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The problem
This essay poses one problem and draws upon three main bodies of
work in an attempt to resolve it. The problem is this. How can we
study and conceptualise the relationship between interaction and
symbolic integration in contemporary societies which are apparently
marked by a diversity of symbolic universes and systems of practices?
The empirical material is mainly drawn from Trinidad & Tobago,
which is a poly-ethnic nation-state often described as a conglomerate
of discrete cultural groups held together by the sheer force of
the state. In order to discuss in which ways Trinidad is a society,
I will look into aspects of the social and cultural integration
of Trinidadians of Indian origin, who comprise some forty per cent
of the population, but who have been politically and economically
marginal until recently. More generally, I shall discuss the relationship
between aspects of integration and aspects of segregation or differentiation
in poly-ethnic societies. In approaching this question, fundamental
to social theory and research, I intend to draw on theory from Continental
sociology, methodology from British social anthropology, and ethnography
from my own field work. I shall attempt, to paraphrase Dumont (1980:
xviii), to be empirical without thereby being empiricist. I will
also suggest that the marriage between continental social theory
and British anthropological methodology - which in reality is a
synthesis between a totalising and an individualising perspective,
as has been so splendidly achieved by Bourdieu in his best moments
- may best be undertaken through field work.
There are ample opportunities for scholastic cleverness and deconstructive
pyrotechnics in a confrontation with this admittedly vast complex
of problems. Instead of confronting the concepts themselves head-on
and thus wasting time and energy on arid and ultimately fruitless
discussions of the meaning of words, I shall point at their fuzzy
edges as we go along.
Totalising and individualising social thought
On the one hand, I take my cue from French and German social philosophy,
which tends to be totalising in nature, in that it attempts to conceptualise
wholes. These traditions, themselves multiple, try to conceptualise
the principles behind interaction and symbolisation, and tend to
presume that such principles exist - even if they are invisible
to the empiricist observer - as the necessary triggers for agency
or social interaction. Conceptualisations of such fundamental principles
range from Sartre's concept of the pratico-inert, to Dumont's idéologie
and valeur, Bourdieu's doxa and habitus, Husserl's Lebenswelt and
Schütz's Relevanzstruktur, and Foucault's discours. Just as
French philosophy never seems to get over the problems posed by
Descartes, it may also be said that French sociology remains committed
to Durkheim's concept of social facts as something to be studied
comme des choses, as things reflecting that totality which is society
- even if, as in the case of Bourdieu, one is critical to such an
idea. Within this totalising tradition of social thought, conflict
and contradiction are conceived of as emerging from within society,
as confrontations between its organic constituent parts, as it were.
According to such a perspective, the individual may largely appear
as a product of those complementary sets of abstract relations which
make up society. A highly simplified, one might say operationalised,
version of this kind of thought is apparent in Radcliffe-Brown's
writings and in other classical structural-functionalist social
anthropology. In dealing with the seemingly fragmented and poorly
integrated societies of Trinidad and (to a lesser extent) Mauritius
below, I shall argue that their seeming social fragmentation is
dependent on their cultural integration at a deeper level; that
the articulation of ethnicity and conflict is parasitical on the
underlying unity which, among other things, provides the language
within which conflict is articulated. Such a perspective has largely
been lacking in the literature on ethnicity, where the separation
of ethnic groups is usually seen as more fundamental than their
integration at a higher systemic or segmentary level.
A main limitation of totalising philosophies of society, as has
been pointed out repeatedly from Anglo-Saxon thinkers and by Continental
heretics (such as Bourdieu, 1977), lies in their inability to account
for the role of individual agency and internal variation within
a society; that is the inherent sociological determinism seeing
agency as a response to rules, and the tendency to reify society
and culture as bounded and stable systems. This was the tendency
against which Barth reacted in his Models of Social Organization
(Barth, 1966), targeting in particular Radcliffe-Brown. Barth placed
the maximising individual at the centre of social theory, and argued
that culture and norms should be seen as explanandum and not as
explanans. He thereby reversed the chain of causality usually evoked
by sociologists seeing society as being prior to the individual.
So when Radcliffe-Brown writes that the individual Toms, Dicks and
Harrys only interest us in so far as they may enable us to recognise
aspects of structure (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952), he deprives us of
the possibility to discover internal variation and innovative agency
in a society. This insight is nowadays plain common sense, and it
is evidently relevant in our day and age, struggling as we are to
conceptualise society and culture as unbounded systems and neverending
process.
Society and two concepts of culture
Society, I suggest, should not be conceptualised as a noun, but
as a predicate - as an aspect of, and a condition for, meaningful
interaction. By implication, culture exists as a shared idiom for
discourse, an inventory of ways of communicating and solving tasks.
Both society and culture are dual phenomena in that they are accumulated
results of ongoing action and necessary conditions for action to
be meaningful; they are not things, and they change (Giddens, 1979;
Eriksen, 1991a). Culture, further, is a matter of degree. The pidgin
language Russenorsk, used in communication between Norwegians
and Russians in the border areas before the October Revolution,
created a very limited field of shared meaning. Possessing a vocabulary
of about four hundred words, it was definitely inadequate for a
wide number of communicational purposes. Yet, it cannot be denied
that the speakers of Russenorsk activated shared culture in speaking
the language; they had a structure of relevance in common enabling
them to carry on their interaction in a meaningful way, although
the social field activated was narrow. Culture, in this meaning
of the word, is not something which can be pluralised (cf. Leach,
1982). The current state of intellectual paralysis experienced by
some cultural anthropologists derives largely from their insistence
to pluralise the word culture, instead of using it in its other
main meaning; namely, as humanly created, transmitted and distributed
capabilities for communication and agency (cf. Ingold, 1990, for
a similar point). Regarded in this way, culture is the invention
of the anthropologist (Wagner, 1981), or an "analytical implication"
in Hastrup's (1989) words.
Following the integration of so-called traditional peoples into
nation-states, symbolic universes merge in many respects. People
become more similar in terms of practices and representations; an
increasing part of their learnt capabilities for communication,
their taken-for-granted structures of relevance (Schütz's,
1981, concept), become shared. Simultaneously, modernity and individualism
enable agents to reflect upon and objectify their way of life as
a culture or as a tradition, and they become a people with an abstract
sense of community and a presumed shared history. This kind of process
has taken place among Trinidadians of Indian origin since the 1950s,
but particularly since the economic growth associated with the oil
boom of the 1970s. Many middle-class Hindus in Trinidad have, for
example, in recent years associated themselves with the charismatic
Sai Baba movement, which helps them to see their history as that
of a dignified culture (Klass, 1991). It is at this point that culture
is made into a noun, and traditionalist ideology is remarkably similar
to common anthropological definitions of culture, such as the Geertzian
view of culture as a coherent symbolic system (Geertz, 1973). Like
some anthropological theories of ethnicity, such ideologies are
primordialist in that they stress continuity with the past as a
raison-d'être for the unity of the ethnic group. For now,
the word tradition will refer to agents' own reification of their
way of life, which they regard as unique and usually ancient, which
has a sacred element, and to which they are emotionally attached
(cf. Longva, 1991) - in other words, as that reification of culture
evoked by traditionalism. A tradition in this sense is invented
- but not by the anthropologist, rather by the agents themselves.
There are thus two senses of culture which must be kept separate
here; the analytical concept of culture, and the reified, native
view of a culture comme une chose; the latter, similar to some anthropological
concepts of culture, I shall call tradition. Whereas it may be said
that societies like Trinidad are marked by multiple traditions,
they do not thereby necessarily contain multiple, autonomous symbolic
universes.
The Rhodes-Livingstone perspective
Whereas the totalising view of society as a relatively atemporal
coherent system of kinds of social relations tries to account for
the principles for its reproduction over time, the individualising
view of the person as an intentional being tries to account for
the logic of flowing human action itself. Both are aspects of persons
in society (cf. Holy & Stuchlik, 1983:1). In a bid to defend
the totalising pespective and thereby the concepts of culture and
society from the threat of total dissolution, I would now like to
call your attention to the studies undertaken by the so-called Rhodes-Livingstone
school, later the Manchester school, in the North Rhodesian (later
Zambian) Copperbelt and elsewhere in Southern and Central Africa
from the 1950s to the 1960s. These studies of urbanisation and interethnic
encounters rarely deal explicitly with confrontations between symbolic
systems or cultural syncretism, but rather focus on aspects of instrumental
action, and situational selection of statuses, taking place between
agents of diverse cultural origins, who were thrown together in
a shared industrial workplace (Wilson, 1942; Mitchell, 1956; Epstein,
1958; cf. also Gluckman, 1961). This body of work, not only pioneering
in the study of ethnicity (or "tribalism", as it was called
at the time), can today be read as exceptional case-studies in how
new shared meaning can be developed through interaction between
people of discrete cultural origins.
The most remarkable theoretical achievement of this school was perhaps
their readiness to deconstruct the then dominant view of societies
as bounded and stable entities. It was the nature of their field
of study, which could obviously not be delineated other than in
an arbitrary way, which prompted the replacement of "society"
with concepts like social network (Barnes), action-set (A. Mayer),
scale (the Wilsons) and social field (Gluckman and others) - all
of which denote the relativity of system boundaries; which remind
us that society or society-ness is a matter of degree. It should
be noted, however, that Wilson, Gluckman and their successors took
certain insights from Continental social theory for granted, frequently
without acknowledging this explicitly. They assumed that agents
were fundamentally constituted by, and acted upon premises defined
within, their societies. They had internalised the premises of societal
integration taught by Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard,
and saw no reason to question it. The discontinuity between the
life-worlds of agents of differing "tribal" backgrounds
was taken for granted. However, in actually investigating social
process and change on the Copperbelt, they were emphatically actor-oriented.
Epstein and Mitchell, in particular, applied the principle of situational
selection in order to to explain how conflicting expectations arising
from the agent's participation in different systems of relevance
were reconciled, so that "the individual may behave as a tribesman
in one situation but not in another" (Mitchell, 1966:59). Aidan
Southall, writing on urbanisation in Uganda, remarks, in line with
this idea: "The switch of action patterns from the rural to
the urban set of objectives is as rapid as the migrant's journey
to town" (Southall, 1961:19). Mitchell further makes the important
distinction between situational and processual change. Only in the
latter case do the social institutions change; in the former case,
individuals adapt strategically to changing circumstances (Mitchell,
1962). In other words, to re-phrase Marx's famous statement: Agents
act intentionally, but they have to act upon social conditions which
they have not themselves chosen. When a larger field of shared meaning
than that immediately available is required for the accomplishment
of a certain task, this is developed through patterns of interaction
frequently described as negotiation. In a study of ethnicity in
Mauritius, I have myself (Eriksen, 1990) described such interaction
as the search for common denominators, which can be defined as the
totality of rules and symbols adequate for a particular kind of
interethnic encounter to be meaningful for both parties involved.
These common denominators, and any disagreement concerning their
content and field of relevance, are framed in a shared language
of discourse, which is thus supra-ethnic. Interethnic negotiations
and competition, and overcommunication of ethnic differences, can
in this way be an indication of a high degree of supra-ethnic cultural
integration.
Seemingly recent insights about the relativity of system boundaries
were perceived as obvious facts, and were dealt with in a sophisticated
way by the anthropologists affiliated with the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute. They knew that any delineation of a system is arbitrary
and ultimately meaningless unless one delimits the system with a
particular analytical problem in mind. Best known in some quarters
for their field methods and quantitative techniques for handling
data, or for their characteristic form of analysis and presentation
known as the extended case-study, their contributions to theoretical
ideas about society or society-ness are no less important.
On the one hand, it is abundantly clear, as has been argued forcefully
by the Continental sociological school and its branches in the Anglo-Saxon
world, that the person is fundamentally socially constituted and
cannot act or speak in a non-cultural way. On the other hand, the
actor- and network-centred studies of social change in Southern
Africa indicate that persons may consciously switch between structures
of relevance in such a way that they may seem to belong to different
traditions in different situations. If this seems inconsistent and
a likely source for cognitive dissonance, we should rather investigate
how agents actually cope with such complexity than draw the conclusion
a priori. In The Kalela Dance, Mitchell (1956) also shows how new
cultural institutions are developed by agents acting upon radical
social change which they have not themselves brought about. As Wittgenstein
has remarked, sometimes we even invent the language-game as we go
along (Wittgenstein, 1983).
Multiple traditions and societal integration
Another influential perspective on complex societies has stressed
the separation rather than the interaction between members of different
groups. This is the view from classic theory on "plural societies"
(Furnivall, 1947; Smith, 1966), which depicts poly-ethnic societies
as consisting of culturally distinctive groups which were integrated
only through the limited interaction taking place in the market
and through common political leadership, usually in the hands of
one of the groups. Furnivall and Smith consider the cultural universes
of the constituent groups of the "plural society" as being
by and large discrete and autonomous, largely unmodified by the
limited interaction taking place between the groups in the market-place.
The metaphor describing discrete ethnic groups as "pearls on
a necklace", used by a Mauritian "pluralist" of my
acquaintance (Hookoomsing, 1986), sums up this position.
Multiple traditions may be conceived of as existing in an area,
such as a polity or "plural society", or as impinging
on a person, or both. When Redfield and Marriott spoke of "little"
and "great" traditions with particular reference to India
(cf. Marriott, 1955), they referred to a division of knowledge corresponding
to a hierarchical division of labour and distribution of ritual
purity. Redfield and his students saw a mutual interdependence between
the segments, but left it to Dumont (1980) to show how they form
a hierarchical totality of relations. Whereas the "cultural
pluralists" in the tradition from Furnivall regard the constituent
groups or segments as being forcefully integrated politically, voluntarily
integrated economically and otherwise autonomous, the views of Redfield,
Dumont and the Rhodes-Livingstone school would regard the role of
multiple traditions as something negotiable and relative. Only the
latter perspectives allow us to regard plural societies as societies
(cf. Eriksen, n.d. 1)
We are now prepared to approach the question of social integration
in poly-ethnic Trinidad and its relationship to the multiple traditions
of the island. Let this suffice as a theoretical introduction, therefore,
and let us now turn to some empirical Toms, Dicks and Harrilals
in order to see how they can illuminate the relationship between
similarity and difference in societies.
Curepe junction
A large proportion of my field material from Trinidad was collected
within a radius of two to three kilometres from Curepe junction,
a major road junction in central north Trinidad. In the immediate
vicinity of the road cross itself, there is a high level of activity
virtually all day and night. There is a bus terminal, a taxistand,
a post office, there are several rumshops and restaurants, places
of worship for the followers of various religions, and an abundance
of shops and stalls where a great variety of commodities are sold.
Many commuters from South Trinidad change buses at Curepe. Rather
than being a distinctive place with a distinctive local identity,
Curepe can be described as one of several commercial and communicational
hubs in the heavily urbanised East-West-Corridor where about half
of the Trinidadian population of slightly over a million live.
Curepe is in no respect a bounded system. Laid out spatially, the
personal networks of Curepe inhabitants assume the appearance of
so many dispersed clans in the New Guinea highlands. People commute,
they frequently live far from their relatives, and have local as
well as non-local linkages. In addition, their social identities
are partly defined through their engagement with mass media, mass
political organisations and institutions of national society, which
contribute to the creation of their structures of relevance.
The residents of Curepe may be divided into several categories according
to different "grid" principles. Ethnically, the largest
category in the area is Hindu, but there are also many blacks and
Muslims. In terms of social class, Curepe displays an extreme variation,
ranging from a squatter's camp near the mosque to the middle-class
Valsayn estate; in the very same street just below the Eastern Main
Road, there are miserable shacks immediately next to imposing new
two-storey concrete buildings with large gardens. A third dimension
for social distinctions follows the rural--urban dichotomy with
regards to origins, which can be important in Trinidad.
Setting out to do field work in this area, I found it useful to
begin by mapping out what Adrian Mayer (1966) has called action-sets,
that is the ego-centred first-order stars of linkages, to use the
terminology of network theory. In other words, an important aspect
of research in large-scale urban society consists, just like field
work in a small village, in finding out who does what with whom
and for which purposes. The distinguishing mark of the large-scale
field work consists in the fact that it is impossible to cover everybody
and to map out the entire network. There are simply too many people.
One has to make a selection. Mine consisted in locating persons,
or key informants, who covered as wide a range as possible regarding
profession, age and ethnic membership. (I will be the first to admit
my male bias.)
Curepe identities
Anand is a middle-aged gardener of Hindu religion; he owns his house
and lives there with his wife, two daughters in their teens, and
an adolescent son. A pious and industrious man, he rarely goes out
in the evening, except if there is a puja or a similar ritual at
the local temple. His action-set has four main components, excluding
his nuclear family: Kin, affines, neighbours and colleagues. His
relevant kin, notably his siblings, live in the Rio Claro area in
South-Eastern Trinidad; his affines live in the same region. Anand
and his family visit both categories about once a month and at special
occasions such as birthdays. His closest neighbours are all Hindus;
he exchanges a few words with them daily. His colleagues include
blacks and Muslims, and he frequently engages in lively discussions
at work, concerning the state of the country, public events or the
situation at work. There are certain issues which cannot be discussed
in this poly-ethnic setting, such as the calypso songs of the season
- for unlike many Hindus, he doesn't listen to calypsoes - or matters
pertaining to religious beliefs and practices. On the other hand,
the poly-ethnic character of Anand's workplace, and the lack of
ethnic segregation at lunch and during breaks, indicate the existence
of shared culture crossing ethnic boundaries. When they discuss
conditions at work, and when allocating tasks, their statuses as
colleagues are more important than their ethnic ones. Incidentally,
Anand told me that unlike his parents' generation, where marriages
were arranged, he would not himself interfere with his children's
choice of spouse, unless it was a black. Although the Trinidadian
caste system is in many respects defunct, the Indo-Trinidadian resistance
against intermarriage with blacks remains strong.
A very different type of action-set is that of Kumar, who lives
very close to Anand and works only a hundred yards from Anand's
workplace. Kumar is university educated and has a higher clerical
position in a private company. He is married but still childless,
and has a much wider range of linkages than Anand. Apart from his
kin and affines, to whom he has certain strong obligations, his
action-set includes friends scattered all over Trinidad and abroad,
recruited on the basis of shared interests or shared past, as well
as colleagues and political associates. He is politically active,
and could be described as a Hindu militant, critical of what he
sees as the black cultural domination in Trinidad. His action-set
activates a social field of larger scale than Anand's. Kumar's action-set
includes few non-Hindus outside of his workplace, but he is on cordial
terms with his non-Hindu colleagues. Sometimes, he experiences role-dilemmas
at work. One such event took place when his union proposed to go
on strike for higher wages. This union was regarded as a black civil
servant union. Kumar, as an Indian identifying with the Indian trade
unions, saw this move simultaneously as promoting his interests
as a wageworker and as an indication of black aggressiveness in
economic matters. The strike was, incidentally, called off.
Both Anand and Kumar identify themselves as Hindus, but they stress
that they are simultaneously Trinidadians. Their shared Hindu identity
includes components such as religion, an ideology of endogamy, and
a notion that the political party identified with the Hindus serves
their interests best. In addition, despite their widely different
backgrounds, both regard Hindu tradition - the mentioning of which
evokes a rich and sophisticated cultural heritage - as essential
for their own personhood. When they meet in the street and quickly
greet each other, their identity as Hindus in a non-Hindu country
- highlighted in ritual, at cultural shows and elections - is an
important aspect of the definition of the situation, however ephemeral
the encounter may be. Their shared identity as Hindus has not come
about through interaction with each other, but ultimately through
the appropriation of information channelled through the anonymous
structures of mass communication and national politics. The context
for any encounter between them is to a great extent defined by a
shared historical consciousness, including references to the sufferings
during indentureship, the black political domination and the presumed
discrimination and cultural stigmatisation suffered by Hindus in
Trinidad. This knowledge is mediated by impersonal structures of
modern communications and the nation-state and, of course, through
the ongoing flow of interaction. But neither of them would be able
to map out linkages indicating that they belong to the same system
of interaction, whether that system is to be delineated as Trinidadian
society or the Hindu community. Further, the Indo-Trinidadian tradition
is embedded and confirmed, and to a certain extent created reflexively
by the very existence of "Indian" trade unions, religious
groups and parties which operate at an abstract national level,
and which prove, as it were, the existence of Indian tradition.
The system of parties and trade unions is constituted at the higher
level of national society. Kumar's and Anand's shared identity is,
in other words, conditional on their integration into greater Trinidadian
society.
Overlapping structures of relevance
Anand and Kumar represent very different positions in terms of education,
class and intellectual orientation, but share a reflexive identity
linked to a tradition. They also have a wide range of shared representations
and practices with non-Hindu Trinidadians. Had they gone to India,
they would have found out what V.S. Naipaul found out when he went;
namely, that they and their tradition are more West Indian than
Indian (cf. Nevadomsky, 1983). In terms of the substantial content
of Trinidadian Hindu tradition, if we try to regard it as a habitus
or a complete form of life, it has converged in important respects
with practices and representations of other Trinidadians. The loss
of language is almost complete; the caste system is no longer functioning;
arranged marriages are virtually a thing of the past, and it could
be argued that the Indo-Trinidadian is homo aequalis rather than
homo hierarchicus (Dumont's, 1980, terms as he compares European
and Indian culture; cf. Klass, 1991:162) in many respects - in other
words, that their culture, if not their tradition, has adapted to
the demands of modern Trinidadian society. In many a regard, Kumar
seems to have more in common with John, a black clerk working in
the area, than with Anand. Although I never succeeded in arranging
a meeting between them, it was evident that John's perspectives
on Trinidadian politics, on the economy of the country, and his
general orientation, were quite compatible with Kumar's, although
they would have disagreed on a number of points. The main point
is that they would have been able to conduct a shared discourse
in fields which were closed to Anand, and which would also be closed
to non-Trinidadians. This might concern the lyrics of calypsoes
or the books of V.S. Naipaul, the recent public criticism against
the former Prime Minister, Eric Williams, corruption, or other issues
of national interest. Indeed, many of my acquaintances engaged in
intense interaction with people of different ethnic background,
without showing the slightest sign of doubting the exclusiveness
of their ethnic identity and tradition; it simply applied in different
contexts.
The segmentary and situational character of social identities should
be kept in mind. The term Indo-Trinidadian, which is sometimes politically
relevant, encompasses Muslims and Indian Christians in addition
to Hindus, and they would normally be closer to each other on a
Bogardus scale of social distance than to the "creole"
groups, which are themselves segmented into blacks, "Reds"
or browns, whites etc. Class cuts across this classification in
a complex way. When some Tom, Dick or Harrilal from Trinidad is
off to vote, he acts in an "ethnic" way; when he takes
an exam, he acts in a "meritocratic" way, when he goes
on strike, he acts in a "class" way, when he serves a
prison term, he will have been convicted according to "nationalist"
principles of justice, and when he goes on holiday to Europe, he
may well take on an identity as "someone from the Third World".
One may indeed ask rhetorically: Which is his tradition, or his
"culture"? - It makes sense to say that Trinidadians are
integrated into a Trinidadian cultural system, represented through
the shared idiom of Trinidad English or Trinidadian Creole. On the
one hand, this system is segmented along various "grid"
dimensions such as class, gender, regional origin, and ethnicity.
On the other hand, the Trinidadian cultural system may also be seen
as a segment connected with a wider Caribbean cultural system, which
is frequently activated locally in discourse concerning regional
politics and cricket. System boundaries are relative, and various
levels of integration are activated in different situations.
Resistance against entropy
Trinidadian society is integrated in such a way that interethnic
avoidance and "differential integration" are becoming
increasingly difficult. It is not exclusively integrated through
face-to-face interaction. Infrastructural facilities, schools, mass
media, the political system and the system of taxation, the labour
market and, to some extent, venues for public events, are increasingly
shared at a national level. A shared idiom for the articulation
of interests, conflicts and experiences is continuously enacted.
In some respects, the social impact of cultural variation is decreasing
strongly - as is the compass of the variation itself. This process
has inspired an ethnic revitalisation among the Hindus (as among
the blacks), who have created a tradition to prevent the disappearance
of their past and the erosion of their cultural identity. The new
Trinidadian Hindu tradition is apparently being reproduced intraethnically
- through religious ceremonies, cultural shows, political rallies
etc. - but this happens with a continuous reference to the surrounding,
black-dominated national space. Its intensity therefore derives
at least in part from the increasing self-conscious integration
of the Indo-Trinidadians into wider social and cultural systems.
This is especially evident in politics, both party and trade union
based, where organisations representing the Hindus compete with
similar organisations representing the blacks. Philip Mayer's (1961)
contention that trade unions transcend tribes is not evidently and
always true - indeed in Trinidad trade unions are associated with
ethnicity and have been instrumental in forging a coherent Indo-Trinidadian
identity shared by people who will never meet.
Despite the obvious existence of shared forms of discourse in Trinidad,
despite the visible process of mutual adaptation as witnessed in
the development of Trinidad English and the disappearance of Bhojpuri,
the shared educational system, mass media and labour market, and
despite the obvious fact of divisions of representations and practices
which do not follow ethnic lines, it makes sense to speak of multiple
traditions with respect to a society like Trinidad. The empirical
salience of ethnic self-consciousness, and the reproduction of reflexively
monitored ethnic practices, demonstrate this. Such traditions, however,
need not merely to be discovered. They must be invented, nursed
and propagated through anonymous mass media as well as through face-to-face
interaction. Thus it seems that interaction in this society is not
a necessary condition for cultural integration, if by cultural integration
we mean the development of shared ways of conceptualising and acting
in the world. It is to a great extent through large-scale processes
of communication that rivalling versions of the social world are
presented, and they in turn contribute to defining the premises
for the situational selection of identities.
Power and multiple traditions
One of the invented traditions of Trinidad is the national one.
Its potential for success, I have argued elsewhere (Eriksen, 1991b),
lies in its ability to reconcile or transcend the diversity of the
ethnic traditions. An important role for the state and civil society
in this kind of place consists in the integration of that diversity
which is evident in the reproduction of discrete traditions. At
the state level, it may be said that credible institutional interfaces
guaranteeing formal equality are required to this effect. At an
interpersonal level, common denominators are necessary. In both
cases, it may be meaningful to talk of shared forms of discourse
or shared structures of relevance as constituting Trinidadian society
and culture as something different from the formal structures of
the state. The representatives of ethnic traditions in a state society
are often compelled to move within parametres delineated by the
state. Indo-Trinidadian tradition thus stresses Indian music and
Hindu ritual, but has not attempted, for example, to revive the
jatis or panchayats (caste councils), which would have been incompatible
with the individualist capitalist ethos pervading the Trinidadian
labour market. Nor have they tried to save Bhojpuri - a despised
language even in India - from local extinction, or to create their
own educational system. In this way, a possible schism between social
reality and cultural models is prevented. The state, for its part,
is faced with the difficult task of simultaneously promoting equal
rights for its citizens (similarity) and tolerating the existence
of discrete traditions (difference). Discontented Indians in Trinidad
may accuse the state of succeeding in neither: Indian tradition,
they claim, is neglected, and blacks are favoured as public servants.
The power associated with the public social fields may contradict
ethnic traditions in ways which are perceived as discriminating.
I will mention two examples of presumed discrimination against Indians
often quoted by my Indo-Trinidadian acquaintances. The first concerns
the winner of the main calypso award in 1979, "Caribbean Unity",
better known as "Caribbean Man", by Black Stalin. Its
most famous lines go like this:
"Dem
is one race - De Caribbean Man
From de same place - De Caribbean Man
Dat make de same trip - De Caribbean Man
On de same ship - De Caribbean Man"
Many Indians were offended by Stalin's popular calypso, which defines
the region as one settled by the descendants of slaves. They did
certainly not come on the same ship from the same place as the Africans,
and would be appalled at any suggestion that they belonged to the
same race! (Deosaran, 1987) One may add that women, perhaps, would
have a similar reason for grievance; this never surfaced. One might
also add that many Indians would probably not have been aware of
the significance of the calypso, had there not been a public debate
over it at the time. Much more common than the statements made in
Stalin's calypso is the implicit non-recognition of the Indian presence
in Trinidad, as when the country is depicted to foreigners and in
textbooks as an essentially black country.
The second example concerns the attempt, in the early 1980s, to
set up an Indian cultural centre in Port-of-Spain. The centre never
materialised, and there are strong rumours - although undocumented
- about sabotage in the public service, as an explanation. Some
Indians claim that the failure of this project was a main reason
why the black--Indian alliance government of 1986-87 dissolved.
Both of these examples are controversial and ambiguous - for example,
some of my black friends held that the Indian cultural centre failed
because the Indian Embassy never met their financial obligations
(cf. Eriksen, n.d. 2).
In contemporary Trinidad, the public, interethnic or national spaces
are important. The Furnivallian model of cultural pluralism, where
the constituent groups are depicted as bounded and discrete, is
not applicable here. It presupposes a nondemocratic and nonegalitarian
political system and differential economic participation. When such
impediments are removed, new patterns of allegiances develop, and
new sets of shared representations and practices emerge due to intensified
participation in the same social fields. Ethnicity, to use Bateson's
(1972) terminology, becomes a symmetrical rather than a complementary
phenomenon in terms of culture, although it remains an asymmetrical
phenomenon in terms of power. The power to define the relevant levels
of culture and society is unequally distributed, and in the presence
of multiple traditions, this power asymmetry is crucial. Sometimes
it may be appropriate to speak of structural power in these respects,
since the strictures of discourse can only rarely be traced back
to one or several persons. The power of ideology consists in its
ability to convince people of the validity of a certain model of
the world, and its success relies on its ability to reconcile political
goals with social identities. The relationship between different
forms of discourse in societies marked by a plurality of traditions,
can therefore be regarded as a struggle between different versions
of the world attempting to seem credible. Some such versions may
be "muted" and fail to surface, and others may be framed
as resistance against entropy.
Ethnicity and "reality"
Before that invention of traditions in post-war Trinidad which turned
the inhabitants into peoples, Trinidadians of different ethnic membership
were scarcely integrated into a uniform system of signification.
Hindus were largely rural and lived in isolated villages, they spoke
Bhojpuri and a little English, and they hardly participated in fields
of public discourse such as mass media and national politics. In
terms of politics and group consciousness, they were fragmented.
In terms of culture, they were more distinctive then than they are
now. Ethnicity was less important and traditionalism did not exist,
since they largely lived in mono-ethnic environments with little
need for demarcation of boundaries and few opportunities for cultural
reflexivity. Today, the former East Indians have been transformed,
and have transformed themselves, into Indo-Trinidadians, just as
French-Canadians have become Québecois following a similar
process of social and cultural change (cf. Handler, 1988); they
are now self-conscious carriers of a tradition and simultaneously
self-conscious citizens in a country they know is poly-ethnic and
black-dominated. They now possess the resources to actively take
issue with what they see as discriminating practices and stigmatisation
of their culture. Their myth of common origin is sufficiently vague
to allow membership in the Indo-Trinidadian imagined community also
to those who cannot trace their descent to the Bhojpuri-speaking
areas in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. As has been pointed out several
times by analysts, ethnicity is not a vestige of a past, but can
be an integral aspect of modernity.
One aspect of cultural homogenisation which has not spurred ethnic
revitalisation in Trinidad, concerns language. At the beginning
of this century, several languages were spoken in Trinidad; the
majority of blacks spoke a French creole, and most of the Indians
spoke Bhojpuri. Today, virtually everybody speaks Trinidad English
or Trinidadian Creole. Dialectal differences in contemporary Trinidad
follow class and region rather than ethnicity. It may here seem
as if an aspect of Galton's problem needs resolving, namely that
the variation within the taxon seems in several respects to be greater
than the systematic variation between the taxa. Conversely, if the
compass of shared forms of discourse is greater than the compass
of exclusive forms of discourse, is it not then possible to say
that the traditions have merged? - If we try to reply to this question,
we shall commit the same essentialist error as the inventors of
traditionalist ideologies do when they try to measure cultural differences
instead of looking at their social relevance, and we shall confound
the native idea of a tradition with the analytical concept of culture.
It is, however, only through the widespread belief in such essentialist
ideologies, which are reflexively forged so as to fortify and even
create ethnically specific practices, that multiple traditions can
be maintained in this society, where tendencies toward cultural
homogenisation are strong.
At this level of analysis, we see the importance of distinguishing
between culture and tradition. While cultural universes and practices
merge in important respects, discrete traditions are simultaneously
strengthened. It is true that certain systematic differences in
habitus between the ethnic categories continue to exist; the physical
repulsion of Muslims against the idea of eating pork is one example,
as are the differences in views on sexuality between blacks and
Indians. However, as I have argued here, differences in habitus
or practice cannot account for ethnicity, unlike what Bentley (1987)
seems to argue in a recent bid to transcend current theorising on
ethnicity. As Yelvington correctly points out in a comment on Bentley
(Yelvington, 1990), it would be absurd to speak of a peculiar "white"
habitus in the Caribbean, although whites are certainly an ethnic
category. He concludes, as I have also done, that ethnicity is essentially
a relational phenomenon. Differences in habitus do not cause ethnicity,
but are themselves reproduced by aspects of ethnicity, particularly
religion and endogamy. I would further like to point out that the
shared Trinidadian culture is partly doxic and involves shared or
complementary elements of habitus; it may be taken for granted,
and it is a necessary although frequently unacknowledged condition
for Hindu traditionalism. It is perhaps most easily visible to outsiders
or to Trinidadians who go abroad, where they discover that Indo-
and Afro-Trinidadians have a great deal in common. In this way,
the national culture is discovered, and may be reified, through
contrasting with others. This is the sense in which the new Indo-Trinidadian
tradition may be said to feed upon an encompassing unity.
Case Noyale
It might seem that the mutual indifference and anonymity encountered
at Curepe junction would be impossible in a village setting. This
is no doubt true to some extent. Anonymity is impossible in a village
of less than a thousand inhabitants. However, the patterns of communication
of identity and difference which I encountered in a Mauritian fishing
village, is in several respects similar to that of Curepe. I shall
briefly remark on the similarities.
Case Noyale is a village of some 700 inhabitants. The Hindus of
Case Noyale form a small minority in the by-and-large Creole village.
They perceive themselves, and are perceived, as being culturally
distinctive. Occupationally, Hindus tend to follow different professions
from Creoles, but there is considerable overlap. As regards informal
peer groups, these tend to be mono-ethnic, but this is not always
the case. Besides, there are internal criteria for differentiation
within the Creole community which also contribute to the definition
of peer groups. All inhabitants of the village speak Mauritian Creole
(Kreol). In terms of ambition and aspiration, there is continuity
between the Indians and the neighbouring Creoles, although they
hold strong stereotypical representations of each other and sometimes
stress their mutual differences. The tradition of the Case Noyale
Indians is Indian, but it is certainly not identical with that of
any part of India. Their language is related to French. Their knowledge
of Hindu religion is sketchy, and most will simply state that they
believe in God if asked. There are Hindu women in the village who
go regularly to church, and who just as regularly sacrifice bananas
at the local Kalimai. Nevertheless, their commitment to their Indian
identity is demonstrably firm, and the one case of Hindu--Creole
intermarriage in the village resulted in very severe sanctions from
the Hindu family. The Case Noyale Indians self-consciously identify
with the larger Indo-Mauritian community, although their relationships
with, and personal commitments to, the local Creoles are extensive,
and although their language and general way of life is quite similar
to theirs.
In Case Noyale as well as in Curepe, what needs accounting for is
the continued or even increased importance of ethnic identity in
a situation of increasing cultural integration at a national level.
I have already argued that the societal wholes may be seen as integrated
systems of interaction and symbolisation in various respects, although
they are also segregated and internally diversified. The mutual
social interdependence between the groups is obvious in both societies.
Michel, a Creole fisherman and longanist (sorcerer) in Case Noyale,
exemplifies this. In his day-to-day affairs, he depends on an Indian
banyan (middleman) for selling his catch, on other Creoles who are
his workmates, and on Indian and Creole customers as regards his
practice as a longanist. He is thus a member of several groups or
quasi-groups to which he pays allegiance, and only some of them
are ethnically constituted. Like the people of Curepe, Michel and
his co-villagers enact action-sets committing them to crossing allegiances,
some of which cross ethnic boundaries. However, his family - both
the natal and the nuclear one - and his closest friends are Creoles.
He also identifies with the political party believed to serve the
interests of the Creoles.
In both Case Noyale and Curepe, non-ethnic bases for identification
and organisation are available, and these are sometimes activated.
The principle of endogamy, which is particularly strong among Hindus
and Muslims in both societies, and the successful invention of discrete
traditions at a national scale - as a response to the underlying
process of homogenisation or cultural integration - precludes the
breakdown of ethnic boundaries. In this way, ethnicity is a potential
resource which can be mobilised politically under particular circumstances
- however, so are nationhood and class in both societies, which
recent events, such as international sports competitions and general
strikes, have shown.
Interaction and cultural integration
Just as concepts of culture and tradition should be kept apart,
nationalist ideology, seen as a reflexive phenomenon, should be
distinguished from the processes of social and cultural integration
into the nation-state. Nationalist ideology in societies like Trinidad
and Mauritius, I have argued elsewhere (Eriksen, 1991c), can hardly
draw upon the imagery of some mythical past for its legitimacy.
The goods that it is expected to deliver consist chiefly in interethnic
peace, prosperity, and pride in nationhood. Its success is not necessarily
conditional on the failure of ethnic ideologies, but it must be
able to reconcile them.
Cultural homogenisation, I have shown, is compatible with a proliferation
of traditions. Let us now consider the question of the relationship
between social interaction and cultural integration. As it should
be clear from the foregoing discussion, this relationship is not
easy to grasp in societies where information is disseminated in
an anonymous way and where inhabitants form personal networks along
several different axes, according to different "grid"
principles, and involving different personnel. Of course, there
is an intrinsic connection between actions and representations,
but it would be misleading to say that interaction creates cultural
integration without qualifying such a statement. On the other hand,
Geertz's unfortunate statement that culture is integrated in a logico-meaningful
way whereas society is integrated in a causal-functional way (Geertz,
1973) might deserve a confrontation with Bourdieu's (1980) concept
of habitus which, while actor-centred, in a sense fuses the cultural
with the social, being a concept which sums up the potential forms
of action which a person is conditioned to carry out. In these societies,
the global and domestic mass media and the public social fields
of labour, politics and education doubtless create shared frames
of reference and contribute to shaping the habitus, but they do
not create social interaction. As a general rule, we may thus state
that cultural common denominators are not sufficient for social
integration to come about, nor do they necessary result from social
interaction. They serve, however, as lubricants, and they are necessary
conditions for meaningful interaction to happen. The integration
into a shared educational system, and the integration into a labour
market based on a monetary economy and formal principles of meritocracy
are in social respects much more significant, both in the case of
Curepe and Case Noyale, than the mass media. It is at school and
at work that people actually meet, but it may to just as great an
extent be via radio, TV and public events that their shared cultural
repertoire is developed.
The difference between urban Curepe and rural Case Noyale is thus
one of degree. In neither case are the actors exclusively integrated
locally; in both cases, the ethnic boundaries are jealously guarded
and efficiently maintained. In neither locality is there a systematic
ethnic difference between the personal ambitions and general outlook
of people of different ethnic membership. The main cleavages in
both localities may seem to derive from social class and educational
attainments. Yet, intermarriage is very rare and ethnicity is sometimes
overcommunicated - and besides, members of both the Creole and the
Indian communities in both places may readily attribute class differences
to ethnic differences. On the other hand, non-ethnic bases for community
are available as templates, and these are occasionally activated.
The conventional distinction between societies integrated through
face-to-face interaction and societies integrated through anonymous
structures of communication and surveillance may be applicable here.
In the case of localities in Trinidad and Mauritius, be they rural
or urban, interethnic interaction is in principle not necessary
for cultural integration to take place on a nationwide scale, since
this integration is mediated by mass media and the anonymous structures
of the state and market. In a tribal village, people may produce
their own food on a household basis, and or may obtain it through
barter. In Case Noyale, people buy food in the shop; in this way,
their patterns of consumption become similar due to other causes
than interaction. The nation is not constituted through interaction;
it is defined from above, and offers opportunities to those who
support it. A certain degree of cultural integration is necessary
for interaction to take place, but the inverse does not seem to
hold true in these societies, unlike in stateless societies.
An example of a very different "plural" social system
would be that comprising the Baruya of New Guinea and their neighbours
(Godelier, 1973). Contacts between groups are here limited to trade
and exchange of women. This system seems to approach the Furnivallian
plural society, at least as regards the preservation of distinctiveness
in the face of limited interaction (which takes place in the market-place
only). Many of the language-games enacted by each group are unintelligible
to the other groups. Compared with such a system, Mauritius and
Trinidad appear as extremely well integrated societies, at both
systemic, social and cultural levels.
As I have argued presently and above, it may be meaningful to talk
of shared language-games, common denominators or shared forms of
discourse as constitutive of society. Crossing allegiances or multiple
loyalties at the interpersonal level further integrate the system,
as in any segmentary system. However, we should not forget that
in these societies, there is much more "glue" than that
represented in the crossing allegiances of individuals: there is
the power of the state and that of the capitalist market, both of
them important agents in the creation of shared interfaces, and
they are both powerful instances of sanctions against unacceptable
deviations.
At the level of discourse and doxa, cultural homogenisation is taking
place at increasing velocity in both societies. National traditions,
attempting to bridge perceived differences between the constituent
segments of the societies, have been invented. A shared language
- in both a literal and a metaphorical meaning of the word - for
the articulation of interests, conflicts and experiences - is being
developed, and is continuously enacted. Both in Trinidad and in
Mauritius, for example, dialectal differentiation now follows class
and region rather than ethnicity. The influence from Bhojpuri on
Kreol is stronger in the Mauritian countryside than in the towns,
where the influence from French is stronger, but villagers in the
north-east of the island speak a similar dialect no matter their
ethnic membership. At the level of self-consciousness, reflexivity
and political organisation, social differentiation nevertheless
tends to follow ethnic lines in important respects. The groups do
not merge.
Following the lead of Park and Bogardus, we can depict cultural
integration as concentric circles or as overlapping Venn circles,
where each circle contains a delineable field of shared ways of
creating meaning, held by a limited number of people. Such models,
notwithstanding their reifying character, can be useful in descriptions
of identity and differences in such complex societies as Trinidad.
They are encompassed, however, by what Dumont (1983) would call
the ultimate values of the societies, which enable the segments
to articulate their differences.
Such fields of shared culture need not be coterminous with the system
of interaction; the social and the cultural need not, in other words,
be congruent. The anthropologists in the Copperbelt, working from
structural-functionalist premises, assumed that there was a correspondence
between the social system and the system of representations. The
development of the Kalela dance, an expression of a new spirit of
"tribalism" in Mitchell's (1956) view, was seen as an
adaptive response to social change. Geertz draws a similar conclusion
in his study of ritual and social change in Java (1973), although
he stresses that representations do not respond mechanically to
social change at the macro level; that there may in fact be a temporary
schism between the two aspects, akin to what Ogburn spoke of as
"cultural lag". My conclusion is more radical. I have
argued that in a society where the state and mass media have a strong
presence, changes in people's representations do not necessarily
depend on changes in their immediate social environment. Feedback
between the social and the cultural goes both ways, and "social
lags" are just as plausible as "cultural lags". The
ethnic traditions of Trinidad depend for their success upon being
propagated through anonymous mass media, and preferably through
state agencies of secondary socialisation, as well as through face-to-face
interaction. It is to a great extent through large-scale processes
of communication that rivalling versions of the social world are
presented and appear as real and enduring to the target groups.
While interaction requires some degree of cultural integration,
cultural integration may come about without interaction. The fact
that two people share models of the world is no evidence that they
belong to the same social network.
Concluding remarks
Culture consists of those shared ways in which life, activities
and the world make sense. Society is that perceived social environment
to which agents commit themselves morally and to which they make
demands; and it is also those unacknowledged social processes which
empower and render powerless. The power to define culture and society
is unequally distributed, and in the presence of self-proclaimed
distinctive traditions, this power asymmetry can be crucial. Sometimes
it may be appropriate to speak of structural power in these respects,
since the strictures of discourse only rarely can be traced back
to one or several persons. The power of ideology consists in its
ability to convince people of a certain model of the world. The
relationship between different forms of discourse in societies marked
by a plurality of traditions can therefore be regarded as a political
struggle between different versions of the world. Some such versions
may be "muted" and will then fail to surface.
There are different levels and different degrees of both society
and culture. In some societies, it is necessary that the inhabitants
have very much in common in order for the society to continue to
fulfill their needs and to continue to exist without changing profoundly.
In such societies, the favourite laboratories for anthropologists,
system boundaries, both social and cultural, can apparently be delineated
easily. In the societies where I have worked, any such delineation
is in some sense arbitrary. This does not mean that we should abandon
the concepts of society and culture. For despite his shortcomings,
Durkheim was fundamentally and intuitively correct in insisting
that society, as a moral community, is a bounded system of social
relations and symbolisation, and that society is necessary for human
life to be meaningful. This idea is in fact compatible with that
which Barth, from a more dynamic perspective, has spoken of as boundary
maintenance (Barth, 1969). Our present challenge consists in looking
more closely into the dual flows of interaction and symbolisation,
armed with our new, processual concepts of society and culture -
which relativise the boundaries between systems and which do not
take for granted the congruence between the social and the cultural.
So even if we must acknowledge that we are all living in Leviathan,
as Maybury- Lewis puts it, as he writes on minorities and the state
(Maybury-Lewis, 1984), the state is not always an appropriate synonym
for society, nor is the nation always an appropriate synonym for
culture, even if folk models may sometimes suggest that it is so.
Both can be misleading; there are different levels and degrees of
both culture and society, and we should not be deluded by professional
ideologists into committing the same errors of reification as they
themselves commit.
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