Commentary: Learning the Rhythms of a Place

The authors of "Riddims of the Street, Beach, and Bureaucracy," raise many issues that all who do research in the Caribbean have had to consider at one time or another. The problem of others trivializing work in this region as simply a scholarly lark in a beautiful place devoid of complexity and significance is perhaps the most annoying and tedious to address. The realization that one is engaging in scholarly imperialism by the very act of developing a research project in this mother of all colonial regions is perhaps the most daunting and humbling. The title of their article appropriately emphasizes that even in the smallest places there are starkly different contexts and "positionalities" to which the researcher in the Caribbean must constantly adjust and then readjust. They are wise to start an open discussion on how research by outsiders in this region can easily slip into insensitivity. The obvious issues of race and class and gender and the researcher as outsider that arise in many, if not all, world regional contexts are also partially addressed by the authors, something I will follow up on near the end of this essay.

And yet, I wonder if others, who have worked in this region and even in Jamaica, will find their own experiences accurately reflected in this article. I would have to say that my sojourn as a woman geographer doing historical and cultural research in the eastern Caribbean (30 field seasons over the course of 32 yr in Montserrat, with short stints in virtually all of the eastern Caribbean islands, plus, Jamaica and Trinidad) has been different from that of these authors. Certainly, I have dealt with occasional hostility in the moment, and with skepticism on the part of bureaucrats and officials, and ordinary people and sometimes on the part of Caribbean academic colleagues; but given my status as an intruder, I have often marveled at how joyous and trouble-free my research time in the Caribbean has been. Upon reading this article I began to see that possibly some strategies I bumbled into early in my career are responsible. First, out of financial and family necessity, I spent nine years studying and reading about the Caribbean before I ever went there, covering every ethnographic, historical and political account I could find. This was a sobering venture that prepared me for all manner of experiences and actually led me to expect much more trouble in the field than I ever experienced. Later I would be astounded to encounter graduate students (not my own) who came only sketchily informed about the region beyond the narrow confines of their research topic. Perhaps because of their relative lack of preparation, they seemed intimidated and confused by the realities of everyday life rather than intrigued with how all they had read jibed, or not, with what they were now seeing in person. So, deep background preparation was an incalculable aid to my work and that of my students.

A second strategy was imparted to me by an anthropologist who was working in Montserrat when I arrived there in 1973. Yolanda Moses (1976) was then studying gender issues and realized that her work would be eased if Montserratians at all levels of society understood just why she was there. So she began inviting bureaucrats, expatriots, merchants, government officials, farmers, school teachers and a host of others to small simple dinner parties in her rented home. She also joined cooking classes, did radio interviews, went to church, spoke to the Rotary club, and just generally made herself known to the community. Not surprisingly, doors began to open for her. Later, my research team and I did similar things to introduce ourselves and our work to our host community and to entertain those who worked with us. Very recently, I was told by a man who was a secondary school intern on our research team in the 1980s, that our regular beach picnics for the project staff are still fondly remembered and re-enacted for his children.

A third strategy developed slowly out of the second, just described. That was to include the...