Creolization as Cultural Creativity

Amalgams and Mosaics, Syncretisms and Reinterpretations: Reading Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors of Creolization

243 Amalgams and Mosaics, Syncretisms and Reinterpretations Reading Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors of Creolization —robert baron Creolization is a slippery concept, powerful in its ability to characterize emergent cultural forms but eluding precision in definition. Perhaps its slipperiness befits a concept so useful for rendering the fluidity of processes build out of the interpenetration of cultures. Ask a creolist what creolization is, and the response may very well include one or more metaphors for combinatorial processes and the forms emerging out of cultural contact. Metaphors in creolization studies, as in any realm of scholarship, fill lexical gaps, drawing from other semantic fields in the absence of adequate existing terminology in a given area of study (see Soskice and Harré 1995). The metaphors of creolists speak to key issues in creolization studies— how (and whether) creolized forms maintain the identities of components derived from source cultures, transformational processes, and the relationships of cultural forms of diverse provenance to one another within the creolization process. Melville J. Herskovits extensively employed metaphor to similar ends in his circum-Atlantic project examining the retention and transformation of African cultural elements in the Americas. He used metaphors from various semantic domains to render how elements of cultures combine and new forms emerge as a result of cultural contact. While these forms and processes would be viewed today as manifestations of creolization, Herskovits did not describe them as “creole.” Seeking to substantiate the presence of a living African heritage in the Americas and analyze its Robert Baron 244 transformations, he utilized both metaphor and schematic, social “scienti fic” explanations tied to his efforts to create a conceptual framework for the study of acculturation and cultural change. Contemporary critics of Herskovits contend that he elided transformation as he pursued what Richard and Sally Price characterize as his “genealogical imperative.” They view Herskovits as “trait chasing” in his “search for African origins,” which Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price suggest “lead[s] to a somewhat mechanical view of culture and deemphasize[s] processes of change and diversification” (Price and Price 2003, 85; Mintz and Price 1976, 13). While Herskovits did search tenaciously for elements of African culture retained in the Americas, at the same time he was concerned with dynamics of change in Afro-Atlantic cultures, which altered these cultures while maintaining an African heritage. Herskovits could be viewed as a proto-creolist, and like contemporary creolists he employed metaphor as a vehicle for conveying cultural transformation. Today, scholars and laypersons alike acknowledge the African heritage of peoples of African descent in the Americas. In his own time, Herskovits ’s views were revolutionary. He argued passionately that African cultural tradition was not lost in the Americas, but retained and transformed in multifarious ways. Over the course of two decades of intensive research and numerous publications about Afro-Atlantic cultures, Herskovits employed metaphor to represent how African cultural elements were juxtaposed, coexisted with, or combined to varying degrees of completeness with elements of European derivation in the formation of New World Black cultures. His field research in emergent, African-derived cultures of the Americas during the 1920s and 1930s took place in an ideal laboratory for observing creolized processes and products of “acculturation,” defined as phenomena resulting from firsthand, continuous interaction between individuals of different cultures. Metaphors drawn from a variety of semantic domains rendered the new cultural patterns brought about by acculturation. Herskovits ’s use of metaphor diminished in the 1940s as he developed new concepts for the reconciliation of cultural elements and beliefs derived from cultures in contact with one another. Syncretism, the best known of these terms, was redefined several times. It was eventually superseded by the concept of reinterpretation, which emphasized meaning over form as it referred to processes providing old meanings for new forms and retaining old forms with new meanings. Reading Herskovits and Contemporary Creolists for Metaphors 245 Why is metaphor of such value for characterizing creolization processes and the forms resulting from cultural contact? Combinatorial processes, and products of creolization, may best be described with terms for other processes and entities created out of two or more components. Herskovits and contemporary creolists use such terms as amalgam, mixture, compound , and convergence. Their use involves catachresis, the provision of a term where one is lacking in our vocabulary. Janet Martin Soskice and Rom Harré see catachresis as an “activity of filling lexical...