Introductory
remarks
This essay critically examines the island metaphors which have underlied
anthropological theorising and research - metaphors which in the heyday
of functionalism and cultural relativism produced strong images of
isolated and self-sustaining societies, but which have today been
dismissed as misleading and potentially harmful by many anthropologists.
Drawing on empirical material from the literal island society of Mauritius,
it is suggested that these criticisms must be well-founded since Mauritius,
although isolated, has since its inception as a society been crucially
dependent on the outside world - it is everything but isolated. A
modified diffusionism, therefore, ought perhaps to be revived. It
is further argued, still drawing on Mauritian material, that island
metaphors may still be useful, but that they should now denote aspects
of intersubjective meaning and the conscious erection of social and
cultural boundaries, rather than "objective" properties
of societies.
A transformation of the island metaphor along the lines suggested
could be seen as an indicator of a more pervasive shift in the dominant
anthropological mode of reasoning. This shift, which by now seems
definite although a new "paradigm" has yet to appear, has
changed the discipline's emphasis from positivist search for truth
to less ambitious interpretations of ambiguous worlds; from structure
to process, from causality to intersubjectivity, from stable social
units to fluctuating systems of signification - and, in a certain
sense, from explanation to understanding.
The island metaphor and the social world
The island is a powerful metaphor in everyday speech as well as in
several academic disciplines. The idea of the island connotes isolation
and uniqueness; within biology, for example, the island metaphor is
used in descriptions of isolated gene pools, divergent evolutionary
patterns and closed ecosystems. Indeed, an image of nearly totemic
stature and significance in modern biogeography and evolutionary theory
is that of a literal archipelago, namely the Galàpagos islands,
which played a pivotal part in the development of Darwinism. In anthropology,
too, island metaphors have had a strong attraction on the discipline's
practitioners, and for similar reasons. Modern social anthropology
was, we are well aware, founded on an island, namely Kiriwina in the
Trobriand archipelago, which in many ways is to anthropology what
the Galàpagos islands are to biology. However, as with the
case of biology, islands and insularity are first and foremost strong
metaphors - often implicit - of isolation and the boundedness of systems
in anthropology. The classical social anthropological monograph would
tend to depict a small-scale society, frequently a village, as a closed,
self-sustaining social system. In so far as the local community described
was compelled to have relations with the outside world, these relations
would be depicted as extrasystemic links, as not really forming part
of the relevant social unit. Similarly, cultures, in American cultural
anthropological usage, have also generally been conceptualised as
closed, self-sustaining systems of signification and interaction.
The idea of societies, or cultures, as being closed social and symbolic
systems has been severely criticised in recent years. It has been
stressed repeatedly that no society is entirely isolated, that cultural
boundaries are not absolute, and that webs of communication and exchange
tie societies together everywhere, no matter how isolated they may
seem when viewed superficially. Nevertheless, the very ideas of societies,
groups and cultures as entities which can meaningfully be isolated
for analytical purposes, have not been discarded. Although ethnicity,
for example, is now widely agreed to be constituted through social
encounters and the symbolic contrasting between social groups, the
notion of the ethnic group as a relatively fixed unit remains strong
(cf. e.g. Barth, 1969). And although it has been pointed out that
"cultures", or systems of signification and symbolisation
if one prefers, are tied together in increasingly complex ways (see,
for example, Wolf, 1982; Featherstone, 1990), the underlying metaphor
for much anthropological work remains that of a culture as a distinct,
relatively bounded system.
In some respects, we here seem to be approaching a parameter collapse
(Ardener's, 1989, expression) in the social disciplines. The concepts
of "cultures" and "societies" as our central units
of investigation increasingly seem outdated as regulative ideas, since
they indicate a stability and boundedness in social systems which
is unwarranted (see, for example, Wallerstein, 1988; 1991). On the
one hand, the current scepticism regarding these concepts can be traced
to changes in the dominant way of thinking in academic milieux, which
has in recent years tended towards attempts to conceptualise process
and unpredictability instead of structure and regularity. (This development
is, incidentally, as present in sociology and philosophy as it is
in anthropology.) On the other hand, it may be argued that actual
change in the social relations of the post-war world is the main cause
of the imminent parameter collapse regarding the concepts of societies
and cultures. The interrelationships between social systems, the argument
goes - systems which may formerly have been fairly discrete - are
nowadays simply so omnipresent and so important in the reproduction
of any social system, that they should not be understated in any social
study with a claim to intellectual honesty (see, for example, Hannerz,
1989; Appadurai, 1990).
The metaphor of insularity, usually implicit in anthropological research
and theory, can be used to summarise these fundamental issues. The
problem to be addressed here can thus be stated as follows. In which
sense can cultural phenomena and human societies meaningfully be said
to be discrete, that is to say autonomous, bounded and thus distinctive
from each other; and conversely, to what extent is the entire cultural
production of humanity woven together in a seamless, continuous pattern
of communication and exchange? The issue is of great importance to
contemporary social anthropology, and it cannot be answered in a straightforward
way. The question may nevertheless be fruitfully approached through
a reflection over mechanisms of social and cultural isolation, that
is what we may provisionally call cultural island phenomena.
Literal and metaphorical islands
I shall deal with islands in both the literal and the metaphorical
senses. If regarded literally, the island, an area of land completely
surrounded by water, is not necessarily more isolated in socio-cultural
respects than other areas of land. It is perhaps true that small islands
may display similar cultural characteristics in some socio-cultural
respects, but I shall refrain from going into that here. Suffice it
to say initially that a great deal of scholarly effort has in recent
years been devoted to the task of demonstrating that seemingly isolated
island societies have always - that is to say, before the coming of
Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook and their successors - migrated,
and have always been involved in extensive networks of communication
and exchange with their neighbours (see, for example, Sahlins, 1985;
Wolf, 1982; Hviding, 1991). Their presumed isolation was an incorrect
European assumption.
Seen as a metaphor for isolated sociocultural phenomena, the concept
of the island summarises, I have already suggested, major, extremely
complex issues in the comparative study of society and culture. A
main problem consists in deciding in which ways societies change when
in extensive contact with each other, and in which ways they do not
change. Are, for example, the changes brought about by colonisation
instances of plus ça change, c'est plus la même chose;
superficial changes which do not affect the fundamental modes of thought,
beliefs and forms of social organisation in the societies in question?
Conversely, one may wish to ask where to draw the boundary between
different societies in the contemporary world, which knows no absolute
boundaries between societies. The dominant systems of communication
and exchange in the modern world are global, and they are increasingly
becoming universal and seemingly all-encompassing (cf. e.g. Robertson,
1987; Giddens, 1990). If one ventures to visit places which were until
recently white spots on the map, such as upstream Sepik river communities
in Papua New Guinea, one may be offered to buy frozen foods flown
in from Australia in the local shop; in central Africa, which could
be labelled dark Africa only a generation ago, the inhabitants may
now follow World Cup soccer games on radio and TV; in remote Chinese
villages, aspects of the Gulf crisis were discussed vividly on the
basis of daily, international news reports, and so on. This emergence
of a seemingly boundless world should provoke us to re-think our concepts
of cultures and societies as being relatively closed, isolated entities.
In a sense, the dominant paradigm in social anthropology still defines
all societies as islands - as unique, virtually self-sustaining systems
to be understood primarily in their own terms, according to their
own, presumably unique cultural logic. This idea should be re-thought
both because it was wrong from the beginning, and because the contemporary
world very visibly cannot be unambiguously divided into discrete societies.
On the other hand, it remains obvious that worldwide cultural variation
is strongly discontinuous. There seem, in other words, to be strong
entropy-resistant mechanisms at work preventing the total dissolution
of cultural and social boundaries. With reference to a literal island
with which I am familiar, namely Mauritius, I shall discuss some aspects
of this duality between similarities and differences within the human
world. In discussing the insular metaphor with continuous reference
to a literal island, it is my wish to follow Bateson's suggestion
concerning the use of analogy, which he warmly recommends as a technique
for combining "loose and strict thinking":
"[T]he first hunch from analogy is wild, and then, the moment
I begin to work out the analogy, I am brought up against the rigid
formulations which have been devised in the field from which I borrowed
the analogy." (Bateson, 1972 [1940]:75)
In other words, if we are to try out analogies from islands in thinking
about society, then we ought to investigate what literal islands are
like.
Allow me, by way of a detour, first to remind the reader of two, officially
abandoned analogies used to describe social and cultural change -
which have nevertheless left their mark on our discipline - in order
that the subsequent discussion can be related to a wider context.
Evolutionist and diffusionist theories of cultural change
At the beginning of this century, there were two dominant kinds of
theories about social and cultural change in non-European societies,
that is "primitive societies", namely diffusionism and evolutionism
in all its varieties. The diffusionists held that societies changed
because of influences from the outside; that is, the borrowing of
alien cultural traits and subsequent reconfiguration of the local
culture. This theory is closely related to David Hume's general theory
about the emergence of new ideas. Hume held that so-called original,
imaginative thought normally consisted in new combinations of old
ideas (cf. A Treatise on Human Nature). The diffusionists, like Hume
himself incidentally, were in their time criticised for not being
able to account for the actual origins of what they called cultural
traits. In addition, their explanations, notably those proposing the
existence of common sources for different cultural phenomena, were
- and still are - regarded as highly speculative. Radcliffe-Brown
thus warned his contemporaries against the pitfalls of what he condescendingly
spoke of as "conjectural history" (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952).
The history of non-literate peoples, he maintained, could not be researched
in a scientifically defensible way, and the comparative study of societies
should therefore be synchronic only. This notion remains a forceful
one in social anthropology, even if diffusionism lurks behind as an
implicit premise for much anthropological comparison (see Holy, 1987;
Kuper, 1988)). The evolutionists, on the other hand, held that it
was in the "nature" of human society to develop along certain
lines. Most evolutionist schools would even specify particular stages
through which every human society would necessarily pass, although
some, such as most marxisms (including that of Marx), would allow
for local variations such as the "Asiatic mode of production".
Evolutionist theories about society were in the years immediately
preceding World War II increasingly being subjected to criticisms
of ethnocentrism from both British structural-functionalists and American
cultural relativists: they were charged with uncritically and unwittingly
using their own society as a standard for human evolution, and thus
ranking other societies and cultures from a vantage-point which was
deeply ideological and which made no explanatory sense.
The evolutionists and diffusionists of early anthropology borrowed
their central metaphors and concepts from nineteenth-century natural
science. Some powerful diffusionist metaphors, presented as explanatory
concepts, are osmosis and the second law of thermodynamics. The notion
of long-range dispersal has also been implicitly borrowed from biogeography.
The central metaphor of evolutionism was, of course, that of the evolution
of species through natural selection. Society was fancied as a "natural
species" deemed to evolve according to certain laws of nature.
The explanations engendered by these, admittedly seductive analogies,
were ultimately unsatisfactory. They left a mass of data unexplained,
and today we may safely add that the conjectural histories of evolutionists
and diffusionists led to the production of enormous amounts of intellectually
stimulating, but scientifically useless theorising.
Today, we should note, some social anthropologists and sociologists
are catching up with twentieth-century developments in the natural
sciences, and they now tend to borrow their concepts and analogies
from systems theory and chaos theory instead of Darwinism and Newtonian
physics (for example, Morin, 1986). This move may eventually contribute
to a solution to the problem of delineating the boundaries of societies,
through a re-stating of the issue within new conceptual parametres.
Nevertheless, and that is the point here; although evolutionism remains
discredited, core ideas from diffusionism remain alive and well in
central branches of the social disciplines. In discussing the concept
of islands in relation to the comparative study of societies, I shall
actually propose an updated version of diffusionism, which may be
a useful model for understanding social and cultural change. For when
all is said and done, we are all diffusionists in the end - lest we
become ignorant believers in absolute insularity. The focus on single,
presumably isolated societies as pieces in an enormous mosaic, championed
by nationalists and classical social anthropologists for decades (cf.
Handler, 1988), both groups perpetrators of the myth of cultural islands,
has become tangibly obsolete. We have presently acquired new concepts
for thought and research, and in addition, the world has metamorphosed
into a much smaller place than it was during the late Victorian era.
Is Mauritius an island?
In the literal meaning of the word, Mauritius is doubtless an island.
Mauritius, its origins volcanic and geologically recent, has an area
of 1,850 square kilometres and is entirely surrounded by the south-western
Indian Ocean. The African mainland is approximately 1,000 kilometres
away; India is almost twice as far. Seen from the perspectives of
biogeography and biological evolution, Mauritius is also famous, although
not quite as famous as Madagascar or the Galàpagos islands,
for displaying typical island characteristics. When it was discovered
by Europeans in the 17th century, the biology of Mauritius was unique
and provided several examples of divergent evolution. The flightless
dodo was to become the most famous indigenous inhabitant of the island.
However, the agency of man quickly intervened against the law of the
evolution of species by natural selection. The defenceless dodo was
exterminated in a matter of decades by hungry Dutch sailors, and within
a century, little was left of the original Mauritian ecosystem. It
had by and large been replaced by a manmade ecosystem. The sugar-cane,
the Javanese deer and the rat were brought by the Dutch from their
colonies in the East Indies. When, in 1715, the French took over the
management of the island, sugar plantation on a large scale was introduced,
and additionally, an ambitious plan intended to introduce as many
new plant species as possible was implemented (Toussaint, 1977). Mauritius
still contains endemic species of birds and insects, but most of its
densely populated area bears pervasive and persuasive marks of human
agency and planning, and is dominated by nonendemic species. When
Charles Darwin visited Mauritius briefly in 1836, he was more concerned
with his own disappointment at its slight degree of Anglicisation
- it had, after all, been on English hands for over two decades -
than to chart its biology (Hollingworth, 1965).
Even in a botanical and zoological sense, then, Mauritius has been
a part of a worldwide system of exchange brought about and monitored
by conscious planning. The fact of human agency should therefore be
borne in mind if we wish to compare cultural systems with ecosystems.
The humans inhabiting Mauritius (and other islands) did not arrive
haphazardly on pieces of driftwood or "natural rafts". They
went there with a purpose in mind, either their own or someone else's.
The island metaphor may have some relevance for the biogeography of
Mauritius prior to human settlement, if it is used as a metaphor for
relative isolation. After human colonisation, however, Mauritius has
not been an island in a biological sense, nor, I shall now argue,
in most socio-cultural respects.
Mauritius is not an island
Let us now look at the social and cultural system of Mauritius with
notions of presumed insular isolation in mind. As is the case with
every human society, the Mauritian one is in an important sense not
pristine. At certain points in time, its population arrived there
from somewhere else. What is peculiar to Mauritius, compared to many
other societies, is the recent arrival of humans as well as their
diverse origins. All of the roughly one million Mauritians alive today
descend from immigrants who arrived after 1715. Moreover, they came
from three continents, some of them from very far away. The main ethnic
categories of Mauritians today are Hindus of northern Indian descent,
Muslims originating from the Indian subcontinent, Creoles of African
descent, Tamils and Telegus from southern India, Chinese, and the
descendants of French and British colons (see Eriksen, 1990; in press,
for details of Mauritian ethnicity).
The factors shaping Mauritian society were never wholly indigenous.
During French times, the island was designed to be a producer of sugar
and a transit port for ships on their way from Africa to India and
the Far East (Arno and Orian, 1986). The Britons, who took over the
administration after the Napoleonic wars, saw Mauritius as a small
cog in the great imperial machine, its chief task being that of producing
sugar for Britons and for the world market. Since independence in
1968, Mauritians have re-designed the infrastructure of their society
somewhat. They still rely heavily on sugar exports, but have diversified
the economy considerably into tourism and manufacturing (Bowman, 1991).
The island remains extremely reliant on the outside world for trade.
This dependence can also be seen as an extreme vulnerability. When
oil prices rise, or when the U.S. government introduces new taxes
on textile imports, the outcome can almost immediately be economic
disaster for many Mauritians. If there is an economic recession in
France, the tourist business suffers; if parts of Indonesia succeed
in their bid for rapid industrialisation, the domestic textile industry
will lose market shares. Many Mauritians go abroad for education,
some go abroad for wives; their main literary languages, French, English
and Hindi, are all foreign ones; the cinemas of Mauritius show Indian,
European and North American films; and one could go on. Mauritius
would simply not have existed as a society if it had not been peopled
through conscious human design, which brought immigrants from other
parts of the world. It would have been an entirely different place
today, had it not remained tightly integrated into a global economic
system.
Mauritius is peripheral economically and in many other respects, but
it is no more insular in these regards than other peripheral areas.
It could be retorted here, of course, that Mauritius is not a typical
island; that its culture is in a sense "artificial" since
its population consists of fairly recent immigrants. If we say so,
however, then we must necessarily propose a clear distinction between
artificial and non-artificial cultures. Modern culture, which is based
on large-scale human planning and the reflexive monitoring of agency,
would then appear as being more artificial than non-modern culture,
which would then seem to evolve in a more "natural" way.
However, one need only look at other island societies to see the spuriousness
of such a distinction. The indigenous inhabitants of Madagascar, for
example, are now known to have arrived from distant Polynesian islands
in historical times; the Arawaks and Caribs encountered by Columbus
in the Caribbean had arrived from the mainland a few centuries or
less earlier; and native Polynesians and Melanesians alike may travel
astonishing distances to trade goods which are often of a purely symbolic
value (as has been so well documented by Malinowski, 1961 [1922],
and his successors). One famous historical insular society was that
founded by Norse settlers in Greenland in medieval times. This community
was crucially dependent on trade with Europe, particularly Bergen,
in order to survive. When European ships no longer arrived due to
the hardships and recession following the Black Death in 1349-50,
the community vanished. I will not venture to generalise from this
single course of events, but the fact of contact with the outside
world seems a universal feature of human societies.
Mauritius is therefore not a metaphorical island, if the term is to
be reserved for relatively isolated systems. On the contrary, Mauritius
- like virtually all inhabited literal islands - is constituted as
a society on the basis of extensive contacts with the outside world.
Mauritius is an island
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are aspects of Mauritian
society which display intriguing island characteristics, meaning aspects
of isolation and endemic process. Although Mauritius is not an island
in an economic or political sense, it contains several distinctive
"cultural island phenomena" despite its relatively short
history. For although there have always been extensive and crucially
important contacts with the outside world, Mauritius remains, like
every society worthy of the name, in many respects distinctive - and
to this effect, Mauritius is an island.
First, there are the kind of cultural island phenomena so dearly loved
by the old-fashioned diffusionists who tried to account for differences
between otherwise related societies. These would be phenomena brought
to the society through diffusion; phenomena which have been transformed
or which have fallen into oblivion in their place of origin, but which
thrive in their new habitat - or which have taken on a different significance
in their new context. Comparative sociolinguistics has provided many
good examples of such phenomena. For example, the Norwegian dialects
which were until recently spoken in the North American Midwest resisted
change long after the dialects of origin had been altered; and the
Faroese and Icelandic languages are regarded by linguists as only
slightly modified varieties of the Old Norse language once spoken
all over Scandinavia. As regards Mauritius, a number of such odd "survivals"
can be enumerated, both as regards language and other aspects of culture.
The French spoken in Mauritius contains a number of lexical items
deriving from eighteenth-century sailor's French (Corne and Baker,
1983); some of the varieties of Hinduism practised in Mauritius would
be regarded as heterodox at best, or heretical at worst, in India
itself; a peculiar "aristocratic" ethos exists among some
Mauritians of French descent, who perceive society more or less in
the same way as pre-revolutionary Frenchmen did, and so on. The resistance
towards technological change among Franco-Mauritians managing sugar
plantations could also plausibly be regarded as a survival from a
pre-industrial era (Eriksen, 1986).
Many other "exotic" aspects of culture and society in Mauritius
could be cited as documentation that it really is an island - remote
from and out of touch with developments on the mainland. However,
we may note that none of the phenomena cited have developed in total
isolation; they were initially created through contact with the outside
world. Insulation as an aspect of society must therefore always be
a matter of degree. No society is entirely closed; no society is entirely
open either, since it then ceases to be a society. A society must
have boundaries in some regard in order to be a society. To this problem
I shall return.
The "cultural island phenomena" which have now been mentioned
are phenomena which most of the inhabitants ignore. Mauritians chat
away cheerfully without the remotest idea that their lexicon contains
terms deriving from eighteenth-century sailor's French; Franco-Mauritian
aristocrats may denounce Rousseau and the French revolution without
knowing how ridiculous they may seem to a contemporary European; low-caste
Hindus may worship their gods in idiosyncratic ways without knowing
that orthodox Indian Hindus would have been shocked and appalled,
and so on. To Mauritians, it really makes no difference. As the Norwegian
saying goes, "What you don't know won't harm you."
These cultural island phenomena are comparable to biological island
phenomena. They have been brought about causally through objective
mechanisms of isolation; notably, physical distance from the metropole
and irregularity in contacts.
Mauritians and insularity
I shall now turn to a different kind of cultural island phenomenon,
namely, those aspects of insularity which the agents acknowledge and/or
create consciously. The most significant forms of isolation in Mauritius
are in fact brought about because agents themselves are determined
to form an island in one respect or other; that is to say, it is their
conscious wish that they should be isolated. We may, of course, ask
about their reasons for wanting this, or about the underlying causes
for such a wish; I shall not emphasise this cluster of issues. My
central concern is rather to try and distinguish between those island
phenomena which are the results of historical contingencies and those
which are brought about through, or at least mediated by, conscious
agency. The latter seem sociologically more significant than the former.
Cultural entropy, that is the dissolution of internal cultural boundaries,
is positively encouraged by the Mauritian state. Since its main project
since independence in 1968 can be summarised as nation-building, there
are many good reasons why cultural homogeneity should be regarded
as an asset from the perspective of the Mauritian state, which is
a nation-state (Eriksen, 1990). The state thus favours the development
of a unitary educational system for all, a uniform labour market and
a shared national language. Although many contemporary tendencies
in Mauritian society have favoured the systematic removal of socio-cultural
boundaries, the state has been forced to compromise on a number of
issues. For one thing, there are now important legal provisions for
various ethnic groups guaranteeing their cultural rights, embedded
in educational policies and in the media. More significantly perhaps,
ethnic boundaries are systematically and self-consciously being reproduced
by the ethnics themselves, so to speak. The island is very densely
populated (the average is 500/sq.km.); blacks, Hindus and Muslims
frequently live in the same neighbourhoods, they may be educated at
the same schools, and may apply for the same jobs. Significantly,
a growing majority of Mauritians speak the same vernacular, Kreol,
which is a French-lexicon creole. In many other respects, the groups
are approaching each other in terms of shared culture, due to the
spread of uniform education, wage-work, nationalist ideology and international
mass media, among other factors. Despite such objective changes, the
flow of personnel between ethnic groups is nearly zero, the intermarriage
rate is extremely low, and ethnically distinguishing symbols are fiercely
protected and overcommunicated. Why, then, do these groups remain
entropy-resistant as ethnic categories, or as "socio-cultural
islands" if one prefers?
One could offer many different explanations for this resistance against
social entropy, not all of them mutually exclusive. A simple sociobiological
explanation would be that people guard their genetical pool against
the pollution (or dilution) from genetically remote populations (cf.
van den Berghe, 1981); a simple marxist explanation could be that
ethnic tensions have been brought about by the hegemonic whites in
a divide et impera strategy (Durand & Durand, 1978); a theorist
of games might regard Mauritian ethnicity as an articulation of individual
competition, and so on. While neither of these single-stranded explanations
are entirely satisfactory, it remains a fact that cultural group isolation
is promoted as an absolute value by most Mauritians. They have learnt
to compromise, yet they take great pains to prevent compromise from
turning into contamination. Each group remains an island, one might
say, in respects crucial to the existential well-being of its members.
Ideologies proclaiming that one's own group is morally superior and
in important ways self-sufficient is important among the members of
every ethnic category in Mauritius. On the other hand, there are clearly
ongoing processes of change in processes of self-definition and self-recognition,
in addition to the objective cultural changes taking place. As the
internal integration of Mauritian society gains momentum, Muslims,
Hindus and Creoles develop growing fields of shared meaning. If they
were not able to do so, it would have been impossible to talk of a
Mauritian society as something different from the formal trappings
of the Mauritian nation-state.
So while Mauritius is an island and yet it isn't, as I have argued,
we might also say that the ethnic groups of Mauritius are islands
- and yet they aren't.
Insularity as a battle against isolation
Paradoxically perhaps, the concern to reproduce ethnic boundaries
at home, the urge to remain ethnically pure and uncontaminated, is
as typical of Mauritian society as the collective urge to become fully
integrated into the global system of communication and exchange. Mauritians
dearly want investments and tourists from anywhere in the world, and
many of them wish to emigrate to some distant mainland. Romanticising
and idealising notions of metropolitan societies are actually very
typical characteristics of island societies (that is small and peripheral
societies) all over the world, along with the related anxiety to keep
up with the world.
The widespread self-awareness of its potential isolation, and the
bid to overcome this, is characteristic of Mauritius and many other
societies which are insular or remote either in a literal or a metaphorical
sense. In this sense, insularity is relative. While, for example,
Trinidadians look towards New York and Toronto for escape routes away
from insularity and isolation, small-islanders from St. Vincent and
Grenada may look towards the larger island of Trinidad in a similar
way. There is doubtless a very strong resistance against various forms
of social and cultural insularity in Mauritius and other island societies.
One will have noted that I have not distinguished carefully between
the literal and the metaphorical meanings of islands and insularity
in the preceding paragraph. Of course, the concept as such is a metaphorical
one; it would be silly to pretend, for example, that Great Britain,
Greenland and Easter Island had anything particular in common just
because they were islands. On the other hand, it cannot be denied
that the fact of literal insularity has contributed to some forms
of isolation in the Mauritian case. There is in this case a substantial
overlap between the metaphorical and the literal use of the term.
This should nevertheless be regarded as a coincidence. Relative insularity
may be brought about by a variety of causes, and literal insularity
may just as easily facilitate contact as isolation. As the linguist
Peter Trudgill has remarked (1991), the most ancient Norwegian dialects
are not to be found on islands off the coast, but in inland valleys.
Is the world an archipelago of cultures?
Until recently, anthropologists studied their communities as though
they were islands. The idea of the global "mosaic of cultures"
- still a common metaphor in travel literature - is now acknowledged
to be untenable. "Cultures" are now widely held not to be
fixed entities, nor are they perceived as "things" with
clear boundaries - this is particularly evident in the contemporary
world, marked by processes of globalisation of culture and the corresponding
dissolution of physical boundaries. A hundred years ago, it would
take weeks to travel from Europe to Mauritius; today, it takes twelve
hours or less.
In this essay, I have occasionally depicted Mauritius as a single
society and compared some of its features cursorily with other societies
other places in the world. This entails seeing Mauritius as a whole
as a cultural island, contrasting it with the mainland. In order to
do this, we must always specify in which respects we choose to regard
a given social phenomenon as an island, or as a relatively bounded
society, culture or social system if one prefers. For, as I have also
shown, internal social and cultural boundary mechanisms, be they of
an ethnic or different nature, may also encourage us to regard specified
sections of Mauritian society as islands in specified respects. The
persistence of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries in respect to the low
occurrence of intermarriage is possibly the most striking insular
feature of Mauritian society. This feature has nothing to do with
the fact of Mauritius being a literal island.
Isolation is always relative. Thus, Mauritians from different ethnic
communities, when they meet in France or England, tend to relate to
each other as Mauritians - not as Hindus, Creoles or Muslims. As a
general rule, island identities depend on a contrast with the mainland.
What is to be conceptualised as the mainland and what is to be regarded
as the island, varies with the social context. In the domestic context,
the mainland is frequently the entire, multi-ethnic Mauritian society.
When one is abroad, the mainland is France, England or the whole world
- and in these situations, Mauritius as such may be an insular focal
point for self-identification.
Since isolation is always relative, a peninsular analogy would perhaps
be more appropriate than the insular one. For although no cultural
entity should be isolated absolutely even for analytical purposes,
and that every human act and institution has been developed through
communication with other human populations, it also remains a fact
that societies remain to a greater or lesser extent isolated in important
respects, lest they cease to be societies. The difference between
isolated and non-isolated societies, although sometimes an important
distinction, is always one of degree. There is nothing more natural
about a human who has lived his entire life in central Borneo and
who has known all of his fifty relevant others since he was a small
child, than say, a Mauritian who has studied in France, worked in
England, and now lives in a different town from that where he grew
up. Both retain a sense of belonging, of identity, with people whom
they perceive as being similar, and a sense of difference with those
who are perceived as dissimilar. Moreover, the very notions of culture
and society are relative and refer to abstractions of particular processes,
not to "des choses" (Durkheim).
The world cannot be viewed in an unqualified way as an archipelago
of cultures or societies. In certain contexts, the entire globe can
be regarded as one's island; in other contexts, a dyadic pair, for
example, may relevantly perceive itself as a social island. The general
point is that self-identification is brought about through the creation
of contrasts (insularity), which is nevertheless situationally variable.
Since system boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are relative, and
since humans are self-defining creatures (Geertz, 1973), it may be
equally true to claim that a global culture exists as to claim that
there are cultures encompassing only two persons. Insularity is a
question of perspective.
Summary and concluding remarks
· Initially, it should be noted that the island metaphor in
relation to societies or cultures is unfortunate from the outset,
since it does not even work very well in the field from which it was
taken. For in a literal sense, there is nothing peculiar to island
societies as a category. Nor are islands necessarily more isolated
biologically than other places.
· Used metaphorically about cultures or societies, the island
concept is interesting as it highlights relative isolation. It is
misleading, however, because all human societies are, to varying degrees,
in crucial intercourse with other societies. In this sense, the diffusionists
were correct in a general way, in emphasising that societies influence
each other.
· Used metaphorically about aspects of cultures or societies,
the island concept may initially seem a very potent one. The operational
dimension could here be the boundary whereby differences are made
socially relevant (Barth, 1969). It should be noted that conscious
human agency contributes to defining in which respects a society is
insular, and in which respects it is not. Unintentionally insular
aspects of societies should be distinguished from those which are
consciously wished, planned and monitored. Cultures or societies do
not change according to laws of nature; the changes are at the very
least mediated and interpreted by the intervention of consciousness
and reflexivity. As Marx noted: A builder erecting a house, no matter
how poorly qualified and sloppy he is, does something qualitatively
different from a bee building a beehive: he has a model of the house
inside his head before starting work on it. This does not, of course,
imply that changes are always planned.
Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous distinction between hot and cold
cultures (Lévi-Strauss, 1962) seems to support the assumption
that isolated, insular cultures exist. Hot cultures, according to
Lévi-Strauss, change unceasingly and in a feverish manner.
Cold cultures repeat themselves cyclically; they are in this sense
as regular as clockwork. Although this assumption may have some commonsense
appeal, and although it initially deepened our understanding of modernity,
no distinction between hot and cold cultures is ultimately valid,
even if we do not take into account the contemporary modernisation
of the entire world. All "cultures" change and are in contact
with other societies. We may speculate on the causes for contact and
change, as many profound minds have indeed done. Could it have something
to do with the incest taboo and the related quest for women from neighbouring
societies? Could a Nietzschean will to power be a driving force behind
travelling, warfare, trade and other techniques for approaching others?
Is it population growth and scarcity of land, or scarcity of protein
for that matter, which drives people towards culture contact? Is it
merely a male form of compensation for not being able to give birth?
Is change intentional, causal or arbitrary? - And one could go on.
Let us not try to answer any of these questions now. Although I have
argued that "no man is an island entire of it self" (John
Donne), and have indicated that no society is truly an island, I have
also stressed that boundaries between societies or between groups
within societies are frequently activated despite continuous pressures
towards entropy. Traditionally, these boundaries have been related
to topography, geography and technology, and they have also been regarded
as "natural" boundaries. It seemed natural that literal
island societies, for one thing, were isolated. I have challenged
this idea from two perspectives.
First, island societies never really were isolated, nor were other
seemingly isolated tribal societies. When Napoleon Chagnon met the
Yanomamö of north-eastern Amazonia in the 1960s, after a long
struggle through the jungle, they were growing non-endemic plantains
and were using imported steel tools even in the most remote areas
(Chagnon, 1983). The mosaic vision of the tribal world is definitely
a fiction (cf. Fabian, 1983; Kuper, 1988).
Secondly, the contemporary world does not allow for isolation proper.
This should not, however, lead us into believing that all cultural
difference will eventually vanish. Although we become increasingly
similar in some ways, new differences are continuously generated.
What is perhaps new in our own time, the era of the universalisation
of certain aspects of modernity, consists in the growing self-awareness
of cultural identity and the conscious, reflexive maintenance of social
boundaries. When asked, the Hindus of Mauritius may say that they
prohibit marriage with Creoles because of a concern with their cultural
identity, which they believe threatened if they were to allow intermarriage.
Can we refuse to take such an answer at its face value? A second question
as we wind up: What about our own societies? They remain insular in
so far as they refuse to allow cultural minorities the same rights
as the natives, and certainly to the extent that they do not open
their borders for unlimited immigration.
Modern capitalism and modern means of communication - which transmit
people as well as messages - defy boundaries and create uniformity
as well as self-conscious difference where there were formerly unexplored
and unknown differences. Contemporary cultural islands are, therefore,
to an increasing extent thoroughly planned, their walls and moats
carefully fashioned by humans who abhor the idea that humanity should
be one down to the minutest detail. If it is possible that we can
be us, someone else necessarily has to be them.
Commenting on the fact of ethnic animosities and so-called racism,
Lévi-Strauss once said that in order to realise its creative
potential, every human society must discover its proper equilibrium
between isolation and contact with others. What is the proper point
of equilibrium varies according to factors which are beyond the scope
of this essay. However, it is probably not too bold to suggest that
most of the world's aboriginal populations, to mention one example,
would have fared better, had they been allowed to retain more of their
insular characteristics.
The processes of globalisation - the spread of literacy, television,
national armies, tax forms and so on - seem to prove the assumption,
fundamental to social anthropology, of the mental unity of mankind.
Our recent history has proven that anyone can "become modern".
It is also interesting to note that the self-conscious, reflexive
production of cultural islands has many similar features all over
the world. The "artificial" islands are much more similar
to each other than were the "natural" islands which they
seek to replace. They are mediated by the interfaces of the market,
the state and the seamless, global systems of communication. These
systems are nevertheless manifested only through the permutations
of an infinite number of local expressions, which are different in
nontrivial ways. Some of these differences may seemingly be accounted
for through recourse to explanations which reject the idea that human
agency is important in the constitution of society; some of them are
nevertheless demonstrably created by humans who insist on the right
to retain, and worship, their sense of living in an island.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of the article was delivered as a lecture at the
interdisciplinary conference Islands: Their Biology and Culture, organised
by the North Norwegian Academy for Science and the Arts, Melbu, Norway,
16-20 July, 1991. I am grateful to the participants at the conference,
particularly Peter Trudgill and Edvard Hviding, for their comments
and suggestions.
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©Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1993 |
