Journey to the Center of the Earth:The Caribbean as Master Symbol

Abstract

One of the most terrible implications of the ethnographic approach is the insistence on fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated survival. -Edouard Glissant, Caribbean DiscourseHow feasible is dialogue in the abstract when the concrete term itself is so unstable? -Carolyn Allen, "Creole, Then and Now" Cultural Anthropology 16(3):271-302. 271 272 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY epitome of "creole" culture(s), it apparently follows that the Caribbean region be determined the "root metaphor" we seek as we try to get a better grasp on the evermore indeterminate yet interconnected terrain around us. Rather than continue to try to refine the concept's definition, as many recent works have already done (e.g.article explores the concept of creolization in terms of the referents that it both engages and creates, and the premises, often implicit, upon which it rests. With this aim, the article considers the extent to which "creole/ization," as an interpretive category, advances anthropological inquiry, and the extent to which reliance on the concept accomplishes the descriptive and theoretical tasks of ethnography. 5 While much of my discussion considers varied approaches to creolization, I also offer the case of East Indians in Trinidad (Indo-Trinidadians) as an example of the limitations of the creolization concept-as both master symbol of the Caribbean and as paradigm for the global.My premise is that we need to examine what the Caribbean experience means before we construct the Caribbean as an encapsulation of the world. I am not suggesting that creolization does not obtain in the Caribbean. I am proposing, rather, that it obtains everywhere else; this ubiquity suggests that creolization's reputed specificity to the Caribbean is a particular fiction that invents the region. I will argue that, at best, the recent refashioning of the creolization concept as a metaphor for creativity, agency, and empowerment of subordinate peoples renders it, in many cases, redundant. At worst, the concept privileges a relatively safe counterhegemonic revision of the way we understand culture, power, and culture change, and, in so doing, supports some of the very assumptions and approaches it is meant to dismantle.Lauded notably by academics and intellectuals, the Caribbean as center of the earth has proven a useful model for both internal and external perspectives. The Francophone Caribbean's contemporary creolite movement, for example, espouses that " 'the whole world ... is evolving toward a condition of creolite,' toward a 'new dimension of man of which we are the prefiguration in silhouette''" (Price and Price 1997:12-13. quoting Berbabe et al. 1993:51. 27). 6 Because the Caribbean was allegedly "the cradle of ethnic and cultural syncretism,' Fernandez Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert (1997; 1) conclude that it is logical that "as the West seeks to address its increasing eclecticism,'" Western scholars look to the Caribbean "for clues to an underst...

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