Research notes / Notes de recherche

THE CARIBBEAN COURT CONUNDRUM

Several years ago Chandra Jayawardena (1963) demonstrated how seemingly trivial disputes and court actions among Guyanese plantation workers manifested the social stratification and class conflict of the larger society. This promis- ing study, however, seems to have made little impact upon subsequent observers of the Ca- ribbean scene. Confusion remains over wheth- er, or how, minor court actions are engaged in by lower class West Indians. My observations here suggest the source of this confusion and urge the revival of the study of such disputes and litigation as a valuable tool for social analysis.

The published literature generally presents the view that courts and other legal processes are alien institutions to West Indian ‘folk,’ little understood and little utilized. M.G. Smith, for example, suggests: ‘Both during and since slav- ery, the members of the lowest section of Jamaican society have tried to settle their com- munity disputes by informal arbitration or ad- judication, in order to prevent such issues from going to court. Obeah, family land, the village lawyer, the peacemaker, or the revivalist priesthood are among the institutions which serve these ends’ (1965: 170). And Lowenthal argues: ‘Identifying law with elite oppression (the West Indian masses), maintain a solid front against it.. . What distinguishes Caribbean legal systems is that those discriminated against con- stitute the great majority of West Indians. Their own habitual mode of life, officially vilified for its illegal or extra-legal transgressions, is vali-

STUART B . PHILPOTT I University of Toronto

dated for them by a separate institutional sys- tem’ (1972: 101).

True, West Indian lower class people actively or passively resist many legal enactments and the police who attempt to enforce them. True, most disputes among the masses (as among the elites) probably are settled outside of the court room. 1 contend, however, that the emphasis on a ‘separate institutional system’ has resulted in serious analytical and empirical distortion. To my mind, this stems from overzealousness of the adherents of the plural society model to demonstrate its validity. And the ethnographi- cally exotic still captures the most anthropolog- ical attention; the Obeah man is more intriguing than the magistrate.

Contrary to the prevailing viewpoint, my im- pression is that West Indian lower classes are quite litigious. Rubenstein, for example, found that in the area of St Vincent he studied ‘there is hardly an adult in Texier who, at some time, has not been a plaintiff, defendant, or witness in the village Magistrates’ Court’ (1976:778). More- over: ‘... while a measure of ambivalence to the courts may be observed, villagers still view the institution as the most effective means whereby satisfaction may be gained when some outrage such as theft, slander, or physical assault has been committed against them’ (1976:778).

This statement essentially also applies to the area of landless former estate workers which I studied in the mid-1960’s (Philpott, 1973). There the idiom of the courtroom permeates the cultural context. At the wakes following the

Rev. canad. SOC. & AnthJCanad. Rev. SOC. 8~ Anth. 14(4) 1977

The Caribbean court conundrum 429

death of a local inhabitant, for example, games are played which involve ‘lawyers’, ‘magis- trates,’ and ‘sentencing’ of the ‘defendant.’ Or, in the public disputes discussed below the par- ties often call upon the onlookers to ‘Witness!’ or ‘Identify the fact!’ MacDonald also suggests that minor court cases are a source of lively interest in ‘Lance,’ a Grenadian fishing com- munity (1973: I 18) and Richard Frucht (personal communication) indicates the situation is much the same in Nevis.

Clearly the issue is no longer whether West Indian lower class people use courts, but under what circumstances they use litigation rather than other arenas of conflict and avenues of dispute settlement. Only a few years ago the choice model offered the way out of a similar impasse in the analysis of West Indian family and mating practices (cf. Horowitz, 1967).

A focus on the courts is important for pre- cisely the reasons a plural society model suggests they are irrelevant, i.e. because they are ‘national’ or ‘mainstream,’ even somewhat ‘alien,’ social institutions. Therefore, the ‘choice’ of the court by lower class West In- dians (and here I recognize the distinction be- tween actions initiated by individuals and those initiated by the authorities) as an arena for dis- putes may reveal much about social tension and change in the society as a whole.

T H E S O C I A L B A S I S O F D I S P U T E S

Jayawardena, it will be recalled, proposed that ‘eyepass’ disputes on Guyanese plantations over the relative status of the parties involved resulted from a contradiction between the strong egalitarian ideology of the workers, on the one hand, and their aspirations for social mobility in terms of the values of the larger society, on the other. He argued that the egalitarian social norms have ‘provided the most effective assurance of the interests of the plantation labourers’ and that the disputes and associated court cases publicly dramatize and reinforce such norms (1963: 142).

In a similar way, an increase in such court cases in Montserrat in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the height of the exodus of islanders to Britain reveals much about the institutional change underway at the time.

The massive migration had reduced the sup- ply of labourers willing to work for low wages to the point where estate (plantation) agricultural production ceased entirely. Furthermore, in-

creased remittances from migrants produced a substantial decrease in subsistence production and cotton share-cropping by villagers remain- ing behind.

Prior to the collapse of the estates, landless men and women usually earned part of their income as agricultural wage labourers and part as share-croppers. While the estate owners and managers obtained labour through assymetric cash transactions, the share-croppers cooper- ated with fellow community members in recip- rocal labour exchanges locally termed ‘ma- roons.’ In a maroon, groups of five to 30 men or women gather at the land of the organizer to prepare the ground, weed, or harvest the crop. While the organizer is expected to ‘give back the day’ in similar labour for each of those who participated, the maroon also has aspects of a Ete. Most householders share-cropped roughly the same amount of land and stood in a rela- tively equal socioeconomic position vis-a-v is one another. As the men and women of most households were involved in different, and sometimes two or more, maroon groups, this institution created a considerable degree of economic interdependence between house- holds within the community.

Since the migration to England and the end of estate agricultural production, maroons have almost disappeared. Interhousehold depen- dence decreased while household-migrant de- pendence increased. Many households no longer grow cotton or even food, depending instead on remittances or other sources of in- come. Members of such households are not in- terested in participating in maroons. With the increasing emphasis on cash purchases, those few people who undertake agricultural labour will work only for wages.

At the same time court cases on charges of assault, indecent, abusive, or threatening lan- guage, and disorderly behaviour increased among the former estate workers. Many of such disputes arise from domestic difficulties, drun- kenness, or jealousy but most begin with a vil- lager being seen as illegitimately claiming higher prestige on the basis of material acquis- tions or alterations in behaviour such as man- ners or speech. The other party, usually a social equal involved in close association with his or her adversary, claims that he or she has been ‘advantaged’, either materially or socially, that the first party is ‘pret up’ (arrogant, snobbish) or ‘forward.’ When public quarrels are precipi- tated on this basis, ‘indecent’ language, abuse,

430 / Stuart B. Philpott

pushing, or more violent contact is com- monplace, leading to the possibility of charges being laid by the police if they witnessed the event or if one of the parties involved com- plained. In other instances one of the parties will hire a lawyer and instruct him to initiate legal action.

Once it reaches court, the dispute takes on an almost ceremonial character, with considerable numbers of fellow villagers attending the ses- sion in Plymouth. While the magistrate is in- terested only in ascertaining whether the of- fence took place as charged, many ofthe details of the dispute are often revealed in court. Even in cases where the charged party is not fined or even found guilty the party who initiated the proceedings will often claim that he has ‘ o b tained satisfaction.’ The general harassment of the court proceedings or, in those cases that do not reach court, the police investigation or even the public quarrel, demonstrate that the ‘advan- taged’ party is not to be trifled with and that the norms which suggest all villagers are equal in prestige and power are not to be easily breached.

Residents of the area often interpret the dis- putes in personal terms. People no longer ‘move together’ as they should because their ‘good friends’ have left the island leaving only the ‘vagabonds’ behind. This view was evident even in an essay written by a twelve-year-old boy: ‘... the people in Montserrat is too fast. I don’t like most of them at all. They look at people business too much. That is why they are going to the court so fast.’

The social basis of such disputes, however, seems evident. Shared subordination in the ag- ricultural estate hierarchy contributed to class cohesiveness and solidarity, manifested in strikes and other trade union activities among the landless estate workers. Reciprocal labour exchange acted as another form of social inte- gration. Both agricultural estates and maroons declined without the development of other in- tegrative institutions within the community. Material and behavioural differentiation in- creased while the social norms stressing equal- ity of all villagers remain unaltered. Social ten- sion and conflict became inevitable.

Richard Frucht has indicated that a similar increase in disputes and court cases took place in Nevis connected with migration and remit- tance income (personal communication). He has also explained: ‘A traditional mode of life in which social relationships were mediated

through neighborliness and common participa- tion in productive and ritual tasks has been re- placed almost completely by a mode of life mediated by the cash nexus, in which invidious comparisons and the “grudge” become the hall marks of social relations’ (1968: 206).

R E S E A R C H D I R E C T I O N S

At this stage, the problem of conflict and dis- pute settlement in the West Indies calls for two related research directions. Clearly, the first essential is the development of an adequate comparative methodology. Ideally, this would permit rigorous comparison of degrees of litigi- ousness both within and without the Caribbean region. There are obviously substantial p rob lems in developing such an inclusive methodol- ogy, however. Differences in legal codes, his- torical and cultural backgrounds, economy, and technology make meaningful comparison be- tween very diverse populations extremely difficult.

Initially, therefore, research efforts should be directed at comparing West Indian temtories which share a British colonial and legal back- ground. As most of my examples are drawn from the Eastern Caribbean, there may well be inter-island variation. If so, this calls for dem- onstration and explanation. The quantitative aspects of such a comparison would include the frequency of various types of court actions (and ideally other types of disputes as well), changes in such frequencies over time, and the propor- tions of such cases initiated by the authorities as opposed to private individuals (although this distinction is not always clear-cut). The qualita- tive aspects must deal with such variables about the populations involved as their community type (open, closed, rural, urban); mode of pro- duction (peasant, proletarian), and class and status differentiation.

The second direction lies in far more detailed field research on the issue in various West In- dian communities. As suggested already, not only must the types and frequencies of local level disputes be established, but also the fac- tors guiding the selection of a particular means of settlement. To some extent, Rubenstein (1976) has done this in showing why villagers in ‘Texier,’ St Vincent, held ‘effigy hangings’ in- stead of court actions in some cases of incest. His analysis is limited to one type of conflict, however.

Furthermore, the people’s perceptions of

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conflicts and modes of settlement must be as- certained along with the on-the-ground happen- ings. (It seems necessary to reiterate this an- thropological truism here inasmuch as it has been ignored in most Caribbean research.) In this regard, MacDonald’s (1973) treatment of the context of ‘cursing’ in Grenada is instruc- tive; but it, too, is confined to one type of ‘of- fence.’ In the case of court actions, the partici- pants’ notions of what courts are all about are vital, especially as their ideas are usually strik- ingly different from the official view. In such notions, the underlying social basis of disputes may be revealed.

The proposed research directions, while concentrating on interpersonal and community disputes, should ultimately also illuminate much about class consciousness and conflict.

R E F E R E N C E S

Frucht, Richard 1968 ‘Emigration, remittances and social

change: Aspects of the social field of Nevis, the West Indies.’ Anthropologica ( N . S . ) IO(2): 193-208

Horowitz, Michael M. 1967 ‘A decision model of conjugal patterns in

Martinique.’ Man (N.s . ) 2:477-88

Jayawardena, Chandra 1963 Conflict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plan-

tation. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology No. 25. London: Athlone Press

Lowenthal, David 1972 West Indian Societies. London: Oxford

MacDonald, Judy S. 1973 ‘Cursing and context in a Grenadian

fishing community.’ Anthropologica (N.s . ) IS( 1):89-128

University Press

Philpott, Stuart B. 1973 West Indian Migration: The Montserrat

Case. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology No. 47. London: Athlone Press

Rubenstein, Hymie 1976 ‘Incest, effigy hanging, and biculturation

in a West Indian village.’ American Ethnologist 3(4):765-81

Smith, M.G. 1965 The Plural Society in the British West

Indies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni- versity of California Press