Caribbean Studies – Caribbean Culture and Identity
Introduction
The culture of the Caribbean people as practiced and experienced among the islands of the Caribbean Sea, that stretch from the Bahamas in the north to the mainland shores of the Guianas in the south, comprises a complex amalgam of influences gathered together over a period of some five hundred years. Caribbean anthropologists, like their colleagues in sociology, history, geography, political science, economics and even literary criticism, are increasingly expanding the frontiers of their respective disciplines to overlap and encompass previous academic boundaries in their quest to effectively represent and interpret the heterogeneity of the Caribbean experience. In his post-modernist perspective of the region, the Cuban, Antonio Benitez-Rojo considers that this eclecticism should not be regarded as a reluctant concession but rather as a considered strategy. For him, the Caribbean can be regarded as a cultural sea without boundaries. "Who can tell us that he has traveled to the origins of Caribbeaness?" he asks. "This is why my analysis cannot dispense with any of the paradigms, while at the same time it will not be able to legitimate itself through any one of them, but rather only in and through their nonlinear sum" (Benitez-Rojo 1992:270).
Anthropology's front-runner in the Caribbean by almost two decades, Melville Herskovitz, conducted research among Afro-Caribbean populations in Surinam, Haiti and Trinidad between 1928 and 1939 (Herskovitz and Herskovitz 1934, 1947; Herskovitz 1937) His ground-breaking study on the Haitian peasantry stimulated postwar work on peasantries, sugar cane workers and social pluralism by other North American anthropologists such as Julian Steward (1956), Michael Horowitz (1967) and Eric Wolf (1966). They found, as the entire corpus of Caribbean anthropology has since confirmed, that their studies had to be read against a background of the incongruity between the...