William Roseberry, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy

Book Reviews -William Roseberry, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and capital: Dominica in the world economy. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1988. xiv + 344 pp. -Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Robert A. Myers, Dominica. Oxford, Santa Barbara, Denver: Clio Press, World Bibliographic Series, volume 82. xxv + 190 pp. -Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Robert A. Myers, A resource guide to Dominica, 1493-1986. New Haven: Human Area Files, HRA Flex Books, Bibliography Series, 1987. 3 volumes. xxxv + 649. -Stephen D. Glazier, Colin G. Clarke, East Indians in a West Indian town: San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-1970. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986 xiv + 193 pp. -Kevin A. Yelvington, M.G. Smith, Culture, race and class in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Mona: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of the West Indies, 1984. xiv + 163 pp. -Aart G. Broek, T.F. Smeulders, Papiamentu en onderwijs: veranderingen in beeld en betekenis van de volkstaal op Curacoa. (Utrecht Dissertation), 1987. 328 p. Privately published. -John Holm, Peter A. Roberts, West Indians and their language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 vii + 215 pp. -Kean Gibson, Francis Byrne, Grammatical relations in a radical Creole: verb complementation in Saramaccan. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Creole Language Library, vol. 3, 1987. xiv + 294 pp. -Peter L. Patrick, Pieter Muysken ,Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Creol Language Library - vol 1, 1986. 315 pp., Norval Smith (eds) -Jeffrey P. Williams, Glenn G. Gilbert, Pidgin and Creole languages: essays in memory of John E. Reinecke. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1987. x + 502 pp. -Samuel M. Wilson, C.N. Dubelaar, The petroglyphs in the Guianas and adjacent areas of Brazil and Venezuela: an inventory. With a comprehensive biography of South American and Antillean petroglyphs. Los Angeles: The Institute of Archaeology of the University of California, Los Angeles. Monumenta Archeologica 12, 1986. xi + 326 pp. -Gary Brana-Shute, Henk E. Chin ,Surinam: politics, economics, and society. London and New York: Francis Pinter, 1987. xvii, 192 pp., Hans Buddingh (eds) -Lester D. Langley, Howard J. Wiarda ,The communist challenge in the Caribbean and Central America. With E. Evans, J. Valenta and V. Valenta. Lanham, MD: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. xiv + 249 pp., Mark Falcoff (eds) -Forrest D. Colburn, Michael Kaufman, Jamaica under Manley: dilemmas of socialism and

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access democracy. London, Toronto, Westport: Zed Books, Between the Lines and Lawrence Hill, 1985. xvi 282 pp. -Dale Tomich, Robert Miles, Capitalism and unfree labour: anomaly or necessity? London. New York: Tavistock Publications. 1987. 250 pp. -Robert Forster, Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, A civilization that perished: the last years of white colonial rule in Haiti. Translated, abridged and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1985. xviii + 295 pp. -Carolyn E. Fick, Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: the lost sentinel of the Republic. Rutherford, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1985. 234 pp.

In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 62 (1988), no: 3/4, Leiden, 165-209

This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl

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Peasants and capital: Dominica in the world economy. MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1988. xiv + 344 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00)

Read one way, this book is a contribution to theory, a reflection on peasant labor processes within capitalist processes of accumulation. Read another way, it is one of the very few available accounts of Dominican history and society. Read another way, it is an ethnography of the village of Wesley Ville la Soye, a banana producing village on Dominica's northeast coast. Read yet another way, the book offers an account of the relationships between Dominican banana producers and the British firm of Geest Holdings Ltd., outlining the manner in which Geest controls trade and documenting the process of capital accumulation at Geest at the expense of Windward producers. What makes Trouillot's book unique and successful is its careful and thorough integration of each of these levels. Trouillot has set out to write an ethnography in the world system, one that could simultaneously illuminate processes at the center and in a peripheral village. Aside from a theoretical introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three major sections: The Nation, The World and The Village. After a brief description and survey of the island, the bulk of the first section is devoted to an historical sketch, which is constructed around two guiding themes - the history of the export economy and the evolution of the island's labor force. The first, presented in chapter 3, is a story of a succession of export commodities, each of which has enjoyed a period of dominance during the past two centuries - coffee, sugar, cocoa, limes and bananas.

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At the conclusion to this chapter Trouillot suggests that this history can be written in spatial terms - the coast (sugar and limes) versus the interior (coffee, cocoa, vanilla and, later, bananas) - which simultaneously represents an opposition (struggle) between large estates and peasants. The next three chapters build upon this insight in impressive fashion, outlining the evolution of a peasant labor process, from the plantation economy and the slaves' provision grounds, through squatting on estate and open lands after abolition and the move toward the interior, to struggles with estates and the state over access and rights to land, and so on. We end the first section with a fïrm sense of the small scale banana producer in Dominica as historical product and historical actor. In the short section on The World, Trouillot moves to the present and recent past, presenting an economie and social analysis of the relationships among local banana producers, the Dominican Banana Growers Asso- ciation (DBGA), the Windward Islands Banana Association (WINBAN), and Geest Holdings in London. From his examination of agreements between DBGA, WINBAN and Geest, through his analysis of the un- favorable position of DBGA and especially the small producers in a buying scheme that places all risks on the producers, to his examination of the history and available accounts of the Geest group, Trouillot moves his analysis to a level not often encountered in ethnographies of the sort. He does not simply assert that small producers are caught in a wider set of structures or that their poverty is a function of Geest's capital accumulation; he demonstrates it. His discussion of banana contracts, the process by which DBGA selects and rejects bananas, and the social situation of banana producers who own land and seem to control production but fïnd that the most fundamental decisions concerning their livelihood rest elsewhere is at once empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated. Given the structure of the book, the ethnographer does not allow us to arrive in his village until we are two thirds of the way through the book. Once we arrive, Trouillot pro vides us with an historical sketch that places the village within the larger history presented in the first section, a description of the village and of local conceptions of space that leads directly into an account of banana production and marketing as seen by the producers themselves (walking to the garden, rushing to cut sterns and get them to Londonderry on a hastily announced market day, standing in line at the DBGA depot in Londonderry, etc), and an analysis of the fundamental social groups within the village. Trouillot concludes with an examination of recent social trends in Wesley and Dominica, trends which have produced a generation of "banana children" who have been schooled outside the village, whose visions take them off the farm, whose aspirations

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 167 include the civil service or emigration, but whose possibilities are somewhat more limited. In most ways that matter, this book is a success. It offers such an impressive integration of theory and history, of macro- and micro-levels of analysis, that it should serve as a model and Standard for future studies in anthropological political economy. It does, quite well, what many anthropologists have been saying we should be doing. The theoretical discussion of peasant labor processes in chapter 1 is insightful and should carry the ongoing discussion of peasants and capitalism to a new level. The historical sketch in part I is a successful example of how one can write a history that pays simultaneous attention to structural transformation and to the agency of working people. And the examination of Geest in Part II makes an analysis of actions and processes at the metropolitan core central to Trouillot's account of the social dynamics of a peripheral village. This reviewer has but two areas of disquiet, both of which are minor. First, given Trouillot's interest in theory, he generally begins, both in the book as a whole and in several chapters, with a theoretical discussion that leads to and provides a rationale for history and ethnography. But the true justification for the importance of the history and ethnography is to be found in the quality of the accounts themselves, the value of which Trouillot seems to discount, ironically enough, in his theoretical introductions. Second, given the book's importance as a model and Standard, it should have included a statement of the author's methods and strategies for linking village ethnography with archival research in Dominica and London. We wish the author's presence as ethnographer were a bit stronger - not in post-modern sense currently in vogue, in which ethnograph/'&s are about ethnographery, but in the more modest sense of a straightforward account of how an ethnographer came to know what she or he knows. Neither of these problems presents great obstacles. This particular ethnographer obviously knows quite a bit and has done an effective job of communicating that knowledge to us.

WlLLIAM ROSEBERRY Department of Anthropology New School for Social Research New York, NY 10003, U.S.A.

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Dominica. ROBERT A. MYERS. Oxford, Santa Barbara, Denver: Clio Press, World Bibliographical Series, volume 82, 1987. xxv+ 190 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.50)

A resource guide to Dominica, 1493-1986. ROBERT A. MYERS. New Haven: Human Area Files, HRAFlex Books, Bibliography Series, 1987. 3 volumes, xxxv + 649 pp. (Paper)

The unequal significance of the fifty odd units that compose the Caribbean region is one of the most consequential assumptions of Caribbean studies - in part because it remains implicit. Claims of regional unity based on a collectiye history or structural commonalities go hand in hand with widespread indifference for the islands or mainland areas once neglected by the colonizers themselves. Even within the boundaries set up by colonial history - say, within the so-called British Caribbean-scholars have shown inordinate preference for some territories over others. Given Dominica's place among the territories most neglected by scholarship, any bibliographer deserves praise just for paying enough attention to that island. But Robert A. Myers does much more than that. First, he has produced two bibliographies rather than one. Second, both works stand as models for the series within which they appear. One need only compare Dominica, published in the World Bibliographical Series, with other Caribbean bibliographies published by Clio Press to realize the extent of Myers' feat. Myers manages to come up with almost 500 references on the island under some twenty headings. The bibliography reflects the salient features of Dominican history, society and culture and environment. Not surprisingly, references to the Carib Indians abound, but Myers' harvest also extends to language, migration, government, and the arts. Many useful references are pruned from books or articles not dealing directly or solely with Dominica. One could easily call this bibliography the best such work on Dominica if Myers himself had not done much better. That Myers did a phenomenal amount of research (and saved many of us that much work) appears most clearly in the second bibliography under review, the Resource guide to Dominica. This three volume work is a success by any measure: the amount of material covered, the organization of the subjects and itemization of the entries, the author's comments, and the references to depositories and libraries. The book is organized in 31 chapters, two-thirds of which are thematic. Chapters 23 to 30 offer new materials (or cross-references of materials previously cited) according to means of communication, format or sources: maps, films,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 169 theses and dissertations, archives and libraries. The author begins most of these chapters, as well as the ones organized around substantive topics, with introductory comments that make the entire package less dry than a mere list of entries. But entries are what bibliographies are made of; and by this criterion, the Resource Guide is an outstanding one, with 5,700 insertions spanning twelve languages and drawn from the work of 1,800 identified authors and numerous anonymous sources. Myers frames the bulk of his entries between three chronological lists. The opening salvo is an Outline History with 22 pages of dates which gives the pulse of the island's historical evolution, followed by a list of the Chief Executive Officers of Dominica from 1763 to the present. After the chapters mentioned above, the work ends with a Chronology of Events in periodicals such as the Times of London, the New York Times or The West India Committee Circular (Chapter 31). Those three chronological lists will be most helpful to the users of the Guide less familiar with the intricacies of Dominican history, the abrupt changes and the many dawns which followed hurricanes or constitutional reorganizations. Both Dominica and the Resource guide will be valuable research com- panions to different groups of Caribbeanists. Candidates for advanced degrees or scholars just turning to Dominican studies will find both works helpful in distinct ways. The shorter bibliography offers a simpler overview that will faciltate the layout of entry-level research programs or proposals, provided that users keep in mind that detailed research will probably require the use of the Guide itself. Dominica may suffice to Caribbeanists who do not specialize on Dominica as such but wish to know enough about the island in order to avoid the unwarranted extrapolations or gross generalizations now so common in regional studies. But the most grateful researchers are likely to be among the few of us who already treat Dominica in its own right. From now on, we will learn to distinguish between the era when we had to sift through hundreds of pages in the hope of finding a passing allusion relevant to our research and that marked by the wealth of sources made available by Dominica and the Guide. I will humbly say that my own research would have been so much better had I had access to these two books. Bibliographers are not often given their due; Robert Myers deserves more than passing praise for what must have been quite a time-consuming enterprise. We all should be grateful for the result of

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MlCHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT Department of Anthropology The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland 21218, U.S.A.

East Indians in a West Indian town: San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-1970 COLIN G. CLARKE. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986 xiv+ 193 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95, UK£ 27.50)

A companion volume to geographer Colin Clarke's 1975 study of Kingston, Jamaica, this study explores the impact of decolonization and independence on race relations in Trinidad's second city, San Fernando. San Fernando, Clarke found, was an especially fruitful location for such research because it is an area where East Indians are numerous and live in close proximity to Creoles. The study is based on fieldwork begun in 1964. The author made subsequent visits to Trinidad in 1968, 1972, 1973, and 1985. He skillfully utilizes historical records, statistical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, anecdotes, scholarly and literary citations (consisting primarily of quotes from Trinidad-born novelist V.S. Naipaul) alongside the customary geographical technique of spatial mapping. His bibliography has been updated to 1985, but recent citations (post-1981) have not been incorporated into the text. Clarke has been strongly criticized for his reliance on Naipaul, but I believe his citations of this writer are appropriate. Clarke does not acknowledge, however, that his data often do not support Naipaul's general assessment of the Trinidad situation. The book opens with a succinct discussion of theoretical issues relating to race, culture and class followed by a brief overview of the North Indian origins of Trinidad's East Indian population and their historical interactions with Creole society. Chapter three is especially strong, giving a brief summary of San Fernando's development as a town, with special attention to the role race and culture have played in the town's social structure from slavery to the 20th century. Also noteworthy is chapter four, consisting of a detailed analysis of the social and spatial structure of San Fernando

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 171 between 1930 and 1960. That chapter also includes questionnaire data from a random sample of 890 adults. Clarke addresses a number of specific issues which have been subject to extensive debate among Caribbeanists: How do East Indians fit into the social structure of San Fernando? Has education stimulated changes? Do urban Hindus and Moslems retain their familial and religious traditions? Are Christian East Indians mediators? What differentiates Clarke's treatment of these issues from the work of many other Caribbeanists is his attempt to answer these questions empirically. On the basis of his substantial database, he suggests that: 1) spatial proximity does not necessarily make for social integration; 2) household similarities do not necessarily imply household commonalities; 3) neither religious conversion nor class mobility erodes racial segmentation; and 4) since Independence, racial segments have become more self-conscious and more polarized. It is extremely difficult to quantify the complexity of Trinidad ethnicity. For example, the term "Creole", Clarke correctly notes, has a special meaning in Trinidad. The term excludes East Indians, Chinese, Syrian and Portuguese minorities, but includes whites, browns and blacks. This gives rise to numerous problems. For example, should people of both Creole and Indian descent be treated as Creoles or East Indians? Such classifications are among the most difficult and controversial in the study of Caribbean race relations. For the most part, Clarke manages to stay clear of debates. He makes his reasons for classification explicit, and while other scholars may disagree with them, at least they are presented in such a way that they can be replicated in future research. The author is to be commended for providing a clear and cogent presentation of an incredibly complex and fragmented situation.

STEPHEN D. GLAZIER Department of Sociology Kearney State College Kearney, NE 68849, U.S.A.

Culture, race and class in the Commonwealth Caribbean. M.G. SMITH. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Mona: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of the West Indies, 1984. xiv+ 163 pp. (Paper US$ 6.00)

Despite stating in the first sentence of his concluding chapter that "This is not the place in which to expound or defend concepts and models of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 172 BOOK REVIEWS pluralism and/or the plural society" (p.137), M.G. Smith's latest book is devoted to just that. And in his tenacious defense therein, Professor Smith attacks not only opposing theories, but he attacks them with reference to the ethnicity and nationality of opposing theorists. Thus, Adam Kuper's studies of Jamaica and critiques of Smith's work are dismissed as coming from

... a white South African studying a less rigidly stratified multiracial society... [who] was unable to recognize or conceive the objective significance of race and colour in Jamaica... [because] he allowed the beam of his own culture and home-made folk models so to cripple his perceptions that he could only find motes in the eyes of native scholars who asserted local realities that he could neither accept as significant nor subjectively appreciate, however strongly they were supported by quantitative distributions of objective conditions and values.... [all of which] illustrates the overwhelming power of the author's native South African culture on his scholarship and objectivity (pp. 81-3).

Lloyd Braithwaite is "...the Trinidadian Creole who foresaw that his social section would succeed to power..." (p. 9), and therefore, the plural society model was hard for Braithwaite to accept because it denied legitimacy to colonialism and its inheritors. Likewise, although Smith cites approvingly the work of the Jamaican Edith Clarke, that work is prefaced as coming from "... a wealthy member of the white Creole planter class..." (p. 61). But perhaps the best, or worse, M.G. Smith saves for his old sparring partner R.T. Smith, the "sympathetic expatriate" who, "despite his long association with the region and concern for its countries and peoples,"

... is clearly disinclined to consider or even mention the evil and inhuman consequences of British rule for these Caribbean societies... [and whose] discussion of their cultural histories and social orders is perhaps better understood and appreciated as a sustained and sophisticated apologia for British colonialism in this area than as a dispassionate and comprehensive analysis of the structure and development of these societies (p. 9).

Academies in general have begun questioning supposedly value-free or neutral research positions. Anthropologists, in particular, have begun to ponder the political context of ethnography and the researchers' ability to represent the "other" (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986).' But it is invalid for Smith to conduct so much of his criticism in those terms without reference to himself. Recently in this journal Virginia Dominiguez (1986) questioned whether natives' views were more authoritative than those of an outsider. Dominguez writes: "Outsiders, then, might have the power

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 173 but the argument seems to be that they do not have the authority" (Dominguez 1986:210). Smith implies that differentiation but, perhaps strategically, he omits any mention of his own background and avoids the historical context of his own thought. This was the point of Robotham's (1980, 1985) critique. Arguing that Smith's position was representative of the Jamaican middle classes of the 1950s, he wrote:

Smith does not grasp this context for his own thought at all. For him it is all a matter of pure thought acting on its own orders! Not he, but others have their thoughts originating, developing and changing with historical, with social forces... All is sociological, but his ideas. These defy space and time (1985:144).

Now, whether Smith's ideas were representative of a certain social section of Jamaica or not is not my point, and I do not want at all to enter the vicious and protracted debate between Robotham and Smith (Robotham 1980; Smith 1983; Robotham 1985; Smith 1987). I do want to submit, however, that Smith simply cannot have it both ways. It could be that Smith has feit that those who have found fault with the plural society model over the years have done so with his personal characteristics in mind and not on the merits and demerits of his theoretical approach. Indeed, elsewhere he has acknowledged the "...overwhelmingly negative reaction of Caribbean scholars to my interpretations of Caribbean society" (Smith 1983:116). Therefore, in Culture, race and class in the Commonwealth Caribbean - which was apparently only available more than a year after its publication date of 1984 - he gives no space to critics who see his plural society model as tautological (Hoetink 1967) or as just as functionalist as the model it seeks to replace (Cross 1968, 1971). Further, he selectively cites favorable passages from works (e.g. Rubin and Zavalloni 1969) that are otherwise inimical to his plural society thesis.2 Smith's point of departure is his observation that

...beneath the facade of modernisation, universalistic incorporation and universal suffrage, the basic components of the colonial society and political order persist with astonishing resilience, once we look below the surface of social life and party politics, as do many natives who participate in these processes and who are most directly affected by them (p. 35).

The societies of the Commonwealth Caribbean, then, are plural societies, which ".. .are constituted and distinguished by corporate divisions that differ culturally, and... these may be aligned in differing ways to create hiërarchie, segmental or complex pluralities" (p. 32). Readers familiar with Smith's work will notice that here he retains the notion of the Corporation,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 174 BOOK REVIEWS which he adopted when he altered his thesis substantially (1974) from earlier works (1965). But there is little mention by Smith in the book under review of changes in his stance over the years. After the generalities, Smith proceeds to review the literature of two "hiërarchie Creole units", Grenada and Jamaica, and two "complex multiracial societies," Trinidad and Guyana (Chs. 5-8), all the while assembling his usual impressive array of sources and shooting down with panache those authors whose arguments do not support the plural society thesis. This is the argumentative, peremptory Smith at his best. But what about those of us who cannot buy the plural society model any more than we can agree with Parsonian functionalism or the plantation society model, but who still acknowledge the salience of Caribbean ethnicity? Here, a recent article on culture by Margaret Archer (1985) may help us better relate Caribbean ethnicity and culture. Archer argues that the anthropological image of culture, as appropriated by sociology, is one that conceives a unitary, perfectly integrated system. Instead, she suggests we conceptualize culture on two levels: one belonging to the world of ideas and the other belonging to the world of practices, and she argues that these are constantly being conflated. Hoetink (1975) has offered similar distinctions for Caribbean culture with his concepts of "sociological culture" (practice) and "anthropological culture" (ideas). Regarding the nexus of ethnicity and culture, if we assign ethnicity, as a particular cultural identity, to the realm of ideas, we can empirically investigate the relationship between cultural practices and ethnicity. Given these distinctions, it might be that, in any particular Caribbean territory, there is a high degree of practical cultural integration (for example, in religion, linguistics and even cuisine), along with a lesser degree of ideational cultural integration, but that these are dependent on such factors as class, gender and geography. For nearly 40 years M.G. Smith's continued attention to questions of the region's social structure has mattered. This book, therefore, is an important addition to Caribbean scholarship. While those readers just being introduced to the Caribbean will be interested in the book for its literature review, others will find it absorbing reading because it is pitched in the tone of a debate; and, after all, pointed and lively intellectual debates and criticism are part of the reason why Caribbeanists are Caribbeanists.

NOTES

1. They have also begun to question other supposed value-free academie practices. On the prevalence of sexism in academia, for example, see Journal of Social Issues, 1983, 20,

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2. Others would be the work of Drummond (1980) and Alexander (1977).

REFERENCES

ALEXANDER, JACK, 1977. The culture of race in middle-class Kingston, Jamaica. American Ethnologist, 4, 3: 413-35.

ARCHER, MARGARET S., 1985. The myth of cultural integration. British Journal of Sociology, 36, 3: 333-53.

CLIFFORD, JAMES & GEORGE E. MARCUS (eds.), 1986. Writing culture: the politics and poetics ofethnography. Berkely, University of California Press.

CROSS, MALCOLM, 1968. Cultural pluralism and sociological theory: a critique and re- evaluation. Social and Economie Studies, 17, 4 : 381-97.

-, 1971. On conflict, race relations, and the theory of the plural society. Race, 16, 3: 477-94.

DOMINGUEZ, VIRGINIA R., 1986. Intended and unintended messages: the scholarly defense of one's people. Nieuwe West-Indische Gids / New West-Indian Guide, 60, 3 & 4: 209-22.

DRUMMOND, LEE, 1980. The cultural continuüm: a theory of intersystems. Man, 15, 2: 352- 74.

HOETINK, HARMANNUS, 1967. The plural society as envisaged by M.G. Smith. Caribbean Studies, 1, 1: 36-43.

, 1975. Resource competition, monopoly, and socioracial diversity. In Leo A. Despres (ed.), Ethnicity and resource competition in plural societies. The Hague, Mouton, pp. 9-25.

ROBOTHAM, DON, 1980. Pluralism as an ideology. Social and Economie Studies, 29, 1: 68- 89.

, 1985. The why of the cockatoo. Social and Economie Studies, 34, 2: 111-51.

RUBIN, VERA AND MARISA ZAVALLONI, 1969. We wish to be looked upon. New York, Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

SMITH, M.G., 1965. The plural society in the British West Indies. Berkeley, University of California Press.

, 1974. Corporations and society. London, Duckworth.

-, 1983. Robotham's ideology and pluralism: a reply. Social and Economie Studies, 32, 2: 103-39.

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, 1987, Pluralism: comments on an ideological analysis. Social and Economie Studies, 36,4: 157-89.

KEVIN A. YELVINGTON School of African and Asian Studies University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QN, England

Papiamentu en onderwijs: veranderingen in beelden betekenis van de volkstaal op Curacao, T.F. SMEULDERS (Utrecht, dissertation), 1987. 328 p. ISBN 90.9001728.3. (Hfl. 50,00), privately published.

Si den hopi pensamento Even if she, in the eyes of many, E sa pasa tur licencia Goes beyond all bounds, Tolera su insuficiencia; Endure her shortcomings; Pordona nos papiamento. Forgive our Papiamentu.

W.M. Hoyer, "Nos Papiamento", La Cruz, 4 april 1906.

The vernacular of some 80 per cent of the population of the Dutch Leeward Islands - Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao - is Papiamentu. Focusing on Curacao, Ms Smeulders has carefully analysed and described the thorny road that ultimately led to the acceptance of Papiamentu as the native language. Since the early days of its existence - the 17th century - the further linguistic development and the social status of Papiamentu have been persistently undermined by the Dutch and their 'civilized tongue'. The consequences are hard to erase: the language of instruction in schools being Dutch, education in this island has had to cope with major problems. All this has become the central issue of Papiamentu en onderwijs (i.e. Papiamentu and education), or in terms of the subtitle, 'changes in image and significance of the vernacular in Curacao', especially with reference to popular education. The first chapter (of the three that constitute the book) neatly delineates the development of the linguistic situation since 1634, the year in which the Dutch West Indian Company set foot on Curacao. Although it took yet another two centuries for the Dutch colonizers to become really interested in the difusion of their language in Curacao, Dutch became the official language. Ms Smeulders is careful not to get entangled in the complicated question of the actual origins of Papiamentu, and - rightfully

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 177 so - just touches on the African Portuguese-pidgin as the (most likely) base for this Caribbean Creole language and on competing theories. The slaves in Curacao spoke and further developed Papiamentu against all odds, and what is more, found their language in due course of time to be the major vehicle of communication for the other social groups as well: the large group of coloured people, as well as the white creole and Jewish elite. The stories of temporary residents and travellers in the 18th and 19th century testify to the growing use of Papiamentu among members of these groups. Generally talked about in a most deprecatory way by the Dutch visitors to the island, these very remarks show Papiamentu to stand firm against the threat of Spanish (in the last decades of the 19th century, a.o. because of the influx of many Latin American refugees) and of Dutch. The Dutch language grew in importance when the education of the Afro- Curacaoan people was hesitatingly taken up after the abolition of slavery in 1863, but especially when a Dutch international oil company decided to construct a refinery on the (former) plantations bordering the bay/ natural harbour in Willemstad. Ever since the arrival of the company - between 1915 and 1918 - Curacao society changed fundamentally within two, three decades, the unambiguous institutionalisation of the Dutch educational system and of Dutch as the language of instruction in schools being one of these changes. Only in the last two decades has this copying of this educational system and its language of instruction been challenged, and increasingly so. The diminishing socio-economic power and influence of the oil-company, a growing self-awareness and -respect, as well as the urge for greater cultural and political autonomy, have almost completely ousted Dutch from every day life in Curacao. Standardization of Papi- amentu was taken up and has been carried out fairly successfully. However, schools maintaining Dutch as the language of instruction cannot but cause great didactic and socio-psychological problems. Only recently, the.introduction of Papiamentu as the language of instruction in the first two forms of primary schools and as a subject matter in the following forms has taken place. At the same time discussions flared up and arguments for and against, so often heard in earlier decades, have started to lead a new life. In the second chapter the history of the arguments of those in favour of Papiamentu and those favouring Dutch as the language of instruction are the focus of attention. The Roman Catholic missionaries were the first to take interest in the education of the Afro-Curacaoan people, especially when the Fathers of the Dominican Order arrived on the island in 1870. Their missionary work, they thought, could only have some effect

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if carried out in Papiamentu. Their (primarily religious) education in the schools they began, was also founded on a strong belief that only in Papiamentu could their pupils be educated, or rather be 'civilised' and thus become the decent and reliable 'flock' of the missionaries and citizens of a Dutch colony. Ms Smeulders does emphasize the pragmatic necessity of the use of Papiamentu, but pictures the Fathers also as quite interested in and disposed to favourably value the vernacular. Using Papiamentu, translating the catechism, religious stories and tracts, designing instructional texts and compiling (would-be) dictionaries, may - from a present point of view - be considered to have contributed to the consolidation and further development of Papiamentu, but does not necessarily imply that the Fathers always were favourably inclined towards Papiamentu as such. There is no reason to assume that the missionaries were fundamentally different from other Dutch colonizers as far as their view of Papiamentu and its speakers was concerned: their use of Papiamentu was nothing but instru- mental to their social and religious power. They would for that reason defend théir use of Papiamentu against attacks that not only questioned their linguistic policies, but more often than not their particular power and influence as well. This power and influence was also at stake when the Fathers of the Dominican Order were severely criticized by the Friars of Zwijsen, especially in 1915 and 1932 (discussed in detail by Ms Smeulders in this second chapter). The Friars had come to the island in 1886 and were generally fervent advocates of Dutch as the language of instruction: 'good' instructional texts from the mother-country would make their (Afro-) and Curacaoan pupils decent followers of the Church, as well as real Dutch citizens of a Dutch colony, and Dutch was thought to enlarge their possibilities in life. The general missionary aims of the Friars were the same as those of the Fathers, they only differed as far as the use of language was concerned. Yet for the tension between the Fathers and Friars to become as great as it did in the pre-war years, competition and changes in the balance of power seem to have been essential ingredients. These (sociological) aspects might have been given more attention by Ms Smeul- ders. Besides, the acceptance of Papiamentu and of their speakers by the Fathers of the Dominican Order, and the 'deep concern' of the Fathers of Zwijsen for the linguistic needs of their Papiamentu-speaking pupils were feit to be skin-deep: from the moment it was actually possible for the native speakers of Papiamentu to dispense with the Roman Catholic missionaries - from the late '30s onwards - these gradually lost their social and religious power. With this loss of power went the disappearance of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 179 strong claims by the Fathers of the Dominican Order for education in Papiamentu. Wordly 'powers' and sentiments of a different kind have continued the fight, and Ms Smeulders has given a well documented and most readable account of most of those involved. However, of these other groups a small, but productive one is conspicuously absent from Smeulders' study: the literary agents in Curacao society: the poets, novelists, play-wrights and short-story writers who since the turn of this century have produced a considerable number of texts in Papiamentu. The plea for Papiamentu heard in post-war years was not so much 'taken over' from the Fathers of the Dominican Order, but may well prove to be a continuation of particular tendencies of which pre-war (Afro-)Curacaoan writers such as Joseph Sickman Corsen, Willem Kroon, Manuel Fray, Miguel Suriel, Shon Wein Hoyer and a dozen others were the spokesmen. Shon Wein Hoyer - who often used the pen name 'Patriota', i.e. Curagaoan patriot - is indeed given ample room in Smeulders' study, but rather as an essayist than as a poet, and rather as someone who spoke out against the abuse of Papiamentu in the '30s than as someone who held the same ideas already in the first decade of this century. Undoubtedly the Roman Catholic missionaries dominated the discussion about the status of Papiamentu as a language, but their Afro-Curacaoan 'flock' may have been concerned for quite different reasons than their 'shepherds'. To consider Hoyer's care, love and compassion for his language to be equal to that of the Fathers of the Dominican Order - as Smeulders at times does - hampers our understanding of yet another group of particular participants in the fight over Papiamentu.

With the recent introduction of Papiamentu as the language of instruction in the first forms of primary schools and as a subject-matter in higher grades, particular problems - that opponents have warned against or say they have warned against - need to be dealt with. One of these is the increasingly deficiënt knowledge of Dutch of pupils entering in secondary schools. In the third chapter Smeulders broadens her study and compares the present educational problems of Curacao with those in other (former) colonies of the Caribbean, in Africa and Asia, where the predominant role of a European language has caused more or less the same problems. Ms Smeulders draws attention to the fact that the introduction of the native language in some African countries has resulted in its reverse: the reintroduction of the European language, right from the very first form in primary schools. The solution that Smeulders favours is the use of the vernacular as language of instruction in both primary and secondary

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schools, and the study of Dutch or another foreign language as a subject- matter to be taught over many years. Ms Smeulders does not close her eyes for the heavy task waiting: the training of teachers, the design of instructional texts, the further standardization of Papiamentu, the (idi- omatic) enrichment of the language et cetera. Now that 'Papiamentu has gone to school' in Curacao, the knowledge of Dutch will, at the end of primary school, be quite insuffïcient to fully participate at secondary schools where the language of instruction still is and will be Dutch. Given the few years that are left, much too little attention has been paid so far to this pending problem. Ms Smeulders' study should therefore also to be seen as a serious - and most welcome - warning.

AART G. BROEK Bosgouw 30 1352 GB Almere, The Netherlands

West Indians and their language. PETER A. ROBERTS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 vii + 215 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.50; paper US$ 10.95)

There has long been a need for an objective, readable source of information about Caribbean English and Creole English which would be suitable for West Indian teachers and other educated readers with little or no training in linguistics. With only a few reservations, Roberts' book can be recom- mended to fill this gap. The book, edited by Cambridge Caribbean, is clearly aimed at West Indian readers. For example, the symbol /o/ is explained as the vowel in hot or caught (p. vii), as it is for educated speakers of many varieties of Caribbean English (as opposed toVa/ in North America and A>/ in Britain). Roberts restricts the scope of his book to English and Creole in "the Commonwealth Caribbean: Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Barbados, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Montserrat" (p. 3). On geographical and political grounds the omission of the Bahamas, Belize, the British Virgin Islands and the Caymans is unclear, given the inclusion of Guyana in South America. On linguistic grounds, the exclusion of the Dutch Windward Islands and anglophone Central America from Panama to Honduras is also difficult to justify. West Indian English dialectology is still in its infancy; there are no thorough studies from a number of territories, which hampers progress

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 181 in comparative studies. Few have even dealt with the problem of sub- groupings, which make Roberts' ideas on this topic particularly interesting. His schema of the "Historical and linguistic relationships between the characteristic speech of West Indians" (p. 87) is as follows:

Creole-type French-influenced

Jamaica Barbados Trinidad \ Guyana t \ Antigua Grenada | St. Kitts, Nevis St. Lucia I Montserrat St. Vincent Dominica / ^ / In this diagram, "arrows... indicate that during the formative years... migration was on such a scale that it contributed a number of features" (ibid). The brackets "indicate in both cases that there are close linguistic similarities between the territories with a decreasing strength in Creole features going from Jamaica to Montserrat and an increasing strength of French Creole features from Trinidad to Dominica. Barbados has the fewest Creole features and St. Vincent more than Barbados" (ibid). Aside from creoleness diminishing from top to bottom in the first column and then from bottom to top in the second, there are some problems with this diagram: there is no indication of the English creoleness of the French- influenced varieties, and a number of historical migrations with important linguistic consequences (e.g. that of Barbadians to Trinidad and the Windward Islands) are omitted. While an accompanying table of linguistic features (p. 89) makes this schema seem plausible, there is obviously a need for much more evidence to support it - phonological, lexical, syntactic and sociohistorical. The introductory chapter (pp. 1-16) defines such terms as West Indian, languages, dialect, creole, patois and slang. Chapter 2, "Language varieties in the West Indies" (pp. 17-49), distinguishes between foreign English (e.g. as spoken by Britons or North Americans), radio and television English, erudite English, colloquial English, Creole English, Rasta English and profane English. Beyond clarifying scholarly usage of these terms as opposed to their sometimes conflicting local meanings in the West Indies (where slang, for example, can refer to the nonstandard dialect in general), these two chapters provide valuable insights into language attitudes and conflicts in the region. Chapter 3, "Creole English" (pp. 50-84), discusses this variety's structural differences from the Standard in straight-forward, non- technical language suitable for undergraduates without special training in

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linguistics. Chapter 4, "Linguistic differences between the West Indian territories" (pp. 85-104), is the chapter of most interest to the specialist. Many of the local features are from master's and other theses written at the University of the West Indies and appear here in print for the first time. Chapter 5, "Linguistic sources of West Indian English" (p. 105- 132) briefly discusses theories about the origin and development of West Indian English, identifying both British dialect and Niger-Congo sources for specific features in phonology, lexicon and syntax. These examples tend to support convergence and to minimize the role of restructuring: "General comments about major structural developments in West Indian language from start to finish, suggesting a pidgin stage, then a Creole stage, and projecting a non-Creole dialectal stage are conjectural or based on scanty evidence" (p. 123). However, no linguist has - to my knowledge - ever argued against the existence of creolized English in most parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, which requires the prior restructuring known as pidginization (although this may have occurred partly or mainly in West Africa). There is a widespread consensus among linguists that it was contact between restructured and unrestructured English that led to the present-day folk speech of most of the Anglophone Caribbean, and it is misleading to suggest in an introductory text that this theory has little support. Roberts' own position that "Creole English shows a normal evolutionary relationship with English" (p. 58), implying no disruption of language transmission with widescale restructuring, does not reflect what most linguists understand by creolization. Chapter 6, "Language and culture" (pp. 133-171), deals with the use of dialect in literature, folk tales, proverbs, riddles, songs and games. Chapter 7, "Languages in formal education" (pp. 172-204) concludes the book with a discussion of the issues most directly relevant to language teachers, ranging from dialect and the teaching of literacy to specific problems that speakers of West Indian dialects have in learning Standard English. There are a number of typographical and other errors that mar the book. For example, on page 32 the British pronunciation of the vowel in poor in indicated as /au/ (actually /ua/), while that of coke is given as /ua/ (actually /au/). Figure 5.1 (p. 111) is virtually unreadable because column headings are given in the same type face as items in the column. Yoruba words are given without their diacritics, which are essential to meaning: e.g. "awon omonde" for "awon omondé" on page 129. Moreover, a number of generalizations are just not borne out by the facts; for example, on page 3 Roberts asserts that "French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese all prefer a version of the word 'Antilles' and a direct equivalent of West + Indies is not common" (surprising news to readers of the Nieuwe West-

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Indische Gids\). Finally, it should be noted that if little in the book's contents seems new, there is a reason: over 75% of the works referred to were published before 1980. Despite these shortcomings and the problems in theory discussed above, this book is probably as accurate as most textbooks, and it does fill a real need.

JOHN HOLM Department of English Hunter College of the City University of New York New York NY 10021, U.S.A.

Grammatical relations in a radical Creole: verb complementation in Sara- maccan. FRANCIS BYRNE. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Creole Language Library, vol. 3, 1987. xiv + 294 pp. (Cloth US$ 38.00)

Francis Byrne's interesting and challenging book on various aspects of the syntax of Saramaccan Creole, with emphasis on serialization, is an attempt to prove which theory of Creole origin is correct - the Substrate Theory or the Bioprogram (Universal) Theory. This is an issue of great importance to Creole studies. The Substrate Theory, whose extreme proponent is Mervyn Alleyne (1980), contends that Creoles develop largely from the substrate languages in the initial contact situation. Thus Atlantic Creoles, which include Saramaccan (SA), have a large measure of continuity from African languages. On the other hand, Bickerton's (1981; 1984) Bioprogram (Universal) Theory claims that radical Creoles, such as SA, come closest to approximating the unmarked state of our one innate and genetically endowed faculté de langage. Byrne agrees that SA does have some African features: there are correspondences in the lexicon, phonology and syntax. But the bone of contention is Alleyne's (1980:167, 169) observation that '"...the rules which account for [serialization] are basically the same in Afro-American (i.e. the Atlantic Creoles) as in [the] Kwa [West African] languages" and that the characteristics of serialization in the Kwa languages "seem to be closer to SA than to other Afro-American dialects".' Abstracting from numerous papers on West African and Creole languages

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 184 BOOK REVIEWS dealing with serialization, Byrne states that most observers agree on three characteristics:

1) Tense, modality, aspect and negation are either marked only once, usually in the initial clause, and interpreted as the same throughout, or are marked in the initial clause and then repeated (i.e. copied) in all subsequent serials; 2) the subjects of serial verbs are phonologically realized only in the initial clause; 3) There are no overt markers of subordination or coordination preceding serial verbs.

SA, however, does not fit the first two characteristics. With respect to the first feature SA can have the following:

a bi-téi sikifi papai sikifi di lete he TNS-take write thin-stick write the letter 'He had written the letter with a pen.' 'He had taken a pen and (then) wrote the letter' (p. 165).

a téi göni ta - süti di pingo he take gun ASP - shoot the pig 'He took a gun and is shooting the pig' (p. 163).

a ö - ta téi góni ö- (ta-) süti di pingó ...will- ASP-. WM-(ASP)L 'He will be shooting the pig with a gun.' 'He will be taking a gun and (then) will shoot the pig' (p. 164).

With respect to the second feature the example below occurs in SA:

a téi göni (a) suti di pingö he take gun he shoot the pig 'He shot the pig with a gun.' 'He took a gun and (then) shot the pig' (p. 167)

These differences, according to Byrne, jeopardize Alleyne's use of the claim that SA is the most African-like of Atlantic Creoles. There is no reason to believe that serialization is a direct result of West African languages,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 185 especialiy in other Creoles which betray more European influence than SA. Since SA represents the deepest form of Creole we know of, these differences indicate that serialization is a part of our faculté de langage. To lend credence to such a claim Byrne examined the demographic and social history of SA within Bickerton's (1984) criteria for the emergence of a pure Creole. The criteria are: 1) the displacement of the superstrate speakers along with their slaves during the early years of the colony; 2) the escape of slaves from the plantations and their banding together to form new communities; 3) the life expectancy of any new slave who arrived in the colony, in this case in Suriname. On the basis of social and demographic factors and the unique nature of serialization, Byrne concludes that SA serials spontaneously emerged during the creolization process. Therefore, Bickerton's Universal Theory is better suited to explain the facts of SA. Since Bickerton (1984) claims that children are necessarily forced to develop essential aspects of their first language from innate linguistic knowledge in the most radical creolization, Byrne finds support for his position with Borer and Wexler's (1984) preliminary research on child-language acquisition. According to Byrne, Borer and Wexler propose identical conditions as those present in SA core grammar. For example, the child uses serial structures before he internalizes rules and categories which would make serialization un- necessary; the categories noun and verb are basic in child-language acquisition, just as they are the only major categories needed to describe SA. Byrne states that four SA speakers accounted for 95% of his data. The primary means of soliciting data was the informant-reaction method, although free conversation, folktales and travel narratives were also recorded. He further states that because the informant-reaction method could lead to erroneous judgements, he was accompanied by a native SA speaker, and his data was checked as many as six times whenever variation manifested itself. But Wijnen and Alleyne (1987) in discussing the functions of the form fu, record informant judgements different from those posited by Bickerton and Byrne (forthcoming) - judgements which jeopardize Byrne's claim that fu is a verbal form. Byrne's argument for the verbal status of fu is that it can take an overt subject and can be tensed. Therefore he gives the examples below:

di wömi fu- woöko a di bakaa wösie ...should... 'The man should work at the white man's house.'

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di wömi bi-fu-woöko at di bakaa wösu 'The man should have worked at the white man's house.'

If we follow the judgements of Wijnen and AUeyne's informants, the examples should read:

di wömi a fu woöko... di wömi bi a fu woöko...

The form a preceeding fu is the verb abi 'to have' in its form a which it takes in the modal function. Byrne also posits that the complementizer fu can be tensed:

a kè bi- fu woöko a foto he want TNS- for work loc Paramaribo 'He wanted to work in Paramaribo (but didn't)' (p. 135).

But three of Wijnen and AUeyne's four informants preferred structures where the tense marker precedes the verb in the subordinate clause rather than precedes fu (p. 45):

mi duingi hen faa (=fu + a) bi go I forced him for he TNS go "I forced him to go"

However, Wijnen and Alleyne do point out that data from decreolized lects in Trinidad and Jamaica show evidence of a tensed complementizer (p. 45):

I had was to go "I had to go"

Muysken (1984: 204) points out, and Byrne notes, that a tensed complementizer is not conclusive evidence for the verbal status of fu. But if we also accept the informant judgements claimed by Wijnen and Alleyne that fu cannot be preceded by an overt subject and neither can it be tensed in the main clause, then we have no evidence for saying that fu is a verb. Just as Byrne finds no category 'complementizer' in SA, he is also of the opinion that there is no category 'preposition'. Muysken (1987:100) referring to Bickerton and Byrne (forthcoming), states that SA has developed a grammar of considerable complexity, and 'it is simply not

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 187 true that the category P is absent or marginal in the language under study ... Nor is it true for any other creole languages, as far as is known.' Has Byrne been successful in distinguishing which theory of Creole origin is correct? Byrne accepts the position of both Alleyne and Bickerton that SA is the oldest layer of Creole known to us. Alleyne follows on by claiming that it must therefore be more like West African languages than the other Atlantic Creoles. Bickerton follows on from this premise by claiming that SA is closer to biological nature than other Creoles and thus demonstrates Universal principles. Byrne shows that the features of serialization in SA differ from that of West African languages and thus concludes that serialization in SA arose spontaneously. Proof of this is not only serialization in child-language acquisition, but that TMA, negation and overt subjects existed in the Kwa group of the West African languages in the 17th Century. Since SA serials emerged with different features, the slaves' West African languages have no bearing on the emergence of serial verbs. If we accept this position, how do we account for serialization similarities between West African languages and other Atlantic Creoles? We could argue, as Byrne's position obviously implies, that SA will change and become like the other serializing languages. (This reflects the kind of linguistic determinism typical of Bickerton's work). Alternatively, and more sensibly, we could argue that the similarities between West African languages and other Atlantic creoles is due to transference - the evidence being that the features of serialization existed in West African languages in the 17th Century, which is the same period of time that the Atlantic Creoles arose; but due to demographic and social factors SA created different features of serialization. Furthermore, Byrne states (p. 3-4) that aspects of the lexicon, phonology and syntax of SA show substratal input. Thus there is no reason why serialization in SA could not have been influenced by West African languages. If he had shown that the features of serialization in SA were like that in child-language acquisition then I might have agreed that it was all a part of ourfaculté de langage. Instead, he has shown an interplay between creativity and substratal influence and not the pure creativity that he desires. Goodman (1984:194), referring to serial verbs in New World Creoles points out that:

'Certain substratal features are much more easily transferred than others in the context of language contact, specifically those constructions that can be formed by using only basic vocabulary and no morphology, precisely what a beginning language learner acquires.'

So, although Byrne has shown that Alleyne is wrong in his assessment

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 188 BOOK REVIEWS of the relationship between serialization in SA and West African languages, he has failed to show which theory of Creole origin is correct. In my opinion he has shown that substrate factors and language universals play a part in the creation of a Creole. It is not an either-or situation, but a more-or-less one depending on factors surrounding the emergence and growth of the Creole.

REFERENCES

ALLEYNE, MERVYN, 1980. Comparative Afro-American: an historical-comparative account of English-based Afro-American dialects of The New World. Ann Arbor, Karoma.

, (ed), 1987. Studies in Saramaccan language structure, Amsterdam, Instituut voor

Algemene Taalwetenschap.

BICKERTON, DEREK, 1981. Roots of language. Ann Arbor, Karoma.

188. , 1984. The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis. The Behavioral andBrain Sciences 7:173-

BICKERTON, DEREK, & FRANCIS BYRNE, Forthcoming. Syntactic markedness and parametric variation.

GOODMAN, MORRIS, 1984. Are creole structures innate? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7:203-204

MUYSKEN, PETER, 1984. Do creoles give insight into the human language faculty? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7:203-204.

, 1987. Prepositions and postpositions in Saramaccan. In Mervyn Alleyne (ed).

WIJNEN, BEPPY & MERVYN ALLEYNE, 1987. A note on FU in Saramaccan. In Mervyn Alleyne (ed).

KEAN GIBSON Unit of Use of English and Linguistics University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus Barbados.

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Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis. Edited by PIETER MUYSKEN and NORVAL SMITH. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub- lishing Company, Creole Language Library - vol. 1, 1986. 315 pp. (Cloth US$ 60.00)

The debate featured in this book's title has gone on for over a century without any sign of resolution, so non-creolists might be forgiven for choosing to avoid the latest exchange, fearing the familiar polemics and name-calling. That would be a mistake. Although the editors, in their perspicuous introduction, set the two positions in broad and direct opposition to each other (universalist: 'universal principles + European' vocabulary — Creole'; substrate: 'native languages + European vocabulary — Creole'), perhaps the surest sign that scientific progress is being made is the depopulation of these extremes and the extensive development of the middle ground. Ten of the fourteen articles in this collection of papers adopt some sort of synthesis. Among the more surprising results are the strength and numbers of those allowing for significant substrate influence, and the fact that all those adopting an explicitly generative linguistic approach are among them - except for Derek Bickerton. S. Mufwene's contribution, explicitly synthesizing the two positions, is refreshing for being mostly theoretical and generativist, but having robust and interesting data sections. While he is skeptical of the use of universals made by Bickerton's very influential Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH), and asserts that substrate influence is sometimes undeniable, he is also critical of substratists' belief in the essential identity of West African languages and insistence that isolating structures come from Kwa languages. Among the other synthesists, H. den Besten's article on doublé negation and the genesis of Afrikaans, and the paper by P. Baker and C. Corne on the Indian Ocean Creoles, are both excellent examples of what one hopes is a new trend, combining detailed exposition of the historical/ demographic factors that characterised these societies during the emergence of the Creoles with careful analysis of the documentary record of texts and utterances. Den Besten answers the question about Afrikaans in the affirmative, considering it essentially a Creole. Baker & Corne's model of three major demographic "events" is already being widely quoted, and seems applicable to many situations. Ian Hancock's contribution argues that Atlantic Creoles developed from Guinea Coast Creole English, itself based on the West African languages and Ship English that creolized in the early 1600s with Portuguese influence. Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE) diffused along the African coast,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 190 BOOK REVIEWS and was transmitted by grumettoes to slaves awaiting shipment; these spread it to the New World where universal linguistic processes and various social conditions combined to produce distinct Creole languages. Hancock's historical scenario gives documentation of a depth and scope that set a new Standard in studies of pre-Creole contact situations. However, a crucial link - transmission from grumettoes to waiting slaves - remains regrettably undocumented. A good contrast is the contribution of P. Seuren and H. Wekker, which elaborates the idea that Creole genesis is heavily determined by a tendency to maximize semantic transparency (ST), but criticizes simplistic attempts to formulate ST. This paper is entirely theoretical (no data are provided) and resolutely universalist in its attempt to explain similarities between Creoles. But even for such hardshell generativists, the substrate is available as a palette from which features are selected in accordance with ST: "the evidence for substrate influence is overwhelming and highly convincing" (p. 62). Only P. Muhlhausler and G. Gilbert adopt a neutral view, with impressive results. Gilbert continues to take a comprehensive historical view of creole studies. He examines the "founding fathers," pointing out that Schuchardt and Hesseling invoked both universals and substrate as important expla- natory principles. He also makes it clear that the LBH is not based on new ideas, though it has addressed new issues, and its coherent emphasis on the role of the individual in nativization has not been seen so strongly before. Muhlhausler's article shows convincingly that neither the substrate nor universalist hypotheses can explain or predict the course of adjective-noun order in Tok Pisin; he recommends as "the only viable method" a longitudinal account which examines and compares "how developmental processes unfold across languages" (p. 42). He concludes that grammatical reanalysis is the best explanation for the problem; a valuable bonus is his survey of the construction across 28 pidgins and Creoles. The most extreme position is Bickertön's. He aims to prove that "the rules that generate creoles... [are] quite different from those that generate West African languages" (p. 26), particularly for Saramaccan and Haitian. Bickerton fails his own oft-quoted test of historical plausibility; he gives no reason for considering the African languages he examines (Yoruba and Vata) probable substrates for these Creoles. Thus one is neither surprised nor impressed when he concludes that, "on a major parameter of U[niversal] G[rammar], the two creoles pattern one way and the two West African languages another" (p. 32). The parameter, in the Chomskian GB framework he uses, is "proper government from COMP"; however, although

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 191 his entire argument is based on the structural notion of government, Bickerton repeatedly mis-states himself by referring to "lexical government" when he means "antecedent government" (p. 30). Bickerton also differs from the source of his Yoruba analysis (Carstens 1985) on crucial questions of fact regarding resumptive pronouns in subject-questions. Such factual and methodological lapses seriously mar his attack on the relevance of substrate languages. H. Koopman and C. Lefebvre have each contributed articles that are strongly substratist, rely on the generative GB paradigm, compare Haitian with West African languages, and draw on the same admirable long-term group project. Lefebvre's is more data-oriented, evidently not sharing Koopman's questionable assumptions about "general West African properties" but relying on and refining the concept of relexification as a natural, possibly universal process of change. Both emphasize lexical and word- order properties, and reject Bickerton's LBH. J. Holm does so more directly, by attacking its weakest empirical link: the crucial case of Hawaiian, he suggests, resembles Atlantic Creoles because it is actually related to them historically by diffusion, and because the preceding pidgin was English- based, contra Bickerton (who, Holm claims, looked at the wrong speakers from the wrong time). The collection concludes with a piece by M. Alleyne arguing that the African origin of Atlantic Creoles is a central datum, massively supported in the case of Jamaica by the cultural dominance of the Twi people in other spheres and the survival of their language into this century. The analysis of Maroon speech in terms of language death supports his point (though implying a role for language universals), and furthers the view that many creolists seem to be converging on, namely that Creoles are not linguistically special but are born out of and continue to be affected by general linguistic processes. The volume is handsomely bound and printed by John Benjamins, but nearly every page contains typos - some subtle, some absurd, and a few quite damaging (eg. Bickerton's Table 1, p. 36, mislabels the Y and V columns).

PETER L. PATRICK Department of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104, U.S.A.

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Pidgin and Creole languages: essays in memory of John E. Reinecke. Edited by GLENN G. GILBERT. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1987. x + 502 pp. (Cloth UK£ 22.50; US$ 35.00)

This book is a compendium of articles by the friends and colleagues of John E. Reinecke. It contains nineteen articles which span the geographical and theoretical range of what Reinecke (1937) called "marginal languages." Although all of these are of potential interest to the readers of NWIG, I will only discuss those directly related to the circum-Caribbean region. The introductory article is a biographical tribute to Reinecke written by his wife, Aiko, and Charlene Saito. It traces his scholastic and political activism in a personal manner. Reinecke's last scholarly work, a biographical study of William Greenfield, has been reprinted in this volume. The contribution of Carrington is a critique of the theoretical substance of Creole studies and in particuar Bickerton's "bioprogram hypothesis." He ends with a programmatic proposal for future research in the field. The article by Corne is a comparative study of verb fronting structures in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean Creoles. Examples are drawn from the francophone and anglophone Creoles, Bantu, and other languages to demonstrate that constructions such as a tiif Jan tiifdi mango (Jamaican) are not part of the bioprogram but more likely attributable to both substratal and superstratal influences. Le Page's article represents the views found in Acts of identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985) where language is seen as a non-defmable entity having no locus beyond the individual speaker. While Le Page's view is intuitively appealing to many sociolinguists, it is difficult to formalize in terms of a theory of grammar and usage. Rickford reports on the difference between his (1979) quantitative study of decreolization in Guyanese and Bickerton's earlier (1975) study. Basically, the comparison reveals more variability in Rickford's corpus, the reasons being related to sample size and methodology. Rickford rightly contends that the process of decreolization is additive and not replacive. The articles by Carter, Hancock, and Goodman are comparative in nature. Carter's is a detailed comparison of the suprasegmental systems of Twi, Yoruba, Kongo, West African Pidgin English, and Guyanese Creole. Her conclusion based on this evidence alone is that a demonstrable genetic connection can be made only between Guyanese and West African Pidgin, both being derived from a common ancestor. This adds further linguistic support to the view that the anglophone Creoles of the Western hemisphere diffused from West Africa and not the converse. Hancock's article is also concerned with genetic relationships, but takes a different focus: comparative morpho-syntax. This is the largest and most important comparative

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 193 study of the anglophone Creoles, 33 varieties in all including two from the Pacific, to appear since Hancock's own 1969 study. From the comparison, Hancock provides a detailed genetic classification of the Atlantic anglophone Creoles, which traces their origins back to the Guinea Coast region of West Africa. The contribution by Goodman is a reassessment of the role of Portuguese pidgiri/Creole in the formation of other Caribbean creoles. He claims that the Portuguese element in the Western Hemisphere Creoles can be linked with the migration of Dutch and Jewish refugees from Brazil - and the associated diffusion of sugar technology, and not directly to the input of African slaves. Holm's article is also historically oriented, dealing with the possibility of Creole influence on the development of Popular Brazilian Portuguese. Holm includes evidence from sociolin- guistic history as well as comparative-typological linguistics to demonstrate that Popular Brazilian Portuguese was influenced by an early variety of Portuguese Creole in Brazil. The predominant concern of the articles in this volume is comparison and classification, mirroring Reinecke's emphasis on linguistic comparison and classification based on detailed social history. Pidgin and Creole languages is an accurate reflection of John Reinecke's deep influence on the field of pidgin and Creole studies. It stands as a fitting tribute.

REFERENCES

BICKERTON, DEREK, 1975. Dynamics of a Creole system. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

HANCOCK, IAN, 1969. A provisional comparison of the English-derived Atlantic Creoles. African language review: 7-72.

LE PAGE, ROBERT AND ANDREE TABOURET-KELLER, 1985. Acts of identity: creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

REINECKE, JOHN, 1937. Marginal languages. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.

RICKFORD, JOHN, 1979. Variation in a creole continuüm: quantitative and implicational approaches. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.

JEFFREY P. WILLIAMS Department of Linguistics The University of Sydney N.S.W. 2006, Australia

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The petroglyphs in the Guianas and adjacent areas ofBrazil and Venezuela: an inventory. With a comprehensive bibliography of South American and Antillean petroglyphs. C.N. DUBELAAR. LOS Angeles: The Institute of Archaeology of the University of California, Los Angeles. Monumenta Archeologica 12, 1986. xi + 326 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00).

Dubelaar has produced a thorough inventory of the petroglyphs of Surinam, and a compendium of references in the literature to petroglyphs from Guyana, French Guiana and adjacent areas of northeast South America. He admirably achieves his stated goals of making the data on Guyanese rock art available to students of South American prehistory, and of providing a complete inventory of known petroglyphs from the Guianas in order to untangle the web of multiple references to the same petroglyphs. Dubelaar organizes the material by country, then by petroglyph site, then petroglyph group, then petroglyph number. For each petroglyph site that Dubelaar recorded, the following information is presented: the name of the site, its District, its geographical position in latitude and longitude, and a map reference with coordinates. The sites are shown on a map of the country in which they were found, and each is shown on a smaller scale map showing the immediate surroundings of the site, and its relationship to other nearby petroglyph sites. For each individual petroglyph, the author reports its vertical and horizontal dimensions, the type of engraving used (from a defined set of four line types), the compass orientation, and if the petroglyph has been mentioned by other writers, the citations. Line drawings and excellent black and white photographs of chalked petroglyphs (which unfortunately rarely include rulefs for size reference) are plentiful. For Suriname 25 sites and 192 petroglyphs are described. The data from Suriname are the most complete and thoroughly reported, because Dubelaar was able to do almost all of the recording himself. The petroglyph inventories from Guyana, French Guiana, and adjacent areas of Brazil and Venezuela are drawn from a bibliography of relevant literature. For Guyana the author inventories 31 petroglyph sites and 5 rock painting sites reported in the literature. For French Guiana 7 sites are reported. 24 sites are reported from adjacent parts of Brazil and 5 from Venezuela. The bibliographic sources relevant to each country are presented chronologically, from the earliest sources to the latest. The most recent bibliographic entry for the four regions is 1981. In addition, the volume contains a useful 65-page bibliography of sources pertinent to the study of South American and Antillean petroglyphs. Of the 1221 citations, 131

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 195 concern the petroglyphs of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. This bibliography contains sources as recent as 1985. The author leaves the interpretation of this body of rock art to future researchers. No attempt is made to interpret the petroglyphs or place them in a cultural context. Beyond stating his belief that the petroglyphs were made by Amerindians in the pre-Columbian period (p. 1), the author does not attempt to say who carved the petroglyphs, when they carved them, or what the petroglyphs meant within the makers' culture. Dubelaar's inventory lays the groundwork for comprehensive distributional, stylistic, and comparative ethnohistorical/ethnographic studies of the origins and meanings of the petroglyphs. Such interpretations will be greatly facilitated by this catalogue.

SAMUEL M. WILSON Department of Anthropology University of Chicago Chicago, 111. 60637, U.S.A.

Surinam: politics, economics, and society. HENK E. CHIN AND HANS BUDDINGH', London and New York: Francis Pinter, 1987. xvii, 192 pp. (Cloth UK£ 24,50, US$ 35.00; Paper UK£ 7.95, US$ 12.50)

Written by a Dutch university economics professor of Surinamese descent and a Dutch journalist on the Suriname coup d'etat and its aftermath, this book is itself a bit of a coup. Surinam is the first book-length treatment in English of Suriname's recent experience with revolutionary change and is, arguably, the first book-length academie study of the country's travails in any language. The authors, who chose to publish their work in the Marxist Regimes series of Francis Pinter publishers, were first past the post and should be congratulated for it. They have done us a service by assembling a large quantity of historical, political and economie information in one volume, the lion's share of which is in the Dutch language. The book is organized topically and chronologically. Chapter One (of fïve), "History and Political Traditions," comprises over one-third of the text. Basic geography and a smattering of colonial history bring the reader to World War Two and the eve of Suriname's universal suffrage and transformation from colony to internally autonomous member of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Modern politics, through independence in

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1975 to the sergeants' coup in 1980, is discussed in the context of plural society theory and the elite cartel or consociational democratie model developed by Arend Lijphart. The subsequent bewildering catalogue of ethnic-based parties and coalitions is described in uninspired prose and relies excessively on the previous studies of R.A.J. van Lier and Edward Dew. The coup (fomented by sixteen young non-commissioned officers and one junior officer), the ideological uncertainty of the first two years of military/civilian rule, the sharp turn to the left in 1982, and the expiration of revolutionary ideology in late 1984 completes the chapter. The authors' name dropping of prominent individuals alerts the informed reader to changing coalitions and the waxing and waning of different political party fortunes, but does not in itself provide an analysis or explanation of the dynamics of the tempestuous political events. Nor does it explain why radical ideology remained only embryonic and never succeeded in grafting on to the fabric of Suriname society. Predictable guideposts in the country's post-democratic odyssey structure the narrative: coup, first and second Chin A Sen governments, several unsuccessful counter-coups, the increasing Cuban presence and involvement in local affairs, Commander Bouterse's close relationship with Maurice Bishop, the hideous murders of December 1982, the increasing fortunes of the left-nationalist PALU (Progressive Union of Workers and Peasants) and Marxist RVP (Revolutionary People's Party), the expulsion of the Cuban ambassador following the US military action in Grenada, the return of centrist civilian politicians and dialogue with the so-called "old" ethnic- based parties, and the movement towards elections and a new constitution promised for late 1987. The book went to press before the elections were held and, roughly, at the same time a young maroon named Ronny Brunswijk began his anti-government insurgency in east Suriname. Chapter Two, "Social Structure," filling eleven pages, is sufficiently weak to justify its omission altogether. Chapter Three, "Political Systems," describes various government programs and policy implementations in the context of emergent revolutionary ideology. The military, in collaboration with PALU and RVP, tried unsuccessfully to mobilize support among the "people." Numerous gambits (copied from Cuba and Grenada) were tried, such as the Bureau of Popular Mobilization and its grass roots instrument, "peoples' committees" in rural villages and urban neighbor- hoods. A political arm of the military was designated the "25 February Movement" (in commemoration of the date of the coup) and established to recruit clients and to solidify military-civilian coalitions. It failed, as did the political party which later emerged from it (the National Democratie

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Party), which went on to a resounding defeat in the 1987 elections. Chin and Buddingh' correctly point out that these complicated efforts at mobilization were an attempt to build a revolution "after the fact." An armed "peoples' militia" was established to protect the artificially fashioned "revo." A more conventional forum, appointed by the military in their attempts to build "lasting democratie structures," was the National Assembly comprised of representatives from the military and its civilian supporters, the major labor unions, and representatives from both small (domestic) and large (international) business houses. The "old" politicians, deposed from power by the coup, would be invited to join this forum in 1985 when it became clear that the military had failed to win the hearts and minds of Surinamers. The revolutionary vanguard learned quickly that the only groups enjoying genuine and widespread support were the traditional interest groups of labor unions, ethnic political parties, and Christian, Muslim and Hindi religious sodalities. The revolution went no further than the barracks and the patronage pot. Chapter Four, "The Economy of Suriname," summarizes the emergence of Suriname as a dependent plantation economy and as an extraordinarily dependent dual-sector economy later, in the twentieth century, following the exploitation of bauxite. The chapter is technical but readable. lts major shortcoming occurs in the discussion of economie change and poliey under the military regime. The authors rely almost exclusively on government poliey reports, manifestos, and "action plan" proposals to summarize economie activity and social welfare plans during military rule. If wishing made it so, Suriname would be a socialist paradise. Although formal statements, often bloated with anti-imperialist rhetoric, give insight into the ideology of the ruling revolutionary elite, they are less than satisfactory in describing, much less explaining, what exactly did and did not happen to the economy over the past eight years. The authors conclude with the observation that the country's bankruptcy forced the military to promise democratie reforms in order to regain the massive Dutch aid endowment withdrawn in 1982. Chapter Five, "The Regime's Policies," concludes the book with a twenty page review of the regime's (changing) policies in the fields of education (an excellent summary of the system, although, as with most everything else, the revolution changed it but little); cultural policies promoting nationalism and the new Suriname man; church-state relations (still antagonistic); the composition of the military, and foreign poliey. Again, the chapter is summative rather than analytical. I have no basic quarrel with this book's conceptualization or narrative

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 198 BOOK REVIEWS style. There should be no pretention; the text is descriptive, bringing us neither fresh information nor analyzing what we already know. The style is highly formalistic and hence a bit flat. There is no passion, uncertainty, intrigue, treachery, deceit, cynism, or contradiction - all of which were and are so palpable in the play of Suriname politics. For example, years ago, before independence, I was drinking with Dobru (Robin Ravales, the deceased nationalist poet of Suriname) in the old Coconut Club in Paramaribo. He was concerned that Suriname was going to be "given" its independence by the Dutch and that he and like-minded nationalists would not have the chance to fight for it as in other countries. Revolutions can be tricky; the coup in Suriname gave many Dutch-trained leftists the financial bonanza and ideological opportunity of a life time. One very serious criticism must be made. The style, spelling, and composition of the English language is absolutely atrocious. Spelling and grammatical errors abound in unacceptable numbers. Indeed, the bibliography contains spelling errors in Dutch. The authors are inconsistent in defining acronyms, sometimes giving the Dutch name, other times translating directly into English, and on several occasions providing first the English translation and then referring back to it in Dutch. For strangers to Suriname this will make the book difficult and confusing to read. The footnoting is unsatisfactory and incorrect citations are all too frequent. In fact, on pages 84 and 98, the same quotation is duplicated but with different words in each version. The book is just plain sloppy and should never have gone to press in its current form. Nevertheless, if you can ignore the English the book is worth reading as a description of Suriname's recent past. However, books yet to be published must endeavor to explain the revolutionary process and failure more adequately.

REFERENCES

DEW, EDWARD, 1978. The difficult flowering of Suriname. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.

LIER, R.A.J. VAN, 1971. Frontier society. A social analysis of the history of Surinam. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff.

LIJPHART, A., 1969. "Consociational Democracy." World Politics 21:207-25.

GARY BRANA-SHUTE Department of Anthropology University of Utrecht, the Netherlands

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The communist challenge in the Caribbean and Central America. HOWARD J. WIARDA AND MARK FALCOFF, with E. Evans, J. Valenta, and V. Valenta. Lanham, MD: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. xiv + 249 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.75, Paper US$ 11.50)

The principal authors - especially Howard Wiarda - are rapidly and deservedly earning a reputation for sophisticated, albeit generally conservative analyses of the modern crisis in the Caribbean Basin. With the apparent scholarly incompatibility between those who argue (as do most scholars) that the region's political instability is traceable to social and economie inequities, and the smaller number of analysts who identify Cuban and Soviet meddling as critical, they fall among the latter. In his introduction and especially his essay on Soviet policy in the region, Wiarda is especially alert to this continuing scholarly debate, chiding his fellow area specialists about their preoccupation with Latin American civilization and their unwillingness to assess, in a dispassionate, scholarly fashion, what has been termed the external threat to America's "legitimate" security interests in this hemisphere, particularly in the Caribbean Basin. Yet these essays - though uniform in their emphasis on the "communist challenge" - are not by any measure hortatory. Surprisingly, the authors are occasionally restrained about what the United States can do to meet this external threat. Briefly, the collective message of the essays is as follows. Despite years of experience in the Caribbean Basin and overwhelming strength in the region, U.S. policymakers persist in reacting to events rather than trying to shape them. The Soviet Union, which has undeniably expanded its role in the past decade, remains a secondary, though potentially dangerous, threat to U.S. interests. Soviet policy is opportunistic. Where U.S. policymakers calculated that Soviet ambitions could be restrained by a more vigorous U.S. effort and concrete proposals, they have generally been proved correct. Where they erred was in underestimating Soviet commitments, particularly in military assistance to Nicaragua, or in permitting Cuba to play a more challenging role in both Central America and the insular Caribbean. In what may be a less persuasive argument and one that is bound to upset liberal-minded development strategists, the authors contend that a massive aid program, such as a revived Alliance for Progress, will not retard - and in its inspiration of hope for the dispossessed may even fuel more - upheaval and unwittingly produce "another Cuba." As it found out in Nicaragua, the American government, even when it acts benevolently toward a revolution, is not able to chart its course. The Sandinistas, as did Castro, had their own agenda; both chose their Soviet ally. What

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 200 BOOK REVIEWS the Russians can offer is not a successful blueprint for development but a detailed handbook on how to stay in power once the revolution is victorious. In the volume's most unsetling conclusion, the authors chide U.S. policymakers for their waffling on the strategie importanee of Latin America and their apparent befuddlement over how the region fits into U.S. global strategy. Rhetoric, particularly the bellicose challenges that have emanated from the Reagan administration, should not be so overheated as to worsen what may be a manageable situation. Political, economie, and social reforms will not by themselves defeat a dedicated insurgency. The American government must state unequivocally what actions it will and will not tolerate by the Soviet Union in Latin America. All of this makes sense - even if one does not particularly agree with the general thrust of these essays. The book is one of the better to emerge on the Caribbean crisis, but in their determination to analyze rather than "moralize", or to provide a reasoned assessment, the authors are unin- tentionally as naive as the area specialists who attribute Latin American revolutions to social and economie misery. Caribbean, particularly Central American, policy has fallen captive to U.S. politics and its inevitable rhetorical assaults between rivals, to bureaucratie gang wars in Washington, to political posturing between Democrats and Republicans, and finally to something neither the authors nor most other scholars will recognize about the Latin American condition. The revolution that is sweeping the hemisphere is not communist insurgency but the "second American revolution." The first provided the hemispheric model for republican government; the second, unintended by the United States, was what political scientists of the 1960s called the "revolution of rising expectations." In their view, its goals were essentially political. But the real revolution of expectations has been fomented by American culture and its belief that one can have more than one's parents, that one can "be all that you can be", that "you are what you do" Or that "you deserve what you want," which is, incidentally, far more revolutionary than "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."

LESTER D. LANGLEY Department of History University of Georgia Athens, Ga. 30602 U.S.A.

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Jamaica under Manley: dilemmas of socialism and democracy. MICHAEL KAUFMAN. London, Toronto, Westport: Zed Books, Between the Lines and Lawrence HM, 1985. xvi 282 pp. (Cloth UK£ 18.95, US$ 19.95; Paper UK£ 6.95, US$ 9.95)

Michael Kaufman's book begins with a quote from Nicos Poulantzas: "History has not yet given us a successful experience of the democratie road to socialism: what it has provided - and that is not insignificant - is some negative examples to avoid and some mistakes upon which to reflect... But one thing is certain: socialism will be democratie or it will not be at all." The quote is apt. The book uses Jamaica's experience from 1972 to 1980 to tease out propositions about the possibilities of constructing democratie socialism in the Third World. As a theorist, Kaufman believes, "The solutions to the problems of change are not simply bequeathed to us by the writers and social actors of the past, but by the struggles and problems of today" (p. 3). Jamaica is a good case for Kaufman because, as his choice of Poulantzas' words suggests, he is committed to both socialism and democracy. The author's political convictions determine the book's questions, organization, protagonists and antagonists, tone, and even its digressions. But Kaufman is an honest scholar. He gives due weight to the failings of his protagonists - Michael Manley and his People's National Party (PNP). The book is organized into three parts. Part I, composed of three chapters, pro vides an overview of Jamaica's socio-economic structures and the politics of change. The bulk of the study is in Part II, six chapters devoted to the Manley regime and its program for democratie socialism. In Part III, Kaufman summarizes the problems of the PNP in one chapter, and in the final chapter suggests lessons learned. The work does not begin with a statement of the argument, leaving the reader without a guide to sort out and weigh the extensive descriptive material presented in the first two parts of the book. Given this absence and Kaufman's tone, the temptation is to see simply the protagonists as "good," and the antagonists (the usual gang of local capitalists, petty storekeepers, conservative peasants, multinational corporations, the U.S. government, and the IMF) as "bad." Yet as the author himself argues in the concluding chapters, that facile interpretation is misleading and uninstructive. In the brief (three and a half pages) introduction, however, Kaufman does provide an explanation and rationale for the kind of data chosen and its mode of presentation. He suggests that structural features of the Jamaican economy and polity are not sufficient to explain the failure of the PNP's program. Decisive are political obstacles and conjunctural

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economie problems that emerged during the PNP's tenure. Hence the descriptive chapters focus on the intervention and interaction of individuals, groups, parties, classes, and powerful institutions. The dynamics of politics are appreciated as is the importance of choices. This emphasis is persuasive and assists Kaufman in asserting, at the finale, that there are lessons to be learned, that there were and are alternatives for economie change within a liberal but class-stratified democratie polity. Data are drawn from a variety of sources. A significant but unspecified number of interviews were conducted in Jamaica between 1980 and 1984. Publications from Jamaica and elsewhere are employed. Perhaps as a result of the author's political sympathies, greater attention is given to data from Manley and his party. Even when the protagonists are criticized, it is self- criticism that tends to be marshaled. Kaufman's critique of the PNP is that it was naive about the extent of opposition to structural changes in Jamaica. The PNP took on more than it could manage, with its policies, and especially its rhetoric, creating unrealistic expectations among supporters, fence straddlers, and those in opposition. And political gains were not carefully Consolidated and nur- tured. Kaufman is persuasive in detailing the extent and kind of opposition, but he does not explain why the PNP further radicalized when opposition began to emerge. Was it just naiveté about the likely evolution of opposition, or a vaporous lashing out at the opposition, or a bid to increase the commitment of supporters who appeared not strong enough for the emerging battle? Or was it just frustration? Despite Kaufman's considerable and commendable effort, many questions about this vexatious period remain unanswered. Perhaps that is inevitable.

FORREST D. COLBURN Department of Politics Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A.

Capitalism and unfree labour: anomaly or necessity? ROBERT MILES. London. New York: Tavistock Publications. 1987. 250 pp. (Cloth US$ 47.50)

This book seeks to theoretically account for the relation of unfree labor to the processes of capitalist development. The author attempts to give a systematic explanation for the historical fact that the growth of capitalism has been accompanied by the retention and expansion of forms of unfree

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 203 labor. The problem he sets forth is that of conceptualizing this relationship. If capitalism appears as the expansion of wage relation, why is capitalist development accompanied by the maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of unfree forms of labor? Given the persistence of these forms, is unfree labor a necessary aspect of capitalist development or an anomaly? The substantive focus of the book is on forms of unfree labor - including slavery, convict labor, labor tenancy, indentured labor, contractual ser- vitude, and contract labor - in the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa, and Western Europe. Implicit in this project and forming the secondary themes of the book are concerns regarding the political economy of migration and the articulation of processes of racialization and relations of production, which the author seeks to comprehend through the theoretical perspective of unfree labor. However, despite the growing interest in issues of unfree labor, race relations, and migration, this book is ultimately disappointing both with regard to the questions it poses and the responses it offers. The formulation of the problem of whether unfree labor is an anomaly or a necessity is an artifact of the author's conceptual framework. His construction of the problem creates disjunctures between theory and history, necessity and contingency, that preclude historical inquiry and prestructure the possible responses. Miles employs a reified concept of the wage labor form that distorts his conception of unfree labor and of the relation between different forms of labor. In his view, the lack of formal coercion which characterizes the concept of wage labor defines it as free labor. Free wage labor is identified with market freedom - the commodification of labor power, and the existence of a labor market. Thus, what for Marx is the form of appearance of free wage labor - i.e., individual choice and equivalent exchange - is taken for its substance. In contrast, the various types of unfree labor are resolved into coercion in the labor market. Non-wage forms of labor are characterized by direct physical and/or political-juridical compulsion that are used to acquire and exploit labor power in the absence of the labor market, as a substitute for it, or as a means of constraining its operation. Thus, on the one hand, this political-juridical coercion impedes the commodification [i.e. exchangeability] of labor power as well as the operation of the labor market, and on the other, it defines non-wage labor as unfree. The consequence of this formulation is that labor power is not regarded as a category historically constituted by the formation of the capital-wage labor relation, but rather is seen as the natural and universal content of all forms of labor. All forms of labor are regarded as

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fundamentally the same. The differences between them are determined by whether or not there is exchange between labor and capital. This universalization of the concept labor power transforms Marx's critical, historical categories of analysis into abstract, typological categories. These categories are then regarded as spatially and temporally bounded and treated as attributes of particular national societies. The capitalist or non-capitalist character of particular national societies is made to rest upon the presence or absence of predetermined characteristics within the boundaries of national units. The presence of the capital-wage labor relation defines the capitalist mode of production, and non-wage relations are regarded as non-capitalist. In this way, national experiences are understood through the characteristics ascribed to analytical categories, while historical relations and processes are eliminated as the subject matter of theoretical reflection. The character of forms of free and unfree labor and the relations between them are made to rest upon definitions, and theoretical discourse is carried on behind the back of history. Thus, the author conceptualizes capitalism as a mode of production and identifies it narrowly with the wage labor-capital relation. In opposition to what he regards as the economistic functionalist, and teleological character of dependency theory and world-system approaches, the author stresses the historically contingent nature of the 'articulation' of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. The relationship between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production is not inevitable or predetermined by the nature of capital. Rather, expansion of the capital wage labor relation is problematic, and the survival and reproduction of forms of unfree labor in particular historical circumstances may obstruct the development of the capitalist mode of production. He thus concludes that unfree labor is an "anomalous necessity." It is anomalous in relation to the universal tendency for the wage relation to expand, but is necessarily introduced and reproduced because of the historical conditions that obstruct the universalization of wage relations. The persistence of the various forms of unfree labor constitute the historical limits of capital and are responsible for shaping the social phenomena described ideologically as "race relations" which have to do with the differential incorporation of indigenous pop- ulations into the various free and unfree relations of production that have characterized the historical development of the world economie system. However, as has been shown, these conclusions are given in the author's premises. By arbitrarily conflating the theory of capitalist development with its history, he presents an historical sociology that excludes historical relations from theoretical consideration. The mutually exclusive, external, and contingent theoretical categories of free and unfree labor are treated

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 205 as identical with historical relations. Within this framework, the characteristics of each form are predetermined, and the relation between them can only be conceived of as the "articulation" of external and contingent phenomena. While necessity is identified with the concept of the capitalist mode of production, the historical persistence of forms of unfree labor appears as a contingent "anomaly." The contingency of all history, including the history of wage labor and capital, is thus obscured, and the author substitutes classification and periodization for the theoretical examination of historically formed and interrelated social relations and pröcesses.

DALE TOMICH Department of Sociology State University of New York Binghamton, NY 13901, U.S.A.

A Civilization that perished: the last years of white colonial rule in Haiti. MEDERIC-LOUIS-ELIE MOREAU DE SAINT-MERY. Translated, abridged and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1985. xviii + 295 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)

Moreau de Saint-Méry's Description de la partie francaise de L'Isle de Saint- Domingue is the classic contemporary description of the richest slave colony in the Western Hemisphere in 1789. The 1984 edition, published in Paris, contains 1,565 closely printed pages that serve as the basic source for all historians and anthropologists beginning research on this key sugar island on the eve of two great revolutions, the French and the Haitian. An English translation of this work would be welcome indeed. Unfortunately, Ivor Spencer's annotated abridged translation is a dis- appointment on many counts. First, as Spencer is the first to admit, the abridgement is "radical": only 262 pages of modest size and format, constituting no more than ten percent of the original text. Even so, were the passages carefully selected, the translations felicitous or at least accurate, and the annotations incisive and related to the crucial historical issues, this little book would be a useful reference work for researchers as well as an informative introduction for amateur historians and anthropologists or even for the general public. As it is, however, the book fails by all three criteria.

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I detect no rationale for the selections made. They appear to have been chosen haphazardly with, at best, an eye for the sensational - voodoo, the seductive mulatresse, poisoning. The result is a scattering of impressions, interspersed with extended summaries of the original text. Had the editor focused on one or two key issue such as the hierarchy of color or the black slave, the reader might have something to reflect upon. The translations are at best wooden and often incomprehensible. The editor has no feel for French; there is no other way to put it. I will spare the reader of this review all but this one example: "When one...finds himself there on that shorc.he is tempted to direct his feet back" (p. 21) Poor Moreau de Saint Méry. The great majority of the annotations are either banal or misleading, not to say downright wrong. For example, after quoting Girod de Chantrans on the treatment of slaves, Spencer concludes: "Basically, the situation was the same for slaves in the United States" (p. 267). The brief glossary blandly asserts that "nearly all freedmen were sang-mélés or mixed-bloods and vice versa" (xii). This is patently false; well over half of the affranchis were nègres libres or free blacks. Nor were "nearly all blacks slaves." These are not trivial errors and they make one lose confidence in the editor's general knowledge of this complex racial society. Finally, what could Spencer have been thinking about when he entitled this book "a civilization that perished"? What a travesty on the word "civilization"! Surely the vast majority of the island's polulation - 90% at a minimum - saw the slave society of Saint-Domingue "perish" without a tear of regret.

ROBERT FORSTER Department of History Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD. 21218, U.S.A

Léger Félicité Sonthonax: the lost sentinel of the Republic. ROBERT LOUIS STEIN. Rutherford, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1985. 234 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)

Robert L. Stein's recent book on Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the French revolutionary commissioner to Saint Domingue, presents the historical biography of one of the most exceptional figures of that colony's revolution

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 207 next to Toussaint Louverture. Certainly the two men dominated the political arena for much of the revolution, and though from different worlds, they both cherished the same goal, the total and irrevocable abolition of slavery. Sonthonax was seen as a usurper of power and a dictatorial - even blood- thirsty - ruler by his contemporary enemies and by historians generally unsympathetic toward the outcome of the Saint Domingue revolution. And even historians whose sympathies do lie with the revolutionary principles espoused and put to practice by this radical jacobin still see him as a rather oblique political figure. Stein's study of Sonthonax approaches the man and his politics in a refreshingly lucid and direct manner, as much from the perspective of the young radical's own liberal background - and the philosophical tradition of abolitionism - as from the political context of revolutionary France. The book also presents a fairly comprehensive history of the middle years of the Saint Domingue revolution from 1792 to 1797. Sonthonax served as agent of the French revolutionary government on two civil commissions to Saint Domingue. It was during his fïrst tenure, from 1792 to 1794, that Sonthonax unilaterally proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the colony's North province, then under his jurisdiction. That proelamation rendered general emancipation imminent throughout the rest of the colony. During his second commission, from 1796 to 1797, Son- thonax's chief concerns were to administer the new multi-racial 'egalitarian' society, to consolidate general freedom in the face of foreign invasion and internal class strife, and to restore the colony's economie prosperity based on a productive system of non-slave, yet regimented plantation labor. When Sonthonax proclaimed slavery abolished in the North province on 29 August 1793 it was, in Stein's opinion, "the most radical step of the Haitian Revolution and perhaps even of the French Revolution" (p. 79). In June and July he had already freed by proelamation those slaves (and their families) who would enlist in the French army to defend the colony from her foreign enemies, royalist Spain and Britain. He was progressively working toward a proelamation of general emancipation; and on 29 August he took the logical step. It has generally been assumed that, with nearly half the colony in the hands of foreign powers and the black rebel slave leaders (notably Toussaint Louverture) armed for their freedom under the banner of royalism and Spain, Sonthonax had little choice but to proclaim slavery abolished. According to that view, Sonthonax made a calculated move in reaction to a difficult situation. Stein argues, however, that through this proelamation and his subsequent and uncom- promising defense of it, Sonthonax was also fulfilling the promise raised by abolitionist thought - a tradition that stretches from the seventeenth

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to the mid-nineteenth century and within which Sonthonax uniquely stands as a non-gradualist and a practical innovator. But even revolutionaries cannot bring about far-sighted change by the force of their ideas alone. Stein's Sonthonax seems almost to have been weaving his way in and out of an ever-changing web of political and military events, rapidly seizing each occasion to further manumissions in the colony until the only logical outcome would be the universal abolition of slavery itself. Indeed, his 29 August proclamation did push events forward and forced his colleague for the West and South provinces, Etienne Polverel, to follow suit, if somewhat grudgingly. What is missing in Stein's well argued interpretation of Sonthonax' proclamation, however, is the point of view of the slaves themselves. They are never really brought into view: "Sonthonax took [the step] alone and without hesitation" (p. 79). Stein recognizes that circumstances allowed and even encouraged Sonthonax to take that step; however, it is equally important to remember that the slaves themselves had greatly contributed, by their own revolutionary activities, to the creation of those circumstances. A significant number of them had already revolted in 1791 and had effectively f reed themselves in the North. These, along with others at various points throughout the colony, had been engaged in armed insurrection for a full two years, often in enemy camps, and in the name of that same freedom for which Sonthonax was working. Stein presents clearly and coherently the progression toward general emancipation by way of the various proclamations of Sonthonax and Polverel (although somewhat abstracted from the ongoing and autonomous insurrectionary slave movements) and the problems and solutions (some of them only temporary or partial) involved in the transition from slavery to the new system of free - but severely regulated - plantation labor. Property and property relations as they now concerned the newly freed black farm workers, as well as émigré and resident planters are also treated comprehensively, as are the ideological differences between Sonthonax and Polverel on these questions. The remainder of this section of the book is devoted to Sonthonax's defense of general liberty in Saint Domingue, in the face of war and foreign invasion; and in France, in the face of hostile and reactionary colonists who had manoeuvered the recall and trial of the civil commissioners. Sonthonax was triumphantly acquitted and appointed to head a second, five-member commission to the colony. Stein's discussion of Sonthonax's second mission to Saint Domingue focuses on its major tasks: consolidating general liberty, keeping Saint Domingue both free and French and undertaking the colony's social and economie reconstruction to bring an end to racially determined privilege.

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To achieve these goals, Sonthonax had to defeat both the British occupation forces still in control of much of the colony (Spain having withdrawn under the Treaty of Bale in 1795), and certain factions among the former free coloreds that were now trying to assume power and deprive the newly freed blacks of their full rights. But in the meantime, Toussaint Louverture had risen to a position of strength in Saint Domingue. He had become chief commander of the black colonial army and was now a serious contender with Sonthonax for the position of supreme authority. The situation culminated in Toussaint's expulsion of the civil commissioner. Thus, Sonthonax's second mission ended in both success and failure. He did preside over the restoration of peace and economie recovery based on the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality, but he was unable to bring the South, ruled as a virtual mulatto oligarchy, into the same domain. He was also unable to keep Toussaint loyal to French administrative authority in the colony. But these, as Stein rightly acknow- ledges, were failures only in French eyes. Stein's Sonthonax not only makes a valuable contribution to the his- toriography of the Saint Domingue revolution (and perhaps even to the history of abolitionalism in the New World), it also draws attention to the relationship - and the problems and challenges inherent in that relationship - of visionary ideas to revolutionary events.

CAROLYN E. FICK Department of History Concordia University Montréal, Qué. H3G 1M8 Canada

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