Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach

Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad

Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Chapter 1
Trinidad and Modernity

Introduction

There is one clear precursor to a book on the relationship between the ethnography of a Caribbean society and general writings on modernity. This is Crab Antics (Wilson 1973), which argues on the basis of an ethnography of a small Caribbean island for an observable cultural dualism in the region which could best be understood by reference to dialectical theories of modernity. But before undertaking fieldwork I had been sceptical about this book, partly because of its representations of gender. In particular, I felt suspicious about Wilson’s reading of history out of which he proposed a positive male egalitarianism arising from the people and a negative female hierarchy as the legacy of colonial doctrines. While his book seems to rest largely upon ethno-graphic studies centred around the activities of men, my own ethnography, focusing upon consumption, was based largely upon the lives of Trinidadian women.

My own sense of a powerful dualism arose not from this domain of gender, but from observations on the manner in which imported ideas and goods seemed to bifurcate when they reached the shores of Trinidad. I wondered why in the main road near where I lived there was one shop for items devoted to the car exterior and another for the car interior, or why there seemed to be such a clear distinction between the kind of people who were expected to be concerned with new fads that directed attention to the outside appearance of the body, as in body building, and others whose keep-fit fashions directed attention to internal health. Finding my study of consumption permeated by such distinctions I started to look for other areas in which this relationship of surface to interior might achieve greater clarity and found this in the clear opposition between the values which were expressed in the two key festivals of Christmas and Carnival. It also seemed that the dualism which was projected as the opposed qualities of goods was also commonly applied to persons, in this case forming the major ethnic stereotypes.

I also realised that if I was ever to engage in any kind of empathetic analysis of this dualism I had to dismiss all those assumptions which are rendered by the use of the term ‘superficial’. This meant that many of the current debates on modern society which focus on the term postmodern were unlikely to be of much assistance. The literature on this topic, which is represented by the critique of postmodernism associated with the writings first of Baudrillard (1981) and latterly Jameson (1991) and which has had some influence upon anthropology and cultural studies, is largely based upon an uncritical reliance on the semantic linkage between the derogatory term ‘superficial’ and the manifestation of images on the surfaces of peoples and things. This did not seem a promising starting point for an analysis of consumption within which the sense of style figured prominently.

As with perhaps the majority of anthropologists conducting fieldwork I found disconcerting complexities to the application of a set of ideas I had developed previously in more abstract terms. For example, I had expected that the degree to which Trinidad was dependent upon imported goods would be a source of a sense of dependency and alienation which would have to be overcome, but, as the material presented in Chapter 4 demonstrates, in some instances it was the contrary situation which was encountered. In such cases imported goods were far less problematic than the appropriation of locally produced materials. These experiences, which challenged my expectations, helped also to sunder me from any simple representation of Trinidad as a ‘traditional’ society confronted by a modernity which was represented by imported goods, images and behaviours. It also suggested that the centrality of the concept of ‘authenticity’ to the ideologies which lay behind anthropological and other theories of social self-construction, as well as to the design of consumer goods (see Orvell 1989) might not apply in this particular context, and there were instead other blocks and difficulties which threatened the sense of national self-worth.

In some cases there were worrying discrepancies between different kinds of information. Conversation and self-representation were constantly dominated by a concern over ethnicity and this accorded with most contemporary writings about Trinidad in which ethnicity is the key variable. By contrast, in my first and most systematic survey of material culture - the contents of the living room in 160 households - I found that ethnic distinctions were of minimal importance to the selection of objects and their juxtaposition in home design. This was the first of many cases where the desire to respect one’s informants’ views, as against my own self-critique of expected biases and assumptions, came into conflict with what seemed the evident discrepancies between what people expressed in language and what they seemed to value in action.

This finding was also important in that ethnographic analysis of Trinidad has hitherto been dominated by the topic of ethnicity and there is a clear temptation to reduce most observable cultural difference to ethnic distinctions. It was perhaps fortunate that this survey which demonstrated the intractable nature of everyday material culture, with respect to a reduction to social relations of this kind, was one of the earliest features of my fieldwork. As a result the ‘logic’ of such analytical procedures was increasingly reversed and it was the factors which seemed to be manifested in material culture which also appeared to explain the manner by which social distinctions were experienced. The appeal of the more abstract literature on modernity was precisely that it provided a generalised account of cultural contradictions which might give rise to these observable patterns in material culture and social distinction.

I recognise, however, that for many readers of this book the approach is likely to be from the opposite direction: that is, coming to ethnography from a reading of works on modernity. The book listings of academic publishers are replete with titles which include the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’. Indeed, the desire to characterise these phenomena seems to involve a considerable proportion of contemporary academic research in the social sciences and humanities. Much of this spills over into aesthetic concerns and the conflation of modernism and modernity, with works devoted to film, literature and so forth. The terms have also had a considerable recent impact on disciplines such as history, politics and psychology. Much of this literature is about the relationship between modernity and some phenomena such as ‘modernity and the state’ or ‘postmodernity and the body’. There is also what might be called a ‘core’ tradition of works which, at the risk of reifying the terms, are devoted to the problem of characterising modernity in and of itself, as a contemporary experience of the world. Recent examples on modernity would include Lash and Friedman’s (1992) collection of essays or two recent books by Giddens (1990, 1991), while on postmodernity there is Harvey (1989) and Jameson (1991).

A nagging doubt that I suspect affects many readers of this genre of academic literature is the sense that most of the contributors tend to project the attributes they locate on to the population at large. A particular source of anxiety exemplified in some psychological crises, or crises of representation, becomes the crisis of modernity itself with implications for us all, as by definition living within modernity. So whether we are London train-drivers or Brussels secretaries we are all consumed with anxiety as a result of ‘space-time’ compression. What remains questionable is whether a social group which was not being examined or considered with this particular perspective in mind would exhibit the various concerns and forms of experience which are assumed to be intrinsic to the condition of modernity. Indeed, books on postmodernity with their concern for global transformation seem even more inclined to talk about ‘late capitalism’ or cultures of inauthenticity as though they represent in their effects the psychic states and generalised experiences of most of contemporary humankind.

The universalising tendencies of theories of modernity do not easily juxtapose with the relativising imperative of ethnographically informed anthropology. For anthropologists, Trinidad could never be the pure ideal type to the characterisation of modernity. It could only ever be an apt illustration of the kind of tendency to which the contradictions of modernity give rise. Nevertheless the particular here may well be the means by which the general theory is best subject to critique and refinement. Indeed, although narrowed and constrained by such a focusing down on the particular, it may come as some relief that there is at least some comer of the globe within which all this outpouring of academic concern has some actual bearing and pertinence! Ironically, it may then become the literature on modernity and postmodernity itself which comes over as parochial, in failing to account for the diverse contexts within which the dilemmas of modernity are manifested (though see Friedman 1992).

In the remainder of this chapter I will first propose that the Caribbean is indeed a particularly suitable area for examining these questions of linkage, and then introduce the ethnographic setting for the investigation which provided the material which is being considered in the light of these debates over the nature of modernity. I recognise, however, that merely making the claim of relevance is insufficient. The argument in this chapter is that given the particular history of the region, its peoples come up against the problematics of modernity with a particular jolt, having had stripped away many of the traditions and structures which would mediate this relationship elsewhere. I do not want this, however, to become an argument of historical determinism: that given this history such an encounter has to become the key to the formation of modern identity. Instead this book presents the argument for the relevance of modernity directly from the representation of its ethnography of contemporary society.

The organisation of the subsequent chapters follows from this initial establishment of possible linkage. In a book which purports to be about a topic as diverse as modernity it is necessary first to establish which version of the current usages of that term is intended. Given the plethora of writing on modernity and the postmodern, there are a host of possible models of these phenomena that might provide the core to the theoretical contribution of this volume. It makes little sense, however, simply to pluck out one particular version of these models of modernity and as it were ‘test it out’ against the ethnography. Only the most die-hard exponent of naturalism in the social sciences can still believe in hypothesis testing of that kind. Most social scientists will regard social and cultural phenomena as far too contingent and unpredictable to warrant such an approach. For most anthropologists, a generalised abstract ‘modernity’ does not exist except as a necessary objectification within the process of accounting for specific social practices. The intention in Chapter 2 is therefore not to adjudicate on some abstract grounds between alternative representations of modernity but to enunciate that approach which seems most apt for the particular ethnographic encounter which follows. The chapter therefore provides an indication as to which aspects of the modern condition may indeed be illuminated by this particular ethnographic enquiry. The model of modernity used is derived from a reading of Hegel by Habermas, and refined through a consideration of recent writings which attempt to list the key traits of being modern, and finally a brief consideration of the historical development of mass consumption that provides a comparative instance to the main analysis of Trinidad.

The core to this model of modernity is a transformation in temporary consciousness and it is this aspect of contemporary Trinidadian life which emerges most forcefully from the consideration of the subject of Chapter 3: that is the festivals of Christmas and Carnival. These are the two major festivals that dominate a considerable part of the Trinidadian year and are clearly acknowledged as fundamental to Trinidadian’s conceptions of themselves. It will be argued that, as is commonly the case, ritual events of this kind are able to represent with relative clarity relationships which otherwise are submerged in the pragmatic concerns of everyday life. Indeed, it follows that the very importance of these festivals lies in the degree to which they are used to objectify¹ the fundamental and paradigmatic principles upon which most Trinidadians structure both their ideologies and their social practices. The chapter concludes by abstracting from the systematic opposition between the values expressed by the two festivals as an underlying dualism.

The advantage of festivals, from the perspective of clarity of analysis, is also their disadvantage from the perspective of an ethnography which intends to situate itself also in the mundane and everyday life of the peoples among whom the ethnographer lives. The contents of Chapter 4 are therefore the necessary complement to Chapter 3. The festivals demonstrate in ritual form the presence of two systematically opposed principles, one orientated towards the event, and the other determined to reduce the vicissitudes of events by subsuming them within a long-term perspective oriented both to the past and future. The task of Chapter 4 is to document the pervasive importance of these principles in Trinidadian social relations. Chapter 4 therefore starts with a focus upon kinship, which anthropologists generally assume to be a core institution and idiom for everyday social relations. It goes on to argue that a focus on kinship in and of itself would not be appropriate in this case. Instead the chapter highlights the domains of property and sexuality which emerged ethnographically not only as core domains in which social relations are objectified and experienced but als...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Trinidad and Modernity
• 2. Modernity as a General Property
• 3. Christmas, Carnival and Temporal Consciousness
• 4. Household as Cultural Idiom
• 5. Mass Consumption
• 6. Origins and Articulations
• 7. Modernity as a Specific Condition
• Bibliography
• Index