Caribbean Transformations

Arthur H. Niehoff, Sidney W. Mintz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351530040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts, each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean, then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters deal with slavery and forced labor in Puerto Rico and the history of a Puerto Rican plantation. Part Two is concerned with the rise of a Caribbean peasantry--the erstwhile slaves who separated themselves from the plantation system on small plots of land. This creative adaptation led to the growth of a class of rural landowners producing a large part of their own subsistence but also selling to and buying from wider markets. Mintz first discusses the origins of reconstructed peasantries, and then proceeds to the specifics of the origins and history of the peasantry in Jamaica. Part Three turns to Caribbean nationhood--the political and economic forces that affected its shaping and the social structure of its component societies. A separate chapter details the case of Haiti. The book ends with a critique of the implications of Caribbean nationhood from an anthropological perspective, stressing the ways that class, color and other social dimensions continue to play important parts in the organization of Caribbean societies.Caribbean Transformations--lucidly written and presenting broad coverage of both time and space--is essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, historians and all others interested in the Caribbean, in black studies, in colonial problems, in the relationships between colonial areas and the imperial powers, and in culture change generally.

1

Afro-Caribbeana: An Introduction

In the course of the nearly five hundred years since the “discovery” of the New World, millions of migrants from every corner of the earth became “Americans.” In the process they transformed aboriginal American life, such that even the most isolated and self-sufficient Native American communities of the Hemisphere were profoundly modified. “Becoming American,” that is to say, has been a process of change defining the history of the Americas and affecting every inhabitant of the Hemisphere. Though the people of the United States persist in regarding themselves as the Americans, all who live in the Americas have a proper claim on that title, and those to our south commonly refer to us as “Norteamericanos” to make the point.

If we ask what, in some essential sense, makes one an American, the first answer is likely to be geography; however, only the Amerindians, of all Americans, can really lay prior claim to a world that was to become “new”—in total ethnocentric innocence—in 1492. But if this answer fails to satisfy, we may seek to specify further. We who are Americans live in societies and bear cultures whose origins are elsewhere, transformed by the migrations of our ancestors and by the novel challenges this New World imposed upon them. Today, the consequences of transplantation and of adjustment during a period nearly five centuries long define us, even those of us who are Native Americans.

Such a definition may seem irrelevant when one considers the profound gaps—cultural, economic, linguistic, political, physical—that divide New World peoples, both within the component American polities and among them. But from the point of view of those of the Old World we are, in some fundamental way, of the New. That even slight additional qualification may appear to dissolve the contrast—we are rich and poor, Spanish-speaking and Quechua-speaking, Haitian and Canadian, black and white—does not really alter so central a historical feature of the New World reality.

From one vantage point, then, we of the Hemisphere are peoples whose ways of being share the common quality of a foreign past. From another, this reality seems unimportant in our daily lives and in our social relationships. We “Americans”—in this widest sense—share too little. That we are all in part from somewhere else fails of itself to provide us with any sense of common identity or destiny. In fact, some would even argue that the lack of understanding arising from an acknowledgment of the shallowness of our own roots typifies the American experience, dividing us rather than bringing us together. From the vantage point of an Egypt, a China, an India—or even a Europe—we of the Americas are raw and callow, the bearers of diluted civilizations. Our awareness of such disdain is often blurred, but the Limeno in Madrid, the Bostonian in London and the Martiniquan in Paris—not to mention the Trinidad-born Indian in New Delhi—share some knowledge of what it means to be an American, in this most ample of senses. That we more commonly experience our “Americanness” as something else—Blackness, Indian-ness, Third-Worldness, antiyanquismo, or North American xenophobia-at-large—is a reflection both of the highly differentiated character of the peoples of these continents, and of the relative rarity of social situations in which some generalized hemispheric identity might take precedence over other allegiances. In other words, what is implicitly shared by all Americans is usually ignored in the midst of more pressing priorities of consciousness.

And yet it should be within this widest context—the Hemisphere and its five short centuries of newness—that North Americans begin to explore Afro-America. The very word is a hybrid, expressing symbolically the linkage of two worlds—but it is innocent, as is Euro-America, or Mestizo-America (Service 1955), and no more hybridized. We who think of ourselves as athwart the American tradition may claim to feel no need for hybrid words and hyphens, and to resent their implications—except, of course, on St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, and certain other Days, and in memories, dreams, and subtly persistent insecurities. Hyphens are supposedly laid aside, together with old languages, old costumes, and old habits of thought. Shiny new unhyphenated North Americans—gringos, the Mexicans might say—usually prefer the image of a past uncluttered by any realities, and marked by such cozy symbols as Washington’s hatchet, Franklin’s kite, Boone’s bear, Crockett’s coonskin cap, and Teddy’s Rough Riders. We claim to honor a past; yet we have difficulty in admitting that it ever had a beginning, for particular persons among us.

This unease, this nervous joy, is part of a very North American style; Henry Ford’s dictum that history is bunk is a North American dictum. We do not question the American past, most of us, in part because we covertly recognize that we are not altogether part of it. It is a seamless past, summed up in Jamestown, Sturbridge, and Freedomland; we make the Pilgrims’ Pride our pride and our reality; it is Ellis Island and the village slums of Europe that become the fantasy. Nor should it surprise us that new and insistent demands that the Afro-American past be identified and explicated excite a certain amount of resistance. After all, if ancientness of pedigree were enough to win membership in the D.A.R., those worthy ladies might be aghast at the company they would have to keep. How much more anxiety-provoking, then, to the Johnny-come-latelies, is a pedigree search by the anciently disinherited!

Africa and Afro-America

But a genuine search for that hidden past has begun, and it requires of the interested that they think through seriously what “Afro-American” can mean. The term implies two backgrounds, or some kind of interpenetration of one background by another. This book is largely concerned with just such implications as they apply to the Caribbean region¹; their meanings are various and complex. Terms like “Afro-American” and “African”—or any comparably geographical term used adjectivally—are not self-explanatory. When one speaks of an “African” food, an “African” dance, or an “African” custom, for instance, one may mean any of several quite different things. An African food may be a crop domesticated in Africa or native to Africa—such as okra (Hibiscus esculentus L.) and akee (Blighia sapida Koen.). Or an African food may be a food processed in a distinctively African fashion, such that certain sorts of cassava cakes—the Haitian bambouri or

1. An agreed-upon terminology for ethnic and “racial” categories does not exist for the Caribbean region, and geographical terminology for the region itself is highly variable. Terms, the meanings of which appear self-evident when used in the United States, may not exist, or may lack acceptable equivalents, in the languages of many Caribbean societies, and vice-versa. Accordingly, the terminology employed in this book should be understood as arbitrary, and readers ought to feel free to substitute their own favorite words as necessary.

“Antilles” and “Caribbean” are used interchangeably. “West Indies” is generally employed to refer to the polities now or formerly within the British colonial system (e.g., Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, etc.), and that is how the term is used here. The terms “Espanola” and “Hispaniola” refer to that island where today’s Haiti and Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) coexist. Before 1697, it was a single Spanish (and hispanophone) colony. Thereafter the western third became (French) Saint Domingue and, in 1804, Haiti. That is how these names are used in this book.

Where appropriate, and according to ethnic separateness—as defined either by group “members” or by outsiders—terms such as “Chinese” or “Javanese” are used to describe particular Caribbean populations. The term “East Indian” is used in the anglophone Antilles to describe persons whose origins are in India, not in the East Indies; it is usually replaced in this book by the term “Indian.” Those descended from the original inhabitants of the Caribbean region are also (though rarely) referred to as “Indians,” and more commonly as “Amerindians,” “Native Americans,” or as indigenous or aboriginal peoples.

Persons of African ancestry may be so referred to; commonly, they are here called “Afro-Americans” and sometimes “black Americans.” The term “Negro” is-only rarely used, as is the term “colored” (“coloured”); like terms meant to describe genetic “intermixture” such as English mulatto, Spanish pardo and more no, and French gens de couleur and griffe, these words occur principally in citations from the works of others. As far as possible, an attempt has been made to be clear in these usages; but that is not always easy.

the Jamaican “bammy”—might justifiably be considered African, even though the cassava is a New World cultigen and was only diffused to Africa after 1492. Conceivably, an African food could be a food eaten regularly by a group of Africans working at the United Nations—in which case one assumes that it would be a food they typically ate in Africa, and now continue to eat in a new setting, rather than that anything eaten by people from Africa thereby becomes African. One might be impelled to wonder, though, whether anyone feels that pigs’ ears, turnip greens, and grits—items from the cuisine called “soul food” in the United States—could qualify as African, even if these foods are not (or were not) eaten in Africa. Most reflective persons would, one supposes, think not; but the confusion here is real, even if its implications are not wholly intellectual in character.

If we turn from such things as foods to human beings, the confusion is compounded. When a person is described as an African, one is prepared to assume that this means someone born in Africa, or a citizen of an African country or colony—that, at least, is parallel to the way we North Americans define an American. The term African, that is, refers to someone from a definable geographical area, the African continent. But if that is the meaning, are not the children of Kenyan Indians, Nigerian Lebanese, and Dutch voortrekkers Africans all? And, this of course, is part of the confusion—because, for at least some people, the term African carries clear overtones of physical type. Such confusion inevitably returns us to puzzles of culture such as cuisine, to ask again whether a food might be classified as “African” according to the physical type of those who eat it.

For most of those interested in defining the field of Afro-American studies, the term Afro-Americana has to do with culture—that is, with patterns of socially learned behaviors expressed in artifacts, languages, traditions, values, and the like. In the case of Afro-American cultures, the patterns of socially acquired behaviors and their consequences are principally—though by no means exclusively—carried in time and space by those descended at least in part from African slaves whose histories involved enslavement, forced transatlantic migration, protracted servitude, and persistent social isolation and exclusion. But the physical type of the individuals who maintain the behavioral patterns, hold the values, and use the languages is a relevant datum only to the extent that it affects behavior socially—that is, through the perceptions of the persons involved in social relationships. There is, in other words, no genetic relationship between a particular mode of learned behavior—eating turnip greens, dancing the frug, standing or gesturing or intoning in some patterned way—and the physical type of those who exhibit it.

Yet there is a noticeable readiness on the part of contemporary observers to attribute such behavioral patterns to heredity rather than to learning. In the case of white North Americans observing Afro-Americans—and it needs remembering that some Afro-Americans are phenotypically white, while some white North Americans are not—such attributions cannot be explained purely on grounds of a lack of observational keenness. While we may expect to see English children dance morrises, we are neither startled nor amused to see them dance a waltz or even a mambo. Polish children do dance polkas; but the news that they knew how to dance the watusi and preferred it probably would be received calmly by most of us. And yet, when we see black North American children dancing, too many of us expect them to dance in ways that are somehow connected to the way they look—even though we are not always prepared to admit this.

The implications of an assumption that socially learned behavior is really genetically transmitted are immensely important, and not only because of the intellectual errors that flow from this assumption. Here, however, the assumption concerns us only with reference to the study of Afro-Americana. In recent years in the United States, this assumed or imputed connection between physique and behavior has become more rather than less widespread among Afro-Americans; its presence among North American whites is ancient. Malcolm X tells us in his autobiography (1966: 57) that learning to dance appropriately was difficult for him at first; but soon his African ancestry—his “long-suppressed African instincts,” as he put it—“broke through.” There may be a full circle here: from the imputation of “inborn rhythm” to Afro-Americans by whites who cannot (or will not) distinguish between physique and culture, to the pseudoscientific question of the difficulties of finding “a gene for rhythm,” to the assertion of “an African instinct” for dancing by a black militant. To some extent, this conceptual merging of physique and behavior is expressed in common parlance by the use of such terms as black and soul without any clear attempt to specify that African or Afro-American cultures are socially learned and socially perpetuated phenomena. Discussions of Afro-Americana and Afro-American studies today thus must take into account the fact that terms like Afro-American may be used in ordinary discourse with either physical or cultural associations, or both, in mind.

The distinction between physique and culture was once drawn carefully by Afro-Americanists, as in the work of Melville Herskovits (1930: 145–55). The apparent linkage between physique and culture is difficult to dispute, however, in regard to such items as intonation, facial expression, gesture, and posture—items of the sort Herskovits himself once labeled (1945: 22) “cultural imponderables.” It is easy to see why these aspects of behavior might be thought to be innate or genetically transmitted, since their manifestation seems “automatic” or “natural”; but the socially acquired character of these traits is demonstrable. The learned and patterned motor habits that we usually pick up unconsciously and at very early ages from our parents and other kinsmen, and carry into adolescence and adulthood, are both difficult to become aware of and difficult to change; the covert and unnoticed character of the social transmission of such habits is of course the principal reason why they are commonly perceived as “innate” rather than learned. Motor habits of speech are similarly learned, in good part unconsciously, and carried unnoticed; these, too, though to a lesser extent, may be perceived as “part of” a person because they seem to be linked phenomenologically to the very way in which he or she is defined.

It is of interest that these seemingly minor behavioral patterns are also closely tied to the expressive media, such as music, dance, drama, voice, and the like, and that it is in these aesthetic spheres, once again, that linkages between physique and culture are often imputed to Afro-Americans. However, rather than “explain” such behavioral patterns by vague reference to racial or instinctual responses, we should view them as continuities with the African past, and as evidence of the success of Afro-Americans in conserving cultural materials that could not always be conserved in other aspects of life. Patterns of socially learned motor behavior are probably not readily destroyed, even by extremely repressive conditions; and the aesthetic and creative possibilities implicit in these traditional patterns and their cognitive accompaniments may have been among the cultural traditions most readily maintained under slavery.

Nonetheless, there is a strong predisposition to view the connections between physical type, learned motor behavior, and aesthetic expression as genetic rather than cultural, and it is not difficult to see why. What is more, the perceptions of persons who assume a genetic connection between perceived physical characteristics and learned behavior become cultural data themselves, by virtue of the effects such perceptions may have upon behavior. That is, physical type and culture are not biologically linked, but certain kinds of social behavior, based on the assumption that they are, can produce clear correlations between them. This assertion in no way qualifies a historical reality—that those African peoples torn from their ancestral homelands whose descendants are today’s Afro-Americans both carried with them elements of different cultures, and were of different physical appearance, from those who frequently became their masters. But the assumption that the linkage is biological rather than social lies buried beneath the whole of Afro-American social history and is—in some deformed and refracted way—the mirror image of the Afro-American tradition itself. In what sense this may be so will become clearer at a later point.

The first African slaves to be transported to the New World arrived during the first decade following the “Discovery,” and slavery did not end in the New World until Brazilian abolition was decreed by the imperial government at Rio de Janeiro in 1888. Hence the involuntary servitude of Africans and their descendants in this Hemisphere lasted nearly four centuries; its initiation predated the North American Declaration of Independence by nearly three centuries. The precise number of enslaved Africans who reached the New World alive will never be known—nor will the numbers who died in slaving wars and in the hideous coffles to the coast, during the Middle Passage, or before being debarked in the Americas. Even if we accept the radically reduced estimates of the number of African slaves who reached this Hemisphere (Curtin 1969), New World slavery may well have been the most massive acculturational event in human history (Mintz 1961b: 580).

Aside from special circumstances—as when hispanicized slaves of African origin served as subalterns and assistants to the con-quistadores—nearly all the slaves were allocated in terms of the needs of large-scale agriculture. This was especially the case for the production of subtropical commodities, such as tobacco, sugar, and spices, which were finding large and sometimes new markets in Europe. Hence the African slave trade and slavery itself were intimately bound up with the spread of European military and colonial power and with commercial developments, especially in overseas capitalistic agriculture.

New World plantation organization during the sixteenth century and the subsequent two centuries, though of course agricultural, had a very modern—even industrial—cast for its time. This was particularly true for sugar production, where mill operations were tied closely to those of the field, and capital investment in equipment was necessarily heavy. Slaves were used extensively for sugarcane cultivation and sugar production in Brazil and the Hispanic Caribbean in the sixteenth century; in later centuries, similar patterns developed along the Guiana coasts, through the Caribbean islands, on the Pacific coast of Peru, on portions of the Caribbean littoral, in Mexico, and in Louisiana. The relatively highly developed industrial character of the plantation system meant a curious sort of “modernization” or “westernization” for the slaves—an aspect of their acculturation in the New World that has too often been missed because of the deceptively rural, agrarian, and pseudomanorial quality of slave-based plantation production.

Moreover, the development of plantations to produce commodities for European markets was a vital first step in the history of overseas capitalism. Even more than the exploitation of mines, the plundering of native treasures, or the development of trade patterns with viable indigenous societies, as in much of Asia and parts of Africa, the establishment of the plantation system meant a rooted overseas capitalism based on conquest, slavery and coercion, and investment and entrepreneurship. The stimulus to overseas commodity production originated in European developments accompanying the accelerated breakdown of European feudalism, the growth and unification of international trade, and the disfranchisement of vast rural European populations as part of the creation of factory cities. Thus, the growth of slave-based economies in the New World was an integral part of the rise of European commerce and industry, while European factory workers were in a position structurally parallel to that occupied by the enslaved and forced-labor strata of New World colonial societies.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the slaved-produced commodities of the subtropical areas outside Europe, particularly in the Caribbean region, were sold to Europe’s working masses and, at a later time—especially with the growth of factory-based production of cotton textiles and of other industrial fibers—to local populations in the “underdeveloped” world as well. Here, again, we discern direct relationships between New World slave-based societies and the growth of European power and influence.

Hence the development of slave systems outside Europe was important to European development; the slave economies were in fact dependent parts of European economies; and slavery itself, as it grew in the New World, was an essential ingredient of that westernization of the world outside Europe that has typified the last four centuries of world history....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Afro-Caribbeana: An Introduction
• Part I. Slavery, Forced Labor and the Plantation System
• Part II. Caribbean Peasantries
• Part III. Caribbean Nationhood
• References
• Index