MICHAL VLACH