Siting Culture

The Shifting Anthropological Object

Kirsten Hastrup, Karen Fog Olwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415150026
• eBook ISBN: 9781134749454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade and this is related to a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. At the same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized, the people studied by anthropologists are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities within global fields of relations.
So far, much of the analysis of the role of place in culture has been carried out at a level of theoretical debate. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance of place in the global space of relations which mould the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture.

Part 1

Finding a place for culture

1
Cultural sites

Sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world

Karen Fog Olwig

Anthropologists, in the past, have had a tendency to regard people as either settled in localized communities or as migrating and therefore involved in processes of moving and relocating in new places. Impressed by the growing importance of travel in the modern world, they are, however, beginning to critique the idea that settled life in particular places necessarily is a “normal” state of being. A great deal of attention is therefore now being directed at the cultural and social significance of moving in space and the transnational communities which may result from this. In the excitement about foregrounding movement and non-local relations we must be careful, however, not to overemphasize the global and transient character of human life on the loose. On the basis of a study of a West Indian community I shall argue that the strong propensity to migrate found among West Indians is counterbalanced by an equally strongly developed notion of attachment to place. In order to understand West Indian life it is therefore necessary to study the role of both fixed places and changeable and ever-expanding global networks of relations. I suggest that a useful concept in such studies may be found in the notion of “cultural sites,” cultural institutions which have developed in the interrelationship between global and local ties. These cultural sites attain their significance because they are identified with particular places, at the same time as they accommodate the global conditions of life which have long characterized the West Indies. It is suggested that such cultural sites may be useful focal points in anthropological studies of the more general global and local condition of human existence.

CULTURAL SITINGS

God created the earth for people to go to and fro,
not to stay in one place.

This idea of movement as a religiously ordained foundation of human life was expressed by Mrs. Browne, an elderly woman from the West Indian island of Nevis whom I interviewed in the American Virgin Islands in 1980. She had lived on Nevis for most of her life, working as a market woman selling agricultural produce on the neighboring island of St. Kitts. Several of her brothers and sisters had moved to England during the 1950s and had helped support her seven children. When the oldest, a daughter, turned 17, Mrs. Browne purchased a ticket for her to go to St. Croix so that she might make a better living for herself—and for the rest of the family back on Nevis. The daughter soon began to send remittances to her mother, and some years later, when she had married a Virgin Islander, she obtained a permanent immigrant visa for her mother which would enable Mrs. Browne to obtain American immigrant visas for the younger children. When I met Mrs. Browne she had just succeeded in relocating all of her children to the Virgin Islands. Several of them were hoping to go on to mainland United States. Having accomplished her mission, Mrs. Browne was planning to return to Nevis to live there in her own house which was located next to her sister’s. She expected, however, to go back and forth between Nevis and the Virgin Islands, explaining, “it is natural for people to move around.”

This little case story presents a way of life and kind of folk wisdom which has not usually been associated with the sort of people who have been the traditional object of study by anthropologists. The image of the “native” prevalent in the anthropological literature has been one of settled persons whose lives can be conceptualized in terms of cultural wholes of shared values and meaning which unfold within a closely linked web of integrated social relations. In this line of thinking, to move, unless part of regular nomadic patterns, has implied uprootedness and hence the loss of a firm cultural foundation. This emphasis on rootedness has been criticized in recent writings which have argued that movement, far from being an interruption in ordinary, settled life, constitutes a normal condition of life for a great deal of people (Appadurai 1988, 1991; Rosaldo 1988; Clifford 1992; Malkki 1992). Thus Clifford has suggested that “travel” should be brought to the forefront in ethnographic analysis, and “cultures” be viewed as “sites of dwelling and travel” (1992:103). He therefore proposes that “traveling-in-dwelling” and “dwelling-in-traveling” should constitute a central topic in cultural studies. In a similar vein, Appadurai sees the world as characterized by a state of deterritorialization “in which money, commodities, and persons unendingly chase each other around the world” (1991:194). While this state generates a sense of displacement, the very experience of displacement is seen by him to fuel “the imaginative resources of lived, local experiences” (ibid.: 196). In his opinion, one of the most relevant subjects of ethnographic study today, therefore, is the imagined worlds which are constructed when “local historical trajectories flow into complicated transnational structures” (ibid.: 209).

If anthropology is not to turn into an imagined world itself, longing for a world of ordered and stable lives that we have lost, it seems that we must listen to Clifford, Appadurai, and Mrs. Browne from Nevis and begin to direct our attention to the interrelationship of moving and dwelling in a world of global interconnections. In this chapter I shall discuss such a global network of social relations and associated cultural values and some of the institutions which can be seen to ground this network in particular places. The study concerns people who are connected with Nevis, formerly a part of the British Leeward Islands, which today has become politically independent together with the island of St.Kitts.

The field work upon which this analysis is based has been carried out in four different locations: Nevis, the central reference point in the transnational network of Nevisians, as well as three migration destinations: New Haven (Connecticut) where Nevisians emigrated during the early part of this century; Leeds (England), which received a great number of Nevisians during the 1950s and 1960s, and the US Virgin Islands which have remained an important destination since the 1960s. Even though the field work of necessity was grounded in specific locations, it took place within a non-local cultural space related to the network of ties which connected individual Nevisians residing in these separate locations. Thus a great deal of the Nevisians’ daily life was oriented toward activities and concerns of relevance to people and places in other points in the global network, giving me the feeling that Nevisian culture kept escaping me—it always seemed to be where I was not. This even applied to aspects of life related to institutions usually associated with a settled way of life, such as possession of land and a home. By viewing these institutions as sites, which have been molded by an interplay of perceptions of presence and absence, I believe it is possible to find a way of analyzing, and understanding, Nevisian culture. Before turning toward an analysis of the present-day Nevisian community, I shall examine the historical context in which it emerged. This will help provide a means of comprehending the particular form the community has taken and the role of place within it.

A HISTORY OF DETERRITORIALIZATION

The Caribbean has been seen to present one of the most extreme examples of deterritorialization in the contemporary world. The present population composition in the area is a result of massive importations of people from Europe, Africa and Asia occurring primarily from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. This immigration, much of which was forced, was followed by extensive voluntary outmigration, during this century primarily to North America and Europe. On Nevis the current population of less than 10,000 is primarily of African ancestry. It is impossible to estimate the number of Nevisians who live outside the island, because there are no statistical records of the total number of Nevisians who have emigrated abroad. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it is difficult to establish objective criteria by which to determine which of the emigrees and their descendants are to be defined as Nevisians and therefore included in the absent population. There is little doubt, however, that the global network of people of Nevisian ancestry who identify with Nevis involves a greater population than that which is present on the island itself.¹

It would be a mistake to view deterritorialization primarily as a matter of physical removal from a territory. The most fundamental form of deterritorialization experienced by Caribbean people of African descent was that which took place within the Caribbean. The Africans were brought to Nevis, as well as the rest of the Caribbean, as a source of labor power to be used primarily on the sugar plantations. As I have shown elsewhere (Olwig 1993a, b, c, 1995a) the Africans were incorporated into the local societies through an institution of slavery which treated them as socially dead chattel labor with no identity apart from that of being their owner’s private property. Being denied a place of their own in the social ranks of the colonial society, the Africans and their descendants developed social and economic ties among one another in the contexts of life that they were able to create outside the sphere of dominance of the colonial society proper. These ties came to form an important basis for the establishment of a social and cultural identity among the slaves.

One of the most important contexts within which a social identity could be established was that which emerged in connection with the subsistence farming that the slaves were able to perform in the forested mountain areas or ravines which were found on many plantations. Not being suitable for sugarcane cultivation these areas were left for the slaves to do kitchen gardening and rear small stock. During slavery, slaves therefore can be seen to have lived a dual life. Within the plantation society, where they spent most of their time performing strenuous and menial labor for their masters, they remained chattel labor with no identity of their own. Within the context of the active social and economic life which they created in their spare time, however, they became persons with an identity in their own right. This was rooted in the places in the margins of the plantation society where they were free to carve out a life for themselves and generate a community of relations relatively undisturbed by their owners.

After the abolition of slavery in 1834, the freed attempted to acquire land where they could settle and thus realize in daily social practice the sort of life which had provided a source of identity and independence for them in the hostile plantation society. In many Caribbean societies, including Nevis, severe obstacles were placed in the way of this acquisition of land (Olwig 1995b), and the emancipated remained landless or acquired only small plots of land, many of them located in the same marginal areas where they had had their provision plots during slavery. On these plots small houses were built —usually simple two-room structures of wood or wattle—and the potentiality for cultivation was usually limited to a little subsistence cultivation. Most of these small landholders, therefore, had to supplement their farming with wage labor or sharecropping arrangements on the plantations. An increasingly attractive alternative for the emancipated became migration off the island. This was not intended as a permanent, once-and-for-all solution to the problems which the people of African descent had experienced on their island of birth. It was perceived as a temporary relocation which would enable them to return with the necessary resources to establish an economically independent life on land of their own. The migrants often left close relatives behind, including spouses, offspring and parents, to whom they expected to return having accumulated the necessary means. Many did not succeed in this and never moved back. They nevertheless usually maintained contact with their family on Nevis and sent remittances to them whenever possible.

The economic and social deterritorialization which the emancipated experienced on their native island was augmented, for many, by the cultural estrangement that took place as a result of British missionary activities which began during the 1780s. The sort of Christianity which was propagated by Methodist ministers, in particular, was closely related to an ideology of respectability which had developed among the rising middle classes in Great Britain. This respectability revolved around a frugal life of hard work, sexual restraint and family values centered on a nuclear family. The family, which was based on holy matrimony, was headed by the husband and father, who was regarded as the provider of the family, but nurtured by the wife and mother who was the moral guardian of the family. Important outward signs of respectability were possession of a modest, yet comfortable home on one’s own property (the center of family life) and sufficient material means for the mother to devote herself to housewifely duties. It was also of great significance that the family was able to give the children proper religious and secular education (proof of the industriousness of the head of the family and the high moral virtues of the home). Those who were not able to become sufficiently economically secure to provide the proper home environment for the family were, by implication, not worthy of respect.

Most Nevisians did not find themselves among the respectable members of society. They experienced a great many problems just obtaining the basic means of subsistence, and the entire family was involved in economic activities, including the mother and the children who often labored in the plantation fields. Furthermore, many Nevisian families were not nuclear, nor were they necessarily based on marriage. It was very difficult for the young to acquire the economic means to build a house of their own, and they tended to stay with their parents and have children out of wedlock. It was also apparent, however, that the European concept of the independent father-headed nuclear family based on holy matrimony was quite different from the network of kin relations that had become the primary family form among the slaves. Kinsmen had provided a vital resource both in dealings with authorities on the plantations and in the development of the African-Caribbean communities which emerged in the margins of plantations. Thus the kin ties involved obligations to help and cooperate and were most intensive between close relatives, in particular mothers and children, who always lived on the same plantation. Ties between sexual partners, on the other hand, were of relatively less significance in the social and economic exigencies of daily life. The post-emancipation era therefore did not see the establishment of a “respectable” class of smallholders based on nuclear families. Rather it saw the further development of networks of kinsmen, some of them living on plantations, some in their own homes on small plots of land, and some outside the island.

A few years after emancipation, a pattern of deterritorialization had become firmly established among the emancipated on Nevis, along with many of the other Caribbean islands. Most Nevisians were either: (1) physically present on Nevis, but hoping to emigrate in order to hel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Finding a place for culture
• Cultural sites Sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world
• Imagining a place in the Andes In the borderland of lived, invented, and analyzed culture
• Which world? On the diffusion of Algerian raï to the West
• Seeking place Capsized identities and contracted belonging among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees
• The culture and politics of place
• The nation as a human being—a metaphor in a mid-life crisis? Notes on the imminent collapse of Norwegian national identity
• Paradoxes of sovereignty and independence “Real” and “pseudo” nation-states and the depoliticization of poverty
• The experience of displacement Reconstructing places and identities in Sri Lanka
• Localizing the American dream Constructing Hawaiian homelands
• Picturing and placing Constable Country
• Topical metaphors in anthropological thinking
• Speechless emissaries Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization
• “Roots” and “Mosaic” in a Balkan Border Village Locating cultural production
• Simplifying complexity Assimilating the global in a small paradise
• There are no Indians in the Dominican Republic The cultural construction of Dominican identities
• Subject index
• Names index