the culture of race in middle-class Kingston, Jamaica

the culture of race in middle-class Kingston, Jamaica

JACK ALEXANDER-SUNY College Oneonta

Scholars have investigated New World racism as a cultural phenomenon in historical studies and in cognitive studies. Tannenbaum (1946) observed that in the non-Iberian New World an absolute distinction was made between white and black and that black was defined as physically inferior, whereas in the Iberian New World no absolute distinction was made and no belief in the physical inferiority of blacks existed. Tannenbaum concluded that these differences could be traced historically to differing slave systems, one of which defined the slave entirely as property, whereas the other retained the moral personality of the slave. Tannenbaums study initiated a series of scholarly works. For example, Harris (1 964) distinguished three New World ideologies: a Latin American Highland pattern that focused on acquired differences such as speech and dress, a Latin and Central American Lowland pattern that focused on racial appearance and took account o f a range of physical differences, and a North American pattern that focused on racial descent and therefore drew an absolute distinction between white and black. Harris related these variants to historical differences in the exploitation of labor. In these studies racial ideologies have been analyzed as consequences of historical events.

Cognitive studies (Harris and Kottak 1963; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971) have attempted to define rigorously the meaning of racial terms. Their procedure is to elicit responses to a set of cards that show human faces presenting systematic variations in the components that presumably underlie racial terminology. These studies, all of which have been done in Brazil, indicate that there is considerable variability in the use of racial terminology and that skin color and hair form are important elements in the meaning of racial terms.

The present article adds to our knowledge of race as a cultural phenomenon through an investigation of the beliefs concerning race among middle-class informants in Kingston, Jamaica. Where previous studies focused on racial ideology as a consequence of historical events, here racial ideology i s treated as creating and reinforcing a reality that informants use in making sense of their experience and in guiding their actions. Where previous studies sought to define the meaning of racial terms by applying objective instruments, here the meaning of racial terms i s determined by linking them to the larger problem of how informants use their ideas about race to make sense of their place in society.

This contribution to the understanding of race as a cultural phenomenon in the Caribbean analyzes the reality created by a racial terminology that has bewildered observers by its many terms and their uses. The analysis shows that race symbolizes mythological time and thereby anchors in the past a belief in the fragmented nature of society.

the culture of race 413

background

Jamaica is a former British colony with a population of two million (Jamaica, Department o f Statistics 1976:2). The major sources of income are tourism, bauxite, sugar for export, and domestic agriculture. Twenty-nine percent of the population lives in the metropolitan area of Kingston, the capital city.

The racial composition of Jamaica, as reported in the 1960 census, is presented in Table 1. This racial composition reflects the history of the political economy of the society. The English took control of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 and by the end of the seventeenth century had developed large-scale sugar production by the plantation system, which used masses of black slaves for cheap, unskilled labor. In time, through miscegenation a small mixed population arose that functioned largely in services and commerce. After emancipation in 1838 white planters introduced some East Indians and later, Chinese to replace black ex-slaves, many of whom lef t the plantations to establish peasant villages on hilly land where sugar could not be grown economically.

Table 1. Percentage racial composition of Jamaica-1 960.*

African Afro-European European Chinese, East Indian, Other Afro-Ch inese Afro-East Indian

16.3 15.1 0.8 1.2 3.4 3.2

*Source: Alexander (1973: 153).

From the point of view of class, Jamaican society was divided legally into free, freedmen, and slave categories (freedmen being former slaves who did not have the full rights of a free man); there were distinctions within each of these categories determined by color and occupation. Currently the class system i s more complex (Stone 1973:7-23). Four classes can be identified in the urban area: the propertied upper class; white collar middle class; skilled, semiskilled working class; and unskilled lower class. However, to speak of the upper class in Jamaica is an oversimplification; while there are large-scale property owners in Jamaica, most large-scale owners of Jamaican property are foreign residents and corporations. The middle class i s an expanding but s t i l l very small percentage of the population.

A rough correlation of class with race persists, but particularly in the expanding middle class this is only a rough correlation. Table 2 shows that Africans are the largest percentage of the middle, working, and lower classes due to their overwhelming preponderance in the population, and that as one moves down the class scale, the percentage of Africans increases and the percentage of AfreEuropeans decreases. Furthermore, the middle class is the most racially diverse class. ( I t is impossible to derive figures from the census for the upper class as here defined.)

methodology

Just as the psychological phenomenon of race prejudice and the sociological phenomenon of race discrimination require appropriate methods of investigation, so does the cultural phenomenon of race ideology. The method used in this investigation

414 american ethnologist

consisted of asking a few persons to tell a t length about their lives and to seek to get them involved in the telling. The data collected make it passible to observe closely how informants use ideas to make sense of their experience and then to abstract a common framework of ideas from these individual accounts.' Informants were rarely encouraged to talk about their society in general terms. Since the aim was to observe informants making sense of their own experience, observing their models of society was only relevant where these models could be related to experiences. Furthermore general questions about the society tended to cast the informant in the role of expert and thereby removed him from his experience.

Table 2. Distribution of races by class for males in Jamaica-1960.*

Professional, Craftsmen Professional and

Services, Clerical Technical Race and Sales Workers

Manual and Service

No. % No. % No. %

African 15,637 51.5 71,539 18.7 199,744 83.9

European 1,290 4.3 345 .3 596 .3

East Indian & Afro-East 1,320 4.3 2,701 3.0 Indian

Chinese and Afro-Ch inese 2,501 8.3 731 .8

6,536 2.7

521 .2

Afro-Eu ropean 5,983 19.8 12,273 13.5 29,476 12.4

Other 1,652 5.7 2,558 2.9 4,754 2.0

Total 29,716 90,147 240,294

*Source: Alexander (1973:115).

The core of the data is a set of interviews collected from eleven informants between 1967 and 1969. Each informant was asked to tel l about his or her family life, and the conversations, which lasted for about an hour and a half a week for six months to almost two years, were all tape recorded and the recordings transcribed. These transcriptions provide texts, and it is these texts that are analyzed. Fourteen more subsidiary informants participated in from one to four interviews. Informants were selected to represent significant social variations in urban middle-class l i fe (see Tables 3 and 4). Informants, however, do not represent a stratified sample o f the target population; the variations they represent make it possible to examine and compare how cultural assumptions are applied differently in different social settings. For this purpose, representation of a statistically small category in the population is equally important as representation of a statistically large category.? Informants were also selected according to their ability to talk about family l i fe vividly and get involved in the telling (characteristics easy to find among Jamaicans).


Table 3. Informants and their social characteristics.

Resi- Occupation Sex Age dential Race Marital

origin status

C. Benton .......... X x x x x A. Benton .......... X X x x X Chung ............. X X x x Cook .............. X X X X

......... X X N. Garner.. X x x R. Garner.. ......... X X X X X Johnson ............ X X X X X

............. X X Morris X x x Sears .............. x x X X Stern .............. x x X X X Wagner ............. X X X X X

X

X

x x X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

The following analysis applies only to urban middle-class Jamaicans. I t s relevance for other aspects of Jamaican society and for other Caribbean societies cannot be inferred directly from the data presented here.

definition of race

Many scholars have noted the proliferation of racial terms in the Caribbean and the great variability in their usage. For example, Mintz has written:

Inevitably, since some major markers of difference are physical, we expect Caribbean peoples to have complicated ideas about their own appearances, as well as about the appearances of others. One sort of evidence of such ideas is the vocabulary that serves to describe physical differences; in many Caribbean societies, dozens, scores or more words are matter-of-factly employed to specify traits o f physique-particularly skin color, hair form, and facial features. Other terms appear to describe gradations and infra-gradations of color and of mixture-and all such terms attest to the intense awareness of Antillean people when dealing with perceived difference, with contrast, with visibility (1971 :439).

Nor is it very difficult to get Jamaicans of differing physical appearance to disagree terminologically on the best way to describe some third Jamaican, known to them both, even if all three are members of the same social and economic group (1971 :443).

Sanjek collected 11 6 terms for racial types in a sample of 171 informants from a village of 2,500, and Harris collected 429 racial terms in a national sample of a hundred persons. Both scholars found great variability in the use of these terms. In Runaway Bay, Jamaica, Taylor (1959) asked informants to categorize twenty-four adult members of the village and collected forty racial terms. Eighteen informants were then given a l i s t of all village


Table 4. Subsidiary informants and their social characteristics.

Resi- Occupation Sex Age dential Race Marital

origin status

L. Adams ........... x x x X X X T. Adams ........... Singh .............. X

x x X X X x x X X X

Desmond ........... X X x x X X Farly .............. X x x X X X Holt ............... x x X X X X Mark .............. x x x x x X Sint ............... X x x X X X Tomas ............. x x x X X Williams ............ x x x X X Ri beiro ............ X x x X X X P. Wagner.. ......... X x x X x x L. Chung ........... x x x x R. Sears ............ X X x x X X

adults and a fixed set o f racial and status categories and asked to describe the persons on the l i s t by age, occupation, color, and status. The only significant disagreement was on color.

Despite the proliferation o f terms and apparent difficulty of predicting their use, careful attention to the use of terms and an appropriate cultural analysis of this use suggests a clear cultural system defining race.

Informants were asked to describe racially all the persons on their genealogies] which ranged in size from eighty-two to 694. This request was introduced long after rapport was established and in phrases that had already been introduced by the informant so as to reduce the likelihood of imposing a framework of racial categories.

The following quote presents the process of categorization for Sears, the mother of two children, wife of an executive] thirty-six years old, who classifies herself as fair. (This statement and all others about informants refers to the ethnographic present. All names are fictitious.) I have excerpted the sections that are relevant to the process of categorization while retaining the sequence in which they appear.

(1) Informant (I): She i s darker in complexion than I though, darker than my father, and her features are much more Negroid than his. It was quite obvious that there was Negro blood on his side anyway.

Anthropologist (A): This whole business of Negro blood, darker, lighter, whiter, is

the culture of m a 417

(5 1 I:

(20) A: I:

A: (25) I:

A: I: A: I:

(35)

(40 1

A: I:

(45 1

(50) A: I:

(55)

A: (65) I:

something that we are trying to investigate. We want to know how it relates to the family. Whether they are willing to admit or not to admit? Starting of f with our family, unless a person married somebody like I married Robert who was half Chinese, Cecile, married Pat (who was black). For instance with Barbara there is very l i t t l e I can say. Except that she told me the other day, Mother Martinez came from South America, so she would have some Spanish blood. But it is not obvious; I mean, Barbara could be my sister. You can find many variations, but I dont think, except as I say Robert, he is obviously different. Pat is obviously different, Leahs husband is darker than we are, but I wouldnt say we are all that different. Have I got it right? As far as my sister Mary, you wouldnt imagine that she had colored blood a t all. I dont think it means anything much to Jamaicans. Do you think so? I mean, in talking to different Jamaicans? What matters to them is when a person is in a different class. People are terribly conscious of hair. 111 try to label these persons but this is something that we probably havent thought of, or it just rolls off the tongue without your having given it much thought. For instance your father? You want me to give a color description, fair or white? To say white in the Jamaican context does not mean Caucasian, you know that? No. Some people say to you they are white Jamaicans, what do you think they mean? Somebody who has no colored blood, or somebody like me who is Jamaican, but is fair? I mean there are so few people in Jamaica who can lay claim to this. So when they say white Jamaican, I wouldnt put my head on the block at all that this means a person who has no colored blood. They have probably continued to marry people of their own complexion or white people and therefore their own children are very fair. Your white Jamaican I would not interpret it as being somebody who does not have colored blood, if you are going to split hairs. But it would be a person who could be white, for all intents and purposes. It would not mean that if you go down in history you wouldnt find that there is a mixture somewhere. What do you take to be white for all intents and purposes? You dont appear to be colored, I suppose. Now, how are you going to label your father? If I say white, it s my interpretation of white. It doesnt mean that he doesnt have colored blood, but if he had blue eyes and straight hair, and very ruddy in complexion, and he could be a white man. But I know he is not. So I dont think it would be right for me to say white Jamaican or fair Jamaican. Now there are your brothers and sisters. In England nobody thought twice about Jim and Bobby. The girls seem to have heavier features, lips and nose, Leah and 1. Mary you couldnt te l l because she had Daddys greyish-blue eyes and Jim has blue eyes; and Bobby you couldnt te l l with him either, he is very fair. I dont think any of us abroad would have any trouble on the color question, one way or another. I have never denied that I have colored blood. Mary is undoubtedly best looking, features of the girls. How about your children? Jo i s very fair. Tommy you cant hide him; hes quite bronze, colored. There is a range of colors in Jamaica. Jean is hard to describe. She is not as fair as Joan and yet not a dark girl. She is sort of bronzy. Maybe some Spanish blood somewhere, but yet she isnt even like Barbara. She is bronze, or rather copper bronze. You have to have a color chart, like lipsticks, you know. But you know this doesnt make any difference. When I said it doesnt make a difference in the majority of cases within our family, it doesnt make the slightest difference, I mean Jean is now dearly beloved and accepted almost like a daughter. You have 1 percent of the population who is white and you forget them and the rest are colored, but in different ranges, from very fair to very black. This shading means a lot. Nelly would be a bit like Barbara, but she has much better features. She is much nicer looking than Barbara. Complexion-wise she is the same; but features, she is better looking. How do you mean, better looking? Straighter nose. You know when people say good looking, theyre always talking about the nose, nine times out o f ten. His wife is quite dark, but beautiful black hair, really very attractive, down to her shoulders. The Townsend girl is very, quite dark. So is Bobbys wife, she is Negroid-dark. Negro-, Indian-, Spanish-dark.


(69)

In the following interview I asked the informant what the difference was between

(70) I:

Spanish-dark, that means soft darkness with pretty black hair.

Spanish-dark, Indian-dark and Negro-dark. Spanish-dark and Indian-dark imply straight hair, and not Negroid features. I mean i t could be straight nose and not very thick lips, sort of thing. Negroid-dark would imply not straight hair.

The analysis of this text proceeds by isolating two main themes and then relating them. These themes are the relations of blood to appearance and the racial classification of persons. An investigation of each of these themes will reveal the cultural definition of race.

In order to make herself clear, our informant has to distinguish and relate blood and appearance. Thus in lines (25)-(42) she makes the following argument: a person may look white, which means he has white skin or which means he has white skin and certain hair form, facial features, and eye color. However, he may not really be white, which means Caucasian, and therefore it i s probably misleading to call him white.

Most o f the terms Sears uses refer to elements of physical appearance. However, these elements of physical appearance are significant because they are taken to be outward signs of race. Race is for her a component o f the inner bodily substance, which we may suppose i s passed down from generation to generation. A t the same time she sees physical appearance as a somewhat unreliable indicator of race. For instance, she acknowledges that siblings who have the same racial composition can have very different physical appearances, just as she acknowledges that someone who looks white may not be really white.

The relation of appearance to race is further indicated by the fact that informants have a restricted and general meaning for color. The restricted meaning for color refers specifically to skin color. The general meaning refers to a number of features-skin color, hair, eye color, and facial features. One must have both meanings in mind to make sense of the following remark: His wife i s quite dark, but beautiful black hair. Dark in complexion, but beautiful black hair. . . down to her shoulder.

To say that a woman was dark but had long hair would be unnecessary unless dark in itself implied some other kind of hair. For her to say dark complexion would be equally unnecessary if dark could not refer to more than complexion. At the same time, if dark only has the general meaning, then the fact that the person has long black hair would require Sears to change her term rather than restrict its meaning by the addition of complexion. Color can have a general meaning that encompasses a number of physical features in addition to skin complexion because, in theory, complexion and these features are related. Thus white skin goes with straight hair, blue eyes, and fine features. All these features go together because they are all Caucasian racial features. Similarly, a black man, by virtue of his African descent is assumed in the absence of contrary evidence also to have curly black hair, brown eyes, and heavy features. Just as informants recognize that appearance is an unreliable indicator of blood, so they realize that color and other physical features may in fact not vary together.

The relation of appearance to race is further indicated by the fact that informants use two types of terms: those such as fair and dark that seem to refer directly to physical appearance and those such as Caucasian and Chinese that refer directly to race. Sears can say that someone looks white but i s not Caucasian and can describe persons as Indian-dark, Spanish-dark, and so on. Furthermore, informants can within the same framework describe one person as half Chinese and another person as


brown. That color is significant as a sign of race is further indicated by the classification of Spaniards. Spanish persons are generally regarded as being of darker complexion than northwest Europeans. Nevertheless Spanish persons are classified as white.3 (Informants commonly reported that lightly colored Jamaicans in the U.S. may attempt to pass as white, and may succeed, by adopting Spanish surnames.)

What sense can we make of the fact that informants use terms that apply to appearance when they are interested in appearance as a sign of race and yet know that appearance is an unreliable indicator? Originally, in addition to color terms, a set o f terms existed that referred directly to racial composition-iisambo,p mulatto, and so forth. These terms have almost entirely dropped out of use in favor of color terms. Even the term mulatto to indicate any degree of Negro blood has been largely replaced by the term colored. One informant answered the question as follows: I suppose I describe more from the point of color, because most of us are sort o f mixed up. Thus the use of color terms for racial description makes possible the continued identification of persons in terms of their racial mixture, when the exact mixture i s unknown.

By contrast, when a group of American students was asked to provide ethnic labels for each person on their genealogies, they were at a loss when it came to dealing with mixture. They had no appropriate way to label the offspring of, for example, Finnish, Italian, and French grandparents. The most suitable label was American, a label that disregards the constituent elements comprising a person, quite in contrast to Jamaican color terms. There i s a faint tendency toward this process among our informants in the occasional identification of colored with Jamaican. Through the use of color terms informants always keep racial identification in terms of mixture to the fore at the expense of any distinctive and unique Jamaican racial or national identity.

For color to act as a sign of racial mixture, informants assumed a continuum from pure Caucasian to pure African. This belief is signified by a continuum with pure white and pure black (in the general meaning) as end points. Categories roughly mark out segments of t h i s continuum, so that a number of people may fall in the same segment, and at the same time the position of any two persons on the continuum can be distinguished relative to each other. Consequently, the process of classifying persons racially consists of applying the continuum to them, and this can be done in two ways. The continuum can be infinitely divisible so that any two persons can be placed relative to each other, or the continuum can be broken into categories so that two or more people occupy the same place on the continuum relative to others.

These two processes can be observed in the following account by Morris in which several persons are defined as both the same and different.

I: Im brown, brown skin. My wife is the same, brown. Her father is half Chinese; so she has also a Chinese name. Knowing the family I realize that it is just like my having a degree of Spanish blood. My sister Rena is darker than myself. My brother, Colin, is a little lighter than I am. Joyce is lighter than us, more like my father.

A: Lewis? I: I would say all o f us are about my complexion.

The same process can be observed in Sears thought. In lines (1 2)-(14), she presents her family as essentially all the same and then she proceeds to distinguish them. Although I never insisted on informants distinguishing all persons, they always did.

In Jamaican culture our evidence suggests a set of five categories underlying the bewildering proliferation of terms. If we analyze the categories Sears develops for her relatives, we find that she eventually develops five categories. She begins with white and black, then she develops fair and dark, fair being near white but not white and dark being


near black, but not black. She then finds she needs another category between fair and dark, which she calls bronze (see lines [51-541). In fact every informant used five categories in describing relatives, and these categories are usually labeled white, fair, brown, dark, and black (see Table 5). Published studies give further evidence for this five category system. Taylor wrote in his study of the Jamaican town of Runaway Bay (1959): With the assistance and advice of the informants the twenty-two preceding terms of color designation were reduced to five broader and more inclusive categories (emphasis added). Sanjeks (1 971 ) analysis o f Brazilian racial terms treats a different society and uses different methods but also concludes that there are five basic categories. He reduces the 116 racial terms he collected and the great variation in their usages to a basic cognitive map of f ive categories (though the meaning he attributes to the categories i s utterly different from that suggested in this article).

Some informants refine their system by additional categories. These are always contiguous to the category in which the informant places himself or herself and reflect a tendency to make finer distinctions in ones own area of the continuum. The same phenomenon has been noted by Errol Miller (1969). Three judges who were of different colors categorized the subjects as white, fair, clear, brown, dark, and black. Miller found in training these judges that they made finer distinctions in their own area of the continuum than in other areas. When we consider that Miller classified himself as brown in the system given above, (1972:353), we discover a five category system, with one additional category contiguous to Millers own being distinguished. Taylor (1959) also noted a tendency for dark informants to distinguish more sharply at their end of the color continuum.

Informants use many more than five terms to categorize, and an analysis of these other terms increases our understanding of the five category system. These other terms are of five types: (1) different labels for a single category, (2) labels for subcategories, (3) labels for categories of persons who are defined as Jamaicans but not on the continuum from white to black, (4) labels for persons who are defined as of other nationality, and (5) historical terms.

(1) Some terms may be treated as different labels for the same category, just as linguists treat sounds in complementary distribution as variant expressions of one phoneme. Thus most informants use the term white and two use Caucasian, but no informant uses both terms when labeling persons on his genealogy.

(2) All informants make more than five or even seven distinctions in categorizing. For instance, Sears subdivides dark into Spanish-dark and Negro-dark, and she usually distinguishes between fair and very fair. Another informant subdivides the category brown into light-brown and brown rather than use terms such as light, clear,

or brunette to create two basic categories. Numerous examples of such subcategories can be given for all informants. Informants could have created basic categories rather than subcategories out o f a large number of available terms, but they did not do so.

(3) The most commonly used categories outside the continuum were those for persons defined as wholly or partially Indian or Chinese. These categories either define the black-white continuum as an undifferentiated unit or define Indian (or Chinese) as an undifferentiated unit. Thus, one set o f terms uses the modifiers, quarter, half, and three-quarter, as in half Chinese. In this set there is no way of knowing whether the other part o f the person i s white, black, or brown. Conversely a person can be defined by such categories as dark with Indian features or fair with Chinese features. Here the degree of lndianness or Chineseness is unspecified. Compared to the

the culture of raw 421

P

N

N

Tabl

e 5.

Rac

ial c

ateg

orie

s us

ed b

y ni

ne in

form

ants

.

Tot

al n

umbe

r of

info

rman

ts w

ho

Cat

egor

ies

Info

rman

ts

use

each

cat

egor

y

Cau

casi

an

Whi

te

Fairs

Li

ght

Bru

nette

B

ronz

e

Cop

per

Uea

r B

row

n D

ark

Swar

thy

Bla

ck

Tot

al n

umbe

r of

cat

egor

ies

used

by

each

info

rman

t

Tot

al n

umbe

r o

f per

sons

ca

tego

rized

Per

cent

age

of

tota

l num

ber

of p

erso

ns

cate

goriz

ed

incl

uded

in

thes

e ca

tego

ries

Chu

ng

Chu

ng

Chu

ng

Chu

ng

Chu

ng

5

Coo

k C

ook'

Coo

k

Coo

k C

ook

Coo

k C

ook

Coo

k

8

N.

Gar

ner

N.

Gam

er

N.

Gar

ner

N.

Gar

ner

N.

Gam

er

5

Gar

ner

Gar

ner

Gar

ner

Gar

ner

Gar

ner

5

John

son

John

son

John

son

john

son

John

son

John

son

6

Mor

ris

Mor

ris

Mor

ris

Mo

rris

Mor

ris

Mor

ris

6

T. S

ears

1. S

ears

T. S

ears

T. S

ears

1. S

ears

5

Sear

s S

ears

Sear

s Se

ars

Sear

s Se

ars

Sear

s

7

Ste

rn

9 S

tern

9 3 3

Ste

rn

9 S

tern

9 1

S

tern

9

5

506

205

92

263

97

118

197

90

61

82%

95

%

99%

88

%t

99%

10

0%

85%

98

%

95%

*Ita

lics

indi

cate

s th

e ca

tego

ry i

n w

hich

the

info

rman

t pla

ces

him

self.

+Thi

s pe

rcen

tage

incl

udes

per

sons

cat

egor

ized

as

Chi

nese

or

part

ially

Chi

nese

.

continuum from white to black. White implies black, while Indian or Chinese implies a contrast with the total white-black system.

The term Jew is equally revealing. It i s always accompanied by a color term (for example, Jew, dark, Jew, fair), unless the informant does not know the color of the person being categorized. The term Jew probably refers to race rather than religion, since religious terms were not used by informants (for example, no person was labeled as Baptist, white). The terminology suggests that a person labeled Jew, dark is no less a Jew than one labeled Jew, fair. Furthermore, unlike the white-black continuum, in which the more black a person is, the less white he is and vice versa, the Jewish element remains constant and unassimilated regardless of the degree of mixture. Analogously, terms like Chinese and Indian are used in racial categories only along the dimension of the black-white continuum. The Chinese or Indian element remains unassimilated. Thus the central meaning of racial categories-the unamalgamated mixture of white and black-is expressed and maintained. The presence of other races and their mixtures is recognized but given a secondary place.

(4) Persons of North American, European, and other Caribbean nations could be categorized by racial categories but are usually not. The preferred use of national categories for such persons indicates that racial categories refer not to physical facts in themselves but to physical facts as an expression o f the consequences of an original historical Jamaican mixture of white and black. Where national terms are used for Jamaicans they are subcategories o f white rather than categories in themselves (as in white, English rather than English) and they apply to historical persons, such as settlers, not to contemporary persons.

(5) Informants used three more terms: sambo, mulatto, and brown man. Sambo means one-quarter white, mulatto in its restricted sense means one-half white and in its general sense means mixed, and brown man means mixed. These terms are rare now but were common in the past. Informants applied them only to historical persons. These terms refer directly to race, not to appearance. Thus, where it is possible to categorize persons accurately by their racial mixture, informants do so with terms such as sambo; where it is not possible informants use color terms.

Given this analysis, the confusion in the analysis of racial terms can be seen to arise because the terms were analyzed backwards. In the cognitive studies mentioned earlier (Harris and Kottak 1963; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971) the anthropologist asks subjects to label a number of pictures in which he has systematically varied components such as skin color, hair form, and facial features. He then notes how frequently a given term i s applied to each picture. (Sanjek also asked informants to define the most salient terms he collected in terms o f his a priori components,) The anthropologist treats this distribution as the meaning of the term. What he gets from his data is a great deal of variation in the use of terms, a considerable overlap among terms, and a statistical tendency for a given term to center on a few pictures. The values of the components in the central pictures are treated as the meaning of the term and the overlap is treated as ambiguity.

However, variability does not appear to be greater than that found in studies of the color domain (Berlin and Kay 1969). Therefore either ambiguity in the racial domain i s not greater than in the color domain, or variability in referents i s not necessarily evidence of ambiguity. Furthermore, the procedure i s equivalent to collecting a set of terms such as heavy, medium, and light by giving subjects a set o f weights varying in weight, shape, and color and then defining the meanings of the terms by calculating the average referent for each term. As the Prague School of Linguistics noted long ago (Trubetskoy 1969:l-14), cultural elements such as meaningful sounds can never be understood solely


from a statistical analysis of actually uttered sounds. This procedure is what earlier linguists had attempted to follow and what Harris and Sanjek attempted to do in the area of racial categories. When an informant labels someone black he means, and his audience knows he means, someone who is at one end of the racial continuum. The range of the color spectrum covered by black varies for different informants and different situations, and the relative importance of hair form, skin color, and facial features also varies. However, this variation concerns the application of, but not the meaning of, cultural race categories.

Whatever ambiguity exists in the cultural system does not depend on overlapping categories, as Harris and Sanjek suppose. Rather, it exists because the relation between terms and categories i s uncertain. One informant labels his middle category brown and his adjacent category dark; another labels his middle category brown and his adjacent category colored.

Thus a racial term does not mean a specific segment of the color spectrum, a particular type of nose, or a particular hair form. A racial term refers to an element in a system of categories (for an example of this phenomenon in the domain of color, see Collier 1975). Furthermore, the meaning of this system of categories lies not in physical features themselves but in what they stand for. The system of categories and the continuum it segments express the importance of purity and mixture in race. There i s pure white and pure black, there i s an equal mixture of the two, which i s the middle category, and there are the two other mixtures, which are preponderantly white and preponderantly black.

To summarize the cultural definition of race as analyzed from our informants accounts, race i s defined as a fundamental property of each persons existence, since it is a property of blood, and it is roughly reflected in certain outward appearances (complexion, hair, and facial features). The definition of race focuses on Caucasians and Africans and the mixture of the two. The definition of race consists of a continuum from white to black that i s infinitely divisible on the one hand and on the other hand can be segmented into f ive categories. The next section will show that this continuum expresses the following principle: despite the generations and centuries of racial mixture, racial identity consists not of a homogeneous type but of varying mixtures of two distinct racial types-white and black.

significance of race

The significance of race is analyzed, as was the definition of race, by isolating several themes that appear in informants accounts and then showing their interrelationship. The themes are: (1) the significance of race as both a deep and a superficial phenomenon, (2) the relation of race to identity, (3) the relation of race to a hierarchy of social honor, (4) the justification of this hierarchy, (5) the relation of race to solidarity, (6) the relation of race to class, and (7) the relation of race to what may be called the mythological charter for the society.

(1) Informants are intensely ambivalent about the importance of race. Thus in lines (15)-(20) of Sears discussion she asserts in rapid succession that i t i s class not race that counts in the perception of people, that people are very conscious of hair, and that people use race terms without much conscious thought.

When Wagner was asked to describe his relatives by race he eventually replied: A: Suppose you were going to describe your children to some third party who didnt know

them.


I: I never thought of it, but I suppose I would have to give them a description. In Jamaica you dont think of things like that. Take a note of that [he looks a t tape recorder].

Ambivalence over the significance of race has two sources. One source is the impropriety of race; because i t makes invidious distinctions between persons, race is something that ought not be important. This source will be discussed later. The other source is the ambivalence over the relative importance of achieved and ascribed characteristics. Here informants are ambivalent about what is and what ought to be the case. On the one hand they believe that a man is what he makes himself. Since he has no control over his race it i s irrelevant. Thus informant N. Garner says: Your color is no fault of your own. I refuse to accept responsibility for what I did not choose. On the other hand informants believe that the rational man who chooses his fate also contains forces over which he has no control. These forces determine what he will ultimately do.4 During the research a large riot erupted in Kingston and many people feared that civil order was threatened. Informant Johnson, who had previously described the decline of racial consciousness in Jamaica, told me the Kingston Gun Club had enlisted as special marshalls and were patrolling with loaded rifles. And, he concluded, you know what color they are. Gun Club members tended to be at the white end of the color continuum. Thus the informant assumed that race is the ultimate basis of solidarity. Another informant said that when he was a child, he could not believe that someone so nearly white as the political leader Bustamante would really be concerned with the welfare of blacks.

Not only do informants think race is in fact important, in some respects they think it ought to be important. Thus, as we shall see in more detail later, informants believe race ought to be an important consideration in marriage. The essential point is that the subject of race immediately raises a conflict for informants over the relative importance of race as an ascribed characteristic. This conflict is not resolved. The assertion that race is or is not important rarely remains uncontradicted for long and consequently is expressed above all in ambivalence.

(2) Insofar as it i s conceived to be important, race is conceived of as having a specific ascribed significance. Morris, a twenty-four-year-old university graduate and secondary school teacher, responded as follows when asked about what part color had played in his life:

A very great part. When he asked about his ancestry and his father told him it went back to a slave woman, that was very important to him. Made him realize where he really belonged. Which had troubled him. He could say he was a Jamaican, but that was not really satisfactory. Would ask himself where do I really fit in. I s there such a thing as a Negro quality? The writing of Aim6 CCsaire and others helped him. Made him realize there was such a quality. They didnt simply exploit the problem on the level of skin, or participate in the back-to-Africa chants. But they gave a feeling of Africa, and made him feel a spiritual link to Africa. Was able to get to the Negro essence, and get rid o f the superficial culture-dress, ideas, education that he was brought up to accept and which is more European than African. To what extent European culture should be rejected is an open question. Cant see much point in ceasing to wear European clothes, though it does assert ones identity.

It was not an artificial development, but a question of discovering what was there. Black was identified with poverty and one tended to identify with whites and colored. Now he has a feeling of kinship, having discovered himself as a Negro.

There are many ascribed characteristics a person can attribute to himself. A person can say I am tall, 1 am strong, I am a heart patient, but these attributions clearly have a different significance from the statement in the above quote that I am brown. This attribution asserts something about the identity of the person. Identity means a persons image of himself as an active and coherent force that seeks to achieve ends in the

the culture of ram 426

context of his own capacities and his given environment (Erikson 1968). Thus part of his identity is attributed to his race.

Morris thus mirrors one of the central themes of intellectuals in Jamaica and the entire Caribbean. To give two examples:

I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they gave? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? (Walcott 1952:18) The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison; that is he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal. Whenever he comes into contact with someone else the question of value, or merit, arises. The Antilleans have no inherent value of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of the other (Fanon 1967:211).

The reader must remember that I am dealing with phenomena in their cultural aspect. Identity is most commonly treated from the psychological aspect and occasionally from the social aspect. My approach, however, is to ask about those ideas people have concerning their identities that result from their being members of a particular society. I find that in considering their own identities persons find it sensible to refer to their race and in considering race they find it sensible to consider their identities. Morris thoughts quoted above might be construed as a case of l i fe imitating art. Morris i s a university graduate and he refers to CCsaire, the Martiniquan exponent of negritude. Although none of my informants happens to be as articulate as the intellectual tradition and there i s a great range in the salience of the problem, nevertheless the issue of who a person i s and i t s relation to race appears in all informants accounts.

In what way i s race an attribute o f identity for informants? Here a comparison can be helpful. Erik Erikson (1963:285-287) suggests that the definition of American identity is that of the person who has a wide range of options and chooses among them on his own. The identity established for my informants more commonly focuses on their group membership, as in Walcotts poem. A typical observation is the following by Chung:

I: Im considered Chinese. I am really in a sense three-quarter Chinese. Am I? Yes, three-quarter I am. Of course, our physical features stamp us Chinese.

Thus in contrast to American identity, Jamaican identity focuses less on a typical mode of action and more on a community o f action. Erikson (1968:45-53) has pointed out that identity inevitably includes an image of a persons place in the community. This aspect of identity is what the cultural definition of race formulates. However, the effect of the cultural definition of race is to fragment and make problematical this identity because it defines, as we have seen in the previous section, the community as composed of two distinct elements and their mixture, a mixture that does not amalgamate. For some, this racial identity often leads them very far into the experience of mixture and fragmentation. Intensive preoccupation with complexion has often been noted. Wagner carries this concern to an extreme that is l i t t le discussed but not uncommon; he presented the fact that his family does not suffer from sickle cell anemia, albinoism, or rope scars at healing (all believed to be inherited black characteristics) to demonstrate that from my immediate blood stream I dont know of any that are really colored.

The significant question for my purpose is not which physical feature i s most important in the cultural definition of race (complexion, hair, scarring, and so forth), but the extent to which, given the psychological motivation or the structural position, the


culture can lead a person to experience himself as racial and as fragmented. This fragmentation of identity on the cultural level is a crucial aspect of the significance of race. The discussion of the fifth theme will show the sense of fragmentation of community, which is the setting for a fragmented identity.

(3) A scholarly truism is that race is hierarchically evaluated-white i s superior, black inferior. However, this truism i s frequently denied by informants, as when Sears in lines (1 5141 8) asserts that class rather than race differences are important. Significantly, where informants consistently feel they have received less than the respect due an equal, they assume race i s the cause. For instance, R. Garner, one informant, recalled an incident when he was twelve years old.

Garner was standing around a t a gas station eating mangoes. A car came in for gas, and the station attendant gave him the gas cap to hold while he filled the tank. The driver grabbed the cap away and cursed G. fiercely. G. f e l t he was being treated as a menial. It might have happened even if he had been white, after all his hands were dirty with mango juice; s t i l l it was the way the man spoke to him.

On one occasion Wagner, his son, a mutual acquaintance (who was a day laborer and black), and I had gone to vis i t Wagners father for lunch. The father was out with Wagners half-brother, who, as Wagner pointed out to me several times, was black and wealthy. After lunch we went to pick up a woman who was living at the house and when we returned the mutual acquaintance and I happened to be l e f t alone on the verandah. He asked me if I recalled our conversation long ago about raciality and proceeded to show me how raciality had been a t work in our vis i t in three events. For example, how when we picked up the woman, she had been introduced to me but not to him. The events he described had indeed occurred and they were susceptible to the interpretation he gave them; however, they had not broken the flow of social interaction, had passed me by unnoticed, and could be explained alternatively. The occasion corresponded to Chungs description, it is not anything raw and naked; it is subtle, nothing gross.

(4) Less evident than the hierarchical evaluation of race is the ambivalence with which this hierarchy is conceived. This ambivalence is expressed in the touchiness with which the subject i s discussed. Informants all framed the matter the same way: race is a subject people do not discuss freely and openly; it remains understood.

If I had to refer to color a t all, which I go out of my way to avoid-it i s a very tricky subject and becoming increasingly so, I would say. But I can tel l you that a friend, say, of our family gets married to a very dark person, I suppose this happened when Winnie married Tom, everybody would talk about it, and say [spoken in a whisper] and he is very dark.

Now her mother has not literally ingrained it in her, but you know how these things are. Certainly she got the message. It is not anything raw and naked; the fact i s it is there in her subconscious. She sees she has no Chinese relationship, she has no Caucasian so she sees the only one available looked down upon.

A: When were you first conscious of color? I: My sister told me that our parents objected to her marrying a boy, and she thought it

was probably because he was black. I thought it was probably so. A: What was there about your parents behavior or attitude that made her theory plausible

to you? I: Nothing gross; just l i t t le things like commenting on how the Negroes in the United States

dont behave.

Even those persons who could articulate their views and experiences concerning race in interviews avoided the subject in public. However freely or jokingly they discussed the subject with me in interviews it was unwise for me to treat the subject lightly and in general the less I said and the more I le f t the initiative to them the better off I was.


The reasons for this ambivalence are revealed by informants discussions of color prejudice. Informants can easily expand on the wickedness of color prejudice and on the evil of superiority claimed on the basis of race. yet they cannot discuss racial differences without implying superiority and inferiority, and th i s dilemma leads to informants ambivalence.

Ambivalence over racial status exists because there is no cultural justification for it. Unlike a society such as India where s ta tus is justified by the ideology of purity (Dumont 1966), there is l i t t le evidence for such an ideology among my informants. Indeed, if racism i s to be strictly defined-the doctrine that a mans behaviour is determined by stable inherited characters deriving from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes and usually cQnsidered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority (Banton 1967:8)-then it might be argued that there is l i t t le evidence of racism as part of the culture of our informants. Though informants do see race as associated with superiority and inferiority, the association is not biological. There are only two instances in which informants consider the possibility that one race is biologically inferior to another. Sears observes:

I would very much like to know, which I will never know, where the various families Im comprised of come from. My parents accentuated the white side. Well, we all know its a healthy mixture. The fact that we know were so mixed up. Theres nothing we can do about it. We must just accept ourselves as we are.

Wagner wonders if the black race is more highly sexed and why it has never produced a civilization. No evidence of racism appears in all the data other than these two tentatively held opinions. If informants do not believe whites are biologically superior to blacks, what i s the basis of their hierarchical evaluation of race? For my informants, racial hierarchy i s the result o f a historical association of race with social dominance and style of life.6 Informants define being white as superior to being black because it brings advantages in the society. White i s also superior to black because it is associated with a superior style of life; white i s civilized, black is uncivilized.

What i s crucial to see is that the association between race on the one hand and superior life style and dominance on the other hand is, from the point of view of informants, a matter of historical fact rather than biological necessity. For my informants, whites did dominate speak English, practice certain conjugal customs, eat certain foods, and so on.

Thus the culturally defined superiority of white over black follows from the culturally asserted historical association of white with superior social position and superior style of life. The earlier analysis of the definition of race revealed that appearances are interpreted as signs of an inward physical condition; the analysis of the significance of race reveals that it i s significant for its association with a superior style of l i fe and dominance. While the link between appearance and race is conceived to be biological, the link between race and superior style of l i fe and social position is conceived to be historical. It remains to be shown that while the association of race with superior or inferior power and style of l i fe is conceived to be the result of historical events, the association of races with distinctive l i fe styles and power positions is conceived to be the consequence of an intrinsic property of race.

(5) Racial differences imply hierarchical and invidious distinctions between persons; conversely racial similarity implies equality and solidarity. Johnsons previously quoted reference to the activities of the Gun Club members during a riot represents the belief that when the bonds o f civil society are threatened the bonds of race remain. Chung discussed the riots against the Chinese in 1965. He reported that many Chinese who had seen themselves as full participants in the society had been stunned to find themselves

428 amrrican ethnologist

objects of attack, defined not as friends, acquaintances, or businessmen, but as Chinese. Most Chinese, he added, had made preparations for the recurrence of such a riot.

A less dramatic example is when informants distinguish relatives racially and yet also tend to classify relatives as racially similar-and these contrasting tendencies are in close association. Let me re-examine an earlier quote:

I: Im brown, brown skin. My wife is the same, brown. Her father is half Chinese; so she has also a Chinese name. Knowing the family I realize it is just like my having a degree of Spanish blood. My sister Rena is darker than myself. My brother, Colin, is a l i t t l e lighter than I am. Joyce is lighter than us, more like my father.

A: Lewis? I: I would say all of us are about my complexion.

I have noted before that Sears asserts first that her relatives are all the same and then proceeds to distinguish them.

Why this contradiction? The reason is that racial differences imply distinctions that are inconsistent with the solidarity of kinship, and racial similarity implies solidarity consistent with that of kinship. The problem i s stated clearly by Sears later when, after describing one of her in-laws, Jean, as copper bronze, she says, You know this doesnt make any difference. It doesnt make the slightest difference, I mean, Jean i s now dearly beloved and accepted almost like a daughter. If difference in color did not imply that Jean was less loved, there would be no need to assert that in fact she is loved.

The idea that people of the same color belong together is most clearly expressed in discussions of marriage. Much has been made by scholars of the white bias, especially as expressed in the desire to marry up in color. This bias is thought to be particularly true of the middle class. What is just as true, but much less noted, is the bias toward marrying someone of the same color. For instance, A. Benton said:

If a man is a doctor or lawyer, barrister and even some teachers, if he earns money he could marry a girl from that class, he could. Because they have the feeling that it will upgrade their children. But the funny thing about it is that by and large the colored people resent this kind of action in a colored person. Because they feel that he would be turning against his group. And women in particular fe l t there were girls out here of educational standing good enough that he could have found a wife. This desire on his part to marry out of his color they didnt accept.

Furthermore, the notion of union between persons of different races has an air of illegitimacy around it. For instance the term China Royal refers to a person who is half black and half Chinese; it also has a derogatory connotation. When I asked Chung about the term he said: China Royal meaning I think you come sort o f by chance, you are not supposed to be around. Just because of a mix-up like you happened.

Similarly, after A. Benton referred to the term mulatto, I asked him in what circumstances it i s used and he replied:

You hear people talking, just describing other people and say shes a mulatto; her father was a Scotsman. Its a good word, but it is also used as a curse word. She was the product of a promiscuous relationship.

Finally informants formulate the illegitimacy o f unions between races in their beliefs about the origin of Jamaican society. For informants the origin of contemporary society i s in the illegal union of a white male master and black female slave and their illegal mulatto offspring.

In the cultural definition, the solidarity that arises out of racial sameness i s an intrinsic property of that racial sameness. People stick together because they have the same blood, and there i s no further explanation necessary. A t the same time the definition of race as a continuum consisting of an unamalgamated mixture ensures that racial solidarity is a fragile condition easily dissolvable by the racial differences that the culture


always formulates. Let me now return to the problem of the cultural definition of race and hierarchy.

While solidarity is defined as an intrinsic property o f racial sameness, hierarchy of racial difference i s defined as an accidental property resulting from historical events. As I have already noted, there is l i t t le evidence for a belief in intrinsic racial superiority (such as racism); the superiority of white arises from its association with superior social position and l i fe style, and not vice versa. I can make most sense of this complex of beliefs by inferring that informants believe common l i fe style and common social position is a result of racial solidarity. Because persons o f the same blood stick together they develop the same l i fe style and function as a group to maintain or improve their position in society. Consequently, while the superior social position and style of l i fe of whites are not a biological consequence of race, they are s t i l l essentially and not accidentally white. That i s why a colored person who lives according to the superior l i f e style or who marries a white person is pursuing a l i fe style that i s not really his own and i s marrying outside his group; just as a colored person, no matter how white he may look, i s never really white. Thus, although l i fe style and social dominance are in one sense achieved characteristics-persons can acquire proper speech and wealth-in another sense they are defined as intrinsically white and therefore ascribed characteristics.

(6) The relationship between race and hierarchy, as it i s defined by informants (that is, in its cultural aspect), leads to the relation of race to class. Scholars have often asserted that race i s a language for talking about class interest or the subjective form that objective class interests take.

My own observation is that informants have no difficulty talking about class interests when they want to, and in general they are keenly aware of class interests. For instance, informants have no difficulty articulating the consequences of secondary school quotas and scholarships for their class interests. Furthermore, informants can talk about race without referring to class. For instance, informants never referred to the class or status of a relative to determine his racial description, with one crucial exception that will be discussed shortly.

At the same time class and status can influence perception of race. A little-known systematic study of this phenomenon is found in Taylors study of Runaway Bay, Jamaica (1959). Taylor classified all adults in the community according to color by a roughly objective standard and then had eighteen informants classify the same persons by social class and color. The results, summarized in Table 6, show clearly the tendency on the part o f informants to make class and color consistent.

Another expression of the interaction between race and social hierarchy can be gained from two informants who found i t extremely difficult to talk about the subject of race. A. Benton never mentioned the topic of race on his own, and when I raised the topic in our twelfth interview he became agitated. Though he usually spoke directly and vividly of his own experiences and opinions, he removed himself from this subject by describing what we Jamaicans generally do.

At one point he turned to his bookshelves and pulled out a text to quote examples of how Englishmen categorize. After much general discussion I asked:

A: I want to know how you would categorize, describe other people here. How about your mother, for instance?

I: Well, the only people I would say we care to label are foreigners, Chinese, Indians.

Then he was off again on a general discussion. Eventually he settled into a discussion of color discrimination and the growing unwillingness of Jamaicans to submit to it, and became more comfortable.


Table 6. Comparison of objective and informant color ratings of all adults in Runaway Bay, Jamaica, by class of adults.*

ClasSt brown fair Black-dark Brown Light brown-

(Highest Class) 1 1 .o$ 2 2.7 3 1.2

(Lowest Class) 4 .a

1 .o .5 .7

1.4

1 .o 1 .o 1.2 2.3

*Based on Taylor, Color and Class, (1959:46, Table 6). tThe class categories and the distribution of al l adults into these categories were established by the

same eighteen informant who performed the color ratings.

*A rating of 1.0 means the anthropologist and informants placed the same number of persons in that cell. A rating of 2.0 means the anthropologist placed twice as many, and .5, half as many persons in that cell as informants did.

When I asked the second informant, Wagner, who was also usually concrete and specific, about color, he spoke in generalities and was reluctant to commit himself.

A: It would be useful for me to get a classification or description of these people by race or color, ethnic group, however you describe them.

I : That is a tremendous question, man. I dont know what ethnic group they really belong. Cosmopolitan.

A: How would you describe yourself? I : I think I am more Caucasian than anything else. A: How would you describe your children? I: How would you? They wouldnt be Caucasian, would they? In Jamaica you dont think

of things like that.

Benton classified himself as black and Wagner as more Caucasian than anything else, but what both had in common was a sharp sense of status inconsistency. Benton had risen to become a vice-principal of a secondary school; Wagner was a clerk who harbored ambitions for a skilled and prestigious occupation. If race were entirely dependent, were simply a language or superstructure on class, then these two informants would have modified their racial self-identification or reduced its subjective significance. However, if race were utterly independent o f class then there would be no inconsistency to disturb these two informants.

How do we order these data? The clue to the answer lies, I think, in the conclusion reached earlier-for informants the link between race and stratification i s one of historical fact. In order to understand the interaction between race and class we must understand the role of race as the linchpin in an origin myth that i s the charter of the middle class, and perhaps of the society.

Informants believe that the middle class originated in the nonlegal union of a white male master and a black female slave that produced an illegitimate brown offspring midway in status between slave and master. This belief is clearly expressed in the genealogies of those informants who see themselves as o f middle-class origins; they all trace their genealogies back to a white male master, black female slave, and mulatto or brown offspring. Only at this point o f origin do class, status, and race correlate directly; only here do class terms have direct implications for race terms, and vice versa. There are two class terms that have an automatic race significance, slave and plantation owner. Slave automatically implies black; plantation owner automatically implies


white. The use of the terms slave and plantation owner i s illustrated in the following quotes:

She was very dark, because her mother, being a slave, would have been black.

She was of the plantocracy: her background came from some of the white folk that had somehow intermarried. I dont know if she had any Negroid blood.

How is the story of the origin of the middle class to be taken as a myth? Certainly it is not a sacred tale that concerns sacred beings, the usual definition of myth (Thompson 1946:9). Nevertheless, the story operates like a myth. The classic analysis o f the operation of myth i s Malinowskis. Malinowski saw myth as a charter.

The function of myth., . is to strengthen tradition and endow it with greater value and prestige.. . . It does so by tracing.. . [tradition] back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events (Malinowski 1926:146). The process by which tradition is traced i s a very special one; the really important thing about the myth [of origin] is i t s character of retrospective, ever-present, live actuality. It is to a native neither a fictitious story, nor an account of a dead past; i t is a statement o f a bigger reality s t i l l alive (1926:126).

Leach (1954) has shown that myth does not necessarily strengthen social tradition, as Malinowski thought, but can be used to argue about the validity of social practices. Still it remains true that myth operates to anchor practices in their origins and does so by a distinctive sense of time. This mythical time has been analyzed clearly by LCvi-Strauss.

On the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future (1963:209).

LCvi-Strauss observes that in modern society mythical time i s primarily private (1963:207). The experience o f the past as not just a completed event (that is, a past cause of present conditions) but as st i l l with us i s primarily a private experience, as exemplified by intense memories o f childhood in terms of which persons s t i l l define the world and act. Nevertheless, public examples can be found.

When the historian refers to the French Revolution, it is always as a sequence of past happenings, a non-reversible series of events the remote consequences of which may sti l l be f e l t a t present. But to the French politician, as well as to his followers, the French Revolution is both a sequence belonging to the past-as to the historian-and a timeless pattern which can be detected in the contemporary French social structure and which provides a clue for i t s interpretation, a lead from which to infer future developments (Lbvi-Strauss 1963-209).

The myth of middle-class origin operates in just this way. It relates events that have taken place in the past and that are yet st i l l in the present, not simply as past causes of present conditions, but actually present. The origin myth formulates in the minds of informants the underlying, fundamental principles of the society against which all variations are measured.

The distinctive mythical time is expressed by race-white blood and black blood have been passed down from the beginning of society, from generation to generation, endlessly mixed and st i l l distinct, into the present.* Race thus establishes the historical rootedness of the society and i t s members place in it. It does so in a way that locates this historical rootedness directly in the experience of persons bodies and thus to a certain extent fuses the continuity o f the person with the continuity o f the society. Every time a person experiences inconsistency among race, physical appearance, status, and class, he is referring the present to a past in which there were two original groups-one English, white, civilized, master, and solidary, the other African, black, uncivilized, slave, and solidary-that mixed without amalgamating. Every time a person perceives himself or


someone else in terms of race, he commits himself to a view that sees the present as the result of a long process of mixture in which the two elements are always kept track of because they have never really joined together.

Conclusion

Listening carefully to a few informants using their ideas about race has made it possible to add to the knowledge of race gained by historical and cognitive studies.

To suppose that the idea of race refers informants simply to physical characteristics or to an inherent physical hierarchy is wrong; it refers them through their bodies to a historical hierarchy and solidarity of races that has been constantly fragmented by a historical process of mixture. Once t h i s fundamental significance of race is understood, then the use of racial terminology to describe what is can be understood as an expression of this fundamental significance.

notes The data on which this article are based come from a larger study of the meaning of family l i f e to

middle-class urban Jamaicans (Alexander 1973). That study in turn was part of a larger project directed by Professor Raymond T. Smith. The first year of fieldwork was supported by the National Sclence Foundation through a grant to that project (NSF-GS-1709). The second year of fieldwork was supported by NIH Training Grant No. 1-F1-MH-34477.01 A2(CUAN). The assistance of the Colgate University Research Council i s also acknowledged. I am indebted to Professors Lawrence Fisher, Ivan Karp, and Raymond T. Smith for their comments on the paper, as well as to Americun Ethnologist readers.

The difference between the subjects of a sociological investigation and the informants of a cultural investigation i s explained by David M. Schneider (1968).

Establishing the fact that color is intended to stand for race may be thought to belabor the obvious. Therefore It is worth observing that a respectable theory of comparative race relations distinguishes color prejudice and racial prejudice, and disassociates the concern with appearance from the concern with descent. This distinction made by Harris (1964) has most recently been adopted by Degler (1971:llO-111) In contrasting United States and Brazilian race relations. Perhaps the Brazilian cultural system defining race is very different from the Jamaican, but from the published accounts it does not appear so. The same distinction as Deglers appears to be made by Errol Miller in one of the reports on hls valuable study of race and body image among Jamaican adolescents.

Six experimenters were chosen.. . . The racial composition of the group was IS follows: Chinese, Indian, Black with Natural hair style, Black with Straightened hair, Mulatto vs. Brown, and White (1972:335).

The term Black is used with Caribbean meaning, that i s Black In appearance (1972-389). My contention is that black means more than appearance.

4This ambivalence is illustrated in Fanons account (1967) of the black man who first denies the relevance of race as an intrinsic element of his personality, then seeks to find it, and eventually accepts it as part o f a social structure that must be changed.

The tollowlng comes from field notes because the interview was not taped. 6Such racial ideologies are described and analyzed by Hannah Arendt (1 951 ). The persistent difficulties scholars have had in determining the values of lower-class populations

arises from the aforementioned cultural fact. Why is it that scholars have no difficulty in establishing the distinctive conjugal values of lower-class East Indians in the New World and find such difficulty in deciding whether lower-class blacks have a distinctive set of conjugal values or a disorganized version of white values? If one pays sufficient attention to the distinction between norms and values, social structure and culture, we find that the lower class in Jamaica, which is largely black, has a set of conjugal norms (Smith 1973), but that in the cultural aspect they do not point to these norms. Similarly in the area of language the lower class has a set of linguistic norms, but they persist in referring to their speech as a broken-down version of English. Reisman (1970) has described and analyzed th is phenomenon clearly for the West Indian island of Antigua.

To understand the peculiar role o f Creole in Antigua we must begin by understanding the dominance of English and of the idea of English in Antigua. A form of negative definition

the culture of raco 433

operates. All varieties of speech are considered to partake of varying degrees of the nature of longuuge-that is, of English. Speech may be defined by villagers as lacking in language-that is, it may be broken.

A l i t t l e more positively it may be back way, a term also used for a mans children by women apart from his main household. Or it may be bad language. . . . Informally, however, one may hear such phrases as our bad language or remarks such as Its ours and we love it (Reisman

In these respects they are expressing the cultural formulation that to be white is to be civilized, and to be black is to be uncivilized, that is, to lack distinctive values.

*The mythical character of the origin story is demonstrated in informants genealogies. We have already mentioned that informants who consider themselves as of middle-class origins place at the apex of their genealogies an illegitimate union of a white male master and black female slave, followed by mulatto offspring. Kinsmen at the bottom of the genealogy are given with great specificity. But the genealogical space between those known in living memory and the apex of the genealogy is filled in vaguely or not a t all; informants know they were descended from a white master and black slave but do not know how they descended. This tripartite division of the genealogy into the mythical past, the present known to living memory, and an intervening area of ambiguity seems to be characteristic of many societies (Barnes 1967: 1 20).

1970:136-137).

references cited

Alexander, Jack 1973 The Culture of Middle Class Family Life in Kingston, Jamaica. Unpublished Ph.D.

dissertation. University of Chicago. Arendt, Hannah

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Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay

Collier, George 1975 A Reinterpretation of Color Nomenclature Systems. American Ethnologist 2:l l l -125.

Degler, Carl 1971 Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. New

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Anthropology 27: 1-1 4. Harris, Marvin, and Conrad Kottak

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pology. Norman E. Whitten and John F. Szwed, Eds. New York: Free Press. Sanjek, Roger

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n.d. Race, Class and Politics in a Post-Colonial Society (forthcoming). 1973 The Matrifocal Family. In The Character o f Kinship. Jack Goody, Ed. London: Cambridge

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Date of Submission: November 15,1976 Date of Acceptance: December 13, 1976


Documents

the culture of race in middle-class Kingston, Jamaica