Value Assertion and Stratification: and Marriage in Rural : Part II Author(s): Michael M. J. Fischer Source: Caribbean Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Oct., 1974), pp. 7-35 Published by: Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25612628 . Accessed: 18/10/2014 18:00

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VALUE ASSERTION AND STRATIFICATION: RELIGION AND MARRIAGE IN RURAL JAMAICA

* Michael MJ. Fischer

PART II

Forms of Religiosity (cont.)

One of the interesting features of local denominational competition in Airy Castle is that the status distinction between a member and a non-member is far more important than denominational ? distinctions themselves. There are three churches in Airy Castle ? Methodist, Baptist, Church of and almost everyone in the community who attends church goes to one of these.1* The Baptist Church is the oldest, established in 1873, and it used to boast the largest congregation. Some years ago a Church of God evangelist came to the community and drew crowds to his preaching, the result of which is that this is now the largest Church. Members of the Baptist Church say that without a resident minister, they simply could not compete, and at their membership low point they were left with only two persons, the deacon and his wife (both now desceased). The Baptist minister for the circuit resides in , preaching at each of his four churches in rotation; the Methodist minister lives in . The Church of God maintains, in addition to its Jamaican contacts, strong links to the parent body in the U.S. and young American evangelists frequently visit.19

* Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. This article is based on three months fieldwork, July-September 1968. Financial support came from an NIMH Pre-doctoral Fellowship (5-F01-HM-35, 70-72) and a research assistantship in the University of Chicago Fa mily Study under the direction of Professor Raymond T. Smith. Further ethnographic details and interview material may be found in my ?Opposite Sets and Selected Masques from a Rural Jamaica Point of View? (1969 unpublished), on file in the Library of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago, and in the Library of the Institute of Social and Economic Research of the University of the West Indies. This is the second and final part of this article. The first part was - published in an earlier issue Caribbean Studies 14, no. 1 (April 1974): 5-37. 18. One man claimed that he and four others in the district were Roman Catholics; he said that very occasionally they went to church. He had not been raised in the district, and I would suspect that this is true of the other four as well. A Seventh-Day Adventist Church exists in Bath, and their literature is passed out in Airy Castle. The 19. first Baptist Church in Jamaica was established in 1791 by George Lisle, a freed slave from In Virginia. 1965 there were 253 Baptist churches in Jamaica with 30,779 members, 69 minis

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Competition among the local denominations either has reference to this local history or is in a friendly exhortarymood of being as good as the others in terms of spiritual uplift and ability to raise money. Thus the who feel themselves to be something of an abandoned remnant, whose membership was seduced by the Church of God, occasionally in their sermons emphasize ?we the Baptists, we are the church of God.? The Methodists emphasize instead the more subdued feeling ?we are all children of Christ.? The Baptists also use their loss of manpower as an excuse for not having quite ? as lively a service as the Church of God emphasizing thus a community of religious attitude rather than, say, dismissing the Church of God for undignified emotionalism, a charge which is used by respectable church members against the unrespectable ?balm-yards.? At one Baptist rally which was rather subdued in spirit and parsimonious in monetary contributions, a woman got up from the audience and in an impassioned voice talked about going to Baptist ? churches in America which were ?really rolling better than the Church of God here,? and even if they only had a fewmembers they ?had fire,? and it was about time that this church got on fire: ?Baptists can sing and testify as well as Church of God people!?. The sister was warmly supported by the rally chairman who in a piece of inspired engineered group dynamics led a chorus of ?Give with Love in Your Heart,? and achieved a bit more monetary flow. Services in the three churches follow the same basic format (alter nation of hymns, prayers, one or two scripture readings, testimonies, announcements and sermon), except that the leadership in the Church of God is somewhat more decentralized. And when members of one church are asked about the others they say that their teachings do not differ, though they may mention minor differences. Thus they may note that Seventh-Day Adventists take Saturday as the Sabbath, same. and Methodists speak of Wesley, but the preaching is all the Husband, and wife, children and parents, sibling and sibling may belong to different churches without conflict, and this is often the case. While going to church itself is a status marker, community markers of distinction between church and non-church members can also be discerned in rites de passage. Although Baptists, Church of

ters, 634 local preachers, 1507 deacons, 2 deaconesses. In St. Thomas Parish there were 13 churches. (Sibley: 1965). The first Methodist missionary arrived in 1789: by 1942 they had 173 churches with 41 minis ters, 19551 members, 40,000 adherents and 644 lay preachers. (Corresponding Baptist figures were 216 churches, 56 ministers, 23,500 members, 125,000 adherents. The had 245 churches, 97 clergy, 44,000 communicant members). (Davis: 1942). The Church of God began missionary work in Jamaica through a Barbadian and had by 1917 four churches and 80 members; in 1935 they had grown to 52 congregations with 1500 members. (Conn 1955; The Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia 1966 : 624-627).

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God, and Seventh-Day Adventists alike do not have infant baptism, a naming ceremony of sorts is widespread and the choice of god parents reflects important status-respect decisions. For instance, an unwed mother commented on how she chose god-parents for the four children:

?Well, they are ardent church-goers and they are looked upon in the community and anybody can look upon them. In choosing god parents you have to be careful that the children can grow up to respect them.?

One informant, a Church of God member, said that Methodists christen married people's children on Sunday, and bastards on another day of the week. Weddings, of course, are public celebrations of respectability par excellence. An almost destitute couple who live by growing a few breadfruit and raising pigeons had this exchange with me:

Man: Well, in Jamaica now, marriage don't cost you anything. [People] can take the bus this morning, and leave from this district here and go to Kingston; and them goes to the office, marriage office and they just to there and married and come back on the bus with the ring on their finger; don't cost anything. His Woman: I can't worry that, Mr. Fischer! A: Why is that? W: Me! Go in the bus this morning, go to Kingston and come back and, Mr. Fischer, I am married!? Too cheap, sir! I have to make a little cake, and kill even two cocks... A: Right, you can do that when you come back. W: No, sir! And I get dress, and I go to the church and let the public see me, and I come inwith my husband, with a few people, and ten or twenty or thirty people coming with me, and have a little time, you know. That look good. [My emphasis].

A contrastive case is, perhaps, even more revealing. A twice-married young woman who had worked in the States and who felt that the were rural folk too concerned with each other's (and especially her) private affairs (the rumour was that she had never divorced either of her two previous husbands, one of whom had himself remarried in England) married for the third time two weeks after I left. She had a church wedding but insisted that both it and the following fete be held in the anonymity of Kingston where she could control the witnessing ?public.? Although she was enthusiastic about private prayer meetings, she did not go to church while in the community. It would be fair to interpret the case as one of a person who, while materially of church-respectability status, stood outside the expected moral standards of the community. Burials again display this churchman/non-churchman distinction. One of the reasons people give for wanting to be a church member

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has to do with their burial and communal memorials. ?Some [people] will say, "well,when I'm dead I would likemy body to be churched"; I would like the bell to ring, to toll and all that.? And churches hold memorial services in honour of their departed members. Again, church members express a preference for holding a prayer meeting instead of a traditional folk ?set-up? style wake on the ninth night after death. The distinctions drawn by the respectability, middle-class-ward striving church members are expressed in an idiom understood and also utilized by the lower classes. Thus we have already seen one man he refer to the distinction of not being able to go to church because a had no jacket, and having God in his heart, i.e., being true Christian. This type of social criticism by reference to divine will is a time honoured one among revolutionaries, leaders of religious schisms, and other dissidents. The device is one which belongs to Christian as Some rhetoric, and is utilized by the discontented poor folk well. times theywill bemoan their condition by contrasting theway things as are structured to their disadvantage with their ethical status a discus ?loving? men living according to God's wishes. For instance, to the sion of the importance of legal marriage to insure inheritance wife should the husband die:

I: When I am married to this woman, if I should die, no one can come to dispossess her from the little holding... A: And if you should not get married could you not let it be known that she has a right to this place? see a common I: Yes, but the children might come in: ?You she's law wife but I'm a child, I'm the seed,? and you know this bring vexation and worries in life, but when the last, you must abide see: a by the law of God and law of man. Well, you ?Are you wife?? ?Oh here's the paper, lawful yes, yes paper, marriage ? certificate^ and the law of the country will back you though father's you are the seed of the father: daughters, children, your ? children. Lawful? say no; wait, this was unlawful. She is law ful in the sight of God, but man law it's what start today.

Another man made a similar distinction arguing that a man's wife woman since is the first woman he has, as long as he had no before, in the latter case she would be another man's wife:

A: So then a church wedding does not make any difference? cannot I: No, look: you can live without married, but married save you, you see? The parson tell you that you must marry is not true. woman or you cannot go to heaven, but that No, that is not true. Suppose you married and you don't keep the life, live to the life, itwon't save you. No, so marriage don't stop You can a person don't go to heaven. You see, don't stop you. to a woman marry you can live and don't marry providing you

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live a Christian life and live up to it. But then marriage is an honour. Respectable, because if you change your ways now, and you marry, if you don't married and you have a job, you don't protected by the government as when you married.

For these men, the teachings of the church on the importance of legal as man marriage is just much the law of as is legalized gambling to the churchman. In both cases, God is invoked as a higher source of legitimacy. The distinction as to where the line is drawn is what separates church member from non-church member. The church members take a rather dim view of ?concubinage,? ?illegitimacy? and so on, and many Airy Castle residents see such things as increasing in the manner which the Bible predicts will precede the end of the world and the . Taking this position, that the end is relatively near (though no one I met expressed any real urgency about the matter), it becomes twice as important for sect members to keep the ?body? or ?bride? or ?church? of Christ so pure, and they make sure no consensual couples ?living in sin? become members (though, of course, Christian charity and brotherly love demand that they be encouraged to attend services in the hope that they will see the error of their ways and will mend their ways in time), and they keep their communion service in private. The Lord's Supper is a ?sacrament? (actually only an ?ordinance? in Protestant theology, but Airy Castle residents are not theologians) which must be kept pure and sanctified; if the Sunday morning service is the central social ritual of respectable religion, the Lord's Supper is the central communal ritual of the saved. That there should be a correlation between the elite of the ?saved? and the elite in the social status above the masses of the poor is thus ensured by the requirements of the ordinances, by the requirements of dress, and by the requirements of weekly dues from members. The non-church members, on the other hand, define being a Christian more individualistically as a matter of true faith and inner repentance. Not unconnected with this is a belief in individualistic gnostic possibilities: every man who is willing to place his faith in is potentially eligible to have contact with divine charisma. Thus is the possibility of self-respect and self-value preserved even for the poorest and socially least respected man. From an anthropological point of view, charisma here displays both its major meanings. In Christian rhetoric it refers to the gifts received during the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: divine healing, glossolalia, and other gifts. In sociological analysis, it refers to the dialectical social relation between leader (or religious adept) and follower, in which the leader articulates the intellectual or emotional dispositions of the followers who have selected him because he can

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articulate these dispositions, and who by thus selecting him create the legitimacy of his power to command; the leader is dependent on the acceptance of his followers, and to keep this acceptance is dependent on faith and ?signs? and ?proofs? (cf. Worsley 1968). The psycho logical process is the same for church member and non-church member. For the church member the ?signs? and ?proofs? of his religion are in his worldly success: he argues against passion and drink on the grounds of their negative results. Thus, one ardent church woman spoke glowingly of a lecture given by a minister's wife on courtship and marriage, in which wives were urged not to refuse a man food in a quarrel, nor ?to turn her pillow to the foot end of the bed?, since either action would only drive him out to another woman. Similarly, several people agreed that a wife should be admonished in private and not before strangers. One drawback to being a Christian is that it is not felt proper for him to frequent rum shops or indulge in wild dances; the solution is to use back rooms of the rum shops where he is not so publically visible. It is not so much that drink itself is bad; what is bad is getting drunk and then fighting or swearing. Abstention from swearing is an item of conduct church members feel very strongly about. Indeed, for the more religious, consciousness of God is an important part of everyday life; they are fervent readers of the Bible, often claiming that they cannot sleep at night till they have read the Bible. One rather extreme case was a deacon who not only would read the Bible several hours a day and deliver elaborate ?graces? at meals, but would repeat or sing ad infinitum choruses such as ?thank you Jesus for saving my soul/ thank you Jesus for making me whole.? These more religious members would make it a point to go not only to Sunday morning services but also to midweek prayer meetings and Sunday evening services. As in most communities where the Bible is the only widely read or known book, Christian imagery plays a pervasive role in their creative and playful talk; many favourite riddles are based on Biblical images:

?What animal alive was not taken onto the Ark?'?the mule because it is a cross-breed of horse and donkey.? ?Everything was taken on the Ark in pairs; how was fire taken? ? flintstones.? ? ?Which is larger: a mansion or a house? house, because "In my Father's house are many mansions".?

The argument here, is that for the true Church members of Airy Castle, not only is church membership an active means of status assertion, but that their faith is a real faith confirmed as true for them by observable pay-offs. This is Max Weber's old explanation for the correlation between strong fundamentalist belief and the petty bourgeoisie (or upper-lower to lower-middle class): the Protes

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tant Ethic of puritan morality or ?this-worldly asceticism? is congenial to and supportive for persons at the bottom of the capitalistic structure of economic opportunities, to whom the difference between success and failure may depend on that little extra effort at frugality and abstention, encouraged both by a doctrine which frowns upon capital dissipation on non-productive ?wine, woman and song,? and by the social organization of a sect whose members consider them selves their brother's keepers. Although Weber did not quite develop his argument in these terms,20 the logic of his position boils down to the psychological observation that Christian asceticism is only one of several forms of asceticism, all of which in psychological terms can be glossed as ?the necessity of strict affective neutrality and focusing on ultimate goals in order to efficiently utilize one's resources for achievement,? and that ideologies with such content are utilizable in situations where failure so to behave means failure of attaining one's objective. A non-Christian example is the asceticism of the nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries commented upon by Turgenev. The corollary, which successors to Weber's sociology of ? ? Proestatism H.R. Niebuhr, Elmer Clark, and others have elabo rated, is that above this social stratum, that is, among the more affluent middle class who are comfortaby well-off without this discipline, there is a tendency away from sectarianism towards a more tolerant denominationalism; and that below this social stratum among the poor, for whom improvement of position requires a great deal more than a little self-discipline, there is a tendency away from sectarianism toward a variety of cult processes.21

20. One can read Weber with a more or less charitable eye depending on one's mood. For the most part he stuck so close to the historical record associating ascetic with the small bourgeoisie that his thesis holds water despite the weakness of his procedure, and thus he failed to recognize the full weight of counter-examples he himself raised: Zinzendorfism, the chialism of Munster. He stresses that what is important to look for among the intricate details of dogma, ethics and morality is the Wirtschaftsethik of each religious form, but he takes the Wirtschaftsethik as a Ding an sich capable of determining conduct rather than as a situational Gestallt. He wants to isolate the ?psychological sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion, gave a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it?. {Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, E.T. 1930: 97). This is a sound enough objective; where his argument breaks down is where he argues from ideologies of ascetic Protes tantism to behaviour, rather than seeing the ideologies as manipulable modes of justifying social behaviour. As as long he argues in terms of ascetic Protestantism and the small bourgeoisie of post-Reformation capitalist growth he is on fairly solid ground. But when he tries to generalize about capitalistic behaviour and Protestantism his logic falters: he argues that by making success a of sign salvation Calvin sacralized practical activity and established psychological sanctions for capitalistic endeavours. But the philosopher John Herman Randall, Jr., can equally well argue ?that the <1948) Protestant reformers made salvation a purely religious problem, not dependant on human conduct (predestination, sola fide), and thus opened the way for the assimilation of any of seem pattern values that might good in the light of men's actual social experience... With the rise of industrialism social experience passed from an economy of thrift and scarcity to an economy of consumption and potential abundance. Protestant ethics was able to shift with remarkable faci from its initial lity this-wordly asceticism to an ethic of pleasure, enjoyment and humanitarianism and to adopt the familiar ideals of the Rotary Club and country club?. Protestantism in America legitimates social ethics from rugged individualism to socialism. 21. The full specification of this theory is quite complex. It is of interest to our of description respectable church religion in Airy Castle that a correlation between fundamentalism and the

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non If the church members of lower class Airy Castle get little pay-off from church rules such as being married (see the next section), staying away from rum shops, and the like, they do find confirmation of the truth of their Christian faith in the curing of illness, granting of wishes, etc., by ?balm-yard? faith-healers, ?science and ? magic, dancing, and so on. Take for instance the following account a of visit to a ?do-good man? (faith-healer) by a twenty one year old high school graduate, W., who is temporarily teaching school until he can find a place in college. He belongs to a church-going family. His affliction was a severe eye strain, and he had been to a physician who prescribed medication which W. found ineffective. He an then made appointment at Bellevue Hospital in Kingston to consult an eye-nerve specialist. A few weeks before this appointment his mother took him to the ?do-good man? and he spent a day with this man in fast and prayer. The ?do-good man? repeatedly stressed that no he had special powers of his own, that he was only God's agent, that for the healing to be effective one had to have faith in God, and that if you did not believe in God or only came out of curiosity, he could not help you. After the fasting and prayer, the ?do-good man? ? told W. all sorts of things about W.'s life that W. confirmed that he had just lost a job, and that luckilyhe had just gotten another, that he had pains in his head, that he had been supposed to go back to the first doctor but that he had not done so, and various cryptic and thereby easily interpretable and confirmable trivia. Finally the ?do-good man? gave W. a bottle of medicine. The medicine worked: it cleared his pains, he felt good, and he could study for long periods. He said that since the appointment at Bellevue had been made, he would keep it, but he wanted to go back to the ?do-good man? for more of his medicine. In his account, W. emphasized the psychological preparatory effect of the prayer and the "crystal ball" session. The prayer and bible reading set his mind at ease about the occult forces the ?do-good man? was calling on; there seemed to be no appeal to anything but above-board Christianity. The "crystal ball" session surprised him about how much the man knew, and made him prone to believe in the man's special powers. The ?do-good man? had been recommended

upper-lower to lower-middle class can be made throughout Protestant history and that the history of Protestantism is a cyclical one of established sects moving upward and becoming denomi nationalized, with schisms developing to reestablish ?prjmiUive pristine Christianity* in sect forms. Such schisms are the origin of Calvinism, Lutheranism, , Baptism, the Church of God, the Seventh-Day Adventists, etc. For this history the standard explication is H. R. Niebuhr (1929), but see also Branson (1933), Conn (1955), Kern (1968), Clear (1953). One cannot, however, state a simple formula that ?sect + time + affluence = denomination*. The form of a sect's social organization, and its methods of insulating and isolating itself from the outside world, play a significant part in its development confirming again the anthropological caveat of treating sociological processes within their situational contexts: cf. Brian Wilson (1959; 1967).

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the reason the to W.'s mother by a friend and I suggested to W. that was his mother had ?do-good man? knew so much about him that told this friend about his problems (which iswhy the recommendation man.? had been offered), and that she had in turn told the ?do-good W. admitted that thiswas possible but pointed out that themedicine had worked. He admitted a confusion as to what to believe about as spiritual forces and went on to relate examples of cognitive paradoxes a variety of ghost stories. Present at this latter account was a devout Christian man who are remarked that he did not believe in ghosts, but that there strange ? to things that happen these, however ,are due the innumerable me about a fallen angels which are about. This man, C, later told second balm-yard (faith healer) in Portland by which he had been was taken in when his wife had been dying. His account coloured by his feeling not only of being duped, but of being duped into playing with the devil. When his wife became ill, he tried several doctors and with eventually this balm-yard. It began as a good Christian meeting the hymns, prayers and bible reading. But this, he said, is only Christian facade: underneath the forces of evil are working. The participants jump about in the morning until they perspire, and then is they go out into the yard to dance around a pool of water into which ? put frankincense and (he knows not exactly what this is myrrh ? must be some kind of powder but it is in the Bible). After a ritual bath one goes to visit the Shepherd privately and he scratches down something with chalk,22 tells you ?all kinds of foolishness,? and then charges you a fee. C. says he does not believe in this foolishness, but he knows there are men with great powers, for the Bible tells about Simon the Sorcerer. The ceremony had no effect on his wife and soon thereafter the healer came to Cs house and told him that it was infested with evil spirits which would have to be exorcised. The whole affair cost C. ?16, and his wife died. He told me that if I wanted to see this balm-yard he could tell me how to get there but we would have to work out a rationale for my presence since he did not want the Shepherd to suspect he had sent me. In the meantime he suggested I talk to a woman who went to weekly Monday services at a balm-yard in a nearby village. This I did and one Monday morning four of us set out: themiddle aged wife of a headman who attended regularly, a nineteen year old pregnant girl who attended occasionally, a curious boy of about the same age who had never been to a balm-yard, and myself.

We entered the balm-yard church building by stepping over a cup of water and spinning about counter-clockwise while a woman

22. Zora Hurston reports that chalk crosses prevent the return of the duppy (spirit) at the end of a nine-night (1939: 48).

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snapped a red flag with white cross over our heads and murmured the 23rd Psalm. This was said to draw off evil spirits. Inside women had to cover their heads. As the morning service commenced there were aside from my party, one young man, three old men, and about seventeen women with a number of babies and young girls; during the day the congregation grew to about forty of which about a dozen were men. The party coming the greatest distance was from . The service commenced with the choruses ?I am Worried about my Soul? and ?There is a Right Way and a Wrong Way: Pick Your Choice? accompanied by the ?Mother? (in a yellow shoulder sash, red waist string, yellow turban, white dress) and an assistant on two drums. Then followed the 23rd Psalm, a hymn, another psalm, and a hymn. During the latter hymn the Mother and her assistant began to groan, flail their arms, and stagger. Of the two, the Mother was the wilder while the assistant held her up or guided her away from the table and benches; she grabbed mem bers of the audience and spun them, grunted, spun and staggered, interspersed with quiescent moments during which she shook her head and held her thumb and forefinger to her eyes as if trying to clear her head. Then she read a ?lesson? from the Bible: St. Mark 5,which is the story of a sick woman who had faith that touch ing Jesus would heal her and it did: ?Daughter thy faith hath made thee whole,? followed by a hymn during which pillows were passed out, and then all went down on their knees in pentecostal prayer to tell the Lord why they had come. This was followed by testi monials interspersed with choruses sung to the lively ?licking? of the tambourine by the Mother. The first testimonial was given by an old woman who said that when she first started coming to the balm-yard she could not bend down, stoop or walk, but now, praise Cod, she could. An obese girl said she had been sick and had gone to several doctors who had recommended a minor operation which she had undergone; she felt even worse after the operation and had come here and now she feltwell. The theme of going to doctors who had not helped was a common one (and in some cases it seemed reasonable to postulate that medication which needed time to work, became effective after the person had started going to the balm yard, thus giving the credit for the cure to the latter). Another female officiant, the Evangelist, then preached on the theme of the earlier lesson of St. Mark that it is the Word of God that heals, not any miracle of man, and therefore if you are to be healed you must believe. Announcements were read, including the notice that on Wed nesday there would be fasting and healing. At this point women who had been fasting came up to the table in front which had on it a number of cups, some flowers and a jug of water; they turned over their cups which were filled with water symbolizing the end of their fast, lifted the cups three times (?In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?) and drank the water. The meeting then dispersed for lunch. The afternoon meeting began with the Mother-Evangelist taking up a three-penny collection from each person and selling a candle for seven pence to all who wanted healing. She then divided the congregation into those on the right of the aisle who wanted the ritual bath, giving them a red ticket, and those who did not on the left. She encouraged one and all to have the bath since, while

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it was not crucial for healing, in the Bible healing is associated with cleanliness. The afternoon was devoted to the healing ritual and included a larger number of officiants than had themorning session. The central addition, of course, was the ?parson? or ?minister? or ?Father,? a Chinese man dressed in white trousers, white shirt with a red sash crossed on his chest and a white ice-cream vendor style cap. He was assisted by the yellow turbaned Mother, four red turbaned women, two women flag-wavers, and a young male bailiff. The ritual began with a chorus and the officiants marching around the table which had been reset, some vials and small containers replacing the cups. The officiants formed a circle in front of the table. The choruses continued all afternoon accompanied by swaying and stamping and some twirling by the yellow-turbaned Mother. They began with the babies who were handed to the Mother; she spun with them counter-clockwise and handed them to the Father; he held them in his left hand and with his right held a candle to their chests swaying and moving it to their legs and back in rhythm with the choruses; he then anointed them on the chest with oil and handed them back to theMother who spun them and returned them to theirmothers. Occasionally the Father would call out instructions to the mother such as to feed the child chicken soup. After the babies came the smaller children, the rest of the children, the women, and, finally, the men. These came up, were spun, were stood in place, were touched and prodded by the Father (using both his hands and the Bible as pressing instruments), and were instructed. Most of the instructions were drowned out by the choruses, but one girl was warned against bad men and told to run away from them. Two aged women who could not stand by themselves were allowed to sit in the circle on stools, and the Father looked appropriately grave, taking his time, and warning that things looked bad and could only be helped if the patient had faith, for to Godless people salvation means nothing. After the instructing, the anointee was made to kneel and was anointed with oil; the procedure varied slightly: for some a cross on the forehead, for some the head was rubbed with oil, for the two old women the legs and arms were also anoint ed. Then the anointed was raised, spun out of the circle, given a cup of water to drink, and sent off for the ritual bath. It took all afternoon to get through the congregation and at times the Father would make a show of being fatigued, or ?tripped up? by insincere anointees; then the Mother would dance with him either spinning or just holding hands and swaying until he recovered. As each person came up he had to empty all pockets, remove all jewelry, and the women removed their headcovering. The ritual bath was administer ed in a bamboo hut by two women who collected ninepence for the service. Actually, the ninepence was placed in one's basin of hot black-herb water from which the women sponged one, and was collected only after the bath.

One set of comments should be made about the reaction of the people who went with me from Airy Castle. It was the first visit of the young man and he was plainly scared while waiting his turn in the afternoon ritual, and probably would not have gone through with it had it not been for my example. When it was all over he had less of a 2

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feeling than I did that it had been a fun day, wanting rather just to leave and return home. It is interesting that the two women, both more or less regular attenders, expressed their reactions in terms of fun and feeling good as well. Contrast this to C.'s experience in which a skeptic went to be converted by a miracle and was disappointed.23 In all these cases and in those to be discussed later on, one must recognize that to a greater or lesser extent for all members of the Airy Castle community, Christian and magical worlds are a single continuous cosmology.24 As Madeline Kerr points out:

?... as most religious teaching in Jamaica says everything in the Bible is true then miracles, faith healing, sorcery, visions, prophecies, the existence of spirit, angels and the devil are taken for granted. ... Anyone who questions the authenticity of a spirit communication or possession is at once faced by a formidable array of Biblical quotations.? (1952:115).

Religious knowledge for Airy Castle residents is limited to certain specifiable bounds: central dogmas about Jesus and about the need for repentance and faith, and traditionally formulated messages of Biblical stories. For instance, when I told people the story of the Mother-Evangelist's sermon (St. Mark 5) they immediately recognized it as a parable of the saving grace and healing quality of faith. Negative bounds can be sketched by the very real ambiguity in recognizing the spatio-temporal reality of events in the Bible, by an uncritical man ner in reading the Bible, and by an almost complete ignorance of non Biblical Christian history. It is not wholly surprising then to find, for instance, a confusion of heaven-earth geography for there is an ambiguity built into Christian rhetoric which constantly juxtaposes human actions and divine interventions and consequences. A primary school teacher tells that when he first arrived in Airy Castle and said the name of his district back home was Jericho, people were incredu lous: Jericho is not on Earth, it is somewhere in heaven. So too then ghosts may not exist, but fallen angels abound, and that comes to the same thing. ?Duppies? are spirits of the dead and

23. The role of faith and of psychologically real investments in a belief are crucial to the relation between miracles and confirmation-disconfirmation-falsification of belief. Cf. Festinger, Riecken and Schacter (1956). 24. From a sociological point of view, I do not find the popular thesis convincing (though it serves well as a short-hand tag) that rural Jamaica really contains ?two worlds? ?a European Christian one and Africa pagan one? as if the public European one were contained in the African one. All of the techniques of religion found in Jamaica are also to be found in the history of Euro pean Christianity. It is true that originally these slaves came from Africa, the masters from Europe; but the is clearly one of Christianization as a facet of Creolization in the post emancipation society, i.e., the process of creating a continuous status system out of the dichoto mous slave-master system. The counter to this would be to discover that the old African ancestor worship is still in existence, not as linguistic or other survivals within a Christian matrix, but as a functioning cult. The counter would be to show Moore's description (1953) of kumina to be opera tive and not a survival (or created) memory, involving the full complex of lineage organization, marriage rules, food taboos, etc.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:00:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CARIBBEAN STUDIES/VOL. 14, NO. 3 19 to also spirits wandering at large. When a man dies, his duppy goes the grave with him but may rise between the third and ninth nights to ?finish up his affairs? among the living. The ninth-night, therefore, is held on the last night of his freedom and is supposed to be a happy celebration to assure him that all is well and that social life is continuing without him, so that he will have no excuse to come back and trouble the living. The old African belief in multiple souls seems to be dying and Airy Castle residents maintain that each man has only one duppy. There is a good deal of confusion with Christian lore about what happens to duppies. As one relatively-well-educated young man said:

?Some say that it goes to heaven or hell, but it is also said that men will be judged on Judgment Day; it is foolishness to believe that a man dies and is sent to heaven or hell and then when Judg ment Day comes is called out to be sent back; so some say that ? when you die nothing happens your soul just rests until Judgment Day: then the good are sent to heaven and the evil burn for two thousand years until God destroys them as if they never existed.?

In any case, when you see duppies or ghosts it is not the man himself whose duppy it is, but the Devil who has taken the duppy from the grave. A Christian believer pointed out that ?when a man dies without believing in Jesus and with evil intentions, the Devil carries them out?; thus a man had wanted to sleep with the speaker's ? wife and had sworn that he would die or get her he died, but strange things began to happen like the sound of metal dropping under the bed. Another common belief is that if one dies believing in Christ, one's spirit or duppy rests, but if one dies an unrepentent sinner, one's duppy is condemned to wander doing the same habi tual things that one did in life. Duppies are not supposed to be able to kill you, for God said to Satan that he could not take away life since he could not grant it. But duppies can play unpleasant tricks on you and hit you. One of the interesting indices of belief in duppies or fallen angels (the functional equivalent for the Christian) is fear of the dark. The frequent context of discussing one's belief in duppies is whether or not one is afraid to walk out at night. An argument developed on this score in the backroom of a rum shop between a young boy with secondary school education, C, and two old men, both road workers from the hills north of Bath. The old men maintained that they were only afraid of living men at night; dead men were dead and they had never seen a duppy. C. argued, at first in a manner of teasing the old men, but then with increasing seriousness (as it became clear that the men were really denying the existence of duppies) that he had seen duppies or at least witnessed their presence

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(a story of his bedroom door opening and the sound of a buckle coming off), and that one always has a chance against live men, but there is nothing you can do about duppies except through obeah (black magic) protection). W., the temporary teacher, says that he does not fear ghosts because they cannot kill him (Satan cannot take away life) and proves this by the fact that a man died in his arms and he was not afraid, and by the fact that he walked from Port Morant one morning around 3 a.m. without the light of the moon. In all this one must discern that duppies or ghosts constitute a cultural idiom and set of beliefs to explain post facto strange occurrences be they psychological illusions or unexplained material events. Both C. and W. do walk out at night (though generally in groups of people) without any visible sign of fear. The distinction is between generalized fear and particular fear, in the sense that Middleton and Winter (1963) discuss generalized and particular mis fortune. Thus, for instance, my landlord always remonstrated with me to close my window at night because there were so many thieves and cut-throats around. But when his cousin complained that there was a man about who was trying to kill him, it was quickly analyzed as a case of delusion, athough outsiders to the situation would com ment in support of the credibility of the cousin's story on the ge neral grounds of thieves and cut-throats. For the credibility of this belief system, the individual needs to have experiences which provide an ?evidential basis? and a mo tivation to maintain the belief; then the beliefs constitute a ?cognitive set* which structures subsequent experience (Spiro: 1967). An insight into this process was offered by W. who described how as children, he, C. and others had gathered in each other's homes in the evening to listen to ghost stories until they were frightened to walk home. Strange sounds in the night then became easily explicable in terms of the ghost stories. The degree of strength these beliefs hold as one grows older, is hard to estimate and, of course, varies from individual to individual, but insofar as they fit into the Christian ideology to which all people of the social universe give lip service, they are reinforced and maintained as a substratum of cosmological cognition. The situation is well illustrated by W. who begins his recitation of ghost stories with an account of how one night he saw something wide and white approaching him about three feet off the road; he froze, paralyzed but trembling, and his head felt like it was swelling; it turned out to be a man wearing black pants, white shirt and carrying a donkey's saddle bags. The most serious evil perpetrated by duppies is done when they are caught by obeahmen and charged with an evil task. This technique of obeah is called ?shadow-catching? and is one of the two major techniques, the other being ?talismanic? or ?sympathetic?

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:00:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CARIBBEAN STUDIES/VOL. 14, NO. 3 21 magic (the stuffingof a bottle with nails and casting it by a spell into the victim's body, etc.). Shadow-catching involves taking some rum and blood and a broom stick to a grave at midnight. You put the stick into the grave and tap at the head of the coffin three times calling the dead man's name. When the duppy comes up the obeah man catches it, feeds it the rum and blood, and charges it with a task. It is no good trying this with two classes of spirits: ?rummers? because they will stop at every rum shop they come to and thus never to get do the task, and ?whorlians? (worldly-ans) because they will stop with every girl along the way. Obeah threats are common in all conflict situations (of the va riety: my obeahman will get you; with response, I have a better obeahman than you). There was a case, for instance, of a teacher hitting a boy and causing his arm to swell; the parents went to see the teacher and agreed that the hitting had been justified, and the teacher sent them to take boy to a doctor at his expense. But then people in the community made them change their course (what are they doing? him hit them pickney!) and they filed a court suit case returning to tell the teacher that they were going to win the in court, and if they did not win they would kill him and there were more ways to kill a man than ?to cut him?. Many of these threats of death have nine-days limits; a teacher from another dis trict said he witnessed a man curse a woman and give her nine days ? to live he does not know if it was a ?coincidence of Providence? but on the eighth day she died. Protections against obeah are various. Some devout as feel that Jesus is strong enough to protect them as long their a faith in him is strong. More ordinary people speak of carrying red cloth given to them by an obeahman, drinking a potion given by an obeahman, and putting a red cross on their doorway. As to the obeahmen themselves, Beckwith makes these comments (1929: 107):

?Today it is customary to look upon an Obeah Man as a crafty knave who practices upon the credulity of the more ignorant to enrich himself, or as a wicked one who may be brought to perform secret murder by means of his knowledge of deadly herbs. A writer in Folklore some years ago, summarizing a pamphlet by Inspector Thomas of the Jamaica constabulary called ?Something about Obeah? divides professional Obeah Men into two classes. The first class, ?generally African by birth? are dirty, ignorant and deformed ? ? in some way with a lame foot or a wall eye, for example who accept a small fee for their services. The second class, well dressed, intelligent, dapper, who make a pretense of ?duppy-catching? do nothing without a large fee. The first class seems really to believe in themselves. The second are conscious of their own fraud.?

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Fernando Henriques (1957: 182) reports that his obeahman was exceptional only in the force of his personality, and remarks that while he believes in his own powers, this does not prevent him from perpetrating frauds as well. The question of ?marginality? of magical practitioners is an important one, and in both the case of a white magician known to me and the case of the faith-healer I saw, the thesis could hold in racial terms. Again, my white magician believed in the power of occult forces, but he was also something of a showman, and disapproving members of the community pointed out that when his business had been in full swing he had been careful to take clients only from outside the district. From the point of view of the respectable church members what is disreputable about religious forms such as balm-yards, obeah, pocomania,25 and Revival Zion is (a) the charlatan assumption of divine power and the use of trickery to the gullible, (b) the the supposed appeal to other forces than those of Christ, and (c) emo social class of people involved. The puritan argument against Poco tionalism is present as well but subdued: i.e., balm-yards and as a of mania may be derogatorily referred to ?bunch jumping ?fire? of about,? without thereby impugning the ?rolling? and is a one of lively respectable churches. The third objection simple to be better status, which is resolved by those who feel themselves than the lower class and who yet use obeahmen or balm-yards by ? keeping such activities secret it is not part of their public masque. are The second objection has to do with evil forces that recognized to such forces to exist but which are opposed to Christianity; appeal but allows the not only destroys a person's chances for salvation dove devil freedom to operate among men, and here the argument increases dissension tails with the first objection: embracing the devil who has worked in the world. Thus a Seventh-Day Adventist elder the fallen are ?real in Jamaica emphasizes that Satan and angels of beings in the world? and that the problem Pocomania, balm-yards, ?one the to and obeah is on the cognitive level of reading Scripture are terrified of know the causes of supernatural events: the pagans causation, that is, such events because they do not understand the are real the fall of Satan and the fallen angels he took with him who on the emotional level the is one beings in the world;? and problem ?these are with of transferring faith to Christ: people ingrained on so that even those in the church superstitions from childhood level sometimes still fear them although on an intellectual they try

of obeah and 25 Pocomania is a cult which mixes many of the elements revivalism, myalism, and Z. Hurston (1939). the balm-yard. See accounts in M. Kerr (1952)

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to overcome these fears.? Merle Davis quotes a stronger condemnation by a Jamaican pastor (1942: 47).

?Obeah is undermining the working habits, discipline and sanity of thousands. It is a short cut to success in scores of situations for all kinds of people. They pay for the obeah magic to help them in sales, in getting a job, in passing an examination, in success in love, in conquering a rival or in paying off a grudge. The evil eye is put upon people whom they would harm, and the knowledge of this often undermines the health and sanity of the people. Obeah has an active hold inside our churches. Our members know it is against our rules. We preach against it and warn our members, and when they persist we suspend them, but in spite of this they consult the obeahman on the sly. One great difficulty is that the obeahman confuses his magic with religion. He cleverly uses the bible in his utterances and predictions and repeats Christian formulae as a species of magic. The two main evils facing our church today are sexual immorality and witchcraft.?

But a from modern psychotherapeutical point of view, the tenacity of can these beliefs be attributed to their efficacy as a means of exposing and relieving social tensions and as a means of individual psychic adjustment. The attribution of positive functions for the social collectivity of sorcery, witchraft, religious possession and emotional cults has been quite carefully developed in many anthro pological studies. Turner, for example, writes of the Ndembu:

?... ? whenever rites to propitiate or exorcise the shades as distinct from private treatment of herbalists'?are performed, there is a factor of social conflict present. The "ritual of affliction" as I have called it, constitutes in fact a phase in the complex process of corporate life and has a redressive function in interpersonal or ... factional disputes, any of which have long histories. All deaths are attributed to sorcery or witchcraft, but only those of structurally important individuals are singled out for special ritual attention. ... Divination therefore becomes a form of social analysis, in the course of which hidden struggles among individuals and factions are brought to light.? (1964:231-2).

This sort of is activity quite clear in accounts of balm-yard proceed in use ings, the of obeah threats (parents against teachers, workmen against overseers, etc.) in obeah and kumina accusations in illnesses and deaths, etc. But social conflict is not the only thing for which these rituals are efficacious. are They used, and are effective, as curing ceremonies. Kiev (1961) in an analysis of Haitian voodoo and Jamaican obeah complexes, points out that ?all the dynamic features which [Jerome] Frank has shown characterize the psychotherapeutic relationship? are to be found in these primitive psychotherapies as well: the patient's

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:00:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 24 I. ARTICLES reliance on the doctor, the doctor's faith in the patient's capacity to respond to treatment, the doctor's initial pessimism introducing ambiguity and raising the suggestibility and anxiety of the patient and making him want to please the doctor, and so forth. There is also an acceptable set of ideas on ?etiology, disease description, dynamic and economic analysis, heredity, patient responsi bility, prognosis and treatments Sereno (1948) points out that the obeah technique, aside from incidental but necessary things like using or paid informants and gathering detailed histories of the patient client, is essentially:

?a technique familiar to clairvoyants, palmists, tea-leaf readers, and other such people; it consists of verbalizing the wishes the client has about the Self, choosing the terms necessary for the verbali zation in a vocabulary which presents fantasies as a concrete reality. ...What the fantasies of the client are, the obeah man guesses safely on the basis of established patterns; other people's hostility becomes jealousy, lack of response becomes romantic incomprehension, lack of success the result of too great a nobility of character. This camouflage of reality has the definite effect of bringing about a feeling of euphoria in the client which predisposes him to accept all that the obeah man represents and stands for.?

Sereno points out that the obeahman deals exclusively with personal sorcerer problems of maladjustment, be they problems for a healer, a or simply an advisor. He transforms confusions and tensions into something the individual can cope with by creating a kind of reality out of fantasies (as defined in the quote). He protects himself from failure by sybilline statements which need interpretation and by complex instructions which predispose the client to recognize failure as improper following of directions. And, finally, Sereno derives much of the tensions and confusions endemic to clients of obeahmen from the West Indian social structure. He may oversimplify when he says ?the tension which the strong racial system creates and punishes at the same time result in this pattern of aggression, catharsis, and atonement, worked out in the demand for obeah, the hiring of the practitioner, and the payment of the fee.? But he is suggestive in saying that the secrecy of obeah has less to do with legislation outlawing obeah than with its own internal dynamic of transforming frustrations imposed by the colour-status bar into somethingmanageable (utilizing, that is, a necessarily ambiguous mode of communication). In the day to day operation of these religious forms different aspects of their efficacy may be of importance at different times: of psychotherapy, exposure of social tension, post facto system on. kumina explaining unusual events, and so Take for instance the on of ceremony of dancing, drumming and possession held occasions Its weddings, entombments, illness, or simple jollifications.? magical

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are powers said to be able to cure cripples and also to kill. An emancipated young man declared that he did not believe in these things (?the younger people don't believe...?) but when he was a boy he a witnessed cripple arise at the stroke of midnight completely cured (post facto explanation of otherwise seemingly strange event). a When prominent member of the community died in an auto accident, there was a rumour that the underlying cause of death (why did the car crash into the tree?) had been a kumina dance held by one political party to rid themselves of the victim, a political rival (exposure of social tension). The kumina dance is associated with Africa and the old ?Africans? who know the ?African language,? and who are the ones can who do the kumina most properly.26 The younger folk, it is said, just pretend they know how to do it; but many of the young folk simply enjoy getting together to ?lick? the drums without pretense to anything more, (recreation). Aside from a couple of drumming jollifications, I witnessed one real kumina, organized to celebrate the marriage of a middle-aged a couple in nearby village. The drums started in a bamboo booth constructed in the yard next to the solid wooden house, and for a while people just stood around encouraging the drummers (two drummers and two rackingmen27) and giving them rum. After a while people began to dance in a counter-clockwise circle around the drums. The dance step is a quick mincing one with the feet kept close to the ground and a shimmying of the body. As the night wore on the a chanting, including number of ?African? words and phrases (the meaning of which people seemed not to know) and the dancing grew wilder more and joyful. One young girl eventually got the ?? (the spirit), whirling madly, throwing herself on the ground and at one point through the wall of the booth. Various people took turns guarding her, and picking her up; a piece of cloth was tied about her waist and was an effective leash for a while. Lighted matches were then wisped about her face and her hair to rid her of the

26. The esoteric lore of magic ??science* and obeah and kumina? is supposed to be known best the most African of by , the Maroons. ?Maroon? comes from the Spanish cimaron, a slave who to the hills. The term is Negro escaped applied to descendants of escaped Spanish slaves with later increments who maintained their freedom until granted autonomy by a treaty in 1738. are centered around Today they in the Cockpit Country of western Jamaica and around Moore Town in the Blue Mountains of Portland. Those who have moved into St. Thomas are called ?African? in distinction to are ?Negro? and supposed to be very black and the reposi tories of African lore. ?Science? has to do with healing and calling down the angels and reading the ?signs? of of nature; as to is it, opposed obeah, supposed to be good magic. The name probably comes from the books of and occult sciences which magic have come into Jamaica from America via novelty the 6th companies, especially and 7th Books of Moses, and the de Lawrence Ancient Book of For mulas. De Lawrence, himself, was influenced by Oriental occultism, but Jamaica has its own source of Eastern occultism in the Indians imported by the English to replace the emancipated and slaves; indeed Indians have a reputation for being obeahmen. 27. The drums are wooden ones long with goat skin heads and open at the other end; the drummers mount them and with their play fingers; the ?rackingmen?. stand behind and play on the sides of the drum with sticks.

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spirit and she was led out. Then the drummers and dancers moved to several different positions around the yard and returned to the booth where the ceremony went on. People, of course, talk of much wilder effects of ?myal? possession, of ceremonies involving chicken and goat blood, and of feats under possession of climbing poles, etc. (See Hurston 1939:56-60). The degree to which induced possession can lead to psychosomatic cures is still a frontier for medical science; in the past the drama of possession was heightened even with the use of drugs (fn. 17).

Marriage as a Religious Act

In the last section we attempted to put some order to a set of religious beliefs and practices which at first sight seem confusingly full of disjunctions between expressed values (encouraging all to go to sex church, and children only within marriage, avoidance of occult forces) and actual behaviour. In this section we follow up on one of these disjunctions, marriage, since the question whether Caribbean lower-class couples living in consensual union prefer formal marriage (and correlatively whether illegitimacy is stigmatized) has become a classic case in the study of the articulation of norms or expressed values with actual behaviour. The initial observations of almost all authors are that lower class people say they prefer formal marriage (expressed value) but that the majority in fact do not live in legal union (behavioural norm). Again, people make a distinction between a ?wedlock child? and an ?outside child? (expressed value), and furthermore it is common for ?outside children? by previous consensual unions not to be brought into a legal union but to be raised by a relative such as the maternal grandmother; yet some seventy-odd percent of births in Jamaica are out of wedlock (behavioural norm). Nor is the disjunction between expressed value and behavioural norm due to inaccessibility of means of marriage: both a campaign of marrying people en masse, and the current civil facilities have not altered the pattern. Rather the solution to this puzzle of apparent discrepancy between belief and behaviour must be sought in the following interlocking social contingencies: (1) the lige and domestic cycles, (2) the prestige meaning of marriage in the West Indies, (3) the position of the domestic unit within the stratified labour economy. First of all, the oft quoted illegitimacy rate of over seventy percent of live births does not itself indicate anything about the rate of marriage in the Caribbean, for the pattern is late marriage, often in middle age after having children (and occasionally grandchildren). William Goode has even tried to demonstrate (1960) that most males

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do marry sometime in their life. What his figures definitely show is that with increasing age the percentage of married males rises (without allowing for class differences) from 10.1 percent among 20-24 year olds to 74.7 percent in the 65+ category. In the meantime sexual relationships are not curtailed; Edith Clarke summarizes (1957):

?It is usual for the girl's first pregnancy to occur while she is still a dependent in her mother's house. The mother's behaviour when she discovers her daughter's condition falls into four almost ritualized stages. The girl's misconduct is always said to have been carried on surreptitiously without her knowledge and brought to her attention only when the signs of pregnancy become apparent. The discovery is greeted with noisy upbraiding, the girl is severely beaten, and in many cases turned out of the house. In the second stage the girl takes refuge with a neighbour or kinswoman. After a period, which may be quite short, the kinsfolk and neighbours intercede with the mother on her behalf, and the girl is taken back into her mother's home for the birth of her child.?

The operation of ritual has affinities with the Anglo-American weakened form of the elopement mechanism (described by Rainwater 1964) in which there is feigned surprise and anger on the part of the girl's parents and the use of the pregnancy as an argument for them to accept the boy as a son-in-law. In the Jamaican ritual, the role of the lover is variable, and his economic position may determine whether on there is pressure him to provide support for the girl and her baby. Airy Castle young men complain that should such a girl take a man to court, the judge always rules in her favour on the theory even man that if the is not the father he can help the girl out; but support payments usually lapse after a month or two, and the girl must again go to court if she wants to continue to force him to pay. Edith Clarke suggests that the ritual may have another effect: to shock the girl either into avoiding casual relationships for some time, or encouraging her to find a man on whom she can depend rather than continuing her now added dependence on the maternal unit. The result of this latter ambition may be a ?housekeeper? domestic arrangement in which she is clearly an inferior, as opposed to the sort of concubinage in which a man and a woman ?decide to test their compatibility with a view to spending the rest of their life together.? If one then looks at the West Indian courtship system as a market system in which high ranking on one or more variables (wealth, is on beauty), traded for high ranking other variables (power, prestige, should occur colour), marriage between persons of like bargaining power (Goode 1960). In early life, however, males and females have unequal bargaining power: the female is the one who gains in economic

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terms from a stable union or marriage, but it is the male's decision tomarry; in early life, especially under conditions of high unemploy ment, the male is partly unable to provide the economic security the girl is looking for, and is partially dependent on his mobility for continuous employment. The girl's problem is intensified, in a society of high promiscuity, by what Goode calls the ?anonymity and isolation within which the decision is made to enter a union? (contrast the American middle-class courting system in which a constant parental ? concern over children's dating that they get dates, that the dates ? be introduced provides a system of enforcing the cultural norms of development from courtship to marriage). Thus, in order to catch a man, a girl must be willing to risk a union outside of marriage and hope it will develop intomarriage. Childbearing in this process can be played as a strategy in an uncertain game: motherhood may lower a girl's market value, but bearing a child for a man is a recognized strategy for effectively tying the man to her if it does not frighten him away as too great a burden. It should not be thought, however, that in a society where sexual services are more or less freely available, there is no pay-off for a male to marry. Part of the burden of the previous section was that a religious-respectability sanction exists:

?Paul said it is better for a man to keep without a wife than marry, but to prevent fornication and lust one should marry a wife. He can't keep without burning so he can't do without a wife.? (Quoted in Kerr, 1952:87).

As Edith Clarke reports:

?It is not considered correct for a man to propose marriage ... cost unless he owns a house and, preferably, a bit of land. The of the wedding itself, with the extravagant expenditure on clothes, finery and food for the wedding feast often exhausts all the man's savings. But what is more significant is that he is expected to support his wife in a higher status than that which is accepted for a concubine. Concubinage is recognized as a partnership in which there is equal responsibility between both partners in practical ... a affairs. Marriage, however, is expected to bring about change of life, to release the woman from the anxiety and drudgery of earning her living ,to transform her "from a common woman to a ladyw.? (Clarke, 1957:78).

of Late marriage is thus connected to the prestige-meaning in world marriage (marriage is a statement that one has arrived the on one to an unstable of respectable establishment) the side, and economic situation on the other. The domestic cycle is that demon strated by R.T. Smith (1953, 1956, 1960) for lower-class Negro families a series of Guyana: (1) young men and women forming relations with

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of lovers and becoming parents while living in their own homes of orientation; (2) isolation of the nuclear family in its own house; (3) a matrifocal household, overlapping with stage one of the next cycle. Note that even aside from possible instability in stage two causing stage three, the children of stage one are in their maternal home without the father. Two furtherpoints might be made: (1) that the pattern ofmarriage after childbirth is quite familiar from rural northern Europe (Goode 1961) and that while permissiveness in sexual codes in Denmark leads to relatively high incidence of premarital pregnancy it also leads to relatively low negative effects in terms of broken homes (Christiansen 1960, contrasting the sexual codes of Denmark, Indiana and Utah); a (2) that three generation matriarchy is a family structure which can a do better job than can a nuclear family structure of caring for both young and old, and of supporting women of child-bearing age, under conditions of an unstable economy, a high birth rate, and a non egalitarian or non-partner-co-operative role definition for the husband father (Young and Willmot, 1957, comparing their study of Bethnal Green, with Kerr's of Jamaica and Liverpool, and Firth and Djamour's of ?South Borough? London). The suggestion can then be made that thematrifocal family is a ?way of coping realistically with lifeunder conditions of high unemployment (Peattie 1967). to As the question then of the relation between expressed values and behaviour, the expressed values are values of desired respect ability; the actual behaviour is an adaptation to current circumstances ? until such time as? ideals can be approached. To marry before one has the social prerequisites of marriage might not only lay one open to ridicule for presumptuousness, but might be less efficient prag matically. And if legal marriage is sometimes a reason for better treatment by the government (inheritance laws), there is in the a meantime higher law of God which recognizes the good man. Values are, above all, something both by which to guide oneself and which to to manipulate one's advantage. Marriage is a sign of status respectability, a social accreditation; but there is a more fundamental kind of ? respectability that of being a good Christian, a personal The quality. superior value then is respectability, a respectability which not only is claimed by the individual but is socially recognized. It is that kind of socially, continuously re-negotiated, valuation that continuously forms men into a community with norms, sanctions, and statuses.

Summary and Conclusion

To summarize and we conclude, began with two polarities of for description religion: (1) the processes of religion which serve to

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separate people as well as bind them together; (2) the relatively easy identification of churches, balm-yards, pocomania, obeah, etc. (religion as particular doctrines and institutions) as against the relatively difficult identification of what people ?really believe? and why they behave the way they do (religion as the self-confirming system of presumptions about the inherent structure of reality). We suggested that these polarities could be seen in their proper perspective as parts of a dynamic model of differential usage of religious symbolism by different socio-economic status groups and classes. Thus, for instance, we traced how a set of religious ideas (towards the second pole of polarity two) is manipulated by different actors of a given community to draw institutional boundaries around and among themselves (toward the first pole). More fully the dynamic elements of the model were as follows. Historically, the two-tier economy of lowland plantations and hill peasantry was formed by contingencies of topography and the allowance of slaves and later freedmen to establish own-account farming in the hills while providing labour for the plantations. Although emancipation partially and temporarily reduced the plan tation wage work of the freedmen, the population growth and decline of acreage per peasant re-introduced reliance on wage-labour. The same processes have led to oversupply of labour, unemployment, unstable geographic mobility, and stable social non-mobility. Adap tations to this are the semi-flexible split in labour-effort between own-account farming and wage-work, widespread kin networks, renting of wooden cottages, and the matrifocal family structure. A supporting aid to geographic mobility is the growing regional organization of services. A corollary adaptation to current contingencies, in terms of feelings of personal value, in terms of social control, and other factors, is the system of status-elaboration which we discussed first in terms of felt relative deprivation (having to do with perceived notions of social distance and justice, under a system of socio-economic in equality but supposed politico-legal equality), and then in terms of the dynamics of religious symbolism. These dynamics (how the religious system is used to define, to justify, and to criticise the way things are) were suggested to be a combination of intentional consciously understood functions, and of non-consciously understood but positively rewarding processes. Thus the uses of a Christian fundamentalist idiom were: public declarations of morality in a game of ?impression-management? so as to claim either or both status and respectability for oneself and deny it to others; and criticism of social exigencies by appeal to a superior law above the laws of men. The uses of a magical idiom were: to explain misfortune, to expose social tensions, and to relieve psychic distress (both of ?cognitive

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 18:00:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CARIBBEAN STUDIES/VOL. 14, NO. 3 31 ? dissonance,? of frustration, and of emotional instability) all three of which uses, on a theoretical level at least, also provide the connection between obeahmen, faith healers, and other practitioners, and marginal social outcasts. These ?uses,? it was suggested, are also keys in the historical dynamics of Christianization of Jamaica under post-emancipated Creolization (creating a continuous status system out of a dichotomous slave-master one). The ?functional interrelations? thus described do not, note, indicate anything about an ?ideally integrated stable or stagnant culture?. Life itself, in human time scale, is an ?open system? (from geo morphological to social processes) and must be described in processual terms. Thus the functional interrelations described are situational adaptations to current contingencies. With the relieving of unemploy ment, (or increasing thereof), the input (or decline) of economic wealth, or the input (or decline) of more opportunities for social mobility, one would except these interlocking adaptations to adjust and change. Whether those changes would occur with violence or not would depend on the particular contingencies of those inputs to the system. Expressing this in terms of the often posed puzzle of the relationship between expressed values and actual behaviour, values such as ?respectability? are negotiable currencies: valuation is the result of negotiating individual claims in the market of social recognition. It is this kind of continuously re-negotiated valuation that forms men into a community of norms, sanctions and statuses. The elaboration of statuses may, as Max Weber hypothesized, proceed further under conditions of (temporary) stability:

?When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable, stratification by status is favored. Every techno logical repercussion and economic transformation threatens stratifi cation by status and pushes the class situation into the foreground. Epochs and countries in which the naked class situation is of predo minant significance are regularly the periods of economic and technological transformations.?

But the ?class war,? imposition of order upon dissident factions, etc., can be expressed in market terms as a non-agreement (the former) or non-voluntary agreement (the latter) of valuation; artificially imposed valuations operate like official exchange rates in a black market either developing their own rationale and secondary elabo rations in the social structure, or being ignored, or eventually being overthrown. If the major argument of this article has been to view social relations in their dynamic ?transactional? and processual inter as relations operational and manipulable, a secondary theme developed

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in the introduction and several footnotes (esp. fn. 2 and 9; but also 3, 4, 6, 7, 20, 21, 24, 28) is a plea formore careful attention to the terms of formal relations used in analysis.28 The logical processes of the analysands (native actors) and the logical processes of the analysts (anthropologists) should be, in terms of basic operations, the same, the difference between the two being only that supposedly the latter evaluate their own manipulations of cultural symbols according to rules of scientific method and logic. What is required is a cataloguing and analysis of these logical operations perhaps in the sense associated with the names Uriel Weinreich and Jean Piaget. A sound epistemo logical sensitivity, it would seem, is required to free us from current impasses both in the analysis of cultural symbolism, and in the endless non-productive arguments such as the ?plural society debate,* the ?necessity of common values,? and so on, which turn out in logical analysis to be, in the terms of their proponents, logical tautologies, or in the terms of their antagonists, logical absurdities.

28. What makes Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions so unsatisfactory; Mauss' reciprocity, Ma iinowski's functionalism, and Evans-Pritchard's segmentation incomplete; and similarly most psy choanalytically-oriented studies elusive is the unwillingness of the authors to proceed beyond the one dogmatic assertion that such terms are basic. It is one thing to discover that is continually finding oppositions in the ?empirical data?; it is quite another to evaluate the epistemological status of such oppositions. The terms are basic because they are specifications of formal relations among data isolated by observation. But although, reductia ad absurdum, polarities in Ogden's sense (fn. 3), reciprocity in Levi-Strauss (1949), and exchange in central place theory (fn. 8) all in a sense can be reduced formally to ?binary oppositions? their utility lies on different planes: Ogden's polarities have to do with logical space, Levi-Strauss' reciprocity has to do with system-require ments of psychological and social dynamics, centra] place theory has to do with the economics of space and cost-profit accounting. To say they are all ?binary oppositions* of sorts is to say something only about the categories of the analyst, and nothing about the analysands themselves. To explain something about the latter, it is necessary after identifying formal relations to pursue their raison d'etre in the empirical world, e.g., the raison d'etre of the hexagonal geometry of location and central place theory lies in the economics of least-cost homeostasis.

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