The Santa Rosa Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad and Tobago: A Video Introduction

Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad and Tobago from Maximilian Forte on Vimeo.

This video introduction is the start of a long overdue series of video documentaries to come, this one focusing on photography and providing a condensed overview of the key themes in the history, politics, and culture of the Caribs of Arima, Trinidad. It also presents much of the material of what used to be available on the website of the Santa Rosa Carib Community, which has since expired and which has not yet been replaced by Indigenous members of the community (I am the former webmaster)--although it remains archived here. (In addition, see this tremendous effort to put material about the Carib Community online, by primary school students in Trinidad, hosted by the Ministry of Education.) With time, I will be posting the best of the materials from the former Carib Community website, so that they are still "active" online.

The video above is based on both ethnographic and historical research. The contents of the video are organized according to the following sections:

1. The Mission

The loss of lands under colonial rule; racism; displacement.

2. The So-called "Extinction"

How the Caribs were abolished by the stroke of a pen; historiography; stereotypes; censuses; "the only real Carib is a pure a Carib, and the only pure Carib is a dead Carib".

3. The Traditions

Loss of land, but perseverance of the essence of indigenous affectivity: belonging, Home. The mutation and multiplication of traditions: glimpsing what the Caribs mean by retained, maintained, and reclaimed traditions.

3-A. The Santa Rosa Festival

Processions. Gathering together.

3-B. Work duties for the Santa Rosa Festival

Carib labour; maintenance of a Carib hold on Trinidad's oldest public festival.

3-C. The Smoke Ceremony

Indigenous resurgence, reclamation, shamanism. Indigenous language reacquisition. Prayers.

4. The Resurgence

A focus on key actors in the Carib Community, and the role played by Indigenous Peoples outside of Trinidad who visit the Arima Caribs.

4-A. Chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez

How he started the resurgence. Formation of the Santa Rosa Carib Community as a new organization. Being landless.

4-B. Shaman Cristo Adonis

The shaman is the one who sings--a short overview of Cristo Adonis' work in the community.

4-C. Carib Queen Justa Werges

Extensive quotations on the role and power of the Queen, the vision of Just Werges.

--Brief notes on other Carib Queens (in this video, a total of four appear: Maria Werges, Edith Martinez, Justa Werges, and Valentina Medina)

4-D. International Indigenous Connections

Selective, based on the photographs available: Assembly of First Nations of Canada, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, Tainos, Australian Aboriginals, Dominica's Gli-Gli Carib Canoe, Guyanese weavers, Surinamese singers.

5. The Question of Recognition

The paradox of recognition as another act of dismissal. How the Caribs have been monumentalized, enshrined, museumized, and continue to be stereotyped and appropriated. The national mainstream media. State support and government recognition.

Yet, the state will only recognize one single organization, and only then after having pushed it to formally incorporate itself as a limited liability company, which is the legal status of the Santa Rosa Carib Community.

Funds provided to the Community are for the purposes of mounting shows and displays, not for the Community's own sustenance, to achieve self-reliance, for its own long-term benefit.

Recognizing only one organization, in one single place, as Carib means that all of the descendants of Trinidad's Indigenous Peoples, spread throughout the country, go unrecognized.

The Caribs have been boxed up. The state mounts an implausible explanation to the United Nations: that all Caribs died off, except for in Arima, only one of over a dozen mission towns to have existed.

If before the only real Carib was a pure Carib, and the only pure Carib was a dead Carib...today that has become:

"The only recognized Carib is an Arima Carib."

Otherwise, the state dares not to even speak the name Carib, Warao, Indigenous, Amerindian, or First Peoples on the national Census.

And so the struggle continues...

Closing with a collage of members of the Carib Community throughout history.

The Open Anthropology Project (OAP)

Editor's note:

For those one or two individuals who may have been minimally curious as to how I could let more than a week pass without posting to this blog, I have to announce the following.

I have started a neighbouring blog which has consumed my energies. This is the OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY blog at:
http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/

The blog was partly motivated by two separate yet coincidental events: my teaching a graduate course in anthropology, focusing on the decolonization of anthropological knowledge, theory, and practice, and the now considerable volume of media and blog articles on the participation of anthropologists in counterinsurgency campaigns. My notion of an Open Anthropology is one that is free of the constraints of "discipline," "profession," and institutionalization, one that is open source and open access, collaborative and participatory, and directly engaged in the politics of liberation (by first beginning to understand that anthropology is an insider's knowledge system...the insider in this case being the colonizer).

So what does "Open Anthropology" look like in actual practice? Well, you could say that I am doing it in this very moment of writing, and the reader is doing it in the very same instance of reading this.

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Network of Concerned Anthropologists: Online Pledge

Thanks to Prof. Roberto Gonzales of the NETWORK FOR CONCERNED ANTHROPOLOGISTS for informing us that an online pledge is now available at:
http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home

This is part of the effort to counteract the drafting of anthropology into counterinsurgency efforts.

Anthropology's Dirty Little Colonial Streak?

In good times it might appear to be a minor streak; at other times it is a big, broad swath. The coloniality of anthropology might be something hidden and obscured by the passage of time, perhaps seemingly esoteric; at other times, such as the present, anthropology's role as an instrument of empire can come back into sharper focus as an inherent problem of a Western way of knowing the world (at other times, anthropology might simply be an amusement of empire). This is of course not meant to paint most, let alone all anthropologists as sinister figures. Yet, we have to admit that imperialism is a significant feature of a "discipline" that was made possible by colonial expansion and where once again anthropologists can find profit from imperialist missions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. When this is added to the chorus of voices in anthropology that would like to diminish indigeneity, that disputes the very concept "indigenous," that refers to the struggles of the colonized for rights in terms of "seeking special rights," and that lords over indigenous physical remains as if other people's bodies (specifically colonized bodies) were the natural property of anthropology--then it is no wonder that this "discipline" (the martial severity of this terminology is indicative and fortuituous in this case) continues to be banished from most universities in the "decolonized" world.

It is also no wonder that numerous programs have been spawned in universities that some anthropologists indignantly criticize as attempts to expropriate their discipline's cherished subject matter, programs such as Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and numerous Native Studies, American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies, and First Nations Studies programs. Why should native communities receive anthropologists who wish to "study" them when anthropology is still fighting with its own colonial heritage, and when some anthropologists seem to have enlisted in the John Howard School of Anthropology? (I am using the figure of right wing Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, whose aim is to force Aboriginals into the white Australian "mainstream" where nobody is to be deemed different or "special," no matter how much shorter their lifespans, or how much greater their poverty, or how different their languages and social relations may be, and in spite of the fact that ideas such as "Australia" can be read as synonymous with invasion.)

What prompted this seemingly sudden outburst of critical self-reflection is the growing number of media reports of anthropologists participating in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. See for example: "Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones," by David Rohde, in The New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007. Some anthropologists are volunteering to take part in what the American military calls "Human Terrain Teams," and once again the terminology tells us something: a conceptualization of a "field" as an object of surveillance and occupation. (See a New York Times video on Human Terrain Teams--Cultural Anthropologists in Afghanistan). Beyond this particular issue, it is surprising that anthropologists, myself included, can so easily resort to talking about "fieldwork" with little in the way of conscious examination of the "scientistic" and colonialist connotations of the idea. Indeed, an Australian anthropologist who helped to devise the new military strategy, David Kilcullen, approvingly calls counterinsurgency "armed social science" (see his articles on anthropology and counterinsurgency in the Small Wars Journal). Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist who has advocated "embedding anthropology" in military missions seems to dismiss critics who say this is militarizing anthropology: "we’re really anthropologizing the military." Wonderful. And what is the military doing "over there" again? Marcus Griffin, who muses on "Of What Use is Anthropology?" defends the participation of anthropologists in these Human Terrain Teams.

It turns out that this latest New York Times article is just the tip of a growing body of information--see for example:

• "Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the War on Terror?" The New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2006
• Anthropology and CIA: "We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work"
• Protests against British research council: "Recruits anthropologists for spying on Muslims"
• Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations
• Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents
• More and more anthropologists are recruited to service military operations
• The dangerous militarisation of anthropology
• Montgomery McFate's Mission: Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?

In this climate, and with this historical baggage, anthropologists will have to work even harder (after decades of "decolonizing anthropology") to challenge the perpetuation of a fairly accurate image of a discipline that is probably the "whitest" (broadly conceived) of all the social sciences in terms of the composition of both its students and faculty. After years of my own complaints at how "unfairly" anthropology was portrayed in some quarters as an Ugly White Colonial discipline, I am tempted to silently acquiesce.
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American Indians confront UC-Berkeley over remains

From The San Francisco Chronicle

Native Americans ask UC Berkeley to return museum artifacts

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Native American groups rallied Friday at UC Berkeley in an attempt to get campus officials to allow them to return thousands of museum artifacts to tribes from California to Alaska.

A group that included university staff and tribal representatives used to decide which items must be returned to the tribes, but a reorganization at the Hearst Museum put museum staff members in charge, and tribal leaders say the new configuration shuts them out.

The move comes as increasing numbers of tribal leaders, using a law approved nearly 20 years ago, try to get possession of human remains and cultural artifacts.

After an hourlong noon rally - during which they extolled the virtues of relinquishing to tribes the remains of 13,000 Native Americans stored at the museum - the 200 protesters marched from Sproul Hall to campus administration offices where they demanded to meet with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.

Assistant Chancellor Beata FitzPatrick emerged briefly from California Hall to assert that the university is abiding by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

READ MORE...

Anthropology and Indigenous Sovereignty

From The Seattle Times:

Anthropology: the great divide

In the fall of 1996, anthropologist Richard Jantz e-mailed fellow scientists with a plea to help save history.

The University of Tennessee professor urged colleagues to challenge the federal decision to give the 9,300-year-old remains that became known as Kennewick Man to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla for burial. In Jantz's view, the Army Corps of Engineers was about to slam shut a critical window into America's past.

In Seattle, archaeologist Julie Stein read the e-mail with disdain. She had had enough of the ham-handed handling of the unusual case of the remains found on the shores of the Columbia River in southeastern Washington. Then-curator of the Burke Museum of Natural History, Stein had spent 14 years studying Washington archaeology and building relationships with local tribes.

She fired back, chiding Jantz for the effort and alleging the Benton County coroner's local consulting anthropologist, who collected the remains, had attempted to mislead the tribes and the corps by saying they belonged to a recent European settler. She also noted hand bones were submitted for carbon-dating without proper consultation with tribes.

"This is an example of why every tribe in the United States should mistrust and detest archaeologists," she said. "This write-in campagne (sic) of yours is targeted toward the wrong individual.

"Disgustedly yours, ... " she concluded.

Neither Jantz nor Stein knew it then, but the Kennewick Man case would gain international renown — and its accompanying controversy would highlight not only the conflict between principals of scientific inquiry and tribal sovereignty but also a deep professional divide within American anthropology.

READ MORE...

Against Recolonization: Australian Anthropologists Speak Out

As reported previously in The CAC Review, the government of Australia has taken a severe turn against indigenous rights in Australia, and internationally, having joined other settler states in voting against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The beleaguered discipline of anthropology in Australia, represented by the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) has, after much debate, produced the following statement directed to the government of Australia:

Statement on recent policy trends in Indigenous affairs

The Australian Anthropology Society registers deep concerns at the policy direction the Australian nation is taking towards its Indigenous citizens. As a group of scholars, many with long-standing and ongoing professional experience of remote as well as rural and urban Aboriginal communities, we offer the following comments:

Australia has refused to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document that was many years in the making. The Declaration does not provide an alternative set of laws to those of Australia or of any other nation. What it does do is oblige nation states to support the capacity of Indigenous populations to act. It aims to enhance the capacity of those populations, and individuals within them, to determine their modes of life within the laws and institutions of the states of which they are citizens. We and our Indigenous colleagues and friends cannot help but wonder at Australia’s ungenerous response to the non-binding but uplifting principles contained in the UN Declaration.

Minority populations with different social and cultural histories are a feature of many modern nation-states, and the ability to treat such people honourably is a measure of the maturity and humanity of a nation. Despite the body of work produced by anthropologists, the varied Indigenous societies that have interacted with the radically different European settlers at various stages since 1788 are little understood in their own country. Even the simplest features of the classical Aboriginal traditions — the totemic and moiety divisions, the mutual dependence and reciprocity built into ceremonial and economic arrangements, the multilingualism evident among the wealth of languages — are less well known to educated Australians than is the Indian caste system or the Spanish bullfight. Without knowledge of the normal economic, political and family structures that comprised the everyday life of Indigenous people, there can be little appreciation of the radical destabilisation and restructuring that these societies have had to manage.

Aboriginal people have been adjusting to their changing social conditions, in some cases for over 200 years but in others within living memory. While a long-term assimilative process may be inevitable and can be constructive and even liberating, a large body of research demonstrates that forcing established social processes into a foreign mould is destructive of individuals, families and cultures. There is no doubt that the insistent pressures and stresses resulting from radical social change, without a respectful and reciprocal relationship with the nation’s authorities, have been responsible for severely destabilising family authority and informal community standards of care and protection for the young and the vulnerable. This breakdown in turn has made it difficult to maintain social control. It is the loss of a coherent community structure that has seen the emergence of some extreme examples of social pathology, which, it must be stressed, are neither typical nor representative of the majority of Indigenous people.

The despair, desperation and destructive violence that mars the social life of a substantial number of Indigenous communities does demand government action. Indeed action is long overdue, but dealing with social dysfunction in a clumsy and ill informed manner is likely to compound the level of disorder and add to estrangement. Anthropologists working in Australia are personally and painfully aware of real and urgent humanitarian needs. Only the most scandalous and shameful of these feature in the media; the chronic conditions that generate them are not so obvious. Effective policy responses require an intelligent understanding and respect for the conditions and the people involved. The language of aggressive assimilationism is not effective in dealing with culturally distinct and historically alienated people. Although initially time consuming, processes of negotiation with respected individuals and relevant organizations are far more effective and thus, in the longer term, more economical. Measures for which Aboriginal people have been pleading for years — more police and law enforcement, better housing, and effective implementation of alcohol prohibitions — should not appear as corrective measures imposed in a military-style operation.

We believe strongly that the governing of vulnerable, marginal and excluded peoples carries an added responsibility as these are people whose voices are often muted in the public arena. Rather than welfare recipients being made the target of punitive measures, there needs to be long term commitment to a stable and holistic program of providing adequate resources for these communities to come to terms with their current conditions of integration with the state’s institutions and processes. A wealthy nation such as Australia surely has the knowledge, the expertise and the resources to provide excellence in education, housing and health for the relatively few residents of remote communities, as well as for other Indigenous Australians. It is crucial that these people are listened to, and thus enabled to take responsibility for the direction of their development into the future.

[Thanks to Dr. Gillian Cowlishaw for circulating this statement]

Professor Gillian Cowlishaw,
President, AAS.
University of Technology, Sydney
Humanities & Social Sciences,
PO Box 123
Broadway, NSW, 2007
Ph. 61 2 9514 2743

Other posts of relevance:

The Binding Symbolic Value of the UN Declaration

Recolonizing Australia...or why Trojan horses never say "sorry"

Canada, the UN, and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Aboriginals in Australia: Still the Worst Off

News from Australia
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Taino Research Targeted for Deletion

In a very public manner, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking to ban funding by the National Science Foundation for a range of anthropological and archaeological projects, including one that is specifically about pre-colonial Taino society and culture. This news came from the American Anthropological Association which sent out the following communique:

The NSF Authorization bill for FY2008 is scheduled to come up for debate today on the House floor. Two proposed amendments – introduced by Reps. John Campbell (R-CA) and Scott Garrett (R-NJ) – would prohibit funding of nine already funded National Science Foundation grants in the Social, Behavioral and Economics Science Division based on their “silly” titles. Five of the nine grants targeted fall under the anthropology or archaeology portfolios. There are also amendments being considered to reduce NSF’s overall authorized funding level.

In AMENDMENTS to H.R. 1867, offered by Mr. Garrett of New Jersey, he asks that at the end of section 3, the following new subsection be added:

(h) LIMITATION.-None of the funds authorized under this section may be used for research related to

(2) The diet and social stratification in ancient Puerto Rico.

That particular project, which he thinks is "silly," has already won a grant from the NSF and the details are available at http://www.nsf.gov:80/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0612727

What the amendment is therefore saying is that no funds should be disbursed to a project that has already been approved by the NSF. The researcher in question is one who many of our Taino readers will know of already, Dr. Luis Antonio Curet.

He describes his research project as follows (I could not find the "silly" part):

With the support of the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary team of Puerto Rican and American archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and experts in bone chemistry will conduct eighteen months of research into the relationship between the development of social complexity and changes in human diet at four prehistoric Puerto Rican sites. The principal goal of this work is an increased understanding of the changes in the consumption of foodstuffs over time that may reflect broader transformations of society.

At the time of European conquest, many of the indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico were organized in stratified societies that have been described by modern anthropologists as chiefdoms. These stratified societies had developed locally in Puerto Rico from earlier egalitarian groups through a series of socio-cultural changes that took place over more than 4000 years of occupation. While a great deal of research has been directed at understanding the causes and consequences of increasing social hierarchization in regions like Mesopotamia, Mexico, and the Andes, comparatively little effort has been expended on regions such as the Caribbean. The present study aims to address just one portion of the issues surrounding the development of social stratification in this traditionally under-studied region through the study of food, which in many societies is an excellent barometer of social difference (e.g., such as caviar and pheasants in Western cultures). This work will attempt to tease out changes in the patterns of food consumption through time, focusing on the elucidation of differences in diet between common people and a developing social elite.

In order to accomplish these goals, a rigorous methodology for the study of prehistoric diets will be employed involving the analysis of a large sample (ca. 250 individuals) of human remains from the four sites. Diet will be analyzed at an individual level by means of the chemical analysis of the bones and possible foodstuffs. A technique called stable isotope analysis allows for the relatively precise discrimination of the diets of long-deceased individuals. The data derived from this analysis will be coupled with detailed archaeological information from the sites under analysis and will be rigorously chronologically controlled through the radiocarbon dating of all individuals under study.

The intellectual merit of this project is twofold: First, it seeks to study the in situ development of social stratification in a part of the world that has traditionally received short shrift. Second, it attempts to track social change at the level of the individual, through the study of their diets, rather than using aggregate measures. This technique will allow for the production of much finer-grained data allowing for far more robust theory building and evaluation.

The impacts of the present project will be felt on a broad scale first because the methodology employed will be able to be implemented in the study of other regions and societies, and second because the results of the study will be widely disseminated to both academic and lay constituencies. This project will assist in the training of both Puerto Rican and American (graduate and undergraduate) students and will facilitate further collaboration between Caribbeanists on one hand and American archaeologists on the other.

For those of you who are resident in the United States, please consider calling your Representative and lodging your protest. Only in a totalitarian society do politicians get to set research agendas, and given the number of Republicans who believe that the Earth really was made in six days, sometime around 5000 years ago, readers should be very alarmed.

Wade Davis: Cultural Conservation Rights

Anthropologist Wade Davis has made the argument that cultural conservation should be a right, and that rapid cultural change, and accompanying feelings of loss and alienation, are partly the cause for some of the more violent forms of "instability" in the world at present. Davis made the case specifically for maintaining indigenous cultures, adding a little twist to the notion of cultural extinction, as in the following passage from an article in the Taipei Times titled "Vanishing Cultures":

Davis says that in every case, indigenous people are being driven to extinction by identifiable forces. "And that's actually a very optimistic observation because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can be the facilitators of cultural survival."

The article adds, "Davis fears that the continued reluctance of governments to make culture a fundamental part of their policy is leading to a less stable world":

"When people lose the comfort of tradition and feel these kinds of pressures of intense change that can provoke a sense of disappointment, disaffection, alienation, you get very strange movements emerging that can be very dangerous. Al-Qaeda is one of these kinds of fantasy movements that invoke a world of Islam that never existed but has to be presumed to have existed for those who are trying to rationalize the humiliation of all these years of chaos in the Middle East. Maintaining the integrity of culture is not an act of sentimentality; it's not an act of nostalgia, its much more than an act of human rights. It's about maintaining the integrity of civilization itself," he said.

Davis was also critical of the failure of academic anthropologists to engage the wider public on issues of vital contemporary importance.

He cites, for example, in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the US, a meeting of 4,000 anthropologists from the American Anthropological Association was held in Washington DC where the primary topic of discussion was the attack on the Twin Towers.

"The entire gathering earned a single line in the Washington Post, in the gossip section, that basically said 'the nut cases are in town,'" he said. "And who is more remiss: the government for not having the ability to listen to the one profession that could have explained what was going on or the profession for not having the ability to communicate effectively with the world at large?"

He made these comments while on a visit to Taipei, Taiwan, to promote his televised series for National Geographic. You can read more by visiting the original article at:

http://www.taipeitimes.com:80/News/feat
/archives/2007/04/29/2003358821