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The Shaping of Folklore Traditions in the British West Indies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Roger D. Abrahams
Roger D. Abrahams*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
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Extract

Most of the countries in the New World were created by economically motivated European colonizers who invaded this hemisphere and defeated the resident populations. The dominant cultural life of these areas is based on the institutions, values and expressions carried by these seekers after empire, as modified by conditions and cultures encountered in the new lands. This is as true of the West Indies as it is of the various larger regions of the two Americas, but the modifying factors are more numerous in these small Caribbean islands. Rarely is there just one European tradition affecting the culture of each of these islands; as European possessions during this era of large-scale wars in Europe, most of them changed hands repeatedly. More important, the establishment of the plantation system and the resultant waves of imported field workers from alien, non-European societies created a cultural conglomerate of incredible variety.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 1967 , pp. 456 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1967

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Footnotes

*

This paper was read in a somewhat shorter form at the 37th Congress of Americanists, Mar del Plata, Argentina, in September 1966. Material included was collected during a summer sponsored by the University of Texas Research Institute and a year as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. To these organizations I owe my thanks.

References

1 The British West Indies is an arbitrary designation for the group of islands which are British possessions, or were until recently. It thus includes Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Caymans, British Virgin Islands, and the Leewards and Windwards; Guyana, which is not geographically part of the West Indies is closely related culturally and historically and is thus included.

2 Smith, M. G., The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley and Los Angeles. The University of California Press. 1965)Google Scholar, passim, (especially the first three ¿hapters).

3 The use of the term “peasant” may be a little misleading; it is used here as it is the designation often given the West Indian agricultural worker by himself. It is also used by fishermen, and craftsmen when they live in subsistence communities. The term has none of the pejorative meaning that it has on some of the larger islands, such as Trinidad. What I mean by peasant is a member of a predominantly agricultural or fishing community. West Indian peasantry is not typified by ties to land, but rather by identification with a community life dominated by a subsistence economy, a predominantly agricultural means of livelihood, a conservative attitude toward achievement possibilities and needs, a matrifocal family system, and many other attributes which will be brought out in the body of this paper.

4 Herskovits, Melville J. and Herskovits, Frances S., Trinidad Village (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 12.Google Scholar

5 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery (reprint edition, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1963), Section III.Google Scholar

6 Carmichael, Mrs., Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured and Negro Population of the West Indies (London, 1834), I, 292.Google Scholar

7 For a discussion of family land in the West Indies, see Clarke, Edith, My Mother Who Fathered Me (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955)Google Scholar; and M. G. Smith, op. cit. (n. 3), Chapter Ten.

8 Lanigan, Mrs., Antigua and the Antiguans (London, 1844), II, 115–116.Google Scholar

9 Herskovits, op. cit., (n. 5), p. 148.

10 Procope, Bruce, “The Dragon Band or Devil Band,” Caribbean Quarterly, 4 (1956), 279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Edwards, Bryan, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 1794), II, 87.Google Scholar

12 Collymore, Frank A., Notes for a Glossary of Words and Phrases of Barbadian Dialect (Bridgetown, Barbados: Advócate Co., 1965), pp. 65–66.Google Scholar

13 See, for instance, Procope, op. cit. (n. 11).