Walter Roth’S Preface) to 2015, a Century After Its First Publication

THE ANIMISM AND FOLKLORE OF THE GUIANA INDIANS 1 Walter E. Roth THE ANIMISM AND FOLKLORE OF THE GUIANA INDIANS With an Introduction by Janette Bulkan First published in 1915 This edition © The Caribbean Press 2011 Series Preface © Bharrat Jagdeo 2010 Introduction © Janette Bulkan 2010 Cover design by Cristiano Coppola Cover image: Annette Arjoon-Martins All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission. Published by The Caribbean Press for the Government of Guyana. This publication was made possible by the financial support of the Peepal Tree Press (Leeds), the Lord Gavron Trust and the Government of Guyana. ISBN 978-1-907493-24-9 2 THE GUYANA CLASSICS LIBRARY Series Preface by the President of Guyana, H. E. Bharrat Jagdeo General Editors: David Dabydeen & Lynne Macedo Associate Editor: Trevor Burnard Consulting Editor: Ian McDonald 3 4 SERIES PREFACE Modern Guyana came into being, in the Western imagination, through the travelogue of Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of Guiana (1595). Raleigh was as beguiled by Guiana’s landscape (“I never saw a more beautiful country...”) as he was by the prospect of plunder (“every stone we stooped to take up prom- ised either gold or silver by his complexion”). Raleigh’s con- temporaries, too, were doubly inspired, writing, as Thoreau says, of Guiana’s “majestic forests”, but also of its earth, “re- splendent with gold.” By the eighteenth century, when the trade in Africans was in full swing, writers cared less for Guiana’s beauty than for its mineral wealth. Sugar was the poet’s muse, hence the epic work by James Grainger The Sugar Cane (1764), a poem which deals with subjects such as how best to manure the sugar cane plant, the most effective diet for the African slaves, worming techniques, etc. As John Sin- gleton confessed (in his General Description of the West Indies, 1776), there was no contradiction between the manufacture of odes and that of sugar: “...a fine exuberant plant, which clothes the fields with the richest verdure. There is, I believe, scarcely any cultivation which yields so lucrative a return per acre as under favourable circumstances, than that of the sugar cane. So bountiful a gift of Providence seems not only calcu- lated to call forth the activity and enterprise of the agricultur- alist and merchant, but to awaken also feelings of a higher and more refined enthusiasm.” The refinement of art and that of sugar were one and the same process. The nineteenth century saw the introduction of Indian indentureship, but as the sugar industry expanded, literary works contracted. Edward Jenkins’ novel Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877) was the only substantial fiction on Guiana, and whilst it was broadly sympathetic to the plight of Indian labourers, it was certain of Britain’s imperial destiny, and rights over mineral resources. It was not until the period leading up to 5 Guiana’s Independence from Britain (1966) and the subse- quent years, that our own writers of Amerindian, African, Asian and European ancestry (A. J. Seymour, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Edgar Mittelholzer, Martin Carter, Rajkumari Singh et al.) attempted to purify literature of its commercial taint, restoring to readers a vision of the complexity of the Guyanese character and the beauty of the Guyanese landscape. The Guyana Classics Library will republish out-of-print poetry, novels and travelogues so as to remind us of our literary heritage, and it will also remind us of our reputation for scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and politics, through the reprinting of seminal works in these subjects. The Series builds upon previous Guyanese endeav- ours, like the institution of CARIFESTA and the Guyana Prize. I am delighted that my government has originated the project and has pledged that every library in the land will be fur- nished with titles from the Series, so that all Guyanese can appreciate our monumental achievement in moving from Exploitation to Expression. If the Series becomes the founda- tion and inspiration for future literary and scholarly works, then my government will have moved towards fulfilling one of its primary tasks, which is the educational development of our people. President Bharrat Jagdeo 6 THE ANIMISM AND FOLKLORE OF THE GUIANA INDIANS WALTER E. ROTH Introduction by Janette Bulkan The Guyana Classics Library 7 8 INTRODUCTION The centenary of Dr. Walter E. Roth’s compendium, An In- quiry into the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians can be commemorated from 2013 (the date of Walter Roth’s Preface) to 2015, a century after its first publication. An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore… was reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation in 1970. The reissue of this annotated compendium in time for the centenary, under the Guyana Classics Series, honours a landmark compilation of the cosmology and beliefs of three of Guyana’s indigenous peoples – Arawak, Carib and Warau. It was not the first such published collec- tion — preceded by, for example, the publications of Angli- can missionary, William Henry Brett, also based in the Pomeroon River District (1880) and Sir Everard Im Thurn (1882) — and others would follow. Among the merits of An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore… is the scrupulous care which Roth characteristically brought to the task of record- ing the words of his interlocutors. A century later, there are radically different analytical exegeses of indigenous cosmology elaborated by linguists and ethnographers, Amerindian and non-Amerindian (Viveiros de Castro 1996, 2000). Fortu- nately, contemporary indigenous peoples, scholars and the reading public all benefit from Roth’s separation of his com- ments from the text, which permits each reader to experience a story directly. Walter Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907 to take up a combined appointment as the government stipendiary mag- istrate, medical officer, and Protector of Indians in the Pomeroon District. He was 45 years old at the time, and the new post was to all intents and purposes a lateral transfer from one British colony to another. By then, Roth had amassed a distinguished record of publications on Australian Aborigi- nal ethnography and languages dating from 1897. He had certainly not exhausted the possibilities for research in Queensland or in Australia. However, Roth served in an un- 1 relentingly hostile atmosphere, in the end hounded out of office and vilified by white settlers and the Queensland government alike, united in their dislike of Roth’s anthropologi- cal and public policy work. Australia’s loss was Guyana’s great gain. Walter Roth’s pioneering and voluminous researches over a quarter of a century would be hard to replicate in any generation. His written records, skilful illustrations and ethnographic collections are a bequest to our nation. Walter Roth’s early life Walter Edmund Roth (1861-1933) was one of nine children (seven sons and two daughters) of Dr. Mathias Roth, a Hun- garian-born physician and his English wife, Anna Maria Collins. Mathias Roth had sought and secured asylum in Eng- land in 1849 after the failed Hungarian revolution of 1848. He was 31 years old then and would build a flourishing medical practice as a homoeopathic doctor, specializing in orthopae- dics. Four of his sons, including Walter, followed in his foot- steps and also trained as medical doctors. Walter was the fifth son. Mathias Roth was reputedly a stern disciplinarian, who also harboured some eccentric ideas, including that his children should run around bare footed even in winter. Inciden- tally, the naturalist Charles Waterton (1782 – 1865) who made four long journeys of exploration through the Guiana inte- rior from 1812 to 1824, famously travelled everywhere in bare feet. Waterton’s best-selling account of those trips – Wander- ings in South America (first published in 1825) – is credited with inspiring young British schoolboys like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace whose pioneering insights in the natural sciences and evolutionary history were likewise cata- lysed by their travels in the pan-tropics. Mathias Roth was Jewish by birth but “a nonbeliever … [who] did make concessions for his wife’s sake and occasionally sent his brood to church: whatever church happened to be in the neighbour- hood” (Brody 2008: 36). The Roth boys attended University College School in London, their education supplemented by 2 private foreign tutors in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences. They also attended boarding schools in Ger- many and France, and Walter was literate in French, Dutch and German. He would later put his linguistic skills to use in translating seminal historical and ethnographic works on Brit- ish Guiana and the Guiana area more generally, including Koch-Grunberg (1917), Netscher (1929), Schomburgk, M. R. (1922-23), Schomburgk, R.H. (1931), and Van Berkel (1948). It was perhaps due to his influence and persistence that some of his translations were published in British Guiana. His pro- ficiency in Latin is displayed by his switching from English to Latin in those parts of the stories in An Inquiry into the Ani- mism and Folk-lore… that describe sexual relations. The remarkable and distinguished contributions of Walter and his siblings in medicine, anthropology and public serv- ice in the far-flung British Empire are the subjects of a recent volume (McDougall and Davidson 2008). The Roth family could not fit easily into the conventional English class struc- ture. Both their foreignness and broad education would likely have contributed to a sense of marginality: “In an atmosphere of pluralistic religious pragmatism, and a household that provided the focus of a cosmopolitan society of liberal-minded people from all over Europe, the Roth family ‘made otherness a norm’” (ibid.: 13).

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