The roots of Creolization in the Cockpits -- The Creolization of the commons -- Myal, kinship and the ancestors -- Reinterpreting Accompong Maroon society -- Accompong, Aberdeen and Maroon Town : the Maroon/non-Maroon interface -- Non-Maroon Maroon Town -- 'Slave Master' Pickni' : Meso-Creole ethnicities and narrative transformations of Trelawny Town -- Maroon Town narratives of Maroon descent and Marronage -- The McGhie Maroons and the Maroon Town McGhies -- Maroon Town and Accompong : ritual, tourism and nationhood -- Creolization at the Maroon/non-Maroon interface
RésuméL'article examine l'héritage de l'esclavage, du marronage et de l'émancipation dans la Jamaïque occidentale, démontrant qu'un regard porté spécifiquement sur la propriété (essentiellement la terre) et la race permet de proposer une méthode pour faire se croiser passé et présent, celui-ci éclairé par celui-là. Reposant sur un travail de terrain mené entre 1968 et 2003, cette approche méthodologique est ici testée sur neuf communautés paysannes fondées par des esclaves, des anciens esclaves et des Marrons, et basées sur l'acquisition de terres. Ces communautés, qui sont liées à des diasporas raciales en Europe et en Amérique du Nord, se situent dans le contexte d'une structure agraire post-coloniale et dans le cadre d'un monopole euro-américain sur le sol, reflet d'une rémanence de l'esclavage. Les différences entre villages s'explicitent par les différents modes de liens entre trois points : la terre, la race, la mémoire du passé et en continuité avec celui-ci.
[First paragraph]Plantation Economy, Land Reform and the Peasantry in a Historical Perspective: Jamaica 1838-1980. CLAUS STOLBERG & SWITHIN WILMOT(eds.)- Kingston: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1992. 145 pp. (Paper n.p.)This interdisciplinary collection focuses on the integration of Jamaica's classical plantation economy with the world economy, and the impact of the plantation economy on the peasantry, land reform, and agrarian modemization in Jamaica from emancipation in 1838 up to 1980. The eight papers comprising the volume were, as a one-page editorial "Introduction" outlines, presented at a symposium at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and are dedicated to the late Professor George Beckford whose work on persistent poverty in plantation economies championed the Jamaican peasantry. As such, the book is a welcome addition to the literature on the Caribbean plantation-peasant interface. However, the chapters are uneven in quality, with some reflecting analytical weaknesses and a lack of historical depth. Typographical errors, grammatical mistakes, and poor documentation are also noticeable. In addition, contrasting perspectives emerge among the contributors and this is not addressed by the editors.
[First paragraph]In her contribution to NWIG 68 (1994:77-99), "An Alternative Approach to Family Land Tenure in the Anglophone Caribbean," Michaeline Crichlow posits an "institutional-structural" school comprising Edith Clarke, M.G. Smith and myself, supported by Yvonne Acosta and Jean Casimir, to which she sees Charles V. Carnegie, Lesley McKay and herself as counterposed. M.G. Smith (1965:221), citing Clarke, identifies "two highly distinct systems of land tenure ... found side by side in many British Caribbean societies," and uses these "institutional distinctions" to support his plural society thesis; "similarly Besson (1979), who is primarily interested in the origins of family land tenure and sees it as emanating out of conflicts between planters and peasants, commits a similar error of treating family land as an institution" (p. 79).
