Writings from an all-round ethnographer

Dell Hymes Passes Away

2009-11-15T11:22:00.001-08:00

At the moment, I simply don't have the words to write an academic obituary for one of the greatest visionaries of the 20th century. In less than a month's time, we lost the fathers of structuralism (Levi-Strauss) and sociolinguistics (Hymes). Dell Hathaway Hymes' vision of

a better world through an empirical study of marginalized voices in society has profoundly impacted my research. I recently presented a paper on Hymes' deep engagement with socialist concerns, and feel that we have only now began to really understand his powerful

vision on how language policy impacts social inequality. It was my professor at Ghent University, Jan Blommaert, who opened up his complex oeuvre and showed that many of his ideas are absolutely essential to better understand language in society. But most of all; Hymes learned me to LISTEN to others, and that listening is an act of love.

I was hoping to see Dell accompany his wife Virginia to the panel in her honour at the upcoming

annual anthropology convention in Philly next month, but that will not happen.

I can only try to pay respect to him the best I can through further engaging with his

monumental legacy. May your vision live on, Dell.

Haircut!

2007-09-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, I decided it's time for a haircut... Why? Well, it seems that after I have cut off my locks, sometime in 1999, I haven't really been satisfied with any way of keeping long hair other than locks, so here goes the "carpet", the "wig", or whatever inventive metaphor friends would kindly present me with. Anyhow, I'll post a picture tomorrow when I get back from the barbershoppe. :-)

Arriving in Toronto...

2007-09-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

I've moved to Toronto now. Officially. School year hasn't started yet BUT I'm here already to undertake some necessary preparations, such as the obligatory stuff like opening a bank account, registering with the department etc. Then, on the 4th, I can embark on my doctoral spree, which should hopefully lead to a Phd somewhere mid 2010. Ouch. 2010. Mmmm...

Toronto's a lot like New York really...People are busy busy busy and even if someone is on the street acting like a lunatic or screaming their heads off or DYING for that matter, he or she will probably not get a lot of reaction. Climate here seems a bit cold, and no, I wasn't talking about the weather. Also, the administrative whirlwind of housing, tuition fees and bank issues seems to be pacing about at a rather high and confusing speed... And that for a city that has gone almost bankrupt and where prices are very high.

Luckily, Toronto seems to have an equally interesting and wide-spread counter-cultural movement, including ecological, vegetarian and queer/feminist groups. And, it seems that the way in happens through these groups. So yes, yours truly has checked out some of these cohorts and might join them as the upcoming months proceed. And, I do hope to make some friends and good colleagues once the year takes off.

As for smoking I am really fucked. I can't smoke anywhere in the building, gotta go 9 floors down AND cross the street (because it is not allowed to smoke in front of the building outside). At 11 euros a pack, one has quickly abandoned the nasty habit. And drinking, well, beer is sold in separate beer shops, wines in wine shops and liquor in liquor shops... Damn...As yours truly really fancied the combination of those deliria, a long long trip will be my curse. BUT as a reward they have Red Stripe, Appleton, and more of that goodness...

I'll be writing more, and share some academic stuff and poetry as well, once I get this pc thing sorted out. Peace be with y'all.

Jimmy in his Provence home

2007-03-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

If there is one writer that is continually on my night-table, under my bed, on top of my desk and shelves, then it's Jimmy Baldwin. I feel as this is my imaginary friend, my twin soul. There are no words that can describe what this picture does for me. Yes, I love Jimmy. Oh yes, I do. I wish I could have just enter the picture and have beer or a whisky with him. 20 years ago Jimmy died but in a remote village, all the way in Belgium (but not so far from his home in France) he is still remembered every day.

Wine and Life

2007-03-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

I just love wine. The growing conditions and the love and care given to the original ranks really account for not only the quality but also the texture, the character and the taste of the wine. Life is very parallel with how the wine rank is nurtured and taken care of. In the next sequence of the movie "Sideways", the main character Miles describes how the Pinot Noir ( also my favorite grape) grows and why he likes it so much. And, he is actually describing himself...And perhaps me... And what better than to enjoy this wine with someone who takes the time for you ? Who thinks you are worth tasting?

LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwpfk2TuRS8

(I hope this link will stay on Youtube for a while).

Zora Neale Hurston: Mother of Caribbean Ethnography

2007-02-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

Good friend better than pocket dunsa (2)

2007-02-09T03:03:00.000-08:00

This is another one of my very good friends, Dirk Oxen. Our history goes back at least six years, when we started to run a local sound system "Rasta Academy", which main purpose was to educate people about social and spiritual issues. Although the sound and inspiration were arguably Rastafarian, they certainly were uplifting. A few years later, we developed "Lovers Hi Fi", "the sweetest sound around". Triggered by personal issues in both our love lives, we decided to give the crowd a selection of the best loversreggae we could find. I remember me and Dirk have spent days in his forest home selecting stuff on minidisc to play in the nearby youth club. Next to all this, we have invented a genre called "reggae comedy", closely linked to Lovers Hi Fi; as we would put on small sketches on stage (a betrayed husband, a fight over a girl) while the music was playing. At last, Dirk fell in love and married an American girl and now practices his other passion (next to Sonya) as a shepherd somewhere close to Vancouver. I hope we can meet again soon. Fond memories, reasoning by the fireplace ... All best Dirk!

How can we look at storytelling in the Caribbean?

2007-02-08T06:18:00.000-08:00

For my M.A. thesis, I investigated patterns of narrative in Barbados and how they contribute to national identity. These may be political, social, fictional, gendered, ... in nature. My fieldwork stretched over a period of two years. This is the introduction to that piece of research. (which can be obtained fully by sending an email to kenyan_star@hotmail.com).

Telling Stories : Ethno-poetic (re)construction of identities
Methodology and Interdisciplinary Implications

Storytelling has always taken prominence in both western and non-western cultures when constructing one’s own and others’ identities. In a largely metropolitanized, yet rural context the written and the spoken construction of narratives gain equal importance. Barbados, exemplary of such a condition, in that it has opened its doors to the world, yet struggles with the Atlantic echoes of a distant African shore, finds itself fairly at ease with its past. Often, linguistic and literary registers are closely intertwined to place the Barbadian individual in the middle of a British-African dichotomy, skilfully integrating both traits in identity construction work by means of narrative. One such example of this close intertwining of African yet British cultural frames is the language situation on the island. Bajan Creole is just one of those cultural forms that hovers between those different cultural/social perspectives, and Barbadian society is severely marked by the constant tension between rural and coastal, Bajan Creole and Standard English, verbal and non-verbal, indeed recursive mappings of ‘British’ and ‘African’.
As Hymes argues that “understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, including ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatics, narrative inquiry and literary criticism”, I’ve covered storytelling in Barbados from a range of perspectives(Hymes 2003: viii). In his volume on the dialogue between anthropology and philosophy Clifford Geertz asserts the (w)holistic aspects of anthropology as the study of culture and the fact that ethnography as a binding method relates all the bits and pieces to one another (Geertz 2000: x). The quality of connecting studies from different points of view; binding them together and then integrating them in the big puzzle of a studied culture, is exactly the surplus any ethnography has to offer. I write ‘any’, because even within ethnographic practice (and that is what it indeed is, a practice) many different approaches can be valid (using any method ranging from participant observation, videotaping, taking field notes, carrying out surveys, etc.). However, what all have in common is the fact that the researcher goes to the studied field physically and develops his own approach, in accordance to the given circumstances (which yet requires a whole set of different skills), and is able to say without shame or pressure from ‘scientific poachers, parvenus or hangers-on’ that “I am an ethnographer, and a writer about ethnography, from beginning to end.” (Geertz 2000: x).
In this volume, I group two types of ethnographies, the first series more traditional, in the sense that they follow more established codes of analysis; the second series more experimental, creative and personal. By deploying these different techniques for the analysis of a Creole speech community in the Anglophone Caribbean, I wish to reflect the kaleidoscope of approaches my teachers (of which some are mentors) have blessed me with. A broad range of linguistic, anthropological and literary techniques, let’s say an ‘assemblage’ of cultural analytical tools, are applied to the study of narratives in Barbadian society, the main stream flowing straight from the Atlantic into the island.
In the first part, which is given the name ‘Narrative Ethnographies’ I look at narratives as ‘a seemingly contradictory genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities’ (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction). By studying narrative from an anthropological point of view, what I do in this part, one can distinguish several points of entry for narratives in daily conversations that contribute to identity making. Newspapers (chapter 2) and television programs (chapter 3) are just a few examples of daily happening ‘events’ or ‘performances’ that largely allow narrative invocations. By investigating uses of Bajan colloquialisms in local newspapers and ways of portraying Bajan, British and African culture in transcriptions of a television program, I show how narratives co-construct identity and recursively map these constructs onto local ‘moral stances’ on identity and nationhood and global dichotomies of (in)equality. I plead that these moral stances are inconsistent and subject to dispute, flux and discovery, narratives often being dichotomies themselves (Ochs and Capps 1995, Introduction).
In the second part, which is largely a methodological overview to reconcile literature with anthropology, I view narratives as a possibility to communicate to the reader through literary texts. Curiously, and rather creatively, I keep the same contours for narrative as outlined in the first part, instead of finding refuge in a more traditional stance of narrative in literature, worked out in theories of narratology and mimetism. Hence my warning this part of the volume might be more experimental, more reflexive, more personal. As narratives are highly interactive and collaborative, one can read local or global texts (about local issues) as a communication from writer to reader, in close tune with the ethnographic framework one is in, Barbadian society in my case. In this respect, literature can often function as a sort of literary meta-pragmatic framework in which the multiplicity and polyphony of voices can be captured. Entitled ‘Literary Ethnographies’, this part deals with the schematic knowledge of the reader (or the researcher as reader of cultural ‘texts-in-the-field) and how literature and fieldwork are both complementary in ‘filling the gaps’. Expanding Iser’s framework with physical work in the field (as this has been most vividly laid out and explored in Iser 1989: 262-284), I have read Brathwaite’s poem, Condé’s novel and Kwei-Armah’s play alongside (before, while and after) my fieldwork visits to Barbados. (Iser 1978,1989,1993). In the chapter on Brathwaite, I explore new methodologies for bringing ethnographic practice and local literature together. These same techniques are then applied to a poem by this Barbadian author. In the chapter on Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, part travelogue, part post-modern painting of island life, I apply the same techniques a bit more loosely, as to demonstrate the limits and boundaries of such an approach. In the final chapter on Kwei-Armah’s play, I look at how the use of Creole language befits a writer that at the same time wants to portray a diverse Caribbean yet homogenizes the Barbadian character.
Interdisciplinary perspectives will gain insight in the complexities of a Creole society under anthropological scope. Sometimes, as we want to grasp a culture totally, as ethnographers, we find ourselves ‘pitfalled’ by the limits of being the ‘writer’ of a culture (in ethnologic postscript) that has already been so eloquently written by its own subjects. Here is an attempt to read a culture and write about it instead of claiming authorship over it. Here is a volume that gently explores the contours of a culture that itself is largely post-scripted, written ‘after’ those terrible crimes against humanity.

References

Geertz, C. (1973). ‘Thick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture.’ In: The Interpretation of Culture. NY: Basic Books.

Hymes, D. (2003). Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Iser, W. (1989). Prospecting: From reader response to literary anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Iser, W. (1993). The fictive and the imaginary: Charting literary anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ochs, E. and L. Capps. (1995). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Good friend better than pocket dunsa (money)

2007-02-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is me and one of my good friends, Mrs. Jeannette Allsopp, Guyanese by birth but nowadays Director of the Caribbean Lexicography unit at UWI Barbados. I believe her patience, eye for detail and brilliant spirit have inspired me on multiple occasions. This is us just before we are heading to the city of Miami to have some pasta ... and wine :-)

One of my latest and ongoing projects... "Queering Caribbean Identities"

2007-02-06T13:28:00.002-08:00

A literary-anthropological focus would allow us to generate important insights about the way female writers from the Caribbean have put the performance of gender on the agenda. Slavery has affected sexuality in a profound way and resulted in the performance of a gendered identity in Black and mixed families. Furthermore, these identities are essentially shaped by matrifocal households. Throughout literary history, the focus on `race' has largely overshadowed the work on `gender', especially in the Francophone Caribbean context. The double oppression of women since slavery times (based on race and based on gender and sexuality) accounts for an interesting starting point for this study. Thus, the project will examine four female authors from the Caribbean within a literary-anthropological framework.

My main goal is to distinguish gendered identities in the literary corpus and see how these constructed fictional identities are represented in Caribbean society, a context significantly marked by a strict social control causing the discrimination and marginalization of non-heteronormative individuals. Concretely, I juxtapose literary works of Dionne Brand (Trinidad), Patricia Powell (Jamaica), Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe) with ethnographic material from the same region by which we might distinguish sexual, gendered and ethnic identities that might differ from the `fictional models' found in the literary corpus.

This means that I will make use of local newspapers, magazines, interviews etc. to clearly situate the visions on identity derived from the works of fiction, in contemporary Caribbean society. By doing so I will be able to formulate a specific Caribbean alternative for Anglo-American hegemony over theories related to gender and sexuality. This is necessary since Caribbean matrifocal family structures and the consequences of male subordination during slavery require a more specific, local scope. Furthermore, this project fills some important gaps in current research.

A first gap this project bridges is the one between anthropology and literary studies.(Iser 1989, Crapanzano 2004) The anthropological conception of `text' or `culture as text' will be confronted with a more classic literary approach to read the `Other'. Literary non-heteronormative approaches to gender and sexuality will be analyzed within a larger literary-anthropological framework that pays attention to the way in which the qualitative ethnographic method (consisting of fieldwork and participant observation) supports the charting of these `constructed, literary' imaginations of individuals whose behaviour is seen as subversive and unacceptable by society at large.

A second gap is the lack of attention for the cultural and literary contruction of `queer' identities within postcolonial studies. Even though there is a growing interest in gender and sexuality in this field, non-heteronormative approaches of on the one hand `gender' (e.g. transgenderism, parodies on gender, carnivalesque subversions of gender, etc.) and `sexuality' on the other hand (e.g. gay and lesbian identities, asexuality, etc.) are still quite largely ignored. This research project initiates a socially relevant study of these `queer' identities in Caribbean literature, linked to its cross-cultural and trans-linguistic context.
Thirdly, this project considers the gap between the English and French academic awareness of the intersections of race, class and sex. Indeed, the initiative stems from the minimal presence of `queer' in the literature of the French Antilles, an otherwise very prolific and productive literary region of the world. Literary history learns us that social issues such as racism and class discrimination dominated over the issue of non-heteronormative sexualities. This shows from a complaint voiced by pan-European feminist Rosi Braidotti:
“How do you conceptualize sexed identity in a French context or in an Italian context as opposed to an Anglo-American context let alone in a post-colonial or `black' perspective?” (O'Grady 1995).

In other words, this research project openly confronts the gap between criticism in the Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial world. Even though homosexuality is legal in the French `départments d'outre mer' Martinique and Guadeloupe (in sharp contrast with the Anglophone West Indies), we hardly find any traces of `queer' individuals in fictional works from the French Antilles. An ethnographic reading of both French- and English-speaking Caribbean women writers enables us to better understand their literatures and the way they possibly `modify' and `mirror' `queer' identities. The project focuses on congruent yet divergent representations or imaginations in literatures that are often isolated, even though they all share the historical context of slavery and European colonization.

References:

Brand, D. (1997).In Another Place, Not Here. New York: Grove Press.

Brand, D. (1999). At the Full and Change of the Moon. New York: Grove Press.

Condé, M. ( 1986). Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem. Paris : Mercure.

Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons : An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Iser, W. (1989). Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

O'Grady, K. (1995). “Nomadic Philosopher: A Conversation with Rosi Braidotti. Women's Education des femmes. Spring 1996 (12, 1): 35-39

Pineau, G. (1998). L'Âme prêtée aux oiseaux. Paris: Stock, 1998.

Pineau, G. (2001). « La vie-carnaval ». Guadeloupe: Temps incertains, numéro d'Autrement . (Marie Abraham et Daniel Maragnès, éds.) Autrement (Collection Monde) hors série 123 (janvier 2001): 149-157

Powell, P. (1999). The Pagoda. Harvest/HBJ Book

Powell, P. (2003). A Small Gathering of Bones. Beacon Press.

Opening Poem: Language

2007-02-05T04:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you
Sit still
In my mind
Not saying
A word

And maybe
My letters
Are not
As complex
As yours

What a joy
When you speak
In my letters

Sometimes
I just listen
To their sound

A Warm Welcome

2007-02-05T03:57:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my Blog. I am a 26 year old hailing from Belgium, Europe with a profound interest in Caribbean music and theology. Next to that I developed also a keen scientific framework for performing ethnography in the region. And that is not all... Deep in my heart and soul I can FEEL the Caribbean, its thrivings, the motion of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic, the wonderful ways the people deal with nature and culture. You can come regularly to check my writings, which will be scientific sometimes, maybe even a poem, an occasional short story and lots of essays on contemporary Caribbean culture. If you want me to add any link or essay that you wrote on the topic, please let me know and we can post it here. You may want to visit the site of my band (which plays mostly reggae) www.rastronauts.be . Feel welcome. Jef.