SUNDAY 5TH JULY, 2015 – UWI TODAY
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culture and politics
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 inNorthAmerican 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, fromwithin 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
Examining Race, Politics and
Religion in Caribbean Life
A workshop in Political Anthropology hosted by Cultural Studies
B y M a a r i t F o r d e
Dr. Maarit Forde is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and coordinator of the Cultural Studies programme at The UWI, St. Augustine.
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 Muslimwomen 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
