Eriksen - In Which Sense Do Cultural Islands Exist- (CREOLE)

7/30/2019 Eriksen - In Which Sense Do Cultural Islands Exist- (CREOLE)

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THOMAS H Y L L A N D E R I K S E N

In which sense do culturalislands exist?';

To Marshall Sahlins

This essay critically examines the island metaphors which have underlaid anthropo-logical theory and research - metaphors which in the heyday of functionalism andcultural relativism produ ced str on g images of isolated an d self-sustaining societies, bu twhich have today been dismissed as misleading and potentially harmful by manyanthropologists. Draw ing o n empirical material from Mauritius, I suggest that thesecriticisms mu st be well-founded since M auri tius, altho ug h a literal, geographicallyisolated island, has since its very inception as a society been in continuous interactionwith other societies, some of them very distant. It is further argued, however, thatisland m etaph ors can be useful in the analysis of Mauritius and ot he r societies, but thatthey are perhaps best regarded as aspects of social and cultural bound ary and identityprocesses.A transformation of the island metaphor along the lines suggested could be anindicator of a mor e pervasive shift in the dom inan t anthrop ological m ode of reasoning.Th is shift, which by now seems definite, has changed t he discipline's emp hasis frompositivist search for t ruth to less ambitious interpr etations of ambiguous worlds; fromstructure to process, from causality to intersubjectivity, from stable social units tofluctuating systems of signification - and, to a great extent - from explanation tounderstanding.

T he I s l an d m e ta p h o r a n d t h e s o c i a l w o r l dThe island is a powerful metaphor in everyday speech as well as in several academicdisciplines. The idea of th e island con note s isolation and un iqueness; in biology , forexample, the island metaphor is used in descriptions of isolated gene pools, dive rgentevolutionary patterns and closed ecosystems. Indeed, an image of nearly totemicstature and significance in modern biogeography and evolutionary theory is that of aliteral archipelago, namely the Galapagos islands, which played a pivotal part in thedevelopment of Darwinism. In an thropolo gy, too, island m etaphors have had a strong':.This article was first delivered as a lecture at the interdisciplinary con ferenc e Islands: their biology

an d culture, organised by the North Norwegian Academy for Science and the Arts, Melbu, Norway,16-20 July 1991. The participants at the con ference, particularly Peter Trudgill and Edvard Hv iding ,made valuable suggestions. I am also grateful to Jean-Clau de Galey for his perceptive and relevantcomments.

Social Anthropology(1993).1,B, 133-147. @ 1993European Association ofSocial Anthropologists 133


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attraction on the disciplines practitioners, and for similar reasons. Modern socialanthropology was, as we are all aware, founded on an island, Kiriwina in the Tro-briand archipelago, which is in many ways to anthropology what the Galhpagosislands are to biology.

However, just as in the case of biology, islands and insularity are first and fore-most strong metaphors of isolation and the bou ndedn ess of systems in anthropolog y.Classical social anthro polo gical m on og rap hs typically d epict small-scale societies, fre-que ntly a village, as a largely bo un de d social system . I n so far as the local com mu nitydescribed was compelled to have relations with the outside world, these relationswould be depicted as extrasystemic links, as not forming part of the relevant socialunit. Similarly, cultures, in the cultural anthropological tradition, have also generallybeen conceptualised as m or e or less integ rated and self-sustaining systems.

The notions of societies and cultures as closed social and symbolic systems havebeen severely criticised in recent years. It has been stressed repeatedly that n o societyis entirely isolated, that cultural bound aries are no t abso lute, and th at webs of com-munication and exchange tie societies together everywhere, no matter how isolatedthey may seem at a first glance. Nevertheless, the idea of societies, gro ups and culturesas entities which can meaningfully be isolated for analytical purposes has not beendiscarded in practice. Although ethnicity, for example, is now widely agreed to besituational and relational, as being constituted through social encounters and thesymbolic contrasting between groups (Barth 1969), the often implicit notion of theethnic group as a relatively fixed, bounded unit remains strong. Further, although ithas been pointed ou t that cultures, o r systems of signification an d sy mb olisation, aretied together in increasingly complex ways (see, for example, Wolf, 1982; Feather-stone, 1990), the underlying metaphor for m uch anthropological wo rk remains that ofa culture as a distinct, relatively bounded system.

In so me respects, we h ere seem t o be approac hing a param eter collapse (Ardenersexpression, 1989) in the social disciplines. Some even argue that the concepts ofcultures an d societies as o u r centra l units of investigation are outdated as regulativeideas, since they indicate a stability and b ound edness in social systems which is non-existent (see, for example, Wallerstein 1988; 1991). The current scepticism regardingthese concepts can be traced to changes in th e dom inant way of thinking in academicmilieux, which has in recent years tended towards attempts to conceptualise processand unpredictability instead of structure and regularity. It can also be argued thatactual change in the social relations of the post-war w orld is an importan t cause of apossible parameter collapse concerning the concepts of societies and cultures. Theinterrelationships between social systems, this argum ent goes, are now adays so omni-present and so impo rtant in th e reproduction of any social system, that they can not beunderstated in any social study (see, fo r example, Han ne rz 1989 ; Ap pad urai 1990). O nthe oth er hand , it could be argued th at it is analytically necessary to isolate ones un itfor investigation.

1 The analogy with modern b iolog y may be pursued further. Like the Galip agos islands, Melanesianislands display great internal variation. Just as several specie s of finches are endemic to particularislands in the Ga lipag os, many languages are endemic to particular Melanesian island soc ieties. Th etwo archipelagoes are actually exceptional, each in their o w n way, in d isplaying typical insularcharacteristics. Poly nesia , for example, is culturally much more uniform than Melanesia, althoughit covers a larger area.

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Uses of metaphors of insularity, usually implicit in anthropological research andtheory, can be used to summarise these fundamental issues. The general problem Ishall address here can thus be stated as follows. In which sense can cultural phen om enaand human societies meaningfully be said to be discrete, bound ed and distinctive fromeach other; and conversely, to what extent is the entire cultural production of hu-manity woven together in a seamless, continuous pattern of communicat ion andexchange? Th e issue is of great importance to social anthropology, and I shall arguethat it can be fruitfully approached through a reflection over processes of social andcultural isolation, wh at we m ay provisionally call cultur al island phenom ena.

L i t e r a l a n d m e t ap h o r i c a l I s l a n d sI shall deal with islands both in the literal and the metaphorical sense. If regardedliterally, the island is not necessarily m ore isolated in socio-cultural respects than ot he rplaces.2 A great deal of scholarly effor t has in recent years been de vote d to the task ofdemonstrating that seemingly isolated island societies have always - hat is to say,before the coming of Columbus, Magellan, Captain Cook and their successors -migrated, and have always been involved in extensive ne tw ork s of communicat ion andexchange with their neighb ours (e.g. Wolf 1982; Sahlins 1985; Hv iding 1991). The irpresumed pristine isolation turned ou t to be an incorrect Eur opea n assumption.

Seen as a metapho r fo r isolated sociocultural phenomena, the concept of the islandsummarises major, very complex issues in the co mpara tive stu dy of society and cul-ture. A main problem here consists in deciding in w hich w ays societies change wh en inextensive contact with each other, and in which ways they d o not. Are, for example,changes brought about by colonisation instances of plus ca change, pl t r s cest la mPmechose; superficial changes which d o no t affect the fu ndame ntal modes of thought,beliefs and forms of social organisation in the societies? Co nve rsely, o ne may askwhere to draw the boundaries between different societies in the contem porary world,which knows no absolute boundaries between societies. Dominant systems of com-munication and exchange in the m odern world are global, and they are seeminglybecoming universal (compare, for example, Robertson 1987; Giddens 1990). If oneventures to visit places which were until recently white spots on the map, such ascertain highland com munities in Papua N ew Guinea, on e may be offered frozen foodsflown in from Australia to buy; in central Africa, w hich wa s labelled dark Africa on lya generation ago, the inhabitants may follow World C u p soccer games on rad io andtelevision; in rem ote C hines e villages, the Gulf W ar was discussed vividly o n th e basisof daily, international news reports, and so on. This emergence of a seemingly con-t inuous world must provoke us to re- think o u r concepts of socie ties as bein g relativelyclosed, isolated entities. In a sense, a dominant paradigm in social anthropology stilldefines societies as islands - as virtually self-sustaining systems to be understoodprimarily in their ow n terms. Although it is useful in com paris ons, this idea shou ld beabandon ed since i t was wrong from the beginning.

2 A main shared insight emerging from the conference where this article was originally presented,which included biologists, social anthropologists and a linguist, was that literal islands are no tisolated in an absolute sense. Indeed, in both biological, linguistic and sociocultural respects,islands tend to be less isolated than, for example, mountain valleys. Water tends to unite ; moun-tains tend to divide.

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O n the other ha nd, i t is obvious that worldw ide cultural variation remains discon-tinuous, notw ithstanding the effects of globalisation. The re are, in o the r words, strongentropy-resistant mechanisms at wo rk prev enting the dissolution of cultur al and socialboundaries, which enable anthropologists to delineate the boundaries on which wedepend in orde r to study cultural variation and social integration. W ith reference to aliteral island with which I am familia r, nam ely M a ~ r i t i u s , ~shall discuss a fewaspects of this duality between similarities and differences. In discussing the insularmetaphor with reference to a geographic island, it is my wish to follow Batesonssuggestion concerning the use of analogy, which he warmly recommends as a tech-nique for combining loose and strict thinking: [Tlhe first hunch from analogy iswild, and then, the mom ent I begin to work ou t the analogy, I am brough t u p againstthe rigid form ulations which have been devised in the field fro m w hich I borrowed theanalogy (Bateson 1972 [1940]: 75). In other w ords, if w e are to try ou t analogies fromislands in thinking about society, then we ought to investigate what actual islands arelike.

Allow me, before turning to the empirical case, to remark on two, officiallyabandoned analogies used to describe social and cultural change, in order that thesubsequent discussion can be related to a wider context.

E v o lu t i o n is t a n d d i f f u s l o n l s t t h e o r i e s o f c u l t u r a l c h a n g eAt the beginning of this century, there were two dominant kinds of theories aboutsocial and cultural change in non -Eu rope an societies, nam ely diffusionism and evo lu-tionism in all its varieties. The diffusionists held that societies changed because ofinfluences from the outside; that is, the borrowing of alien cultural traits and sub-sequent reconfiguration of the local culture. This the ory bears some resemblance toDavid Humes theo ry about the emergence of new ideas. H u m e held that apparentlyoriginal, imaginative thought normally consisted in new combinations of old ideas.T he diffusionists, like Hu m e himself incidentally, we re in their time criticised for notbeing able to account for the ult imate origins of what they called cultural traits: ho wdoes something new appear? In a ddition, their explanations, notably those proposingthe existence of comm on sources for different cultural phenomena, w ere regarded ashighly speculative. Radcliffe-Brown thus w arne d his contem pora ries against the pit-falls of what he condescendingly spoke of as conjectural history (Radcliffe-Brown1952). The history of non-literate peoples, he maintained, could n ot be researched in ascientifically defensible way, and the comparative study of societies should thereforebe synch ronic only. This notio n remains a forceful on e in social anthro polog y, even ifdiffusionism lurks behind as an implicit premise for much anthropological work (seeH o l y 1987; Kuper 1988). Th e evolutionists, o n the ot he r hand, held that i t was in thenature of huma n so ciety to develop along certain lines. Most evolutionist schoolswould even specify particular stages through which every society would necessarilypass, although som e, such as mos t marxisms (including that of Marx), would allow forlocal variations such as the Asiatic mode of production. Evolutionist theories aboutsociety were eventually strongly criticised for ethnocentrism by British structural-functionalists and A merican cultural relativists: the y were , it was argued, using theirow n society as a standard for hum an evolution, and w ere thus ranking oth er societies

3 Fieldwork in Mauritius w as carried out in 1986 and in 1991-2.



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and cultures from a vantage-point which was deeply ideologically biased and whichmade n o explanatory sense.

The evolutionists and diffusionists borrowe d their central metaph ors and conceptsfrom nineteenth-century natural science. Some powerful diffusionist metaphors,which were presented as explanatory concepts, were osmosis and the second law ofthermodynamics. The notion of long-range dispersal , further, was borrowed frombiogeography. The central metaphor of evolutionism was, of course, that of theevolution of species through natural selection. Society was envisioned as a naturalspecies deemed to evolve acco rding to certain general laws. The explanations engen-dered by these, admittedly seductive analogies, were ultimately unsatisfactory. Theyleft a mass of data unexplained.

Today, many social anthropologists and sociologists are l inking up with latetwentieth-century developments in the natural sciences, an d there fore tend to bor rowtheir concepts and analogies from systems theory and chaos theo ry instead of Darwi-nisrn and New tonia n physics (see, for example, Wilden 1980; M orin 1986). ThS movemay eventually contribute to a solution to the problem of delineating bound aries ofsocieties, throu gh restating th e issue within new conceptua l parameters. Neve rtheless,although evolutionism remains discredited, core ideas from diffusionism remain aliveand well in central branches of the social disciplines. In discussing the concept ofislands in relation to the comparative study of societies, I shall actually sugg est that anupdated version of diffusionism may be a useful model for understanding social andcultural change. Whe n all is said and do ne, w e ar e all diffusionists in the en d - est webecome ignorant believers in absolute insularity or absolute entropy. The focus onsingle, presum ably isolated societies, as pieces in an en orm ou s mosaic, ch am pion ed bynationalists as well as by a nthro polo gists for decades (cf. Ha nd ler 1988), has beco metangibly obsolete. We have acquired new concepts for thought and research, andbesides, the world has become a much smaller place than i t was during the lateVictorian era.

I s M a u r l t l u s a n i s l an d ?In the literal meaning of the word, Mauritius is doubtless an island. Mauritius, itsorigin s volcanic and geologically recent, has an area of 1,850 square kilom etres a nd liesin the middle of the southwestern Indian Ocean. The African mainland is about athousand kilometres away; India is almost twice as far. Seen from the perspectives ofbiogeography and biological evolution, Mauritius is also famous, although not asfamou s as Madagascar o r the Ga lapagos islands, for displaying typical island chara cter-istics. When it was discovered b y Eur opea ns in the seventeenth centu ry, the biology ofMauritius was unique and provided several examples of divergent evolution. Theflightless dodo was to become the most famous indigenous inhabitant of the island.However, the agency of man quickly intervened against the law of the evolution ofspecies by natural selection. The defenceless dodo was exterminated in a matter ofdecades by hungry Dutch sailors, and within a century, little was left of the originalMaurit ian ecosystem. It had by and large been replaced by a man-made ecosystem.Th e sugar-cane, the Javanese deer and the rat were brought in by the Dutc h from theircolonies in the East Indies. W hen, in 1715, the Frenc h too k o ver the managem ent ofthe island, sugar plantation on a large scale was introduced, and additionally, anambitious plan intended to introduce as many new plant species as possible was

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implemented (Toussaint 1977). Mau ritius still contain s end emic species of birds andinsects, but m ost of its densely pop ulate d area bears pervasive and persuasive ma rks ofhum an agency and planning, and it is totally dominated by nonen dem ic species. WhenCharles Darw in visited M auritius briefly in 1836, he was mo re concerned with his owndisappo intmen t at its slight degree of Anglicisation - t had, after all, been in Britishhands for over tw o decades- han with charting its biology (Ho llingworth 1965).

Even in a botanical and zoological sense, then, Mauritius has been a part of aworldwide system of exchange brou ght about and monitore d b y conscious planning.The fact of human agency must therefore be borne in mind if we wish to comparecultural systems with ecosystems. The humans inhabiting Mauritius (and otherislands) did not arrive haph azardly o n pieces of driftwood or na tural rafts as animalsand plants would. They w ent there with a purpose in mind, either their ow n or that ofsom eone else.

Th e island metap hor may have som e relevance fo r the biogeograp hy of Mauritiusprior to human settlement, if it is used as a metaphor for relative isolation. Afterhuman colonisation, however, Mauritius has not been an island in a biological sense,nor, I shall argue, in most sociocultural respects.

M a u r l t l u s I s n o t a n i s l a n dLet us now look at the social and cultural system of Mauritius with notions ofpresumed insular isolation in mind. Like every human society, the Mauritian one isnot eternal. At certain points in time, its population came to the island from some-where else. What is peculiar to Mauritius, compared to many other societies, is therecent arrival of humans, as well as their d iverse origin s. All of th e roughly one millionMauritians alive toda y descended f rom imm igrants wh o arrived after 1715. Moreover,they came from three continents, some of them fro m very far away. The main con tem-porary groups of Mauritians are classified locally as Hindus (of northern Indiandescent), Muslims (originating fr om th e Indian subcon tinent), Creoles (of African andmixed descent), Tamils and Telugus (from southern India), Chinese, and Franco-Mauritians (the descendants of French colons, see Eriksen 1990; 1992a, for details ofMauritian e th n i ~ i ty ) . ~

Th e factors shaping M auritian society were thus never who lly indigenous. Du ringFrench times, the island was designed to be a producer of sugar and a transit po rt forships on their way from Africa to India and the Far East (A rno and O rian 1986). T heBritons, w ho took over the administration after the Napoleonic wars, saw Mauritius asa small cog in the great imperial machine, its chief task b eing th at of produ cing sugarfor Britons and fo r the wo rld market. Since independence in 1968, Mau ritians have re-shaped the infrastructure of their society. They still rely on sugar exports, but havediversified th e econo my considerably, going into tou rism a nd ma nufacturing since theearly 1980s (see Leffler 1988; Bowman 1991, for details).

The island remains dependent o n the outside world for trade. This dependence canalso be seen as vulnerability. When oil prices rise, or when the United States govern-men t introduce s new taxes on textile im ports, th e outcom e can alm ost immediately beeconomic disaster for many Mauritians. If there is an economic recession in France,

4 The word ethnicity here means an aspect of the relationships between groups which considerthemselves as being culturally distinctive. I t does n ot refer to essences (cf. Eriksen 1992a; 1992 b).

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the touris t business suffers; if parts of Indon esia or Bangladesh succeed in their bid fo rindustrialisation, the d ome stic textile indus try will lose ma rket shares. M any Ma uri-tians go abroad for education, some go abroad fo r wives; their main literary languages,French, English and Hindi, are all foreign ones; the cinemas show (and lately, thevideo shops rent out) Indian, European and N or th A merican films; and on e could goon. Mauritius would simply not have existed as a society if it had not been peopledthrough human design, which brought inhabitants from other parts of the world. Itwould also have been an entirely different place today, had it not remained tightlyintegrated into a global economic system .

Mau ritius is peripheral economically and in m any o the r respects, bu t it is no moreinsular in these regards than o the r peripheral areas, wheth er th ey are islands or not. Itcould be retorted here, of course, that M auritius is no t a typical island; that its cultu reis in a sense artificial since its population consists of fairly recent immigrants. If wesay so, however, then we mus t necessarily pro pos e a clear distinction b etween artificialand non-artificial cultures. Modern culture, which is based on large-scale humanplanning and the reflexive monitoring of agency, would then, perhaps, appear moreartificial than non-modern culture, which would then seem to evolve in a morenatural way. However, one need only look at other island societies to see thedifficulties inherent in such distinctions. The ind igenous inh abitants of Madagascar arenow known to have arrived from distant Polynesian islands in historical times; theArawaks and C aribs encountered by C olum bus in the Caribbean had arrived from themainland a few centuries earlier; and Polynesians and Melanesians alike may travelastonishing distances to trade a variety of goods (Malinowski 1961 [1992]) o r in searchof fame (Weiner 1988). The inhabitants of Easter Island - an astonishing case ofgeographic isolation - came from central Polynesia (Mitraux 1966 [1941]). O n efamous historical insular society was that founded by Norse settlers in Greenland inmedieval t imes. This community was crucially dependent on trade with Europe,particularly Bergen in what is now western Norway, in order to survive. WhenEuropean ships no longer arrived due to the hardships and recession following theBlack Death in 1348-50, the community vanished. We should be careful not togeneralise from a particular cours e of events, bu t th e fact of contact with the outsideworld clearly seems to be a universal feature of hum an societies.

Mau ritius is therefore not a metaphorical island, if the ter m is to be reserved forisolated systems. O n the con trary , Mauritius is con stituted as a society o n th e basis ofextensive contacts with the outside wor ld. Gr an ted its unusual histo ry, Mau ritius maynot be a good ideal type of an island society, but it serves well as an example of anisland where isolation is not chiefly due to insularity. I now turn to the forms ofisolation characteristic of Mauritius.

M a u r l t i u s i s a n I s l a n dFrom the preceding discussion, we seem forced to conclude that M auritius is not anisland. O n the oth er hand, i t canno t be denied that there are aspects of Mauritiansociety which display island characteristics if b y tha t we mean asp ects of isolation andendemic process. Altho ugh Mau ritius is not an island in an econ om ic o r political sense,it doe s contain several distinctive cultural island phenom ena. F o r altho ug h the re havealways been extensive and important contacts with the outside world, Mauritius is inmany respects distinctive.

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First of all, one m ay find th e kind of cultural island phenomena so dearly loved bythe diffusionists who tried to account for differences between otherwise related so-cieties. These would be phenomena brought to the society through diffusion;phenomena which, perhaps, have changed or which have fallen into oblivion in theirplace of origin, but which thrive in their new habitat - o r which have taken on adifferent significance in their new c ontext. Co mp arativ e sociolinguistics has provid edmany examples of such phenomena. For example, Norwegian dialects which wereuntil recently spoken in the Am erican M idwest resisted change long after the dialectsof origin had been altered; and the Faroese and Icelandic languages are regarded bylinguists as only slightly mo dified varieties of the Old No rse language once spoken allover Scandinavia. As regards Mauritius, a number of such odd survivals can beenum erated, both regarding language and oth er aspects of cul ture. The French spokenin Maurit ius contains a number of lexical items deriving from eighteenth-centurysailors French (Co rne and B aker 1983); some of the varieties of Hinduism practised inMau ritius would be regarded as heterodox at best, o r heretical at wo rst, in Ind ia itself;a peculiar aristocratic ethos exists am ong som e Mau ritians of French descent, wh otend to perceive society more o r less in the same way as pre-revolutionary Fre nchm endid, and so on.

Many othe r aspects of culture and society in Maurit ius could be cited as docume n-tation that it really is an island - emote from and ou t of touch with developments onthe mainland. However, none of the phenomena cited were developed in total iso-lation; they were initially created through contact with the outside w orld. Insularity asan aspect of Mauritian society is therefore a matter of degree. It could probably beargued, in a mo re general way, that n o society is either entirely closed o r entirely open(cf . Du mo nt 1992). A society must have boundaries in some respect or othe r in orderto be a society.

The cultural island phenomena which have now been m entioned are phe nome nawhich most of the inhabitants ignore. Mauritians chat away with out th e remotest ideathat their lexicon contains terms deriving from eighteenth-century sailors French;Franco-Maurit ian aristocrats may denounce Rousseau and the French revolutionwithout knowing how anachronistic they may seem to a contemporary European;low-caste Hind us m ay worsh ip their gods in idiosyncratic ways witho ut kn owing thatorthodox Indian Hindus would have been shocked and appalled, and so o n . ToMauritians, it makes no difference. As the Norwegian saying goes, What you dontknow w ont harm you.

These cultural island phenomena are directly comparable to biological islandphenomena. Th ey have been brought abou t in a causal way thro ugh objective mechan-isms of isolation; notably, physical distance from the metropole and irregularity ofcontact. Such phenom ena therefo re seem to supp ort the old island metap hor regardingsocieties as more o r less isolated. Ho we ver, in Mau ritius, these island phen om ena arefew and of little overall impo rtanc e. Of muc h grea ter impo rtanc e are the cultural islandphenomena which have been consciously developed by Maurit ians in response toaspects of co ntac t and isolation w ith o thers .

M a u r i t i a n s a n d i n s u l a r i t yI now turn to a different kind of cultural island phenomenon, namely those aspects ofinsularity which th e agents acknow ledge and /or create consciously. T h e most signifi-



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cant forms of isolation in Mauritius are actually b roug ht a bo ut because agents them-selves are determined to form an island in one respect or another; that is to say, it istheir conscious wish that they sho uld be isolated. W e may, of course, ask about theirreasons for wanting this, or abou t the underlying causes; I shall not emphasise thiscluster of issues here. My central task is rather to distinguish between those islandphenomena which are the results of historical contingencies and those which arebrought about through, o r at least mediated by, conscious agency and identity pro-cesses. At least in Mauritius, the latter are sociologically more significant than theformer.

Cultural entropy, or the dissolution of cultural boundaries, is positively encour-aged by th e Mau ritian state. Since its main pro ject since indep end enc e in 1 968 can besummarised as nation-building, there are good reasons why cultural homogeneityshould be regarded as an asset from the perspective of the M auritian state (cf. Eriksen1990). T he state thus favours the developm ent of a unitary educational system for alland a uniform labour market based on meritocracy. Although many contemporarytendencies in Mauritian society have favoured the systematic removal of internalsociocultural boundaries, the state has been forced to compromise on a number ofissues. Fo r example, there are legal provisions guaranteeing th e cu ltural an d politicalrights of the different ethnic groups. Even more significantly, ethnic boundaries aresystematically and self-consciously being reproduced by the citizens themselves. Theisland is densely populated (the average is 500 per sq. km.); Creoles, Hindus andMuslims frequently live in the same neighbourhoods, they may be educated at thesame schools, and may apply for the same jobs. A growing m ajority of Mauritiansspeak the same language, Kreol, which is a French-lexicon creole. In many otherrespects, th e group s are approaching each other in terms of shared culture, du e to thespread of uniform education, wage-work, nationalist ideology a nd international massmedia, among other factors. Despite such changes, the flow of personnel betweenethnic gro ups is very low, as well as the intermarriage rate, and ethnically distinguish-ing symbols are prou dly protected and displayed. Why, then , d o these grou ps remainentrop y-resis tant as ethnic categories, o r as sociocultural islands if o ne p refers?

One could offer several different explanations for this resistance against socialentropy, not a ll of them mutually exclusive. A simple sociobiological explanationwou ld be that people guard their genetical poo l against the pollution (or dilutio n) fromgenetically remote p opu lations (cf. van d en B erghe 1981); a simple marxist exp lanationcould be that ethnic tensions have been brought about by the hegemonic whites in adivide et imperu strategy (Durand and Duran d 1978); a theorist of games might regardMauritian ethnic relations as articulations of competition for scarce resources, and soon. While neither of these single-stranded explanations are entirely satisfactory, itremains a fact that a certain degree of cultural group isolation is promoted as anabsolute value by most Mauritians. They have learnt to compromise, yet they takegreat pains to prevent compromise from threatening the boundaries. Each groupremains an island, we may say, in respects crucial to the existential well-being of itsmembers. Ideologies proclaiming that ones own group is morally superior and inimp ortant w ays self-sufficient are imp ortant a mo ng the mem bers of every self-definedethnic category in M auritius. O n th e oth er hand, there are clearly ongoing processes ofchange in processes of self-definition and self-recognition. Following processes ofpolitical, eco nomic and educational integration, Mu slims, Hin du s and C reoles developgrow ing fields of shared meaning. Were they not able to d o so, it would have been

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impossible to talk of a Mauritian society as something different from the formaltrappings of the Mauritian nation-state.

So while Mauritius is and is no t island, it can also be argued that the self-definedcommunities5of Ma uritius are islands - and at the same time th at they are not.In s u l a r i t y as a b a t t l e a g a i n s t I s o l a t i o nParadoxically perhaps, the concern to reproduce ethnic boundaries at home, the urgeto remain pure and untouched, is as typical of Ma uritian soc iety as the collective urgeto become full participants in the global systems of communication and exchange.Mauritians dearly want investments and tourists from anywhere in the world, andmany of them wish to emigrate to som e distant mainland. Roman ticising and idealis-ing notions of metropolitan societies are probably typical characteristics of islandsocieties (that means, here, small and peripheral societies) all over the world, alongwith the related anxiety to keep up with the world.

Th e widespread self-awareness of its potential isolation, and the bid to overcomethis, is characteristic of Ma uritius and man y oth er societies which are insular or remoteeith er in a literal or a metaphorical sense. In this sense, insula rity is relative. W hile, fo rexample, Trinidadians look towards N ew York and To ro nt o for escape routes awayfrom insularity and isolation, small-islanders fro m St Vincent an d G rena da may looktowards t he larger and mor e cosmop olitan island of Trin idad in a similar way. Th ere isdoubtless strong resistance against various forms of social and cultural insularity inMauritius as well as othe r island societies.

It is important to distinguish carefully between the literal and the metaphoricalmeanings of islands and insularity. G reat Britain, G reenland and Easter Island d o nothave anything particular in common just because they are islands. Yet it cannot bedenied that insularity as such has contributed to some forms of isolation in theMauritian case. Th ere is in this case an overlap betw een th e m etaphorical and the literaluse of the term . This overlap should nevertheless be regarded as a coincidence. Relativeinsularity may be bro ugh t abo ut by a variety of causes, and geographic insularity mayjust as easily facilitate contact as isolation. As the linguist Peter Trud gill has remarked(Trudgill 1991), the most ancient Norw egian dialects are no t to be found on islands offth e coast, but in inland valleys.

I s t h e w o r l d a n a r c h l p e l a g o o f c u l t u r e s ?Un til recently, anthro pologists studied their commu nities as thou gh the y were islands.The idea of the world as a mosaic of cultures - still a common metaphor in travelliterature - has proved untenable. Cultures are now widely held not to be fixedentities, nor are they perceived as things with clear boundaries - his is particularlyevident in the contemp orary wo rld with its powerful com munication technology. Ahun dred years ago, it wou ld take weeks to travel from Europe to Mauritius; today, i ttakes twelve hours.

5 In Kreol, the word for ethnic group or community is kominote (from the French communautl) .The word kominafis, which is defined as undesirable forms of group favouritism, particularly inpolitics and the labour market, is similar in m eaning to the Indian term communalism.



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In this essay, I have depicted Mauritius as a single society and com pared som e ofits features cursorily with other societies in other places in the world. This entailsseeing Mauritius us u whole as a cultural island, contrasting it with some mainland.6In order to d o this, we m ust always specify in which respects we cho ose to regard agiven social phenomenon as an island, or as a relatively bounded society, culture orsocial system if o n e prefers. F or, as I have also stressed, inter nal social and cu ltura lboundary mechanisms may also encourage us to regard specified aspects of Mauritiansoci ety as islands in specified respects. T he persistence of ethnic boundaries is perhapsthe most striking insular feature of Mauritian society. Th is featu re has nothin g to d owith the fact of Mauritius being a geographic island, nor with other objective pro-cesses of isolation. It is manm ade.

Isolation is always relative. Thus, Mauritians from different communities, whenthey meet in France o r England, tend to relate to each other as Mauritians - not asHin dus , C reoles o r Muslims. As a general rule, island identities depend o n a contra stwith some perception of the mainland. What is to be conceptualised as the mainlandand w hat is to be regarded as the island, varies with the social context. In the d om esticcontext, the mainland is frequently perceived as the whole of Mauritian society.When one is abroad, the mainland would rather be seen as France, England or thewhole world - an d in these situations, Mauritius as such may be an insular focal pointof identification.

Since isolation is always relative, the term peninsula would perhaps be moreapprop riate than th e term island. For although no cultural entity should be isolatedabsolutely even for analytical purposes, and although every hu ma n g roup has taken o nits character through comm unication with o ther hum an populations, i t also remains afact th at societies remain to a greater or lesser extent isolated in im por tant respects, lestthey cease to be societies. Th e distinction be tween isolated and non-iso lated societies,although sometimes an im portant one, is always on e of degree. Ther e is nothing m orenatural about a human who has lived his entire life in central Borneo and who hasknown all of his one hundred relevant others since he was a small child, than say, aMauritian who has studied in France, worked in England, and no w lives in a differenttown from where he grew up. Both retain a sense of belonging, of identity, withpeople w hom they perceive as being similar, and a sense of difference wzs-u-712s thosew ho are perceived as dissimilar. A lthou gh cu lture and soc iety remain relative notio ns,this does no t entail that they can not be studied an d isolated - hey are isolated n ot o nlyby anthropologists, but also by their informants. The terms refer to processes, andsho uld no t be considered as des choses, as Durk heim would have it .

Th e wor ld can not be viewed as an archipelago of cultures o r societies tout court .At a certain level (such as that of th e ecological crisis), th e ent ire globe can b e regardedas ones island. A t a muc h low er level, a dyadic pair, su ch as a couple dee ply in love,ma y perceive itself as a social island. Th e general po int is that t h e identification of selfand others is broug ht abou t through the creation of social contrasts ( there by insularityis created). Since system boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are relative, and sincehum ans are self-defining creatures (G eertz 1973), i t may be equally true to claim that a

6 Th e notion of cultural mainlands is neither mor e nor less metaphorical than that of islands. O neof the most co mm on conceptualisations of cultural mainlands in the anth rop olog ical literature isWestern culture, which is a very gross reduction of perhaps as many as a billion people, living invery different societies, to a cultural chose.

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global culture exists and that there are cultures encompassing only two persons.Insularity is a matter of perspective.

C o n c l u s l o n a n d s o m e f u r t h e r p r o b l e m sTh e use of the island metap hor in relation to societies or cultures, I have argued , hasproved to be rather unfortunate. It does not even work properly in the field it wasborrowed from. In a literal sense, there is nothing specific to island societies as acategory. N o r are islands necessarily m ore isolated than o th er places.

Used metaphorically, the island concept highlights relative isolation and as suchhas som e relevance. It can still be misleading, h ow ever , because hum an societies are, tovarying degrees, in conta ct with ot he r societies. In this sense, th e diffusionists w ere inprinciple correct, in emphasising that societies react u po n o ne an other.

Used metaphorically about aspects of cultures or societies, the island conceptseems a pote nt on e judging from the preceding discussion. T he op erational dimen sioncould here be the boundary whereby differences are made socially relevant (Barth1969). It should be noted that conscious human agency contributes to defining inwhich respects a society is insular, and in which respects it is not. Unintentionallyinsular aspects of societies must be distinguished from those which are consciouslywished, planned and mo nitored. C ultur es or societies do not change according to lawsof nature; the changes are at least mediated and interpreted by the intervention ofconsciousness, reflexivity and planning. As M arx no ted : a build er erecting a house, n omatter how poorly qualified he is, doe s something qualitatively different fro m a beebuilding a beehive: he has a mod el of the house inside his head before starting wo rk o nit.

LCvi-Straws famous distinction between hot and cold societies (L ivi-Strauss1962) seems to sup por t the assum ption that isolated, insular societies exist. H ot cul-tures, according to Lki-Strauss, change unceasingly and in a feverish manner. Coldcultures repeat themselves cyclically; they are in this sense as regular as clockwork.Although this assumption can deepen our understanding of modernity as an idealtype, the distinction between hot and cold cultures is ultim ately invalid, even if w e d onot take into account the contemporary processes of modernisation. All cultureschange and are in contact with other societies, as Lhi-Strauss has himself stressed o nnum erou s occasions (see, for example, Lkvi-Strauss 1952; 1983). W e may speculate onthe causes for contact and change. Co uld it have som ething to d o with the incest tabooand the related quest for wom en from neighbouring societies? Could a Nietzscheanwill to pow er be a driving force behind travelling, warfare, tra de and o the r techniquesfo r approaching others? Is it population growth and scarcity of land, o r scarcity ofprotein for that matter, which drives people towards culture contact? Is i t merely amale form of compensation for not being able to give birth? Is change intentional,causal or arbitrary?

Let us not try to answer any of these questions no w. Alth oug h I have argued thatno man is an island entire of itself (John Donne), and have shown that Mauritiansociety is not truly an island, I have also stressed th at b ound aries between societies o rbetween group s within societies are frequently activated desp ite contin uou s pressuretowards entropy. Traditionally, these boundaries have been related to topography,geography and technology, and they have also been regarded as natural b ound aries.



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It there fore seem ed natural that literal island societies w ere isolated. I have challengedthis idea from tw o perspectives.

First, island societies have never been really isolated, nor have other seeminglyisolated tribal societies. When Ch agno n met the Y anom amo of northeastern Amaz o-nia in the 1960s, after a long struggle through the jungle, they were growing non-endemic plantains and were using imported steel tools even in the most remote areas(Ch agno n 1983). Th e mosaic vision of the tribal w orl d is definitely a fiction (cf. Fabian1983; Ku per 1988).Secondly, the contemporary world does not allow for isolation. This should notlead us into believing that a l l cultural difference will eventually vanish. We may allbecome increasingly similar in some ways, but new differences are continuouslygenerated (cf. Friedman 1990, for a stimulating discussion of this duality). What ispeculiar to ou r o w n time consists, perhaps, in the growing self-awareness of culturalidentity and the conscious, reflexive maintenance of social boundaries. When asked,H i n d u s of Mauritius would say that they prohibit marriage with Creoles because of aconcern with their cultural identity, which they believe would be threatened if theywere to allow intermarriage. They are in other words self-conscious creators ofislands. O u r ow n Eu ropean societies, similarly, remain insular in so far as they refuseto allow cultural minorities the same rights as the m ajority, an d certainly to the extentthat they d o not open their borders for unlimited immigration.

Modern capitalism and means of communicat ion - which transmit peo ple as wellas messages - defy boundaries and seem to create uniformity as well as self-consciousdifferences where there were formerly unexplored and un kn ow n differences. C on tem -pora ry cultural islands are, therefore, to an increasing extent thoro ugh ly planned, theirwalls and moats carefully fashioned by humans who abhor the idea that humanityshould be one dow n to the min utest detail. If it is possible th at w e can be us, som eo neelse necessarily has to be them.Commenting on the fact of ethnic animosities and so-called racism, Levi-Straussonce said that in order to realise its creative potential, every human society mustdiscover its proper equilibrium between isolation and contact w ith o thers. W ha t is theproper point of equilibrium varies according to factors which are beyond the scope ofthis essay. Still, it can proba bly be arg ued that mo st aboriginal populatio ns w ou ld havebeen better off if they had been allowed to retain mo re of their insular characteristics.

T h e processes of globalisation - the spread of literacy, television, formalisedbureaucratic governance and so o n - einforce the assumption, fundamental to socialanthropology, of the mental unity of mankind. Recent history has proved that every-bod y can be come modern. T he self-conscious, reflexive pr od uct ion of culturalislands has many similar features all over the world. The artificial islands resembleon e anothe r more than the natural islands they seek to replace. Th ey a re mediated bythe interfaces of markets, states and seamless, global systems of communicat ion.How eve r, they manifest themselves on ly throug h an infinite num ber of uniqu e localexpressions. Som e of the differences between societies may be accounted for throughrecourse to explanations which reject the idea that human agency is important in theconsti tution of society. Some of them, however, are demonstrably created by humansw h o insist on th eir right to retain - and worship - heir sense of living in an island.Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Museum of AnthropologyP.O. Bo x 1091 BlindernN-0317 Oslo, Norway

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Eriksen - In Which Sense Do Cultural Islands Exist- (CREOLE)

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