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12 Identity, Personhood, and Religion in Caribbean Context ABRAHIM H. KHAN One of the preoccupations of contemporary Caribbean literature is to define a postcolonial vision of the future with a social philosophy for people of the Caribbean region. Discourse for that purpose frequently employs the term “identity,” and more specifically the idiom “Caribbean identity.” In the zeal to redefine and eulogize a vision, sometimes ordinary terms can have their meanings stretched to the point of semantic and conceptual confusion. This seems to be the case with the term “identity” in discourse and meta-discourse1 promoting the idea of a Caribbean culture, or consciousness, or person. Even the literature2 on socioeconomic and political aspects of the region reflects confusion about Caribbean identity and its representation. To have to propose through literature an identity, however, creates suspicion about it as an ideological invention by those frustrated in their search for lost fragments of cultural roots deemed necessary for the formation of a person. An imagined and internalized identity would offer relief from psychic despair that such frustration occasions, but at the same time it posits a difference or otherness . That difference, in an energized socio-political milieu, can become translated by popular feelings into an incentive for hegemonic power instead of an incentive for critical self-understanding, without which there is no sound economic and cultural development, no peace and security for the ethnically diverse 30 million people3 of the Caribbean region. Though there are other possible reasons4 for the proposal of such an identity, the one stated here is significant for the task at hand insofar as it implicitly recognizes that the connection between one’s cultural identity and personhood formation is complex. The task is to inquire about conceptual coherence, the extent to which Caribbean identity and personhood conceptually cohere, and more specifically whether the concept “Caribbean identity” is an internally consistent one. My basic contention is that the notion of Caribbean identity does not conceptually cohere with notions of personhood for culturally diverse groups5 of people forming the socio-historical reality of the geographical region, and therefore is suspect. Furthermore, “Caribbean identity” is in itself an internally incoherent expression that appears to be intelligible in ordinary speech. Its apparent intelligibility rests on a confusion of at least two types of identity and on a misconstrual in language or a category mistake. In short, the notion is problematic, much more than might be suspected on a surface inspection. Its treatment here is intended to shed some light on its problematic aspects. 139 Identity, Personhood, and Religion in Caribbean Context To focus sharply the contention, I pose the following simple question: Is a Caribbean identity a challenge or threat to personhood formation for the culturally and religiously diverse peoples of the region? Not easily answered, the question has at least two terms of which each has an intricate meaning complex: identity and personhood. Each of them therefore requires glossing to shed light on aspects of the meaning complex relevant to the question, and consequently to establishing plausibility for the case that an invented Caribbean identity is more a threat than a challenge. Of the two terms, personhood is the more intricate one.6 It is a cognate of the word person and refers to the quality of becoming a person. However, the concept of person has a meaning complex whose core has at least two aspects. One of them is designated by the Latin persona (person), which is a composite of per/ sonare meaning to sound through, as in the case of a mask through (per) which resounds (sonare) the voice of the actor. There is some doubt as to whether the origin of the word is Latin, since one view is that it is of Etruscan origin phersu (mask), and another is that phersu is borrowed from the Greek prosopon, which means primarily mask and secondarily the role played in a drama. Either way, the institution of mask is a characteristic of each of these civilizations and suggests the notion of role (personage), type, or character when persona is used. That is, persona is understood as the image or mask superimposed on the individual. Among classical Greek and Latin moralists (for example, Cicero and Panaetius), the meaning of persona takes on a moral tone, a sense of being conscious, free, and responsible. From this extended sense, the step is a short one to the juridical meaning of persona as an individual human with both...

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