▪ Abstract  The contributions of a number of First and Third World scholars to the development of the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean have been elided from the core of the discipline as practiced in North America and Europe. As such, the anthropology of the African diaspora in the Americas can be traced to the paradigmatic debate on the origins of New World black cultures between Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The former argued for the existence of African cultural continuities, the latter for New World culture creations in the context of discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African descent, in light of slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial contexts. As a result, subsequent positions have been defined by oppositions in every subdisciplinary specialization and area of interest. Creolization models try to obviate this bifurcation, and newer dialogical theoretical perspectives build upon such models by attempting to combine revisionist historiography with social/cultural constructionist approaches to identity, especially around the concept of blackness understood in the context of cultural identity politics.

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Helen I. Safa is a pioneering anthropologist of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, one who brought Marxist and feminist perspectives to her work and who in her research and administrative duties engaged with progressive and feminist academics and activists in the region. She has maintained a long interest in investigating inequalities alone various axes-especially gender, class, and "race"-and locating these in structural conditions and social relationships of dominance and subordination. This article is a life-history interview in which Safa reflects on her childhood and family, her coming of age, her training, and the development of her theoretical approach, as well as on her relationships with her colleagues in her nearly 50 years of anthropological research.

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.