Processes of Culture Change in a Creole Society

College Of William And Mary, Williamsburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

Social scientists use creolization theory to analyze a specific type of culture change that occurred when individuals from diverse societies were brought together in a new environment (for example, in plantation slavery) and created, out of dire necessity and over the course of only a generation or two, new shared institutions (including a new language and broader cultural complexes). This project will investigate 20th-century culture change in a society that is well-known for the initial processes of creolization that led to its formation in the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethnographic methods and archival research will be used to investigate mechanisms of culture change among contemporary Saramaka Maroons in French Guiana-descendants of runaway slaves from Suriname-to test whether (and in what ways) the specific mechanisms developed in the formative years of the society continue to function today. The findings will contribute fresh data and insights to ongoing debates about the nature and rapidity of creolization among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about ongoing mechanisms of culture change in these societies and, ultimately, about the continuing analytic usefulness of creolization theory in the social sciences. The project is intended to provide a better understanding of the means by which enslaved Africans became Afro-Americans, as well as the mechanisms by which relatively autonomous Afro-American societies continue to develop today. The broader impacts include dissemination of the research results will in a book as well as in journal articles in the USA and abroad, and the use of the new knowledge to be created in the researchers' ongoing work on behalf of Maroons with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.