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Grenada: Culture, Ideology and Praxis in a Small Island State1 Grenada: Culture, Ideology and Praxis in a Small Island state1 Gail R. Pool Department of Anthropology University of New Brunswick P. 0.Box 4400 Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 5A3 Canada Please do not cite without permission! Paper presented in the panel, "Culture, Identity and Change in the Rural Caribbean" at the Caribbean Studies Association, Havana Cuba, 19-24, 199 1. Abstract In this paper I will examine Grenadian society and culture, using the 1979- 1983 period as a benchmark for understanding hegemonic and counter-hegemonic'tendencies in the island. I will examine how Grenadians used culture to reinforce notions of identity and to produce a revolutionary , ideology. Introduction The social forces creating and sustaining revolutionary socialist development are poorly understood. It is not within the grasp of the social sciences to be able to suggest that a country is "ripe for rev~lution".~At the same time we "know" that the roots of social revolution lie in discontent, oppression, and colonial domination - most observers would agree on that - but why in certain places and at particular times do people rebel? Related to the question of why is that of praxis, that is to say What is to be Done? (Lenin 1963). The socialist transition is a difficult one, and in the past I have used the frame of reference outlined by Clive Thomas in his Dependence and Transformation. He identified three contradictions posed by 1. increasing differentiation in the agrarian structure; 2. the role of the state vis-a-vis production and distribution; 3. the urban/rural contradiction (Clive Thomas 1974286). Thomas' scheme seemed to work quite well in terms of analyzing the developing structures and institutions of the Grenada revolution (see Pool 1989, Pool and Davis 1989). However, it became increasing clear to me that I needed to understand the role of Grenadian culture in the revolution. Indeed, the praxis of revolutionary socialist development should have at its core Marx's meaning of "the free, universal, ~reativeand self creative activitv through which ..." people create and change their "...historical, human world" (~etrovic1971:384; emphasis added). By some definitions culture involves this creative activity. Having held a "political economy" perspective for many years, I realized that it was essential to understand how it felt to be involved in a revolution in order to portray the creative base of Grenadian culture. As an anthropologist it may seem like I am re-discovering my roots, but there were limits to anthropology's insight into revolutionary culture. Until recently anthropologists conceived of culture as a product of accumulated knowledge and understandings about the world, a kind of encapsulated history. As a condensed version of belief, culture was thought to be conservative since it validated traditional modes of thought and action. Such an analysis has its limitations, not the least of which is a fossilized notion of culture. Yet among anthropologists many static notions of culture abound: "reflective action", "traditionw,"mode of thought", "material representation" are but a few floating around.' Pool Grenada: Culture. Ideoloav and Praxis 3 Culture, in its material and ideal aspects, should be seen as including all of these notions, and not excluding the possibility of fundamental repositioning of thought, tradition, action and social formation. As long as anthropologists saw themselves as the objective collectors of information taken at face value (more or less), they remained separated from their object and failed to understand cultural malleability. Culture is now more thoroughly recognized as fundamentally creatable. Increasingly there has been attention paid to the use of culture in its anthropological sense to analyze social situations in transition, resulting in studies of the culture of oppression and resistance (for a path breaking analysis see Sider 1987). Since the 1970s-anumber of reconstructions of cultural analysis have changed anthropology, including the very important contribution of Pierre Bourdieu, who has influenced both historians and anthropologists. He explained in great detail not only how objectivity is limited, but also how, by means of a "critical break", we can construct "an inquiry into the conditions of possibility" (Bourdieu 1977:3). To accomplish this break Bourdieu used another term, habitus, the basis of which is tradition and habit, which immediately transects history: "In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history" (Bourdieu 197792). Habitus is both product and producer. Bourdieu's intention is to replace culture, which may be confused with art or colloquial meanings, with habitus in order to focus on the dynamic. In short, habitus refers to the historical process in coniunction with the limits history imboses on bossibilitv. Armed with the notion of habitus, anthropologists delve into history to understand process and the proceeds of social formation as well as the modus operandi of individual and collective action. Converging -on this mode of analysis is the historical analysis of ideology (politics, art and culture) as practiced by Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams (1981, 1988; see Samuel and Jones 1982).' However, anthropologists have in large measure ignored another major theoretical stream of great important to the discipline: these are the concepts developed by Gramsci and others (in addition Pool Grenada: Culture. Ideolo~vand Praxis 4 to Gramsci 1971, see Bocock 1986, Mouffe 1979, Sassoon 1982 and Walker 1984). In a Grarnscian approach, all people are philosophers, who reach a level of understanding through: 1. Language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of contenr 2. "common sense" and "good sense"; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, wavs of seeing things and acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of "folklore" (Gramsci 197 1:323; emphasis added). Culture, in short, with praxis added. To Gramsci, culture was a fundamental part of the formation of ideologies. We should not underestimate culture's impact. As Amilcar Cabral wrote "One of the most serious mistakes, if not the most serious mistake, made by the colonial powers in Africa, may have been to ignore or underestimate the cultural strength of African peoples" (1979:147). Nor is the role of culture in ideology a simple formulation. Aronoff has suggested that this is a two sided process: A political culture tends to be unquestioned to the extent that it meets existential and societal needs; and becomes undermined to the extent that it fails to do so. The more immutable a political culture is perceived to be, the more it tends to constrain political behaviour, and the more evaluated it is ... The more a political culture is rationally evaluated, the more likely it is to change... The more conspicuously manipulated for political purposes a culture is, the more likely it is to be questioned, undermined and eventually changed (Aronoff 1983:7). We are still faced with the problem of where to place culture and how to understand its role. What we need to know is how "salient, effective and meaningful the various symbolic forms of the political culture@) are to [people] in different contexts and points in time" (Aronoff 1983:16). One should place culture within, not on top of, political economy. For example some writers have used the concept of political culture in analyzing the transition to socialism. Halliday, writing about Arab culture and religion in South Yemen suggested that literature, dance, music and archaeology have all led to increasing Yemeni national culture and that this represents a transformed set of political values in a materialist sense (Halliday 1983:49-50). Given the dominance of the U.S. in certain spheres it is remarkable that so little attention is paid to the manner in which culture can be a mode of producing and reproducing counter trends Pool Grenada: Culture. Ideoloav and Praxis 5 (Williams 1981:201-205). U.S. hegemony, based as is it is on economic and military power, cannot be faced without a complete cultural transformation of the social and economic basis of colonial existence. A new society needs a new person - political, economic, social and cultural. In the Caribbean the notion of culture has occasionally been addressed but the focus has been on economic and political integration. More recently there has been talk of cultural integration: A. N. R. Robinson told the United Nations in December of 1986: "...we are a crucible where a new civilization is taking place" (cited by Smith 1988:2).' Relevant to the example of Grenada is the work of Chris Searle (1984a, 1984b). Again there is an insightful description of the problem, i.e., how language was used in revolutionary Grenada, but Searle says little about how to analyze the data in a systematic way. A snippet here and a snippet there does not lead us to a framework for understanding the nature of this unity, or the causes of its current manifestation. How then does culture give meaning to the social, political, and economic forces to create a context for revolution? In order to clarify how hegemonic force and its counter-hegemonic opposite "revolve" when conditions change, I will outline some of the main feature of Grenadian culture, using the 1979-83 period as a critical social
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