Creolisation in anthropological theory and in Mauritius

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

University of Oslo

In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory edited by Charles Stewart (Left Coast Press 2007) They've got it at Amazon!

A great amount of intellectual energy has been invested in cultural mixing during the last decades. Reacting against an idea of boundedness, internal homogeneity and stability which has been associated with mainstream 20th century anthropology, hundreds – possibly thousands – of anthropologists have tried to redefine, reform, revolutionise or even relinquish that abhorred ‘C’ word – ‘the concept of culture’. The range of engagement is suggested in the apparent congruence between postmodernist American anthropologists (e.g. Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and their now classic critique of the Geertzian notion of cultural integration, and the older European critique of the structural-functionalist idea of social integration, which was led by people like Barth (1966), whose rationalism and naturalism is everything but postmodernist. In both cases, presuppositions of integrated wholes, cultures or social structures, have been debunked.

From being a discipline concentrating its efforts on understanding nonliterate societies, often implicitly positing the uncontaminated aborigine as its hero, anthropology increasingly studies cultural impurity and hybridity, and the dominant normative discourse in the field has shifted from defending the cultural rights of small peoples to combating essentialism and reifying identity politics. While this development has been important and necessary for a variety of reasons, the perspectives developed run the risk of being one-sided and inadequate...

The full text of the chapter can be downloaded in pdf format here.