ABSTRACT
History of anthropology' becomes marginal speciality within the discipline, rather than a living, more widely shared resource. George Marcus, one of the prominent innovators in late twentieth-century anthropology has recently reminisced about his own graduate student days at Harvard University in the early 1970s. Yet some concrete ethnography from such locales and strategic groupings in them could no doubt have allowed some further elaboration of the idea and helped make clear that the root metaphor of creolization is something more than a fancy way of saying 'mixing'. Current tendencies in the formal and informal organization of academic life may well contribute to such intellectual amnesia. The ethnographic and historical work of Lorand Matory in Brazil and Nigeria is perhaps not so often identified as part of the growing corpus of multi-site studies, but it has contributed intriguingly to a view of cultural processes in both continents, and in the traffic across the Black Atlantic.
