Memory, Innovation, and Emergent Ethnicity: The Creolization of an Indo-Trinidadian Performance

Diaspora 3:2 1994 Memory, Innovation, and Emergent Ethnicity: The Creolization of an Indo· Trinidadian Performance Frank J. Korom Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, N.M. By now, ethnicity has been well studied from a number of different perspectives by anthropologists, sociologists, and folklorists, as well as by theorists in the fields of comparative literature and critical theory.1 However, although public events centered on religious displays and cultural performances contribute a great deal to the maintenance of a sense of ethnic identity, they have been less studied (but see Lockwood). I will illustrate and explore the dialectic between religiosity and ethnicity, as well as the interplay of innovation and notions of unchanging tradition, by looking at Hosay, a large-scale Islamic ritual performance observed annually in St. James, an urban suburb of Port of Spain, the capital city of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.2 The event is associated primarily with East Indians, but because it is a public occasion, people belonging to other ethnic and religious backgrounds also attend and participate to some degree. Like many other cultural events practiced by displaced people throughout the world, Hosay is a creative refraction of a transnational phenomenon passing through densely layered local circumstances . While many participants understand it as a "traditional" event—canonized in a frozen form in the past and preserved through performance in the present—the ritual has changed a great deal because of the skillful, if often unconscious, innovations employed by participating community members. This is most readily apparent in the presentation and exegesis of the spectacle by Shi'i Muslims residing in the area. The Shi'ah of St. James, one very small Islamic community within the Trinidadian East Indian population, are primarily responsible for keeping this urban ritual complex intact in a form that they perceive as unaltered by the passage of time or movement through space. Their view is a minority opinion challenged by virtually every other cultural and ethnic group on the island. Needless to say, the issue at stake is not whose opinion is correct, but how exegetical arguments about a large-scale performance form a public Diaspora 3:2 1994 matrix for the assertion of various identities. As we shall see, the interpretations posed by majority groups have led to numerous discourses of contestation concerning not only the freedom of religious expression, but also the important issues of cultural rights and autonomy in a polyethnic society.3 This article will address some ideas that have become commonplace but not moot in the study of ethnic identity. For example, Fredrik Barth's classic formulation concerning ethnic boundaries— namely, that they are to an important extent constructed, patrolled, reinforced—is both confirmed and challenged by this study, which shows how a certain ethnodiasporic community maintains difference and its ideas about itself as different, while disavowing or remaining unconscious of aspects of the social labor involved in maintaining that difference; these processes enable the community to affirm that it remains static, traditional, and continuous in a new and rapidly changing, heterogeneous state (see Barth). While this Barthian paradigm is critical for understanding in-group and subjective attitudes concerning ethnic identity, it must be complemented with accounts of cultural interaction. When cultures interact , ethnicity becomes "situational" (see Cohen 387-89) and "creative" (see Stern and Cicala), or what I am calling "emergent."4 The assertion of ethnicity often occurs at the margins of sociological boundaries, such as public venues, where interaction occurs most frequently (see Abrahams). In these places of intense interaction, the possibility oftransgressing boundaries presents itselfmost fully, resulting in the emergence of multiple identities as a strategy for coping with cultural encounter and change. The processes leading to the inevitable mixture ofethnodiasporic cultures formed from encounter and change have been variously referred to by resorting to linguistic and botanical metaphors such as "creolization" and "hybridization ," respectively.5 Concepts borrowed from the sciences have their limitations for describing cultural realities; nonetheless, I use the term creolization, since urban Trinidadians themselves often employ it to depict the dynamics of their present situation.6 Hosay is an occasion during which both the maintenance and change ofethnic identity can be documented as a process...