 Questions of power, inequality, citizenship and the state have guided political anthropology in the Caribbean since the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin’s 1885 call for “real and effective civic and political freedom.” These questions remain highly relevant today, as thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent face deportation and statelessness; the Cuban revolution has entered a new stage with the US-Cuban rapprochement; electorates in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have once again engaged in political discourse oscillating between national unity and racially divisive tribalism; and inequality persists while memories of the radical politics of earlier generations seem to fade away.
Ethnography is a powerful tool for deepening our understanding of contemporary struggles and stratifications, the strengths and weaknesses of the state and the evolution of democracy in the neoliberal moment in Caribbean societies. Anthropological conversations on such issues, however, often take place outside of the region in North American and European conferences and universities. Despite long-standing anthropological interest in the region, the discipline has not been institutionalized in the Anglophone Caribbean.
To facilitate a dialogue on political anthropology in the Caribbean, from within the Caribbean, I organized a workshop at The UWI, St. Augustine on 11-12 June, 2015. The workshop brought together anthropologists based in the UK, US, and Trinidad and Tobago, working on political questions in different parts of the Caribbean and its diaspora. Meeting for two days, the participants discussed their works-in-progress, pre-circulated to allow for meaningful critique and informed questions. Among the presenters were three UWI doctoral students, and the audience consisted of staff and students from Cultural Studies, the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Sociology and other departments.
Their questions and comments made a valuable contribution to the discussion.
Professor Don Robotham from the CUNY Graduate Center concluded the workshop by drawing together trajectories of thought in our conversations and in related literature. Although all the presentations drew on ethnographic material on Caribbean societies and explored local life-worlds, they were theoretically linked to more general anthropological concepts and arguments. It was an explicit objective of the workshop to reach beyond narrow national or regional contexts and contribute to globally relevant discussions from a Caribbean perspective.
Subjectivity and the formation of political selves were recurrent themes in the conversation. Martin Holbraad (UCL) explored the idea of self-transformation in revolutionary ideology and rhetoric in Cuba. How do political awakenings and transformation on the personal level relate to the shifts in power relations and structures that revolutions seek to produce? Holbraad’s take on Foucauldian technologies of the self opened exciting theoretical viewpoints to subjectivity in the context of social and political change. Post-revolutionary subjects in Haiti, on the other hand, were pathologized as incapable of self-governance in popular and scientific discourse, as Erica Caple James’ (MIT) work suggested. Hostile representations of the Haitian Revolution served to naturalize Haitians as inferior ‘others’ and to legitimatize racial categories and inequality more generally.
Epistemological violence, the reproduction of otherness and inferiority in academic knowledge production, has supported political and economic oppression of Haitians and obfuscated the premises of their self-formation as revolutionary subjects. Tyehimba Salandy (UWI) addressed epistemological contestations in public and popular representations of Rastafarians in Trinidad. Like the discourse on Haiti, the material analysed by Salandy was deeply entrenched in, but also constitutive of, racial and class stratification on local and global levels.
Related epistemological concerns were linked to methodological considerations in Gabrielle Hosein’s (UWI) critique of normative andro-centricity in ethnographic analyses of the state. Feminist political anthropology with a sensitivity towards the transnational realities of Caribbean societies can lead towards more diverse and balanced understandings of governance, democracy, and citizenship.
Rhoda Reddock’s (UWI) work investigated political subjectivity and its cultural and social parameters from the perspective of Muslim women in Trinidad by charting their efforts to maintain access to religious practice within the sacred space of the masjid. Gendered public and private space within various, evolving Muslim groups set the context for these women’s political and religious subjectivity.
In my own paper on a disadvantaged neighborhood in East Port of Spain I looked at cultural norms and spatial practices that limit the residents’ possibilities to engage in public discourse on common issues. Understandings of inside and outside, private and public space, as well as concrete social relations and practices like the balkanization of the area into gangs’ territories structure the public sphere and hinder the emergence of collective political formations.
The possibilities for such formations constituted another major theme underpinning our conversations. What forms can citizenship, belonging, or activism take in neoliberal, multiply stratified, transnationally oriented societies? What can we learn of the civil society, inequality and advocacy in societies faced with exploitative global finances-capes, ethno-nationalist politics or war against drugs?
Rhoda Bharath (UWI) probed the role of ethnically “mixed” citizens in racially aligned party politics that sustain the notion of race-based competition for resources. A different take on citizenship and the formation of collective political identities emerged in Fadeke Castor (TAMU) and Josiah Olubowale’s (UWI) papers on local as well as transnational rituals and belonging in Orisha and Ifá traditions. Spiritual connections to shrines and communities across the Afro-Atlantic, but also to ancestral spirits across temporal divides, invite us to reconsider the ideas of community and belonging, citizenship and political allegiance.
Finally, Ryan Jobson’s (Yale) ethnography of the Trinidadian Highway Re-Route Movement posed important questions about social movements in the contemporary Caribbean, but also about sovereignty in postcolonial states. Ethnographic accounts of the cultural specificities of states and state power allow for nuanced and plural conceptualization of the state, including the “deep state” of invisible but powerful institutions that underpin and outlast the visible state, like governments, public services, or infrastructure.
Dylan Kerrigan’s (UWI) work on insecurity and militarization in Laventille added to this problematique by a discursive analysis of residents’ experiences and understandings of the police and military presence in their community.
The papers are now being developed towards a publication, and the participants plan to continue and expand the dialogue through research and teaching collaborations. I am deeply grateful to the Campus Research and Publications Fund and the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies for financial and administrative support in organizing the event and fostering the growth of anthropology at the UWI.
Dr. Maarit Forde is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and coordinator of the Cultural Studies programme at The UWI, St. Augustine. |
