The leading American Africanist of his generation, specializing in art, folkloristics, and the Yoruba people of southeastern Nigeria. An early graduate student of Melville Jean Herskovits, Bascom shared his interest in the comparative study of religion, art, and folklore throughout Africa and its Diaspora. Beginning fieldwork in Nigeria in 1937, he learned the difficult tonal Yoruba language. After wartime governmental research in Nigeria and Micronesia, Bascom and his Cuban-born wife, Berta, his lifelong coworker, began their studies of the Shango cult, santeria, and divination practices of Yoruba origin in Cuba and elsewhere in the New World. Continuity and Change in Africa Cultures, which he edited with Herskovits in 1959, is a reference text so popular that it has been reprinted eight times. In 1957 he left Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., to become the founding director of the Lowie (now Phoebe A. Hearst) Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where his brilliant exhibitions of African art produced several fine catalogs and a popular text. Continuing his interest in Yoruba religion first developed in his dissertation on cult groups, he produced the magisterial Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa in 1969, which won the Pitre Prize, plus follow-up studies on the Shango cult of the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning as it spread throughout the New World, and a parallel study of the spread of Ifa divination. Although he described himself as “am anthropologist who does folklore,” Bascom’s contributions were invaluable in a number of papers showing the interplay between myth, narrative, and divination. His two addresses as president of the American Folklore Society, “Four Functions of Folklore” (1954) and “Verbal Art” (1955), along with other major papers displaying his outstanding skill in careful and clear description and analysis in preference to theory, were collected as Contributions to Folkloristics just after his death in 1981. He was interested in diffusion theory, as in his major survey article on “Folklore Research in Africa” published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1964, as well as in the aesthetics of narration, as shown in African Dilemma Tales (1975). Edited by Alan Dundes in 1992, his posthumous African Folktales in the New World is Bascom’s final triumphant blast in the decades-long battle with Richard M.Dorson, who held that he had never collected a tale of African origin from his many African American informants, only European, Native American, or Asian tales, and that “Anansi (the popular African trickster) fails to set foot in the United States.” Bascom published numerous tales unquestionably from Africa but told in the Americas, including Anansi stories from the United States. The book also brings up important and embarrassing questions about diffusion and independent invention so long unanswered that contemporary scholars simply eschew them. Daniel J.Crowley
References Bascom, William R. 1944. The Sociological Role of the Yoruba Cult-Group. Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association No. 63. Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association. ——. 1947. Ponape [now Pohnpei]: A Pacific Economy in Transition. Vol. 8 of Economic Survey of Micronesia. Honolulu: U.S. Commercial Co. ——. 1967. African Arts: An Exhibition at the Lowie Museum. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 1972. Shango in the New Wbrld. Occasional Publications of the African and Afro-American Research Institute No. 4. Austin: University of Texas Press. ——. 1973. African Art in Cultural Context. New York: W.W.Norton. ——. 1980. Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ottenberg, Simon, ed. 1982. African Religious Groups and Beliefs; Papers in Honor of William R.Bascom. Meerut, India: Folklore Institute.