Anthropology Analytical
Student: Shantal Jaikaran (812001019)
Course: Anthropology of the Peoples of the Caribbean
Lecturer: Mr. Anand Rampersad
The work of Dylan Kerrigan, put forth concerning Trinidadian heritage and ‘pre-history’ serves as a thought provoking piece, exposing myths that are accepted by the Caribbean people as facts. This is mostly due to a lack of available information on the Caribbean’s history and more specifically on the development of the Caribbean as the rich blend of many ethnicities and cultures, some of which have converged to form new ethnic groups and hybrid culture, which we know today as our own. This historical misrepresentation is especially concerning as it is given from only one point of view, that is the view of the ‘whites’ as ‘it can also be viewed as a form of ideological racial-boundary policing that protects the identity of a fabricated “whiteness,” and its essentialised superiority,’(Robinson, 1983). From the ‘whites’ also come the terms ‘prehistory’ and the more recent ‘multiculturalism.’ One can only wonder whether these terms were created for history, or was history fabricated to fit these terms. This paper has its core focus on highlighting the misrepresentation of the early Caribbean settlers, forged into written historical claims from the view of the ‘whites,’ in which the strengths of, and oppression faced by, the Caribbean people as well as the intermingling of cultures into the Caribbean we now know, has been discarded.
“Hastrup correctly argued that the Western views of the past and of time are clearly different from ancient or non-Western societies, but are in no way superior to them,” Reid (2009). “Dichotomized schemas of indigenous,” (Sand 2002), cultures in Trinidad, unlike traditional belief, were not two tribes, but were two categories of native people, for example, ‘Caribs’ and ‘Arawaks’, which were based on their behaviours, whether resistant or submissive. This is seen not only in the context of Caribs and Arawaks but also
Course: Anthropology of the Peoples of the Caribbean
Lecturer: Mr. Anand Rampersad
The work of Dylan Kerrigan, put forth concerning Trinidadian heritage and ‘pre-history’ serves as a thought provoking piece, exposing myths that are accepted by the Caribbean people as facts. This is mostly due to a lack of available information on the Caribbean’s history and more specifically on the development of the Caribbean as the rich blend of many ethnicities and cultures, some of which have converged to form new ethnic groups and hybrid culture, which we know today as our own. This historical misrepresentation is especially concerning as it is given from only one point of view, that is the view of the ‘whites’ as ‘it can also be viewed as a form of ideological racial-boundary policing that protects the identity of a fabricated “whiteness,” and its essentialised superiority,’(Robinson, 1983). From the ‘whites’ also come the terms ‘prehistory’ and the more recent ‘multiculturalism.’ One can only wonder whether these terms were created for history, or was history fabricated to fit these terms. This paper has its core focus on highlighting the misrepresentation of the early Caribbean settlers, forged into written historical claims from the view of the ‘whites,’ in which the strengths of, and oppression faced by, the Caribbean people as well as the intermingling of cultures into the Caribbean we now know, has been discarded.
“Hastrup correctly argued that the Western views of the past and of time are clearly different from ancient or non-Western societies, but are in no way superior to them,” Reid (2009). “Dichotomized schemas of indigenous,” (Sand 2002), cultures in Trinidad, unlike traditional belief, were not two tribes, but were two categories of native people, for example, ‘Caribs’ and ‘Arawaks’, which were based on their behaviours, whether resistant or submissive. This is seen not only in the context of Caribs and Arawaks but also