Creolization and Its Discontents

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This short essay provides the basic idea of what Creolization is and how it was originated in the New World. Two subtopics will be discussed: social and cultural aspect of Creolization.

Mapping Diversity in Latin America. Race and Ethnicity from Colonial Times to the Present, 2025

The group of islands and coastal territories that circumscribe what was to be named the Caribbean Sea was the first place of encounter with the European endeavor to discover new commercial routes to Asia. From the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, the region experienced a complex process of exploration, colonization, extraction of natural resources, and geopolitical segmentations that transformed the area into what the Dominican intellectual Juan Bosch referred to as an “imperial border,” a prolonged extension not just of Europe’s metropolitan geographies but also of its permanent tensions and struggles within the logics of contemporary Estate capitalism and imperialism. The early and almost total annihilation of the islands’ original populations, the continuous migratory waves arriving mainly from different European territories over four hundred years, the Atlantic slave trade and the introduction of indentured servants, as well as the internal migration patterns and various ethnic mixing processes within the region are some of the most relevant factors to consider in a first approach to “racial” cartographies of the Caribbean. The diversity of that map is a significant background for displaying the notion of Caribbean societies, as it encompasses relations of dependency and hegemonic cultural perspectives and knowledge(s), the articulation of national narratives and intellectual designs, and the modeling of statuses for citizenship and national identity. As a result, the notions of criollo and creole—neologisms used in the first instance to refer to those born in the “New World” and later to the languages and cultures resulting from the context of cultural contact—could be considered heterogeneous epistemic territories and spaces of resistance for ethnic, linguistic, and cultural recognition. This chapter examines how these terms emerged as a tool not just for class and racial classification throughout the Caribbean but also as a pedagogical perspective to produce knowledge about its ecology and even as a linguistic means of resistance. The question of the criollo or creole overlaps with the intrinsic variety of colonization patterns unfolded by Spanish, French, English, and Dutch metropolitan powers over their colonies, some of them shifting from one model to another during the colonial period, some still attached to postcolonial logics today, and the majority of them dealing with the effects of colonial intellectual designs that shaped the ways the body, its social space, and its linguistic behavior could regulate access to national and communitarian identities.

A great amount of intellectual energy has been invested in cultural mixing during the last decades. Reacting against an idea of boundedness, internal homogeneity, and stability that has been associated with mainstream twentieth-century anthropology, hundreds-possibly thousands-of anthropologists have tried to redefine, reform, revolutionize, or even relinquish that abhorred "C" word-"culture." The range of engagement is suggested in the apparent congruence between postmodernist American anthropologists (for example, Clifford & Marcus 1986) and their now classic critique of the Geertzian notion of cultural integration, and the older European critique of the structural-functionalist idea of social integration, which was led by people such as , whose rationalism and naturalism is everything but postmodernist. In both cases, presuppositions of integrated wholes, cultures or social structures, have been debunked.

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America Vol. 11(1), 2013

Puncta, 2022

Latin American Antiquity, 2022

People from different areas of the insular Caribbean and the coastal zone of mainland South America moved in and out of the Lesser Antilles throughout the archipelago's history before the European invasion. Successive migrations, the development of networks of human mobility, and the exchange of goods and ideas, as well as constantly shifting inter-insular alliances, created diverse ethnic and cultural communities in these small islands. We argue that these processes of alliance-building and ethnicity can be best understood through the concept of creolization. We examine this idea first in terms of the cultural interactions reflected in the pottery traditions that emerged among the Windward Islands before colonization, and second by analyzing the historiographical and emerging archaeological information available on the formation of the Indigenous Kalinago/Kalipuna and Garifuna identities from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Finally, we discuss the colonia...

Social Sciences Course Title:

Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 24 (1), 2019

Editor's Introduction, cover page and TOC of JLACA volume 24 number 1